But I hate being along on NY's eve - no date, no one to kiss, no people around to ring out the old and in the new.
I really did try to make a plan, I was going to make myself a decent dinner - but forgot to go to the grocery store on the way home, didn't I? And spend some time reflecting on the year that was, and resolving resolutions. And then maybe some entertainment. I followed my usual rule of getting a DVD to watch when alone that absolutely no one would want to be subjected to besides me, and bought this evening at Barnes & Noble a 5-CD set of musical performances from Saturday Night Live. And then cracked a Clos du Bois Pinot Grigio (poison of choice lately) and watched Disk 1.
Thing is, the performances, all from 1975-1976, I vividly remember seeing most of them back in the day, when they first aired. Belushi and Joe Cocker, Belushi doing Joe Cocker while standing right beside him. Jagger and Peter Tosh doing "Walk and Don't Look Back". Paul Simon starting "Still Crazy After All These Years" dressed in a turkey suit.
I work with people who were born quite a few years after these shows were made.
What's the point of it, anyway? One day we will get so old that we will start dying off, and the kids will turn 45 and have their own thing that they remember from when they were young. You can wallow in nostalgia like I am doing tonight, or you can make plans and move forward, but I know that any plan I make now is just something artificial constructed to make advisors and family and friends happy. You don't ever actually make it anywhere. Pain just accumulates in life. I still remember the pain of being a dissatisfied teenager, and now I'm a disgruntled 40-something so that pain is layered on.
Why am I alone on NY's eve, at this late stage in my life?
Because I'm sucky company for anybody, that's why.
I watched the Kennedy Center Honors last night and Pete Townsend and Roger Daltry were honorees, and there was a bang-up version of "Love, Reign O'er Me" by a lady whose name I didn't catch, and I swear both rock stars were tearing up, up there in the balcony seats, and I certainly was, here at home. When I was 17, overcome with a hopeless crush, I would lie in bed with big puffy headphones on and listen to Quadrophenia and get weepy when listening to this song. And when I got to college I used to watch the movie of Quadrophenia every few years to measure how far I'd advanced from that weepy teenager. But last night I was even more weepy. Here's the equation:
When you're a teenager, the angst is impatience to be older so all this pain will be gone.
When you're 40-something, you know that not only will that pain never leave you, you'll accumulate even more pain on top of it, and so 40-something angst is much deeper and worser. I can vividly remember how it felt to be 17 and impatient and having a hopeless crush, and now I'm 45 and still have hopeless crushes, PLUS the pain of the break-up of a long-term partnership on top, which you can't have unless you've invested the long-term time in the partnership in the first place, so it's an exquisite sort of pain that you can only get from investing the time, like laying down a fine bottle of wine in just the right condition so it ages properly. Layered on top of the past and current teen-aged crush pain.
It's a wonder anyone makes it through it. And also that they keep it secret from the teenagers...
Actually, you can see it, in the very best, pivotal scene in Lost in Translation, where they are lying in his hotel bed and Scarlett Johanssen asks Bill Murray, "Does it get easier?" and he says, "No." But then he changes his mind and says, "Yes." Because he knows it only gets harder, but he also knows he has to tell her that it gets easier so she can keep on.
Okay, I'm not actually thinking of doing anything to stop this journey, to get off this ride, because I don't believe in that. It's irrational for the will to will itself not to be. So, I give it up. I deliver up this crazy life and the senselessness and pointlessness of being 45-
- being a 45
- year-old woman
- in Wisconsin, in the dark and snow and cold
- alone
- on New Year's Eve
- watching sketches she first saw at age 12, while staying up too late, on the dodgy color tv in her parents' new built-on room in Omaha
- now captured for nostalgia purposes on technology we couldn't even dream about back then
- purchased on a whim by swiping a debit card, because I now have a career and a good enough job to have plenty of little discretionary income even on Dec 31 right after Xmas
- and then getting online and blogging about it, on a free blog with extremely user-friendly software and reliable hosting that is absolute FREE and doesn't even have any ads on it
- that's right, not hunched over a spiral notebook scribbling overwrought thoughts and emotions in a notebook that will gather dust and/or get thrown out upon the reconciliation of my estate, but
- writing it here, where Google will look after it and the Martians will find it in a million years when they come down and notice the written record of this life
- All these lives, all these beautiful bloggers with their own stories of New Year's Eve and nostalgia.
"Yeah," says the other Martian, "but keep reading! Because do you know who she grows up to be?"
No comments:
Post a Comment