Brief Reflections On the New Year: "Seventeen-Going-on-Eighteen" and Other Strange References.

"I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away. There's something so sensuous about it-- overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands"

-The Great Gatsby


I spent the capital N New, capital Y Year in New York City. It was the coldest few days I've experienced in a long, long time, which ironically reminded me of one of my favorite descriptive quotes in F. Scott Fitzgerald's romantic masterpiece concerning summers in NYC (long island technically, but don't derail me). Oh how I longed for summer on that bitterly cold excursion to Manhattan. And, no, I did not do the Time Square Thing. I know enough after spending much of my time pounding the pavement on those very streets for very little pay, that there is little I can gain from returning there on holiday. Though, I do not cynically begrudge anyone who might want to subject themselves to the buzz, to the electricity, to the sheer magnitude of the "ball-dropping ceremony".

In fact, my friends tried (and failed) to make it to the countdown. It being the coldest NYE in NYC night on record, I can't imagine the sheer masochism and willpower it would have taken the thousands of people who had done the thing. Did you know (or so I've heard) that they don't allow any outside beverages, nor do they have any place to go to the bathroom during the event? Do that mo'f@ckin' math for a hot second. Nearly a million people congregating  for several hours and no bathrooms? Yea. Right. That square is probably covered in all manner of piss and sh!t and booze et al and I shudder just thinking about cleaning all that up. Of course people "shouldn't just go to the bathroom out in the streets..." but they do. They so do. Am I misinformed? Do people just wear adult diapers or hook up catheters to their pee holes? EWWWW okay I'm getting off this train of thought. Maybe someday I'll do the Time-Square- New-Years thing and document my suffering/ shenanigans. That would be amazing. Alas, my friends were sensible and left when they felt that they were about to--ummm-- die, and they met me in a more sensible area.

I on the other hand spent the evening traveling into the city (one of my favorite treks) after work. It was foolish of me to try and read quietly on the train while being subjected to all the commuters on the Metro North, pregame-ing in preparation for wherever their New Year's destination happened to be. Putting my book away, I accepted an offer to drink a few beers with some diverse, excitable college students in clubbing attire jamming out to some Raggaeton. Why the f@ck not, right?  

So now I'm good and lubed up.

Upon arrival, I for some reason hear Louis Armstrong singing "What a Wonderful World" in my head. I hear it every time I enter Grand Central. I don't know why. Perhaps I heard it being played by a street performer in the Terminal once before when I crossed over through the station's threshold. Perhaps the hectic human hustle in powerful juxtaposition with the meandering melancholic melody of the song has stayed with me. And when I enter the station and behold its prowess in all its grand (apt adj), golden glory... I think to myself: what a wonderful world. Maybe. All the Christmas lights and wreaths hanging up were lovely and picturesque to boot.

As I headed to the hotel in the West End I'd be staying in, swaddled in scarf and hat and hood in an effort to shelter myself from the cold, I could actually hear the million voices in midtown counting their way into the new year. It was like a shuttle launch filled with a mix of hope and angst and resentment and excitement and revelry.

But I was elsewhere in a sanguine trance, away from the madness, focusing way more on finding the location of my hotel with a busted-up smartphone than anything else. There was no pressure in fabricating some fleeting magic moment with a temporary ingenue, there was no worry of whether my guests are having an awesome time. It was just myself, on a journey completely separate, completely removed from the norm, as though I were an alien life form visiting from another planet. 
It was different. It was nice. Passerby's on the street were wishing one another a happy new year, but mostly, people had their own thing going on, uninterested in the fact that 11:59 was happening. Then 
midnight happens and, to nobody's surprise, 12:01 comes and the air is let out. We give so much meaning to a minute.            

Reactions in Twenty Eighteen 

As far as the year so far...we-are-seventeen-going-on-eighteen... and it's awkward. Online we appear to be a leaderless cult of emotional reactionary noise, virtue signalling and projection. That's not really different from last year. Or the year before that. There were too many memes of cynical, adolescent douchery where we piss and moan about how the year didn't go the way we wanted. If you want to blame a succession of numbers for the fact that your life sucks at the moment...well I don't think there's a whole lot a different succession of numbers will do for you. Let's stop being bratty teens about everything, stop expecting that everyone else needs to change this year, and start enacting change and motivation in our daily lives. We cannot change some things, but we do have control over how we react.

I hope you had a lovely new year, dear reader, and that you are settling in nicely after all the holiday madness. I'll be doing my best this year (because new years does serve a purpose to self reflect, change, improve, if you allow it to) to tackle some social/ political issues and shed a reasonable light on some of the polarizing topics that are guaranteed to creep up this year. Just remember, you do have control over how you react to things. In times when it seems like there are no moral, sensible voices, it's because they are being drowned out by the over opinionated, the extreme thinkers with an unreasonable view of the world, with an agenda to do nothing more than control the way you live your every day life. Remember, if nothing else this year, to take a deep breath, think, and remove your phone from your beautiful face.

That's all. Live your best life this year. Get inspired. Rise above the noise.