"Okay. Well, Happy New Year! Happy new year, a pat on the back, we made it through, we made it through the damn holiday season, us orphans and outcasts, gypsies and dreamers, displaced and wandering through six weeks of Winter Wonderlands. December slipped away while I was sleeping, without a warning or a peep or good-bye. As indeed did 2009.
I like to start my New Year in style. Sure, so do most, but I really care. It's become almost a superstition to me that each December 31st will somehow foreshadow the following 365 days, an opportunity to outsmart fate for a year by carefully planning, or irreverently not planning a single evening. And because this New Year's Eve was no different-- both very planned and unplanned, exceeding expectations and dwarfing the fated day the year before-- I didn't make my deadline and thus can write in the present and not in the future for a change. I'm watching Cabo San Lucas glitter and glow and recede from the window on my left, peering over the shoulder of a precociously hip little boy with his face buried in a comic book... If New Year's Eve is in fact a sign of things to come, I am hopeful for 2010. I believe it is a sign, and in my go-in-with-a-bang tradition. But one tradition in which I do not partake is the New Year's Resolution, which can, unlike champagne toasts or wearing red or kissing at midnight, truly and directly improve one's life. And yet I resolve nothing.
I tried, at a Mexican restaurant on the beach, to the serenade if conga drums and flamenco guitar, skillfully pulling off a Gypsy Kings classic, which I requested after they attempted "Tears in Heaven" and endlessly repeated the first verse. I tried again, at a quarter to the new year at a club in downtown Cabo, lit by pink and blue strobes, to the serenade of Britney Spears over a deep house beat. I had nothing but nebulous abstractions like "Do more for my career" and "Learn from my practice."
"Well, those are good, but you should make one that's quantifiable," encouraged a friend. I couldn't. I rejected every suggestion. I can't. But what if I WANT another cigarette? No, no, I won't stick to that... Oh that won't happen... I have no control over THAT! I don't want to break a promise, not even to myself, so I just won't make one in the first place, I thought, and my ears rang from the echo: I don't want to fail, so I just won't try."
Read the full piece HERE.
No comments:
Post a Comment