DATELINE — CLAYBORN, IA — The last surviving New Year’s resolution in Clayborn County was pronounced abandoned Thursday evening at 7:14 p.m., in the east lot of the Casey’s General Store on Route 9, approximately four feet from a silver Ford Escape and directly adjacent to a partially eaten breakfast pizza. The resolution, belonging to 44-year-old insurance adjuster Kyle Dunnewold, had been to ‘drink more water and also read.’ It is survived by one unopened case of LaCroix and a library card that never left the glovebox.
Dunnewold’s resolution outlasted a field of roughly 1,900 others registered across the county since January 1, a cohort that thinned steadily through the month before collapsing in the final week. Local trackers had identified Dunnewold as the likely last man standing on Tuesday, when he was observed finishing a bottle of Aquafina in the Ace Hardware parking lot while holding, though not reading, a paperback copy of ‘The Power of Now.’ By Thursday, both the water and the reading had ceased.
‘We see a cluster of failures right around January 17, another around the 24th, and then a long tail that cleans itself up by the end of the month,’ said Dr. Renata Klipsch, a behavioral statistician with the University of Northern Iowa who has tracked regional resolution attrition for eleven years. ‘January 31 is what we call the Full Casey’s Event. The remaining willpower migrates, almost in unison, toward a hot case.’
The county’s earliest casualties were, as ever, the gym memberships. Clayborn Family Fitness manager Troy Benavidez confirmed that of the 212 people who signed up January 2, only eight were still attending by MLK Day, and that two of those were ‘just using the sauna, which I don’t count.’ Benavidez said he has stopped learning new names in January as a matter of personal policy. ‘I start in February,’ he said. ‘It saves time and feelings.’
The dietary resolutions fell next, undone largely by a three-day stretch of single-digit lows that the National Weather Service described as ‘deep winter’ and that local residents described as ‘the kind of cold where a salad feels like an accusation.’ Sales of slow-cooker beef at the Hy-Vee on Jefferson increased 38 percent over the same week last year. Sales of kale remained, in the words of produce manager Denise Orbach, ‘the same eleven bags we always have.’
Mrs. Peterson, 78, of Maple Street, who makes a point of not making resolutions, said she was not surprised. ‘Every January my son Douglas tells me he’s going to run a marathon,’ she said, stirring a cup of Sanka at the counter of the Wagon Wheel. ‘Every February I ask him how the marathon’s going, and every February he tells me he’s going to run a marathon. We’ve been doing this since Clinton.’
County Supervisor Lyle Forsgren, asked whether the board had considered a civic resolution program to supplement the personal ones, said he had ‘looked into it’ and determined that ‘people don’t want the county telling them to floss.’ Forsgren, who also serves on the Efficiency Task Force, clarified that his own resolution — to respond to constituent emails within 48 hours — had ended January 6, and that he considered the six days ‘a strong showing, frankly.’
Pastor Ellis Muntz of First Methodist delivered a sermon last Sunday titled ‘On Grace and the Peloton,’ which he described afterward as ‘mostly about how Jesus didn’t have goals, He had a ministry.’ Attendance was up slightly. Muntz attributed this not to the sermon itself but to the fact that the sanctuary is heated and several parishioners had, by that point in the month, canceled their gym memberships and had nowhere else warm to sit on a Sunday morning.
The mechanics of Dunnewold’s particular collapse were described in detail by witness Carla Hemmig, 31, who was pumping gas at the adjacent island. ‘He walked out holding a pizza and a Mountain Dew, stood there for a second looking at the pizza, and then just — nodded,’ Hemmig said. ‘Like he was agreeing with the pizza about something.’ Dunnewold declined to comment for this article, citing the fact that he was eating.
Behavioral economists have long noted that the end of January tends to produce what Dr. Klipsch termed ‘a regional exhale,’ in which a population that has been performing virtue for thirty days collectively agrees, without discussion, to stop. This year’s exhale appears to have been particularly pronounced, owing in part to the cold, in part to the general news environment, and in part to what Klipsch described as ‘the cumulative psychological weight of hearing the phrase artificial intelligence nineteen times before breakfast.’
A small number of residents have already begun drafting February resolutions, which behavioral researchers consider a ‘bargaining-stage’ behavior and which historically fail within four days. Dunnewold himself was reportedly overheard Friday morning telling a coworker that he was going to ‘start fresh on the first of the month, but like, for real this time,’ a sentence Klipsch confirmed has been said aloud in Clayborn County an estimated 14,000 times since 1987.
Wagon Wheel waitress Marlena Shuck, refilling coffee at the end of the counter, offered what may stand as the piece’s final word on the matter. ‘Every January they come in and order the egg whites,’ she said. ‘Every February they come in and apologize to the hash browns.’