After filing my taxes next year, I’m wondering if change is all I’ve have left.

I say that because I met with my CPA today, and it seems that whatever tax maneuvers I was able to do before no longer apply. The good news (for me):  Because I own a business, I should qualify for a deduction on pass-through income. This is the thing that was added in the compromise legislation — so now I guess I owe Senator Bob Corker, who held out for this, a thank-you (even though I’d prefer to see him in prison for self-dealing). The bad news (for me):  My state and local taxes, and my mortgage interest, are no longer deductible. (And surely it’s coincidental that these provisions mostly affect such states as California, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, for example, which reliably vote Democratic. But I digress.) Minimum, my federal taxes are estimated to go up $1200 just because of losing that interest deduction.

So much for the tax “cut.”

Other elements of this are head-scratchers:

• For some reason, the pass-through income deduction applies to product-oriented businesses, but not services. So if you’re an accountant, lawyer, doctor, or Indian Chief, no deduction for you. But if you’re manufacturing mousetraps, sure, you get the deduction. What exactly could be the rationale behind this? Except punishing service providers? And if so — why?
• In 2018, entertainment deductions are no longer allowed. I’m shocked this made it through. Really? All those K Street lobbyists won’t be able to deduct their pricey lunches and dinners and travel and concerts and so forth? How did they miss this? Had they known, they never would have let it happen.
• Also, medical and dental expenses aren’t deductible the way they were. Two years ago, I could have bought a good used car for what I spent on the interior of my mouth — and that’s not even with counting the agony that came with it. I got two kinds of relief:  When the pain finally subsided, and when I got a deduction for it. So:  Let’s strip out the Affordable Care Act as best we can, piece by piece — and let’s also limit or remove people’s deductions for medical expenses. One or the other change might make sense, but doing both just seems punitive.

I’m not opposed to change, but, in general, I like change for the better. This was supposed to be a simpler tax code that jump-started the economy. Just about nobody believed that, including the people who said it. For one thing, the economy is doing fine. For another, if you suck $1500-$5000 extra out of my finances, and then you multiply by the number of people like me in those blue states where we actually financially support the federal government (unlike, say, Alabama, Mississippi,Oklahoma and all the other red states that cost the feds more money than they send), what you’re actually doing is depressing our spending ability — which shrinks the economy.

I do wonder just how much informed thought went into this by our selected officials and the corporate overlords who own them. To wit:  Have they asked, if we all die sooner without health care, who’s going to support the 1%?

6. There are lots of good people in the world. In fact, most people are good people.

Don’t believe otherwise. No matter what anyone tells you.

I’ve known people who’ve left high-paying jobs — in business, or as corporate attorneys, or what have you — to scrape by working at small non-profits because they believed in the work of helping other people and the world.

I also know people like Mark, my friend of almost 25 years. Here’s what he posted on Christmas Eve:

A Christmas / Holiday story. Yesterday, I had to do my laundry, but couldn’t at the apartment complex. So, off to the laundromat I went. Decided to go to a different location than usual. But alas, every washer was being used. Not pleased, I headed back to my car to go elsewhere (my usual spot), and that’s when a woman approached me, asking for a meal. Her husband was sitting nearby. I asked, “Only one meal?” To her surprise she replied, “You’ll buy two meals for us?” I nodded, and tears formed in her eyes. We walked up to the counter and placed their order, then chatted for a bit. …

Then Mark went back to his car and got two “blessing bags” — these are bags that they prepare at his church for handing out to people in need; they include things like toothpaste and a toothbrush, socks, maybe a little snack food, water, deodorant and such — and handed them to the couple. Mark keeps blessing bags in his trunk for things just like this.

There’s also the story from three weeks ago of the guy who ran into the fire to save the panicked rabbit. A passing motorist captured it on video, and spoke with the man, but the man didn’t want any credit for it — his sole purpose was in saving the rabbit. Whether or not you think people should rush into fires to save rabbits (opinions vary), you have to credit the man’s selflessness. As CNN headlined it, “Man rescues rabbit from fires, instantly restores our faith in humanity.”

We have all seen incidents like this — of the man who pays for the woman’s groceries at the supermarket; of the person who sends money anonymously to help a family in need; of all those people who volunteer for Habitat for Humanity on weekends to build houses for the homeless; of those volunteers who go out and clean the beach, or the park; of the doctors and nurses who go to poverty-stricken areas once or twice a year to dispense free medical care; and on and on.

