Publicato: A Review, A Reverie, A Reminiscence, Pt.3

In the last installment of this series, I summarized many of 'the best posts' from the early period of this blog. Many of them are quite noteworthy – some are even almost excellent – but the truth of the matter is the best posts were yet to come. 2012, if my recollection is trusted, was the year of titanic posts in which the blog's appearance ceased to matter, I stopped worrying about everything but the words and content... it might've been the golden era.

Need proof? Early in the year I managed to conjure up a masterpiece that had even me convinced it would be a strong year in which sloppy blogging would be superceded by amazing work that would inspire only greater efforts in the future. It would become the most-viewed post I'd ever written, and has the least typos or fuckups of any article I've ever written. With it behind me, I was at least sure that good things were going to happen as long as I kept the faith.

Then I didn't post anything very noteworthy for months and kept pretty lax hours in addition to that. To be fair, on a personal level I was enjoying life and the crushing tedium of having a bottom-of-the-barrel blog was simply not something I wanted to engage too often. To be honest it was mostly a mess after that. There are probably decent posts but I don't feel like it's worth it. Essentially, that's the guiding principle behind lots of my forgettable posts – probably for the 8-23 people who read them for five minutes and move on – not worth it for me and they don't care. The... wait. List quotes again? Review of Publicato's 2012 most noteworthy posts inbound:

"The world's premiere first world country, hamstrung with voter apathy, political landslides, corruption, fraud, authoritarianism, paternalism, and every kind of stupid fucked up downright dangerous problem"

"This scathing, ignorant, and extremely stupid post basically reflects all the many things that are wrong"

"Pick your side and hold a fractious conflict against your opponents while the world withers."

I think it sounded a lot worse than it was. 2012 had a lot of User Comment Rodeos going on, which is okay with me. I somehow fooled myself into thinking it was the year of excessively good writing but my review didn't really bring up any nuggets of profundity. Seems pretty normal. It was a good year, honestly, and there were some gems, but the really fun or interesting things had gone out of it. My absolute favorite to write were the political junkie/Hunter S. Thompson style posts from 2011, they had a real sense of hustle and narrative to them that was as enjoying to craft as it is to look back on. 2012 did not provide a higher concept type of post and fell into a trend that you might be able to work out if you (and I don't expect anyone to) follow the thread of the posts of that year.

Uruguay Stays Strong: Prepares to get Stronger

Whether it kills brain cells or kills cancer cells; whether it's a gateway drug or an end-point drug; whether using it is moral or immoral – Uruguay did the only sane thing remaining after years of overblown rhetoric by anti-drug idiots versus pro-drug idiots, and we can only hope the rest of the world learns something.

For this I commend Uruguay, whatever else their problems and failings. Thanks for having actual human beings in your government and treating your populace like actual, rational, grown-adult human beings as well.

I honestly don't know why neither pro-nor-anti marijuana people in the rest of the world have become so humorless about the issue. What a bunch of stunted robot shits, maybe Bukowski was right when he said weed kills your soul – but he was a soulless drunk himself.