The New Year

I frequently forget that this place exists. There was a time when, like so many other things in life, that my idle ramblings here were updated on a daily, and sometimes twice daily, basis. It was like that bright shiny new toy you got on Christmas as a kid. You played with it constantly til it either broke or you lost interest with it from playing with it too often or another thing came along, piqued your interest, and you devoted your time to that instead.

Today is the last day of 2008. New Years Eve. The night of flimsy hats, dizzy balls, antic anticipation and promises - sorry resolutions - broken even as they're made. The night in which the whole crazy, foolish world and everything, everyone in it becomes simultaneously older, one step closer to the ... My question for you, dear reader, is What's the big deal about celebrating the so called "New Year"? It's just another day. We stay up late, eat and drink too much, wake up the next morning and everything in the world and our lives is pretty much the same.

And just what New Years Day supposed to be? I'm not exactly certain, but it's aficionados know that it covers many bases. It is an acknowledgment of universal fellowship and connection, ritual affirmation of one's own particular belief or unbelief.

Ones affection for New Year's comes in a cocktail-peanut and noisemaker kind of way. There are no aunts or uncles to visit, no gifts to be worried over and rejected, no frozen birds with goosebump flesh to be roasted, dismantled and devoured. New Year's, I understood even as a tyke, was a party! But, still, what's the point???

That point, the infinitesimally small, even immeasurable instant when a solid number shimmers and transforms itself into the next, is why so many have fastened onto New Year's and have never let go. In that brief flash in the pan moment we forget, just for a little while, about everything.

There's a passage in Vladimir Nabokov's novel "Lolita" in which the title's adolescent character wonders aloud if a cars odometer's many new zeros would revert to nines if the auto - if her life, of course - were put in reverse. Forget time zones. Forget cultures without clocks, wrists without watches. There is one moment a year when all the nines turn to zeros, a moment that nobody can turn back and it occurs at midnight tonight.

New Year's noise is necessary. With it, we ring in the new number, and there really is no retreat. We toast optimistic potential and hope, after all as one of the hookers in the movie "Forest Gump" proclaims as the new year rolls in "everyone deserves a second chance". So, to us, at that time, War and its scythe will be urged, at least, to reckon with peace in its diaper and our irresistible need for a ruckus, a toast and for a showy, mutual embrace of hope, explains the most inexplicable behavior of New Years Day.

There's no sense to it.

But tonight, December 31 at 11:59 p.m. open up your window, breathe in the chilled, wintry air and wait, strain to hear the midnight ball-drop roar of the crowd and feel the unexplainable satisfaction of having survived another year.

Happy New Years Everyone! Hold on tight, It may be a bumpy ride!