Newest Year Ever (or: The Metaphysics of Then)

Faced with the choice that befalls every man at some point in his life--spend New Year's Eve with the ones you love, or with the ones you love and a hundred assholes--I opted, as a change of pace, for the latter. I was invited to a party at popular high school acquaintance x's house, and there promised to be a cadre of TNA and a contingent of Ubercrombie there to help vomit forth the new year in suburban style. Now, I know you, dear Reader, would never guess it, but old Foster kid wasn't often invited to the cool-kid parties back in high school. But I married up, and the girlfriend managed to secure spots for me and a crew of friends so motley we make Vince Neil and Tommy Lee look about as well-ordered as the set of positive integers.

So what was it like to hobknob with the beautiful people, the quarterback, the homecoming queen, the social directors, the winners of yearbook superlatives? Well, this isn't fucking page six. If you want a tit-for-tat account, go read Live Journal. We here at the Enfranchised deal in Big Pictures. Often of naked ladies. But I digress...

Suffice it to say that watching the ball drop while taking a trip down memory lane that goes all the way back to when your balls dropped, was a bit surreal. I've been quoted by some sources as saying that youth is a funny thing in that you're supposed to be young when it happens, but I was old at sixteen, too fucking old to go around being reckless and carefree.

When high school ended I remember realizing with a gasp and a blink that I only had four years left to do the things I was going to regret for the rest of my life, and that if I didn't I'd regret it for the rest of my life. But I didn’t have the stomach or the semen for that.

Besides, freshman year at university is neither what’s expected by hopeful intellectuals nor what’s portrayed in B+ movies. I rarely did find the bunchings of sensitive sophists, eagerly powwowing around the vast depth of smart things and/or painstakingly harvesting their collective minds for one kernel of Universal Truth. Therewere no academic orgies, nor orgies of any kind. The frat houses were shotgun and brick affairs that led one into the other along the mediocrity of H Street. Their pulp-fabled glory was non-existent. The parties were—for lack of a better word—lame. And then I asked myself, What did you expect? Corridors of alternating pulpits and soapboxes manned by the future giants of art and politics situated under a cherry tree and flanked on either side by Coors’ Light Gardens and hook-up chateaus, fueled by a never-ending string of full frontal shots and gross out jokes? Is that what you expected? Yes. Yes it is.

But, alas, people were either typical or typically atypical of the most common common denominator. They’re Thin-Candy-Shelled-Men wandering in the RecycledLand, whose deviancies and rebellions fall neatly into accepted norms. The last new idea was that we should be open to new ideas, and now all that's left are second-rate, third-generation Subterraneans who wear their old costumes with all the oblivious absurdity of a British Magistrate in his powdered wig...

Maybe that's why the suburban shindig at x's house was so oddly satisfying. Call it the-devil-you-know, but these people whose adolescences waltzed with mine all those years ago, they were somehow softer now, realer and less anonymous than the herds of WASPs and JAPs and BoBos in training who graze on stale beer and resin at America's institutions of higher learning. Now they're my small town heroes: The prankster who joined the Corps and ships off to Iraq next month, but not before you buy him dinner; that popped-collar who kicked his low-grade coke habit and worked his ass from County Junior College to Big State University, and dropped some of his superiority along the way; the dandy who's finally out and happy and minus one chip on his shoulder; and, of course, all the girls you thought you could have saved, the best of them with something like a self now to go along with the flesh.

If I've rambled its because the point is slippery here. Essays that hit a vein ought, if 9th grade biology serves me, get eventually to the heart. But essays that hit an artery...well, there the end of the road is a thousand other roads. But I suppose if there's something to be gleaned from this dwelling qua prose, it's the lessons of that temporal nexus we call midnight--when the bleary-eyed, sentimental longings of the past and the bright-eyed, zealous pronouncements for the future hurdle toward one another for about ten seconds, and collide for the briefest of instants at the orgastic Nowly Nowness of Now. Its just about the only time the artist, hedonist, and scientist versions of You are ever seen in the same room together.

-The '05 Baby.

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