My friend Brandy once said that New Year's Eve is the one holiday for history buffs. Some would argue that the 4th of July counts, but I don't think so. The 4th is about America and patriotism (sort of) and blowing stuff up. New Year's is, okay, a bit about drinking and dancing and who's getting/giving that New Year's kiss, but it's also about the passage of time, reflecting on the year that passed, thinking about the year to come and oddly about connecting to large groups of people around the year. Honestly, New Year's means more to me than just about any holiday. I'm weird that way.
The thing is, though, like most people I know, I can't really remember a great, great New Year's Eve party. Thankfully, I haven't had some of the disasters some of my friends have had, but I also haven't had that special, knock-your-socks-off New Year's Eve, either. Maybe it's always freighted with too many expectations. Maybe it just never quite lives up to the ideal. Maybe, just maybe, there's too much booze involved and that can turn a party bad right quickly. I don't know.
Since we're coming to the end of a decade (holy f*ck!), I've been thinking about the last ten New Year's Eves and trying to think about how they all turned out. I figured I'd share with you all.
New Year's 1999 into 2000: This one was pretty memorable, not just because it was the Millennium and Y2K was going to kill us all. A friend's parents had an empty house in Florida and invited a bunch of folks down. It was a nice house, in the Panhandle. A couple of days of boozing, go karting, puzzle-making, more boozing. For New Year's, we were on a beach, watching fireworks. We celebrated twice, since, being in the Panhandle, we were just over the time zone line into Central Time. We watched the ball drop in NYC, had champagne and then went out to the beach for another one. The part, though, that sticks with me most was the long, 20 hour drive down and back. We started in Baltimore, where we got the car, at 9 in the morning, drove all day past stands for peaches and fireworks, stopped in a Wendy's for dinner, stood in the parking lot and watched the sunset and then realized that we had about 10 more hours of driving to go. That might have been a metaphor for something. I don't know.
New Year's 2000 into 2001: Yeah, this one is gone. Down the memory hole. If we were hanging out and I've forgotten, I'm sorry.
New Year's 2001 into 2002: Maine. Another friend was opening an office there and invited a bunch of folks up to hang out, ring in the new. It was post-9/11 and I'd had a hard year, so mostly I remember keeping to myself, looking out on the dark windows of a cold, strange city and trying to feel at peace.
New Year's 2002 into 2003: Yep, also gone. I might have had a party? If you were there, I hope you had a good time.
New Year's 2003 into 2004, '04 into '05, '05 into '06: All gone. Seriously, I have some concerns about my memory. One of these years, I went to a party on the first floor of the building I was living in, had a fairly bad time and right after midnight went back upstairs and watched an Entourage marathon on HBO. Good times. One of these (I think '05 into '06) was really great, though. I had a nice dinner with a small group of friends, then saw Clap Your Hands Say Yeah at Irving Plaza. The highlight of that show was the balloons. They had rigged up these balloons that were supposed to fall at midnight, but the rigging didn't work and the balloons stayed up there. We could see them, suspended right over our heads. Then, out of the crowd, one guy, one hipster-y guy, got his friends to lift him up on their shoulders so he could reach the netting holding the balloons. It became the focus of the show, watching this guy creep ever closer to the balloons, nearly slipping off his friends' shoulders, doing this obviously dangerous thing for no good reason. Except when he freed the balloons and the whole place erupted into cheers. It was awesome. I think that was my first image of '06.
New Year's '06 into '07: This was good and then it got weird. After hitting a couple of parties, I wound up at a house party on the Bowery. Good little band playing, dancing, random conversations with people. Booze a-flowing, but no ill after-effects. Well, not from the booze. I finally made it back uptown around 3 in the morning, passed out, ready to slumber well into the new year. But life had other plans. At about 4:30, I was woken up by voices. Lots of voices. In my apartment. My then-roommate, a nutty pastry chef, had just come back from the local drug bar's New Year's Eve party with a lot of new friends. New, drunk and high friends. Going to sleep wasn't really an option or a wise decision. So I stayed up. That New Year's Day, I think I got a total of 2 hours of sleep. A great way to start the year.
New Year's '07 into '08: Actually fairly mellow. A local dive bar. A good group of people. No fireworks, just good dancing, moderate boozing and no hangover the next day. Almost peaceful.
New Year's '08 into '09: Not my finest hour, to be honest. Way too much tequila, way too much in the department of expectations. Dancing at a friend's house party, which was awesome, but it was the kind of night that I wound up apologizing to friends for. Never again.
Ten years, distilled into ten nights, half of which I can't really remember. Here's to ten more, with better memories, more good friends and good times. Less living rooms full of cokeheads at 5 in the morning. Less booze and less whining. More, more, more.
Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind? Not at all. Happy new year, y'all.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Thursday, December 17, 2009
How To Become a Misanthrope In Five Easy Steps
1. Follow the news. I've recently found myself filled with what can best be described as, well, hatred for humanity. Not to put too fine a point on it. I used to be a happy-go-lucky guy and all of a sudden, I'm Agent Smith in the first Matrix movie, wiping the sweat off of Laurence Fishburne's bald head and making him smell it. I've been trying to cart how that happened and I've narrowed i down to six simple things you can do to suck the joie de vivre right out of you and shrink that heart two sizes down. The first thing is pay attention.
I've been thinking of this past summer as the Summer of Bad Vibes. Between the long parade of celebrity deaths, mind-numbing scandals, and the free-form craziness available on Fox News, I was pretty ready to throw in the towel on the human race. I thought we'd hit rock bottom. But then, Lord love 'em, humanity found a way to kick open the basement door and keep going down. Well, no one said they weren't resourceful.
Seriously, if this is government by the people, for the people, the people are clearly vain, self-centered, small-minded bigots. I know I didn't vote Joe Lieberman to be the most important man in the world (or Ben Nelson or Olympia Snowe, for that matter), but this is our system and I vote in support of that regularly. A friend of mine paraphrased Bill Maher as saying that we've got the government we deserve because, at the end of the day, we're just not good people. I'm finding it hard to dispute that. And it's not even like America's got a monopoly on the dumb, crazy and bigoted.
2. Support the Arts. I'm an artist and a supporter of the arts (as best I can be) and this has been a pretty glum couple of months for the arts. Hell, it's been a glum year. After a couple of recent studies have broken, it appears that the arts are getting older, whiter and more privileged. Not to mention there's no funding, basically, anywhere to be had. All in all, a heck of a grand time to be a minority artist.
3. Spend too much time on Facebook. Guilty as charged. But despite what another friend says here, I'm actually finding that technology is making me like people less and less. The unending stream of babble, updates and nonsense, masquerading as connection, the half-baked, inside jokes pretending to be discourse, the whole thread of humanity. Ugh. And the worst part? I'm one of those people. I can't avoid it. Or rather, I've been avoiding it. Because there are definitely people who are my Facebook friends that I'd really rather not see in real life anymore (No, not you. Never you. Of course not, you!). Social network, my ass.
4. Internet date. If you ever want to believe in the openness of the human heart and spirit, yeah, don't date on the internet. Or really don't date at all. Very few things reveal us as simultaneously unbelievably shallow, totally untrusting and exceptionally repressed as online dating. Everyone's deal breakers are calibrated to the tiniest things, half of them totally physical. It's a Darwinian world where the strong survive and come out more alone than they went in. And again, like #3, the hardest part is when you confront all of that in yourself. When you find yourself rejecting someone for some small thing that you do yourself and you know you do it, you've found the cold heart of online dating. For those of you who have found real love in this world, a partner and friend who completes your life, treasure that. It's a miracle beyond miracles that anyone can find anyone else to actually love in this world. You're lucky. Fuck you.
5. Live in New York. The front row seat for the show that is humanity. And it is a terrible, terrible show, with an obnoxious cast, a grating soundtrack, smell-o-vision and it goes on and on. I used to believe that people were meant to live together, to connect, that, as Tony Kushner once wrote, the smallest indivisible human unit was two. Yeah, way off base there. Just watching the grim spectacle of people crowding in and out of the subway, ready to kick, punch, hell even knife each other over a cold, uncomfortable plastic seat that doesn't even fit a human ass is really enough to crush your spirit. And to do it twice a day? That's just cruel and unusual punishment.
Add it all together, let it stew for a few months and bingo! You've got a misanthrope. Just in time for the holidays. And because I'm an agnostic, I've basically turned into the World's Angriest Deist. I believe that God set up the universe with the most obnoxious possible rules, put us on a path of nearly unending misery and pain and then jumped the next train to a non-extradition country to live under an assumed name. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett have one of my favorite descriptions of life: they say it's like playing an obscure and complicated variation of poker for infinite stakes using blank cards in a dark room with a Dealer who won't explain the rules and who smiles all the time. I'd also add that He cheats. Boldly. So you know He's cheating, but can't stop him. It's a mug's game.
Honestly, right now, the only thing that keeps me from flinging all of my belongings out a window, setting them on fire and heading for the nearest bell tower, is this: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. And Zach, the ten-year old kid I'm tutoring in English. He's just started reading it and needs some help preparing an essay for secondary school admission (because ten-year olds need more pressure in their life). I asked him to write me a little essay on the first chapter, to test his reading comprehension. But I haven't read it in forever, so he lends me an extra copy and I start reading. And it's actually more wonderful than I remember it. And I start thinking about what it must be like to be reading this book about this smart, awkward girl and this crazy family and the horrors she goes through to save them and the whole world while worrying about her crazy hair and her terrible schoolmates, too, what it must be like to read this at 10 years old. And what it will be like for me to watch him discover this world, these ideas about time, family and love.
