Resolutions: To Do or Not to Do

I gave up making New Year’s resolutions many years ago. I simply couldn’t handle the guilt when I broke them. Which I always did.

They were created in the euphoria of the coming of a new year. Slate scrubbed clean. Garbage pushed aside. New ballgame. All that sort of thing.

In that state of mind, I would make wildly implausible promises to myself, based mostly on the scrubbed slate. But, of course, it wasn’t scrubbed at all; it was full of carry-over scribblings that wouldn’t wash away so easily. Like most Americans, I like to reduce things to simple equations, then get on with solutions. That’s why there is so much support for an attack on Iraq so we can settle that baby quickly. Well, my resolutions ran into the same sort of complexities and never got kept. So I stopped making them.

But this year, I’m going to take it up again. Why? Because I have a new perspective on New Year’s resolutions. I see them now as a kind of laundry list--the same sort of list I make up daily to prioritize my time. I don’t feel guilt if I don’t achieve everything on my daily list--or if I change the order of things or even change my mind about the propriety of doing an item at all. My daily list is a guide of things I’d like to do--and may or may not accomplish.

This year, I reasoned, why not make out the same kind of list of things I would like to achieve over a year, rather than just a day. So here are my new, improved, guilt-free New Year’s resolutions. In 1991, I resolve to:

* Send out my 1989 Christmas cards.

* Refuse to look at any book, TV program or public performance or lecture that is billed under a title that begins with the words “Unlimited,” “Conquer” or “You, Too, Can. . . .”

* Go to almost any length to avoid putting my car in the hands of a valet parker.

* Avoid eating eggs and cheese and red meat--on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. On months with 30 days or less.

* Never use the term “good old days” unless it clearly applies--which it does most of the time.

* Avoid all movies having to do with interplanetary travel, buddy cops (either men or women), little furry creatures, ghostly visitations, biological impossibilities, or Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

* Learn how to set the margins on my typewriter and also how to insert a newfangled tape to correct typographical errors.

* Answer letters generated by this column promptly--or at least address the envelopes promptly.

* Break a bottle of engine oil across the hood of my 1982 Honda when it passes 100,000 miles sometime this summer.

* Get the novel I’ve been writing since the Truman Administration out of my desk drawer and see how it reads.

* Refuse to go if the call to fight in Saudi Arabia comes for elderly military pilots of propeller-driven planes.

* Avoid political arguments at marriages, funerals, children’s birthday parties or on the tennis court.

* Resist watching the Gator Bowl, Hall of Fame Bowl, Citrus Bowl and Fiesta Bowl on New Year’s Day.

* Make sure we have in our home library all books that the Rev. Lou Sheldon and the American Family Assn. would like to have banned from our schools.

* Continue to keep communication open with my Republican friends in spite of their close-minded and reactionary approach to most matters of public policy.

* Make no comparisons of the new California Angel players Sojo and Felix and Bannister with the new Dodger players Strawberry and Butler and Ojeda until we are at least 10 games into the baseball season.

* Continue to resist cable TV, although I’m being both outflanked and outnumbered.

* Use my pass on Continental Airlines (if it’s still around long enough) to see, among a lot of other things: an Indiana high school basketball tournament game; a Midwestern fall; as many Broadway plays as I can afford; a lot of old friends scattered about the country; a Midwestern spring; the Chicago lake front; the new Comiskey Park, home of the White Sox, who broke my heart before the Angels; the hills of North Carolina; the villages of New England; the prairies of Nebraska; the lakes of Minnesota; the canyons of Utah, and the green velvet tables of Las Vegas.

* Approach with at least a slightly open mind my daughter’s word processor, which we will baby-sit while she explores the possibility of living in London.

* Cease and desist for one month--six weeks if my spiritual resources are up to it--writing about any of the following in this space: the historical shortcomings of the Nixon Museum in Yorba Linda; the fact that most of Orange County’s homeless could probably be provided shelter in the coldest winter in memory here with the money we have blown to pay the personal legal bills of our sheriff, Brad Gates; the John Wayne statue at the county airport; the wit and wisdom of our representatives in Congress and in the state Assembly; a civilian review board to investigate shootings--particularly of unarmed civilians--by Orange County police officers; the syntax of Angel general manager Mike Port, and the Dachshund who has found dog heaven in our household.

* Continue to approach every subject about which I write or speak with complete objectivity, kindness, thoughtfulness, perspicacity, insight and dedication to the truth--as I see it, of course.