... And now is the time for my annual, year-end checklist on how well I did in terms of adhering to my New Year's Resolutions for 2020.

1. I vowed to buy a two-year gym membership and never set foot inside the facility. Check.

2. I promised to sit outside the gym and offer free Krispy Kremes to members. Lasted about a week — or 2,017 donuts.

3. The owner of the gym sold the business and he and I opened a bake shop.

4. The bake shop was next door to his former gym. The gym went out of business.

5. I swore that, if for some reason a plague arrived and everything shut down, I'd periodically trim my thinning hair every six weeks with cuticle scissors. Check.

6. I pledged that, in the event of a plague, if my well-intentioned efforts with cuticle scissors proved ineffectual, I would NOT resort to a man bun. Check.

7. Regardless of hair style, as a gesture of kindness to my wife, I resolved to dye my thinning hair so it's not, in her word's, "the color of crematory ash." Check.

8. Given the choice between "crematory ash" and "speedboat blue sparkle," my wife prefers my hair to be "crematory ash."

9. I petitioned the clever folks at the Ralph Lauren Home Decor Designer Paints line to come up with a new color called "Crematory Ash." They already had it.

10. In a loosely thematic observation, I'd like to point out that the Los Angeles Rams have a new uniform scheme in which the colors of their pants and jerseys are "bone." It's true. Creepily enough, they DO look like bone. It's as though the creative team for those "CSI" was consulted by the Rams with a conceptual request to "Help us make our uniforms look like skeletons."

11. I resolved to stop eating ice cream. Check.

12. There's a famous story about Lance Armstrong leading his Tour de France-era cycling team in a harsh, dead-of-winter ride through sleet and boreal winds on an insane training climb up some towering Alp peak or another. It was brutal. After they summited, the team van drove the exhausted cyclists back down the mountain, where one of the athletes said, "That was insane. I'm glad it's over." To which Lance said, "What do you mean 'It's over?' We're doing it again." And they did.

13. Quitting ice cream is harder than riding with Lance Armstrong.

14. I vowed that I would write a sentence longer than the 33-page, 13,955-word run-on monstrosity penned by Jonathan Coe in his 2001 novel "The Rotter's Club" and in fact I did so and, also in fact, you're reading the sentence I wrote that's longer than Coe's — or at least I should say you're reading the START of the sentence that's longer than Coe's because there's not enough room in this column space to show you the whole thing, not by a long shot, and now that I think about it, I'm not sure there's enough space to get to even the first of dozens of maddening, David Foster Wallace-style footnotes or even some of the clever, meta fiction constructs like flow charts and flip-book kookery like Jonathan Safran Foer enjoys dazzling us with because —