A new year has begun. New neighbors are moving in across the way. A new cold front and possible snow storm is blowing through.

As they say on "Battlestar Galactica," it has all happened before and it will all happen again.

Just like these "new" tensions in the Middle East. When one person this morning talked about the Palestinian view on Israel, he said they believe Jews are against the will of God and you can't negotiate with the will of God.

It's a good thing everyone has an open mind about these things.

An old Lobo basketball coach, now coaching somewhere else, tells the press his hot new recruit came to the school because of prayers to God.

So when the recruiting class sucks, it's also God's will? Apparently us heathens here in the southwest are kinda like the Jews. God don't like us, and that's why our basketball team hasn't been the juggernaut of our conference for so long.

I know it might sound kinda capricious to compare a war in the Middle East to college basketball--maybe even sacrilegious. But then they say God works in mysterious ways.

We've got a lot of things we gotta work on in this new year. I'm thinking we're gonna have to try to work them out on our own. Feel free to pray, though, if it makes you feel better.

I kinda deal with it all on a weekly basis. What am I gonna do this week to move everything along. There are things scheduled and things not. And as the week goes along, stuff gets stuffed into the open slots. Then it's Saturday night again, and the week is almost devastated into history. A whole new slate of time opens. Seven more days.

I do consider longer time horizons as well.

For instance, I have enough martini mixings for longer than a week. This means whether or not to buy clear liquor is not on the agenda for this week. But just now I realized I miswrote. I am almost out of olives.

Maybe this is my existential difference between someone who prays to God for things to happen (or assumes His will) and myself: I will have to get the olives on my own. They will not come to me through prayer. And I do not depend on His divine will to make it happen.

Or maybe it's the timeline of it all.

Yes, eventually I will die. And someone may or may not retrieve my ashes from whatever hospital or research center that gets to play with what remains of my body (heathens are organ donors, deal with it). I might just sit in storage, ashy and content, for quite a while. But wherever those ashes end up is all the same to me. Because all that I know will be gone.

Concerning heaven and hell, well, why should I worry? If consciousness continues after death, then the concept of heaven and hell is based on how one feels about their time here on Earth. Hopefully they won't have spent their entire time on Earth dreaming of going to the "good" place. Or praying for it. Or in complete regret for their own choices. Or trying to save people from the "bad" place.

I don't know how I got into this today, other than I didn't really want to discuss the Middle East non-peace process or that governor (the arrogance!) everyone's been hating for the last few weeks (by the way, the economy is his fault, too). And even though my band had a great gig on Friday night, I'm not getting into that either.

I'm not trying to make you think like me either. I'm just telling you my side of it all. Because we hear a lot about what everyone else thinks about God and his many (many!) other messengers. And what those messengers say about Him. But we don't hear directly from Him at all.

Maybe God is like Lou Reed. Reed hates interviews. He doesn't understand why people ask him the questions he gets asked. Everyone ends up wondering if it was such a good idea to write "Heroin." Because, y'know, some idiot might take him seriously.

Matt Worley watched a Woody Allen movie last night.