The human brain is wired to store bad experiences up front, for quick and easy retrieval; that’s an evolutionary feature, and overall a good one. But we shouldn’t let it blind us to the obvious truth:  that on a one-on-one basis, person-to-person, almost everyone is good, and does good. We’ve been so beset by widely reported bad news in 2017 that 2018 will become the year that we remind each other of all the good.

5.

In 2018, The Ocean Cleanup launches.

Floating plastic, which never decomposes, poses a threat to all levels of the food chain and sea life , including sea turtles and birds that mistake it for food; the undigestible plastic clogs up their digestive tracts and ultimately kills them. Scientists have estimated that there are 7.25 million tons of extractable plastic in the oceans. The Ocean Cleanup seeks to dramatically reduce the levels of plastic in the ocean.

The Ocean Cleanup is the result of a then-16-year-old’s high-school science project to figure out how to strip plastic flotsam and jetsam from the world’s oceans. The answer:  Use the motion of the sea to sweep plastic into large floating nets that skim the surface without trapping plankton or other sea life. His resulting non-profit organization estimates that a full-scale deployment of their systems will clean up 50 % of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 5 years.

The system has been field-tested, and it works. Learn more here.

Human ingenuity created many (most) of the world’s problems. Certainly, most of them are solvable or, at least, highly improvable.

I’ve decided to cancel my cable TV service next month.

My AT&T U-verse bill is up to $278 a month — and nobody in my house watches TV. I might watch one show, and my wife just watches reruns of “Big Bang Theory” that are probably available (free?) everywhere else in the universe.

Here’s an imponderable: I asked my 15-year-old son if he wanted to watch a show with me. He said, “Is it on Netflix?” “No,” I said. “Oh. Then no,” he said.” My question:  What difference does it make if it’s on Netflix or “live” TV? I can’t wrap my mind around this. What if I asked before reading a magazine (yes, I’m old-school in some ways!) if it was printed on matte or glossy paper? “OH! It’s on matte? I couldn’t possibly read that!”

In any event, the TV portion of my bill, which pays for that TV stuff that nobody is watching, is $151/month. (Ouch!) I could easily buy more than 10 cigars a month for that, or something else, if pressed. So I’m going to cancel that. But what if I — or you — wanted to retain the ability to view some of those fine, fine TV programs, while still saving most of that $151 a month? The program offerings are so diverse, and so widely dispersed, that it’s almost impossible to know where to choose, let alone what to choose.

Until, as they say in marketing, until now!

Here, for your reference — and for mine, so I can find it later! — is a helpful online guide to which streaming services offer which channels.

Merry Christmas. Now I need to go to back to whatever I was doing on the Internet, where all the action is.

#4. Real climate change correction is becoming feasible.

No, I’m not Pollyanna, and yes, we should remain alarmed about global warming. But there is cause for careful optimism. This is based on a number of factors:

1. Carbon-cleaning technology already exists. The best future outcome for preventing the environmental apocalypse forecast in the “Blade Runner” movies is probably a combination of reducing carbon output, and offsetting (via trees, etc.) or cleaning the carbon we do generate. We already know how to do this, and many countries have written carbon-cleaning technology into their infrastructure plans.
2. Almost every nation on Earth recognizes the problem and has pledged to do at least something about it. (No need to guess which is the only country that has not made — okay, revoked — that pledge. It’s us. As in U.S.)
3. There’s money to be made in dealing with this problem. As recent history will tell you, once there’s money to be made, action happens. If carbon emissions fuel global warming (which they do), and global warming increases costs for nations and their constituent industries (insurance; agriculture; healthcare — and plus pretty much everyone else, in increased sickness and decrease productivity), then clearly there’s a market for fixing the problem. If you invest in the stock market, you might want to take a look at stocks related to carbon-cleaning technology.
4. China is the world’s largest polluter, putting out about twice the level of carbon dioxide emissions as the U.S.  China is now facing the very real impacts of pollution and climate change — and is now emerging as a leader in the fight against global warming. They’re committed to this, because they know it’s real. We shouldn’t waste any time drawing comparisons with the actions of our own federal “government,” now populated by the sort of anti-science religious fundamentalists we used to more commonly associate with radicals in the Middle East; instead, we should vote them out, and be glad that least polluter #1 (China) and polluter #3 (the European Union) are on the case.

Environmental collapse is our greatest threat, and undoubtedly we’re in for a rough time of it. But given awareness of the situation, market incentives, and growing technology, we may be able to work our way out of it or reduce the impacts. That’s good news for next year, and for beyond.

