Vision Board — January 1, 2025 – John Agliata

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Web Exclusive!💻
Break Stuff🎶
Mrs. O.🍎

THE DAILY UPDATE

In an exclusive revealed only to the readers of this stupid thing (hello you three!), I’m providing an in-depth explanation of the 2025 digital vision board I created just before this year began. Keep your bras on, ladies. There will be time to throw them at me later.

This is the third straight year I created a vision board. I use the desktop display on my laptop (and, thus, my three screens in my home office because I’m a screen snob) to keep these visions in front of me so that hopefully, through osmosis or consistent repetitive viewing, I actually pursue the things I say I want to do or be.

Shall we begin?

Let’s start in the middle. If you look closely, “2025” is made as one big maze. As this section of my website is called “A Puzzle Known As Life,” so I see this coming year as a maze to navigate. Clever as fuck, huh?

Where to go from there? Go to the right. That photo? It’s from Boy The Elder’s wedding to the DIL, and it includes all five members of the Fab Five. These are the people I know without a doubt care about me and the motivation behind me busting my ass to provide and also to do the work on myself to be a better husband, father, father-in-law, and human being.

Let’s go clockwise, shall we? The universe. My God the universe mystifies me. This photo is a reminder that I am but a dot on a planet that is itself but a dot. That should serve as a reminder that, no matter what I face in 2025, it’s small potatoes compared to the vastness of everything and I merely have to do what is required of a dot to have fulfilled my place in the universe.

Then we have a peace symbol made up of the word “peace” written over and over and over again. Why? Because peace fucking matters and I have precious little of it inside my heart and mind. Of all the things I want in life, genuine peace is the biggest. The time I had my near-death experience and got to feel what comes next, I was overwhelmed by the total and complete peace I felt. Remember that peace is problematic sometimes, because Here is not filled with it and I long for the peace that awaits me. But this is a reminder that I’ve got something cool waiting for me and I should do what I can to find it Here while I’ve still got a heart that for some reason is ticking.

Up next? Trees. Nature is my happy place. It’s quite, largely devoid of humans, and it has a restorative quality for me that is unmatched in the rest of this crazy-ass planet. So why don’t I spend more time in it? Great fucking question! I live on three acres of mostly wooded land. Have I fully explored said woods? Absolutely not. That makes me a moron, and I don’t want to end 2025 as a moron, so if I do nothing else in nature other than explore the woods behind my house, I’ll consider myself less of a moron, and that’s a good thing.

Then there’s that dude with the light in the middle of his guts. This is a representation of soul healing, and my goodness do I have some soul healing to do. I did a good job in 2024 of identifying the root causes of some of the major struggles I have had, and I stupidly thought putting a name on the monsters that have stalked me since childhood would mean I’d beaten them. Yeahno. I have work to do, and it’s all around this attachment theory mumbo jumbo I’ve learned more about in 2024. It’s annoying as fuck to be so psychobabbly, but it happens to be true in this case, and I need to heal some of the gaping wounds from the past if I’m going to make it much longer Here.

To the left of that are two sports logos, the St. Louis Blue Knights and the Midwest Rebels. I’m a basketball coach for two teams in the former and a baseball coach for one team in the latter, and I’d like to be good at those things. Yes, I’d like wins on the field, but I’d rather do something that does some sort of lasting good in the lives of at least a few of my players.

Traveling north, you’ve got the four Stoic virtues. I’m a Stoic-in-training, someone who is trying desperately to live a life more regulated and less drama-filled, and to do that I have to understand the difference between the things I have control over (very little) and the things I don’t have control over (very a lot). And then I have to stop being such a dink after the latter and just breathe that shit out, yo. So important are these virtues to me that I freaking tattooed them on my right forearm in 2024. Well, I didn’t. A tattoo artist did. And for that, I am grateful, because I suck as an artist and really shouldn’t be trusted with needles.

Above those virtues is Wakatakakage, the sumo wrestler who I have adopted as my favorite as I get more into a new sport I have become obsessed with during my surgery recovery. I love Wakatakakage, if for no other reason than his name is hella-fun to say. But it’s more than that. He carries himself into battle like I want to carry myself into the battles of life … calm, focused, and with purpose. And he wears a mawashi very, very well, I might add.

We’re almost done, folks. You with me? The next two things are the logos of my business and the business for which I work. Johnny Boy Marketing gives me an outlet to write about really smart people doing really amazing things. And make videos for a youth dance company. My day job gives me a great salary, great benefits, a great workplace culture, and the ability to ghostwrite articles for brilliant people who either can’t write worth a damn or don’t have time to write. Does it bother me that they get credit for my writing? Absolutely not. I’ve done the bylined reporter thing. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, and I don’t have that kind of ego anymore. I just want to help others put their ideas in a way that other people can access them, and I think I’m pretty good at that.

Then there’s Ren & Stimpy, and if you have never watched that show, you’re dumb and have missed something. But this doesn’t represent a long-ago animated adult TV show. It’s Ren & Stimpy singing Happy Happy Joy Joy, and if there’s anything I want in life more than that, it is only the aforementioned peace. My life is disgustingly devoid of happiness and joy, which is my own damn fault. I find myself largely friendless, especially locally, with not too many people in the world outside the Fab Five who could say, “I really knew John” were I to die today, and that makes me sad. On top of that, I’m consistently haunted by a few situations in the past that rob my happiness and joy, and I haven’t figured out a way to fix that, despite many years of trying. I’m not exactly confident I’ll figure it out in 2025, but it sure as hell would be nice to find some Happy Happy Joy Joy in 2025.

Next, if you look carefully, is a dude playing guitar. I can’t play guitar. I have tried. I suck. But music is my soul. If you want to know how I’m doing, check out the recently played songs from my Spotify. That’ll give you a crapton of information. Music defines the different eras of my life, the different people who have come and (sadly) gone, the key events, the depths of my heart. Without music, I wouldn’t want to live. So I listen to music.

Then there’s Dungeons & Dragons dice. I really like DnD. That makes me a geek. Fine. Whatever. I have recently been leading a game, and I am having a fun time being the DM (dungeon master, losers) and making up little offshoots of the storyline in the book. It’s a way to use my improv skillz. So that’s fun.

And finally, in the very top right is an old ink pen. I am a writer. I use that verb very, very specifically, because that is indeed what I am. It’s not what I do. It’s who I am. My goal in 2025 is to publish at least one book. I have a book of short stories in final edit, another book in need of one more look-through, and another book about 75% written as a first draft. Surely I can get something accomplished in this arena. Why? So I can start selling these things and make all three of you happy to have something new from me. I haven’t published a book since 2010. Yikes.

So there you have it. A web exclusive tour around my 2025 Vision Board. Awesome, huh?

Something I’m grateful for today: Having a major white-paper project for my side business mostly done, and it will be submitted by noon tomorrow.

Song of the Day: Break Stuff, by Limp Bizkit

Meaningful lyric from the S.O.T.D.:

It’s just one of those days
When you don’t wanna wake up
Everything is fucked
Everybody sucks
You don’t really know why
But you wanna justify
Rippin’ someone’s head off

Something good from today/yesterday: Writing about 6,000 words of that white paper.

Something I’m looking forward to in the next seven days: Follow-up appointment with X-rays to see how my neck is doing post-surgery.

Something I’ve written: Mrs. O’Loughlin and All I Needed to Know …

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Vision Board — January 1, 2025

THE DAILY UPDATE

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