New Year's Revolution
Happy New Year.
Whatever that means.
Welcome to the change in the last digit you will use now to write your checks.
Nothing will be different this year than it would have been if we didn't count years.
You will still work your way through each day of each month just as you have every other year. One of these days -- March 6? October 25? July 18? -- will be the day that you die. Maybe this year. Maybe not. In any case, you have lived and will live a date that you will die on.
Maybe that's why people drink themselves into oblivion hours before the ball drops and some emo band on ABC plays a song in Times Square that was popular two years ago.
I don't even watch the ball drop. I just blow stuff up with fireworks.
I'm not celebrating a new year. I'm laying waste to it. Destroying history before it begins.
This is the day that I have to seriously consider taking down my lights and tree and stop listening to Charlie Brown Christmas, a funeral of plastic shallowness that will leave us in mourning until the sun returns. This day that draws a line and compartmentalizes life, making it more predictable and recordable and limiting.
Here's my New Year's resolution: I'm not going to have one.
I'm not going to do anything better or different because the linear means by whicht we measure time on has reached an arbitrary end and new beginning.
I will live and die brand new days. Different than every day before them.
Unbound and unlabeled by myopic obsession with time's progression.
"One should count each day a separate life; the day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity." -- Seneca
10 comments:
Boy, somebody needs a nap.
:)
my first thought on new years day: another year, another hangover!
Bah Humbug! By the way what is a Humbug?
"warning! if you break the stick from a rocket, light its fuse, and throw it into the enclosed courtyard where your friend is, make sure that the shed you expect him to seek refuge in is not full of paper products.
because in the million to one chance that the firework goes under the gap in the door, your friend is going to get barbecued."
do you think they could fit that on the label of a small chinese firework?
i vote we have an annoy the neighbourhood with fireworks week.
cori, a humbug is a bug that hums a tune that bugs the hell out of you.
Instea of happy New year, just new year. Where's this pseudo-rage coming from??
And a Happy New Day to you, too.
I've never gotten into new year celebrations, myself. Not even so far as fireworks. I do have a fascination for certain calendar days where eventful things have happened, though. I always reminisce on the anniversaries of births and deaths, although oddly enough not so much of my wedding anniversary. hmmmm. I do wonder what will happen on January 5th, 2012. Glad to hear I'm not so odd about that.....
Hubby (who also refuses to make NY resolutions) and I have been to the Las Vegas Strip and Downtown (as we live near it) for New Years Eve twice. Just to experience it, you know? I have no idea why we went the second time - maybe because we thought the Strip would be different than Downtown. Nope - both were insanely packed with drunk people, and being teetotallers ourselves, just got bored, claustrophobic, and felt up a lot.
My best New Years? 2000 - when we said blast it all, we're getting the hell out of here and headed to Zion National Park. Peaceful, quiet, snowing. A great way to ring in the last year of the millenium, or rather, get away from the people ringing in the last year of the millenium.
Merry January 5th, and a happy 6th to you, too.
"I will live and die brand new days. Different than every day before them."
Sounds like something I read in Fight Club. Great minds and whatnot.
Well... kind of. It was more like "Each day I died, and each day I was reborn" or something similar.
jay, it WAS late, i'll give you that.
chris, the biggest shock to me was when i turned on the tv and there wasn't any college football.
cori, isn't it cool that dan knows what that means?
dan, this year we had some new members of the neighborhood party. people a little skittish about fireworks.
so it figures that as i threw bottle rockets in the air (i know, they're called bottle rockets for a reason), the stick would break and the rocket smash into the garage door.
it also figures that my five year old would SAY he wants to hold a roman candle then drop it on the ground with 8 shots left and walk away.
at least we didn't hit any cars driving by this year ... though almost did. new year's morning, i was driving back from church and had to rush into one yard that was absolute ground zero for shells. we actually had one firework called simply "artillery shell."
krista, this is almost a post itself ... but i think it comes from my love of christmas and time off and my family being home with me. i hate santa claus because he ruins christmas. i hate new year's because it's the funeral before the long, desolate mourning period of janbruapril.
it's just a sobering thing ... and i'm not known for being sober like i should be all the time. ;)
kz, really i'm kind of hypocrite. i'm obsessed with time. i think i'm actually rebelling against myself. sort of spewing to articulate a fault. the best way of rememberance i think is to do it in terms of general seasonal times.
i can remember my wedding in mid-summer. i can remember fishing in ft. lauderdale in mid-summer when i was 10.
it helps me look past things like when two weeks before my wedding my uncle died alone under a bridge by the banks of dirty urban creek. everything becomes suspended non-linearly. does that make sense? i'm not sure.
my 2000 new year's had to be my worst ... because of y2k. when i used to write news, my newspaper assigned me to go to a chain grocery store's corporate headquarters to watch a bunch of screens to see what stores would remain online when the time changed over. nothing happened. i ended up watching a bunch of disgruntled co-workers have to act like they were semi-enjoying how they had to spend the most important new year's in a millennium.
that's pretty damn pathetic, isn't it?
rusty, it does kind of sound like that. also reminiscent of one of my favorite quotes (from the movie), "it's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything."
thanks for the indulgence, guys and gals. just a warning: if you want to avoid similar bitterness, don't read my weblog on valentine's day. ;)
e+
fireworks are certainly getting bigger and neighbours easier to annoy.
on the subject of y2k, on millenium eve/day, at about 2 minutes past midnight, the electricity pole up the road had a glitch and sent the whole street three-phase, blowing up everybody's electrical appliances and taking out the street lighting.
loving that last line about your myopic obsession.
I'm back in 2006 - injured the last day of 2005 - hoping luck goes my way a bit more with the turn of the year - will a stick in time mark the beginning of an unclumsy dawn for me? will I now be the champion of dexterity?
Will it hell
it's a new day a new dawn but another battle to stop myself getting injured in ridiculous ways all the same....
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