new years eve 809am

it/s 809am on new years eve 2020. I just ate two day-old vegan iced cake donuts naked in bed, alone. I thought of saving them for later, for some party trick. But there will be no parties , and no tricks of any description, unless they barter dollar bin classical LP’s Greco-roman wrestling. However, there will be walking the dardenne brothers films in their red envelope to the mail box in the rain. There will be tea. Beyond that , your guess is as good as mine. This is a new years eve tailor made for the introvert, the misanthropic, the immune compromised, and the broke. There will be no winter sports blasted off the barramundi cistern at 6am after a 12 hour bar shift, as a blizzard rages outside. There will be NPR on repeat. You will not be the only sober person amongst 350 fucked up jesus lizard fans beer breathing their way to a new year in a cavernous club 100 yards away. You will be the only sober person in your apartment , as the feline has ripped into the cat nip to prepare. You won/t be with blues explosion and the Dresden dolls at some shithole rock box in downtown san diego playing a new years eve radio show and eating your dinner at 2am in a downtown 7-11, ergo you will not have the sight of Amanda palmer preparing and unwinding shamelessly, beautifully and naturally in a room full of wives. You will not have to explain that she is one of a kind, an enigma, and that we rarely share the dressing room. Nor will you have to scream ‘less is more’ at the 110 minute mark . instead you can listen to blues explosion and the Dresden dolls, loud, on the stereo in your soft pants, and hope that 2021 doesn’t start with world war 3 There’s certainly no way that you will be smoking opium and drinking corona’s with your then girlfriend and her best friend and your weird friend in your then girlfriend’s expansive sunset boulevard abode. All you really wanted to do that night was go to thelonious monster at raji’s but instead there was opium , turkey sandwiches, echo and the bunnymen , and a naked Egyptian girl. The apex of my life at 20 years old. This year there will be toasted cheese sandwiches, the corona virus, and melatonin. There will be no ed hall and doo rag at the kilowatt, or a lovely family oyster and wine centric early bird meal at nicks cove in tomales bay, but there might be schitt’s creek and pork belly with celeriac mash and brussell sprouts. There will be no Times Square ’98 NYPD shakedowns for scaffolding without a permit, 10 minutes after the snowman delivered and miraculously and thankfully the schlub with the club didn’t find my giddy up as he was more interested in banging bodies off the security gates of the espn zone, so I scarpered after release. Straight into a Dominican coke bar where I celebrated freedom with a key party, old friends and a gun toting Puerto rican midget. If you/ve never heard ‘tranquilo amigo’ in an german accent you haven’t lived. Today I will knock back zinc lozenges with florida orange juice and imagine the best of diane diprima read to me in bed in a Melbourne accent. There will be no beach house wine and food fest where everyone is too fucked out or fucked off to make it to midnight. Today there will be schitts creak on the couch in the Heisman pose at 10am. There will definitely be no kissing strangers in line for the bathroom avoiding the midnight toast because you both had no one to kiss, nor will you walk out the door together 5 minutes later to spend the weekend smoking hash and drinking cold cans of cider in bed speaking Spanish and listening to the clash. But you might manage a coffee outside variety if it stops raining, wondering if that woman with the matte black retrospec and the Elisabeth moss profile is a local and is she on tinder and does she like miserable middle aged men that are delusional and unemployed. Nope, by circumstance or choice, there will be no togetherness today , tomorrow , or next week, but there will be post cards or emails or text messages or walks across the bridge. There will be the perpetual goal of staying positive whilst remaining negative as the American experiment dies a painful and public death, and our friends and neighbors and friends of strangers struggle to survive. We will baby step our way through minefields of the last 4 years and the next 3 weeks , and maybe next year we can celebrate with baseball bats and hazmat suits at the publicly funded beltway batting cages. Or maybe we will gather at rockaway beach or the 40 foot or block island or sunset beach and wash off the previous year(s). or maybe we don suits and topcoats and cocktail dresses or ballgowns and shiver under umbrellas outside grogan’s castle lounge, together as a unit and friends til the end.