2016 is mostly men throwing an extensive series of fits at the mere idea they'll have to scoot over into the passenger seat—or climb into the back—as this ride we're on goes forward. That seems to be the freak-out humming beneath almost every major news story in almost every major aspect of every variety of American pop- and sub-culture. When equality was a distant abstract, a gauzy ideal unthreatened by any sort of consistency in reaching it, everything was okay! But now it's actually happening and

Boys.
Can't.
Deal.

We're basically just giant-size milkfed toddlers throwing ourselves on the living room carpet and thrumming our puddly fists in protest of the notion we really do have to share our toys.

So yeah, famous people we love keep dying before we're ready and yeah; rent keeps going up and nobody seems to have a solid plan on how to slow that shit down and yeah; the big-budget blockbuster movies we wanted to see this summer ended up being mostly weak or whatever, but really: 2016 is the exhausting, ulcer-inducing mess that it is because a whole lot of us guys are hoping if we just cry hard enough from the sanctity of our carefully constructed safe little cardboard forts, that mom will give up and let us have what we want, and we won't have to grow the fuck up for another decade or two.

That's basically it.