The mind boggles at possibilities for 2012

I don’t know the same things you don’t know

I don’t know, I just don’t know

And I forget the same things you forget

But you predict what surely hasn’t happened yet

— Closing theme song, Corner Gas, by Odds.

Whilst searching for something the other day amongst the anarchy of papers, magazines, pictures, old press releases and other flotsam I call the top of my desk, I came across a City of Kamloops parking pass.

It expires today. We get a couple of these each year for use when attending to newspaper business around town. As far as I know, this one remained consigned to the lower reaches of my clutter pile, as if it were an artifact awaiting exhumation, since about last January.

Which explains why people kept asking, “Has anyone seen that parking pass?” It served as a silent reminder that 2011 has sped by rather quickly. It was an interesting year in pretty much every way one can imagine.

But in a few hours, the past (as George W. used to say) will be over. What the new year will bring, nobody knows, and I’m not going to make a bunch of cute predictions about it.

I don’t know, for example, whether I’ll join Brian Alexander in being banned from City Hall, though there are probably a few of my former colleagues down there who figure it’s an idea worth considering.

Nor do I know whether I’ll ever sort out the junk on my desk (or what I’ll find in there if I try), or if this will be the year I get new carpet in my office, or whether the boys down at Jay’s Service will, after having it in their shop for seven years, get my old cornbinder on the road (I do know, however, that it would be a relief to both of us).

And I have no idea how Ajax will turn out, whether the Liberals will find a way out of the jam they’re in over the HST, or whether Stephen Harper will be revealed as an alien.

Or — and here’s the big one — whether 2012 really will be the year the world ends.

Who would have ever guessed, going into 2011, that Bill Vander Zalm would be back in the limelight, leading British Columbians to a humiliating defeat of the government over a tax issue?

Or that people would rise up all over the world in an “Occupy” movement that was, at the same time, targeted and confused, admirable and maddening?

Or that a counter petition against a parkade would not only succeed, but succeed easily?

Or that the latest rage at Kamloops high schools would be shooting videos of girls fighting? Or that Tobiano Resort would go into receivership? Or that putting grades on report cards would be considered not an essential part of the work done by teachers?

Or that a family in Australia would set a Guinness World Record by putting 331,038 Christmas lights on their house?

Or that a 99-year-old Italian man would divorce his wife of 77 years after finding out she cheated on him in the 1940s?

Or that a guy convicted of assaulting his former girlfriend would be prohibited from having a girlfriend for three years? (I’m skeptical of that one, but supposedly it happened in Canada).

Or that a guy in Florida would live with turkeys for the entire year to prove they aren’t stupid? Which, of course, raises the question of who’s smarter, him or the turkeys.

The mind positively boggles at the possibilities for 2012.