Once upon a time, when I used to blog, I would call every year’s basic theme. I was never wrong, although I always half expected to have gotten something off. I have developed a system for reading zeitgeist and ortgeist, and it has yet to fail me. I always fancy myself as an emotional savant, but the truth is my primal literacy is on par with the emotional literacy. While I have a strong analytical literacy, I have to work it because it is too easy to slide around with emotional literacy and forget the other two (because they are not as fun and creative), but I don’t care to be one-third literate. I like to be harmonized; so all three literacies get full play together.

I don’t blog anymore, but let me call it The Year of Ascension. As primal and analytical thinkers are duking it out, they are both not going to be the ones who determine the global scaffolding. It’s emotional; it’s been set, and let those sides weaken each other on a global scale. Their hubris needs a lot of humility.

What will 2024 bring? New players, and not the ones who are trying to gain power on a global scale now. Not a single old player has new ideas, and they will not be overtaking any gold standards.

AI? It’s not going to change a thing as much as the analytical ruling class wishes. 2024 US Election? That is not going to make a difference, either, as much as the old primal guard keeps hoping. Neither of these events are anything else but a blip. People are chattering about a black swan, but that will be a predictable dud which will misfire. No, it is not going to be a dragon or a unicorn or a bear or a phoenix. No donkeys or elephants, either. Hawks? Not a force at all. Parrots, sheep, and ostriches need not apply. Forget the menagerie completely. Think a spiral rhodium kintsugi staircase that spins like a tilt-a-whirl as it makes a new silly and eccentric melody with every revolution as a train rides on it with detectives and magicians transmuting their talents to an unexpected new noble profession with no rules or confines, and you will understand the pulse of 2024 perfectly.

Yet this will be a fantastic year. Why?

This is the year where emotional people become unleashed for the first time in history with a real edge and without an effective meddling faction of analytical or primal thinkers trying to sabotage or exploit them.

2023 was a very good year for me: I had four books published again, did a lot of breakthrough publicity for A Different Track and Murder in a Sundown Town. I had eight television episodes of A Time to Kill, I taught a lot of kintsugi, and I even had an article published in Sherlock Holmes magazine. Not everything was fabutastic, but the victory column was even better than 2020, 2021, and 2022, which were increasingly positive years for me. Each year was better than the last. For me, 2019-2023 was a prototype, but now the experiments and tests are done and the results have been carefully analyzed. It is time to put the new methods and inventions to work — and play.

2024 will be an interesting year for me, too. I have two books coming out, with an option of doing a third, which I am considering as it is based on my research notes from the last 30+ years. If I do the third, that will be the last book I will write because I am pivoting toward something else. If not, The Sport of Presidents will be the swan song in June. There is another article coming out in 2024, too, but I won’t be going back to journalism. These articles are postscripts to previous books I have written (Dramatic Moment of Fate and Ethics for Television Researchers and Associate Producers). I also will be doing another interview for A Different Track in a couple of weeks, one for Murder in a Sundown Town in February, and will have a belated book event in February as well. I have kintsugi classes to teach in January; so right now, 2024 is solid for the first two months.

But there will be a very big surprise in the coming weeks, but I won’t say anything just yet. Once that is confirmed, other things will be changing over on my end. I have a couple of loose ends to tie, but that is not on a professional level. Life is not perfect. Once the slate clears in February, I make my bolder moves on every level.

This website needs an overhaul, but that’s not a real priority right now. Until the last book is released, it will stay as it is. After that, I can streamline things and omit the blog part entirely and just have a couple of pages directing people to general areas of my professional life.

Because this website is just for informational purposes. The digital is not the future. It is the present. 2024 will begin to prove that it’s becoming the past. Humanity has been stuck in a rut, and it needs to get pushed out of it.

It will happen this year because it is the Year of Ascension.