It’s like walking through a revolving door at a fancy hotel. You begin in 2009, in the driveway of the hotel. The wind is cold and the elements raw. You make your way to the portal of glass and begin the circular shuffle forward. Suddenly you are in between, in a vacumm chamber of glass and circular motion. You watch the bell captain disappear and the glow of the lobby fill your eyes. Then the rush of cold air dissipates and the warmth of the lobby surrounds you. The sounds of Christmas Music is alive and there’s a fresh energy enveloping you. Keep walking and the circular adventure continues. Suddenly the lobby is gone and the Bell Captain is staring you right in the face. It’s still cold. It’s still dark. The city is still alive with taxi horns and busses roaring. But somehow it’s new.
That’s the changing of the guard. Out with the old, and in with the new. It happens so fast, you barely have time to reflect
How did you ring in the new year? Are you hung over as a monkey right now? Is your head pounding and the words on this page sliding to the right?
Are you one of those people that has to be part of the crowd? Do you have to wait in the line and pay 10 times the amount for a drink that you would normally get for 3 dollars?
Do you have to see something drop from altitude and count backward and then howl at the moon in a throng of anonymity?
Are you the kind of person who has to go to Times Square, at least once in your lifetime, just to say you did it. Do you need to stand in place in 34 degree temperatures for 6 hours?
Or are you like me, one of the legions of quiet revelers who realizes that New Year’s Eve is the unadulterated “Amateur Night”
If you want to find a problem to ring in the new year, then this is the night for you!
Stumble into the street or a bar or god forbid onto a highway where someone is throwing one back and get ready to fight, crash or vomit.
I can get that at home.
So I mix a black Russian and turn on Dick Clark’s rockin new years eve. Dick looks like he has been tumble dried on high and his tag says wash by hand.
I respect Dick Clark. I realize he had a stroke and it’s laudable he is still functioning at a high level, but compared to Shakira and Ryan “I really do like girls” Sechrist, Dick makes me uncomfortable.
Random ruminations:
Why was it snowing at Rockefeller Plaza when just a few blocks away in Times Square it was only raining?
Where is everyone storing their Urine? There are no port-a-johns so that means the urine has to go somewhere.
This year for the first time NYPD was patting everyone down. EVERYONE PATTED DOWN! Thanks underwear bomber! What kind of training must they have to pat down a person wearing 6 layers of warmth? Is that a hand warmer in your pocket, or are you just “excited” to be here fella? And why were the cops smiling after patting down the young girls? Can anyone say free feel?
CNN had the most interesting Times Square coverage in my estimation. Kathy Griffin is a breath away from an FCC sanction and Anderson Cooper is so vanilla, she just turns him upside down with cutting commentary and probing questions about the sexual deviant tendencies of Wolf Blitzer in the Situation room. HILARIOUS!
NBC had GREENDAY from L.A. They were terrific and the crowd didn’t look like sausage wrapped Zombies, perhaps because the temperature outside the Staples Center was a frigid 65 degrees.
Tradition: My dad as he has, for every year since I flew the coop, called me at the stroke of midnight. He’s in California and I’m in the CST, but he still does all the appropriate calculations and fires up the phone call. It is an expected ring and a much needed voice of calm that ushers me into the next decade. THANKS OP.
And finally, I was sent an E-Card that touts the origins of the New Year. What the hell, since you have probably all ready face planted into the key board and vomited in your lap by this paragraph, I will include the tid bits here:
The tradition of New Year resolutions originated about 4,000 years ago when the ancient Babylonians used them as a way to begin the year with a clear conscience, usually by returning borrowed items.
The song “Auld Lang Syne” — meaning “old long ago” — is sung at the stroke of midnight to celebrate the start of the New Year in almost every English-speaking country in the world. The word “syne” is pronounced like the word “sign.” The song is an old Scottish folk lyric modernized by the poet Robert Burns in 1788.
The first ball drop in New York’s Time Square was in 1907. The ball was five foot wide and included 100 25-watt bulbs. The current New Year’s ball is a 12-foot-wide geodesic sphere encrusted with 32,256 super bright LEDs.
NOW YOU KNOW!
And that is all I have. As my long time buddy Tony Narcisse once said; “What? No war and peace!”
The New Year is going to be so much different, so much better than the last year, I can’t begin to tell you! I am excited for 2010, I feel like a Pop Tart in the toaster, ready to be electrified. Now I just need that galactic finger of Universal direction to push the lever down and let the warm coils of the future begin to toast my “CRAZY GOODNESS”
Happy New Year Everyone.
And a little side note: I am finalizing artwork for 6 T-Shirt designs. I hope to have them available in the coming weeks.