Nothing changes New Years Day

by anna at 12:58 PM on January 01, 2007

Goddamn old folks. They demand to eat every day. Which means my wife must go to work even on New Years Day! Leaving me here alone, sheepishly wondering if I made a fool of myself last night in front of her friends.

And on New Year's eve, the old folks home threw a pajama party. Wife asked one of them if she was going to wear her optional PJs. "Oh no dear, my PJs aren't appropriate for public consumption," came the reply from an 80 year old with a walker. This is one of those comments to which there is no rejoinder, like "I've gotta go feed my hostages." Or, snuggled in post-coital bliss with your head nestled on his chest and he muses, "Now that I've found you my gay whoring days are behind me. Thank God."

So here I am alone, as the fuzzy details come back to me in distorted bits and pieces. Actually I am not alone as my son is here. He isn't fighting an overwhelming hangover. He wants to go fly the plane we built over the weekend. In the pouring rain. Argh.

There is something awfully cruel about New Year's Day alone. You want to cuddle up with your loved one under the quilt all day. Maybe give her a Dutch oven. Maybe watch a little TV on the little 13 inch bedroom model. But no. Flick it on and there it is. There it always is, just like Dick Clark's Fucking Rockin' New Years Eve during which you always fall so fast asleep Katrina couldn't roust you.

Yes, it's the 100th Tournament of Roses Parade, hosted by the interminably perky Nancy O'Dell and Billy (a grown man!) Bush, W's cousin. Today the theme is something unbearably exuberant, like "Express Yourself" but only more awful. So much worse I've blotted it from my addled memory card. Perfectly diverse dance quintets are waving their arms and chanting the theme over and over, like monks. The sun is shining and everybody looks like the strongest thing they drank last night was lemonade.

So I start flipping through the channels. End up on HBO. They're running an endless loop of uplifting tales of redemption including Must Love Dogs, The Island and worst of all, The Wedding Date. Every woman in Hollywood has a boob job. Deborah Messing had an elective mastectomy. Click.

And I imagine this is going on in households across the nation, the world even. Except in Australia it is already tomorrow. Or yesterday. Or something.

We all have such shared experiences, like the perfunctory memories they implant into the clones on The Island. Writing our names in wet concrete. Working up the nerve to ask someone out only to be turned down with an incredulous laugh. The last day of school. First fumbling sexual encounter. The way that girl used to swing her leg to and fro in class. Catching your parents knocking boots. Hearing Grandpa sing You scream I scream we all scream for ice cream. Funerals. Weddings. Wakes. Childbirth. Being cheated on. Nervous job interviews. Breast feeding. Gay experimentation. And so on. We might as well be clones.

Which reminds me. I'm soaking in a hot bath hoping to leach some toxins from my body and also hoping my laptop falls into the tub and electrocutes me. There's a newspaper crumpled on the floor with some dirty laundry. I spy a headline. It says, "FDA Says Clones Are Safe to Eat." Yes, but how do they taste? And isn't that technically cannibalism?

A little food for thought is all.