New Year

Some New year’s we creep up slowly on until we are sure we have them five by five in our sights and drop them for the meat. Some New Year’s we slide into head first trying to beat the ball to the plate, some feet first, cleats in the air, knowing we’ll lose the race but maybe scare the baseman. Some New Year’s we stumble into, just staggering home, just try to get home, maybe get a shoe off before falling on a sofa, thinking “you’re not really an alcoholic until you’ve woke up on the sidewalk.”

Some New Year’s we make back alley deals with, a little protection for a little cash. Some New Year’s we don’t see coming at all like the guy who didn’t know he was falling until he saw the ground speeding towards him. Some New Year’s fall gently like snow on rabbit fur. Some New Year’s spit out all foamy like words from campaign speech or a Baptist preacher. Some New years are in an odd chord like E flat and you need a damn slide rule to transpose if you’re ever going to be in harmony. Some New Year’s you hear coming like a herd of cattle or a freight train, they shake the earth and telegraph their coming.

Some New Years are poetic, some prosaic, some illiterate. Some New Years have frosting or sprinkles, some are only half baked. Some New Year’s come at you all red faced and naked and screaming, some in tails and cummerbund slowly ticking a walking stick on the hard packed ground. Some New Year’s make hopeful promises, some lie their ass off, some have good intentions.

The thing about New Years is there isn’t anything you can do about it. You can’t figure out what sort of year it’ll be and stop it. Even if you could, even if you could give us all back this old year, if everyone had it to do over; a year is not enough time. And we talk about this sort of hypothetical, all the time, in real life, in literature, in the movies; “If you had it all to do over again”, and some, many, say they’d do it the same, they have no regrets, at least on screen. But one year? What can you do with one year? And what would the point be in doing it all the same? It’s like having one good vacation and so you never vacation anywhere else. It’s even more like having one good high from heroin and chasing that dragon knowing no one has ever caught it, but once, and it’s the same dragon we’ll all catch; once.

And so you watch the year coming sliding into third, or line up in your sights, or lurking in an alley or running red faced and naked straight at you, and the best you can do is prepare for impact, like that full minute you have in the last second or two when you know the car is about to crash and you can do one thing, brace or cross yourself, close your eyes or anticipate which direction the impact will come from, flash your life to date or flash the future, but you can only do one, and if I were giving advice, I’d say brace.

And I’m not saying this New Year will be like a car accident, just can’t think of clearer example of how to prepare for something you have no way of preparing for or avoiding. I guess like those last few eternal seconds you could do one thing to prepare for the year, open a tax shelter or put more in a 401k, sell all your shit and move into a yurt in Manitoba somewhere, tell the people you love how much you love them and why, walk the dogs with the grandchildren and point out the constellations in the winter night sky, clean out the garage, join a congregation or yoga class, eat more soup and less McRibs, drive out to the desert and sit and watch until you understand how even something so apparently barren teams with life. This is your chance to do it all over again different. Though the you is different, the New Year makes sure of that. There isn’t any malice in it, it’s a personification of our hope and desires and the necessary attendant mirror image, the opposite, that makes the hope and desire all that more precious and fragile. It’s this personification and not an actual thing, the New Year doesn’t even know it’s a New Year, the earth spins on its axis and in the socket of its orbit as it has since before we knew it and way before we called one day a New Year or began to count the personal rungs of our mortality ladder. I don’t know, I didn’t start this. I’ve forgotten my name, my number, how my day began.

There are ashes in trays and bones on my floor and if I thought too hard about it I could mourn, but I won’t, I’ll dump the ashes in the garbage and put the bones back in the dogs toy box, run a vacuum cleaner over the rugs and remove the skin and hair and dust of this year to ready it for the next. I could count days in bones and ashes, wear long sleeved shirts and speak in riddles, but that’s not how I brace myself. I may think in archetypes, I may think that bones and ashes out of context is some metaphor for the book of days, but I act differently; I throw out the ashes, I pick up the bones. A friend of mine likened this once to the nature of the universe, chaotic and we spend our lives trying to impose order, but the bones and ashes will pile up again (though I think, in context, as he was neither a smoker nor a dog owner, he said dishes and dust or something like that). I don’t know, I didn’t start this, but I’m thinking chaos and order have bigger playing fields than my shack; any great celestial drama played out in my shack is coincidence. It’s just a guess. I made those ashes. I brought the bones in and the dogs take them out, they’re supposed to. I think the universe would remain unaffected if I allowed the bones to lay where they were flung and the ashes to spill over. And the New Year will be unaffected. I have neither illusion nor desire for any that I must somehow affect the universe. This is not the mirror image of hope and desire; this is just a thing, not a happy or sad thing, just a way of looking at my life in context. I have several of those, and even more for looking at your life in context.

I think, somehow, despite the futility of doing anything but bracing myself for the New Year, that I can, somehow, protect you. It’s an odd delusion but one I’m comfortable with even though I have failed repeatedly and with grandeur. Instead of getting all maudlin or writing myself into a corner, I think I will take the cheap joke and wander away; Yes, I want to haul your ashes and jump your bones. And I’m spent.