New Year

I'm feeling like this old car--cool but used up. Or once cool. Who knows. Last night, I left my new studio space and walked to a local restaurant/bar, a favorite of a certain kind of crowd in my village. It was early, but I like that I can walk to half a dozen bars from my new place and so thought to start. They were already there. They were washed and dressed and made up. There was a band just getting ready to play. They are a very good band playing mostly early Beatles songs. The drummer is a fellow I know, so I thought I would stay and listen to one set. I ordered a ten dollar scotch at the bar and tried to find a place to lean out of the way of the mixing crowd. I don't like crowds and I have a pretty large personal space I've come to find out over the years. I really don't like getting bumped.

The band started and the crowd began to move. I mean, you could hardly help yourself. I looked around the room and saw half the people mouthing the words along with the band. Determined as I was not to, I kept finding myself singing along the harmony lines. I'd catch myself and look around. I didn't want to join in.

The thing you notice about people as they leave their youth behind is the coifing. Both women and men have the hair of obsessives. I think that when people begin to put on weight and don't like the way they look, they think a new haircut will fix it. By the age of thirty-five, many women have the "hair helmet," that perfect, short colored hair that moves unnaturally if at all. Men have tried in some way to hide the fact that their hair is thinning. Mostly, though, they let their hair go gray.

Their was a lot of tucks and lifts in the room. They look OK until they stand next to the young hostesses and servers. Then you can really tell the difference. But maybe it is not that but the "perma-smile" that seems to be de rigor for a certain crowd. One must look happy, no? All those ultra-white capped teeth grinning and laughing, the bar like an ocean full of sharks.

They danced. That is what they call it, I presume, but it wasn't dancing. It was a mechanical facsimile, a lost recording of dancing remembered. Their was no wildness to it. No, it was like their hair and teeth and smiles, done to show happiness without joy, motion without offense.

I am too cruel, though, for I too found myself beginning to move my legs and hips to the tink-a-tink rhythms unconsciously. I shouldn't complain. They were happy.

And there was the key, I think, for I was not. They had come in couples and in groups, dressed and coifed to see their friends, to go out for a significant event. I stood there against the post in the clothes that I had worn all day, jeans, flip-flops, a t-shirt and sweater. I would spend another New Year's Eve alone wondering about the crowd. I could feel the difference. I looked at the hostess, pretty and young, and wondered what she saw when she looked back? What inventory did she take of details, filing them in the vault however unconsciously knowing that she would never get that way, knowing that she would always be young.

I stayed until the end of the set, watching the rotting flesh and calcified skeletons carefully moving about the floor until I could take it no longer. An anger was rising that I could not control. One more whiff of cologne would be all I could stand before I shoved someone. And so, hoping to find some equilibrium, I waved them all a benediction and strolled out into the rapidly cooling night.

Alone in the darkness, I felt good again. There was the moon with its neighboring planet shining bright.

I got two presents yesterday, both books. One came in the mail from my friend Q in NYC. "The Use and Abuse of Art" by Jacques Barzun. More on that later. The other was wrapped in red paper with the message, "Happy Holidays 4 the Polaroiod Man" scrawled on. There was no card, no name. The book was "Carlo Mollino Polaroids." It was brand new, beautiful. $960.00. Who would have done such a thing?

When I came home from the studio before midnight, I opened my email. I found this:

Three people today have told me to party like it's 1999. I remember where I was in 1999. On a dock. With you.

Happy new year's POB.
xx,

It was from a ghost of New Year's Past. It is a story I've wanted to tell for a long time. I will tell it here someday soon.

Today there will be time to reflect on all of this, time to try to reconcile all that goodness and sweetness and loneliness and angst. I have given up on trying to make sense of it a long time ago. I got that from Hemingway, I guess, from Jake Barnes in "The Sun Also Rises," when he says, "I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about." Or, as Hemingway says in "The Garden of Eden," in response to the query, "What if I die. . . ?"

"Don't let it happen until it happens."

Here I am in my new digs, jeans, flip-flops, t-shirt, and sweater. Happy New Year.