Same Shit, New Year

New Years may well be my favorite holiday.
It's the last of the "holiday season" which can make it both a relief and a little saddening. Everyone celebrates it, everyone feels free to say to say “Happy New Year!” without risking alienating the man who served them coffee.
This year I was in Madison Square Garden at midnight, midway through an amazing concert and a sea of red, white and blue confetti falling from the ceiling.
I started crying.
Ignoring the effects of a few Bud Lights drunk from plastic cups, I think its fair to say that New Years can be an emotional evening as well. New Years causes introspection and reflection on the world. We are forced to think about the past year, what we’ve done and what we haven’t. A year is a perfect unit of time for this, since when we were little, one seemed like an eternity and more and more as we age, they seem to flash by.
A few days before New Years, Erica asked me if I though it was going to be a peaceful year. And I knew it wasn’t. With 140,000 people dead of unavoidable natural disaster in Asia, a mounting death toll in Iraq, war and violence and hate in so many untold corners of the world that I can’t help but mostly ignore it; no, there is no way that 2005 will be peaceful.
No year has ever been peaceful.
Every year has meant sadness and pain for some, ambivalence for some and joy for others- but every New Years Eve, there is this perennial feeling that everything will now be reset, what is old will be new again and we will be able to stop smoking, eating cookies or avoiding the gym because the year restarted. And so I was standing in Madison Square Garden, watching tens of thousands of people embrace, smile and laugh, confetti falling into my Bud Light and crying while the world reset. I was happy to see 2004 go, it held a lot of personal dissatisfaction and a lot of death in my family. But in fairness, 2004 also found me love, kindness, fun and so much good. 2005 so far holds a lot of travel and change, also a sacrifice of stability and comfort. This is how years work, I am lucky (maybe even blessed) and lucky/blessed includes some sadness and some shit.