And then I remember the old story of Pandora and her big box of all the evils in the world. At the bottom of the box was this one bedraggled, battered, little thing, the only thing that Pandora could keep from being lost into the world, one small pathetic creature called Hope. Poor, beknighted bastard-child that it is.
Crap. I even suck at being a misanthrope.
I've been thinking of this past summer as the Summer of Bad Vibes. Between the long parade of celebrity deaths, mind-numbing scandals, and the free-form craziness available on Fox News, I was pretty ready to throw in the towel on the human race. I thought we'd hit rock bottom. But then, Lord love 'em, humanity found a way to kick open the basement door and keep going down. Well, no one said they weren't resourceful.
Seriously, if this is government by the people, for the people, the people are clearly vain, self-centered, small-minded bigots. I know I didn't vote Joe Lieberman to be the most important man in the world (or Ben Nelson or Olympia Snowe, for that matter), but this is our system and I vote in support of that regularly. A friend of mine paraphrased Bill Maher as saying that we've got the government we deserve because, at the end of the day, we're just not good people. I'm finding it hard to dispute that. And it's not even like America's got a monopoly on the dumb, crazy and bigoted.
2. Support the Arts. I'm an artist and a supporter of the arts (as best I can be) and this has been a pretty glum couple of months for the arts. Hell, it's been a glum year. After a couple of recent studies have broken, it appears that the arts are getting older, whiter and more privileged. Not to mention there's no funding, basically, anywhere to be had. All in all, a heck of a grand time to be a minority artist.
3. Spend too much time on Facebook. Guilty as charged. But despite what another friend says here, I'm actually finding that technology is making me like people less and less. The unending stream of babble, updates and nonsense, masquerading as connection, the half-baked, inside jokes pretending to be discourse, the whole thread of humanity. Ugh. And the worst part? I'm one of those people. I can't avoid it. Or rather, I've been avoiding it. Because there are definitely people who are my Facebook friends that I'd really rather not see in real life anymore (No, not you. Never you. Of course not, you!). Social network, my ass.
4. Internet date. If you ever want to believe in the openness of the human heart and spirit, yeah, don't date on the internet. Or really don't date at all. Very few things reveal us as simultaneously unbelievably shallow, totally untrusting and exceptionally repressed as online dating. Everyone's deal breakers are calibrated to the tiniest things, half of them totally physical. It's a Darwinian world where the strong survive and come out more alone than they went in. And again, like #3, the hardest part is when you confront all of that in yourself. When you find yourself rejecting someone for some small thing that you do yourself and you know you do it, you've found the cold heart of online dating. For those of you who have found real love in this world, a partner and friend who completes your life, treasure that. It's a miracle beyond miracles that anyone can find anyone else to actually love in this world. You're lucky. Fuck you.
5. Live in New York. The front row seat for the show that is humanity. And it is a terrible, terrible show, with an obnoxious cast, a grating soundtrack, smell-o-vision and it goes on and on. I used to believe that people were meant to live together, to connect, that, as Tony Kushner once wrote, the smallest indivisible human unit was two. Yeah, way off base there. Just watching the grim spectacle of people crowding in and out of the subway, ready to kick, punch, hell even knife each other over a cold, uncomfortable plastic seat that doesn't even fit a human ass is really enough to crush your spirit. And to do it twice a day? That's just cruel and unusual punishment.
Add it all together, let it stew for a few months and bingo! You've got a misanthrope. Just in time for the holidays. And because I'm an agnostic, I've basically turned into the World's Angriest Deist. I believe that God set up the universe with the most obnoxious possible rules, put us on a path of nearly unending misery and pain and then jumped the next train to a non-extradition country to live under an assumed name. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett have one of my favorite descriptions of life: they say it's like playing an obscure and complicated variation of poker for infinite stakes using blank cards in a dark room with a Dealer who won't explain the rules and who smiles all the time. I'd also add that He cheats. Boldly. So you know He's cheating, but can't stop him. It's a mug's game.
Honestly, right now, the only thing that keeps me from flinging all of my belongings out a window, setting them on fire and heading for the nearest bell tower, is this: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. And Zach, the ten-year old kid I'm tutoring in English. He's just started reading it and needs some help preparing an essay for secondary school admission (because ten-year olds need more pressure in their life). I asked him to write me a little essay on the first chapter, to test his reading comprehension. But I haven't read it in forever, so he lends me an extra copy and I start reading. And it's actually more wonderful than I remember it. And I start thinking about what it must be like to be reading this book about this smart, awkward girl and this crazy family and the horrors she goes through to save them and the whole world while worrying about her crazy hair and her terrible schoolmates, too, what it must be like to read this at 10 years old. And what it will be like for me to watch him discover this world, these ideas about time, family and love.
And then I remember the old story of Pandora and her big box of all the evils in the world. At the bottom of the box was this one bedraggled, battered, little thing, the only thing that Pandora could keep from being lost into the world, one small pathetic creature called Hope. Poor, beknighted bastard-child that it is.
Crap. I even suck at being a misanthrope.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)