Years ending have become samey.
Some snow, some ice; pictures of celebrities who bit the dust back in May, who you forgot even died.
The last month limps off out the room after the ass-kicking; the Christmas tree's still standing there: like some stink-bum at the free doughnuts in the rectory. New Years Eve blows up all over the world, fireworks cascading down over the Opera House in Sydney Harbor while I'm still having an afternoon Diet Coke on the couch. As I feed my kid some chicken nugget hunks for her last dinner of the year, fireworks bedazzle the darkness above the Eiffle Tower.
When I finally get around to taking my first sip of eleven dollar celebration wine/the ball drops in Times Square. Anderson Cooper. Probably douchey Steven Tyler or someone standing down in the crowd, with the frozen peasants. Some music. Carrie Underwood, I guess. Or Taylor whats-her-face. Maybe some Pink. Huzzah.
We'll sit there on the micro-fibre couch, on the dirty cream cushions. Two years ago that thing was our prized possesion. Our brand new RC Willey $550 Sea Foam White sectional. Then life waltzed in; he waltzed in with his bag of liquor and plopped down on the snow bank and started pissing himself and shitting himself and blowing his snots out on the heels of his hand and slyly slathering them across the fabric like some kind of nuclear butter on our warm family toast. The dogs came tracking in their creek dirt, hopping up on the soft white cloud in the living room and farting out dead bugs and ground up deer guts, peppering the fucking proud symbol of our middle-classness with goddamn foul jams leaked from their rotten guts; skidmarks from their parked asses all up and down the marble halls of prosperity.
Monica spilt a little salsa here.
I bring in a little drywall there.
Violet dances across the cushions in her dusty striped socks. Time stains, man. Every unstoppable hour is a bucket of soot.
The year turns over into another year and we're four feet away from each other, me and her. Two pilots throttling down the runway/banging through air pockets and seagull shit and evening mist/ready to fly the filthy sponge straight through the thin cieling of clouds, and up into the clean outer blackness of something mysterious and new.
By two glasses of wine in, I'll be slurring my little speeches. I'll be talking at Dick Clark when he starts mumbling. I'll be yelling at whatever shit band they march out there in the 20 degree night. I'll look down through my Spanish buzz and spot the sign for Bubba Gump Shrimp Factory, down in the middle of all those lights, all that action. And I'll wish I was there, if only long enough to sip a nine dollar Miller Lite: some Long Island asshole in a four hundred dollar Yankees parka blowing one of those New Year's plastic horns in my ear. Ba-ba-booey.
The dizzying promise of the coming year rising up out of me like the warm whiskey shots used to do; back on those New Year's Eves when my neck would unhinge from my young wild head and I could celebrate the simple galaxy of my youth with a pure and proper sick: in an alley, in a city, wrapped in the cold forever night.