Spinning a New Wheel

The neighbors upstairs sound like Steve Irwin wrestling a crocodile in front of an elated live studio audience.

It’s 3 a.m.

I really shouldn’t care so much about it, as I am on the tail end of the work day and have been blessed to enjoy my own bottle of bubbly, quietly, blissful, in the silence that happens when everyone else is fast asleep.

Perhaps the noticeable irritation is that I’m not in the middle of the festivities with them, being social, testing the actual construction of the building we live in that was not designed for all of that excitement. Then I remember that I’m an introvert for the most part, which explains why I am awake by myself at three in the morning, to begin with.

A precipice is reached where I realize I am closer to Sean Connery and Graham Norton than I am to the Jonas Brothers. The games change, and so does the interest. No one wants to play with Grandpa because he’s supposed to be on the golf course, anyway. With everything in me that still feels so young, I realize in the next gentle, savored sip that I’m wildly okay with that.

There is something about this specific point of time more poignant than most, the beginning of a new decade, and in this fact, many I am acquainted with in my circles trying to discover the miscues, the bad things that have presented themselves over the past ten years as if they could suddenly lay out proverbial mousetraps in the hopes that we can catch these substandard events and make them go away for good.

Hope is never a bad thing to have in your arsenal, I would imagine.

Ten years ago, I was in a military uniform. Five years ago, I lost my father. Two years ago, I found the uncomfortable and unrequested ability to converse with dead people. Thus, my father is back, telling me the things I don’t want to hear, but I appreciate it so much more now. Today I discover that my favorite author that I still haven’t read is almost exactly ten years older than me, and in some ways looks younger. I am okay with all of that tonight, as a young girl in her twenties laughs and talks loudly, seeming almost in a joking argument of sorts with a male, probably a young football player from the local college.

Their hopes and dreams are going to be much different than mine are at the moment, with the same desires and ruminations I held some 30 years ago. It strikes me that so many conditions in life change, yet so many stay the same. We rarely decide to chase those things so similar until times of crisis arrive, god forbid, of course.

Who or what are we going to truly love in this next decade? Perhaps that is the question we need to concern ourselves with over the next few days rather than those resolutions that we know we are never going to keep.

The champagne held a subtle strawberry scent and flavor that took me backward in time when I was content standing in the middle of a street in a major city for New Year’s Eve when I was young, mostly dumb, single, and kissing one person whilst wishing I could also kiss the other three or four girls closest to me, ones I had absolutely never laid eyes on in my life until about fifteen minutes prior.

There is nothing on Earth quite as alive as young, hungry hormones. That is also the gist of what I hear going on among the small party above me. They are playing and frolicking, nothing particularly obscene, just happy and carefree.

I remember that night. It was New Year’s Eve 1997. The scents, the perfumes, the newness of the event itself. No thinking about the next day that would follow through with a feeling of head-butting a cinder block. It was the first time I had ever entered a gay establishment. Being a straight, white male, I felt like somehow I had crossed into territory I was never meant to be relaxing in. Like when you drive by a military post and see the government signs that make it clear in no uncertain terms that you are not allowed there, and your presence is not specifically desired or requested.

Relaxing is still the best term because it turned out I was very welcome; it was a beautiful place, and the people and food were nothing short of exemplary. They had opened for the event, as any wise owner of a service establishment would, and we felt as if we were somehow refined and special over our lobster ravioli and what was probably a chardonnay.

Age and time have a way of introducing to us the things we don’t know in life, concrete things, small rules of existence we have aligned ourselves to learn the hard way. Each year, each decade has a way of providing a flavor that strikes us as new but remains old hat to those older and wiser, watching from the sidelines, unable to decide whether to cheer or reminisce.

We don’t have flying cars yet.

That was one thing that ejected itself into the conversation shortly after midnight as the fireworks crashed the stillness of the night over the local college stadium.

“But that’s a Tesla charging bank there, in front of us,” I offered.

“They still don’t fly, yet,” was the response I heard.

As I proffered an answer that must have been too long-winded, I realized suddenly I was the only one awake in the room, which says to me that I have a future in professional hypnosis.

There are high hopes for this coming decade. I’m not clear on what these hopes actually are yet, but perhaps we learn as a culture how to listen better to each other and spend more time frolicking like those kids upstairs and less like the couple engaged in unromantic combat-style professional wrestling that occupied the space before them.

Happy New Year. Happy New Decade.

Be good.