#3.

There is a school of thought that everything really turned to shit only after David Bowie died. While I can’t lay all of the blame on Mr. Bowie, and would never do so, I do have to say it seems like a large contributing factor. Without Bowie in our universe, things got undeniably worse, and that suggests a cause-and-effect relationship.

So here’s the good news:  There will be new music from David Bowie.

We may not get Mr. Bowie himself back — although with the Thin White Duke, one can never be sure what form he might manifest — we will get more of his music.

Oh, it may not come out in 2018 — it might be 2019, or 2020, or, in an homage to his song “Five Years,” it might come out in 2021, five years after his death — but it will come out.

Here’s how I know this:  The Beach Boys recorded most of their truly great music 50 years ago, and it’s still coming out. (Witness the recent boxed collections — that’s a plural, collections — of Beach Boys music recorded in 1967 that came out this year.)

Also, how many new Michael Jackson albums have come out since MJ himself moonwalked off this plane of existence? How many posthumous Johnny Cash albums (some of them pretty good)?

Three-quarters of The Monkees are still with us, and they released a pretty terrific new album last year. I listen to it constantly. It’s so great that it has convinced me that their old music was better than I ever thought. Now, after all these years, yes, I’m a believer! Well, the other day I was listening to it yet again, and had a question about a particular song, and went to Mr. Google, and here’s what I found out:  There were other great songs recorded in those sessions that didn’t make it onto the album. Of course! And they are available for your listening pleasure if you buy various packagings of that album — if you buy it on vinyl, or from the Japanese, or in a deluxe version, and so forth. This reminds me that it’s almost certain that additional songs were recorded for Blackstar that just didn’t make it on the album.

Our Major Tom may have sung “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust,” but I must point out that dust is everywhere — and David Bowie will live on. Knowing that there will be new music should make us eager for at least those elements of our immediate future.

2. More good news:

The GOP may be 100% committed to the 1%, but the average citizen isn’t. Actually, it seems that most of us actually care about each other. In its recent year-end survey of consumer behaviors in 2017, Google reported a great deal of search volume for terms ending in “how can I help”?

This year had more than its fair share of disasters. But people were not content to simply follow the news coverage. They were itching to take action, turning to Google Search in the moment to quickly find ways to help.

In October, wildfires ravaged Northern California and a mass shooting in Las Vegas sent the country reeling. Plus, the 2017 hurricane season ranked as one of the most active and destructive on record, with 17 named storms.

In these moments, we saw people around the country eager for information about how they could make a difference for victims of disasters stretching from Puerto Rico to Napa Valley.

One way they might help:  Ditch the GOP in 2018. If, again, we actually have elections.

1. The mid-term elections look promising for Democrats.

If, like me — and most of the electorate — you’re horrified by the GOP tax law that just got passed, not to say things like eliminating environmental regulations; attacking the FBI every day; working to ban people of some religions from entering the country; subverting the Constitution to steal a Supreme Court seat; selling off public lands; and much much more, then you might be cheered to know that, at the moment at least, Democrats are poised for a big blue wave election next year. With any luck, that’ll happen — and slow down (or reverse) some of this nonsense. Democrats recently won in areas as far-flung as Alabama, New Jersey and Virginia, and should be able to expand on that in 2018.

Assuming, that is, that there actually are elections.

Here’s some Pepto Bismol for that pit in your stomach.

Yes, if you follow the news every day — as one unavoidably must now — things look bleak. But there are some bright spots on the horizon. So throughout the rest of this month, I’m going to post a few of them just to help get us through this holiday season.

“Literary fiction in crisis as sales drop dramatically,” the headline reads. And that’s in England, which is theoretically filled with readers.

The story in The Guardian, which you can read here, posits that part of the decline is due to free, easy, readily available entertainment in the form of Candy Crush. I know this to be true. Someone I’m close to has, throughout her life, been an inveterate reader; now, though, she’s always “feeding her chickens” on some digital farming game on her iPad. I understand the temptation. A couple of weeks ago on a day during a particularly draining spell of flying around the country on brief trips; being over-scheduled here, there, and everywhere; and getting pulled in multiple directions simultaneously by the necessities of career, family, writing and more, and feeling that I couldn’t read another paragraph of anything or write another word of anything else, let alone think straight, I hopped on Amazon.com and bought myself a PlayStation 4 and a copy of “The Last of Us” and spent two blissful worry-free weeks shepherding a digital young girl through the post-apocalyptic zombie wasteland. Since then, I’m navigating another post-apocalyptic scenario courtesy of “Fallout 4.”

At the same time, somewhere in there, I did read two novels, what the The Guardian would call “literary” but which I call “novels,” or “fiction,” both of them debuts by former graduate writing students of mine at USC. I knew they both could write, and given that both books were from major publishers, I assumed they were good. What (pleasantly) surprised me was how good they both were.

I found JJ Strong’s “Us Kids Know,” about three teenagers in post-9/11 New Jersey getting deeply into bad trouble, unputdownable. While always advancing the plot, JJ alternates each chapter from a differing point of view from one of the three protagonists — a device I first encounter in Philip K. Dick’s “The Confessions of a Crap Artist,” the only one of his mainstream novels worth reading, and a book I recommend wholeheartedly and frequently; the net effect is to constantly keep you reading a bit further because you want to see what’s next, and because you want to get back into a previous character’s voice. It’s a sly form of plotting, and incredibly suspenseful. When I was an undergrad studying writing, a long long time ago, my writing professor said to me, “Suspense is cheap” — but having read many writers who have no clue how to create suspense, I’d say that suspense is valuable; you may not always know you need it, but when you don’t find it in something you’re reading, you sure know it’s not there. (Besides, I can’t help throwing in that that professor was a poet — so what would he know about this?) My recommendation to JJ, and this is a serious recommendation, is this:  I encourage him to write a literary horror novel. Stephen King can write suspense, but not literature (the proof I offer of his awful, clunking, lurching writing, can be found here); while any number of major literary writers can write well, but without suspense. (T.C. Boyle being an exception.) Imagine a well-written, beautifully evocative horror novel that keeps you on the edge of your seat and features characters whose entire personality isn’t summed by a King-like quirk like, say, the big killer Indian chief collecting shoes. (That would be King’s “Firestarter,” which was even more ludicrous than most of the rest of them.) JJ Strong is the man to write that novel (and rake in the sales, The Guardian be damned).

The other novel I just completed, on the flight back from Portland on Sunday, “The Most Dangerous Place on Earth” by Lindsey Lee Johnson, follows a group of students and an idealistic new teacher through high school. Filled with penetrating insights into what in untalented hands would be archetypes — the hippie chick; the striving Asian kid; the handsome jock; the beautiful but aloof girl; and more — the novel builds into an emotionally devastating conclusion, leaving all of us glad to no longer be in high school. While I don’t think I learned anything additional about why I so completely hated high school — the forced regimen; the bad teachers; the sense that I was in the wrong place for me and at the wrong time, when I could be learning a lot more in some other way at some other place — I did learn a great deal about student behavior these days, and about what it might be like to be the beautiful girl who doesn’t want attention and doesn’t seek it but who is misunderstood as being an aloof bitch, or the poor dullard whom teachers view as a menace to teaching and everyone knows to be a troublemaker but who finds out far too late that others will actually have a future, and are planning around it, and that those others will soon be leaving him behind, and that, already, his life will be going nowhere rewarding. Somewhat like JJ’s book, chapters are told from alternating perspectives, but here each plausibly could stand alone as a short story; (tenuously) like “The Canterbury Tales,” these are standalones that add up to a whole, with an arc.

“The Last of Us” and “Fallout 4” are incredibly diverting and entertaining. But I haven’t learned anything from them — except, perhaps, the bad lesson that ultimately global nuclear war isn’t so bad, because our species survives, just in degraded situations and without cable TV. (I prefer to think that global annihilation means global annihilation, and we’re better off just avoiding it.) These novels, on the other hand, are incredibly diverting and entertaining — and illuminating as well. They’ve made me feel in a different way. While I think all day long and generally in the middle of the night, too — it’s impossible to turn off — feeling is different; so much of everyone’s day is spent in so much rote behavior that it can be hard to feel something. That’s a gift that literary novels provide. Some of us will always understand that. Others never will. (And maybe they turn to music for the same sensation, or movies, or art, or food, or drugs. I like all of those too (if the “drug” is cigars or bourbon). )

There will always be some sort of market for literary fiction. I say this with authority, because the art I express is mostly in the theatre, and that’s a form that’s been written off as dead or dying for millennia now. But I saw a new play just recently, I’m writing one myself, and I’m directing one now. It’s scheduled to open in January. And I’m ready to start reading another novel.