People won't be working because all the electricity will be shut off and the world will be under martial law!

Smoking or non smoking!

welcome to 50 a.p.! last night, i went to my town's festivities and waved around a sign which said, "just 12 months until the new millennium!"
lots of drunken college students yelled encouragement at me.

my gf was forced to attend a party of her church with her 12-year-old little brother... muy mal. what's more, the party was at the house of a 6th grader from her church who has had a crush on her for several years. annoying. she got a little bit of sleep, but was woken up by the test of the emergency broadcast system in our town. just like me. oh well.

Okay, it's 1/1/00, and dammit, i'm feeling gipped - Where the fuck is this apocalypse?
It seems the only major thing that wasn't y2k complient was boris yeltzin. oh well!
back/forward
Well, I thought I start the new year out on the right foot by vomitting. After going to a warehouse party in the mission district of San Francisco, I rode the drunk bus back to San Jose. When nearing San Jose, a combination of the bus bouncing up and down, drinking a couple beers on the way up, and the abundance of alcohol I had at the party made for a bad combination. I threw up on my newly purchased pants and shoes, as well as the back of the seat in front of me.
After debussing (not unlike deplaning), I proceded to remove my clothes, as my roommate would not like his car seats stained. This, of course, was the perfect opportunity for him to snap a photo of me, which I am sure will end up on a web page somewhere.
(previous).....On the stroke of midnight, awesome fireworks erupted at various points on the Harbor and also from the top of Centerpoint Tower (supposedly the southern hemisphere's tallest manmade structure). This went on for almost 30 minutes (though what we couldn't see from our spot in the city was the cascade of fireworks from the Harbor Bridge, and finally the large "Eternity" written in lights across the Bridge itself). We watched it all with inexplicable misty-eyed feelings of goodwill towards humankind and resolutions about being kinder and gentler beings etc etc.

When the explosive sounds of the fireworks died away, the bells of St Mary's Cathedral, on the east of Hyde Park, began pealing. Went back to sprawl on the bed and watch a French movie ("Les Comperes") on TV while tucking into champagne and a box of chocolates. Occasionally went to the window and looked down at the large crowds straggling back from the Harbor and thronging the city streets. To sleep at 2.30 a.m.

At 11 a.m. we watched on TV and listened to the BBC World Service as midnight hit London and the Thames was set on fire. Here, outside, the skies were grey and the city was empty and quiet.

We had been lighting fireworks as early as 8 that night. I was over at a house of someone didn't know, filled with even more people I had never met. These were all the extended family of the one really good friend I have left in New Orleans, and I was a total stranger to them, but it didn't seem to matter. We blared Sandi's car speakers and watched all these teenage boys strut their stuff, loading rocket after rocket into a five-foot-tall steel tube, littering the neighborhood with paper wrappers and spent fuses. Sandi and I were flirting with the teenage boys, reflecting on our own teenage pasts, realizing that we were to never have them back again. And it was ok, for the most part.

The pyro group kept switching from the front yard to the back yard, where the canal came right up against the house, the nearby nickel plant blotting out the stars in a haze of orange. It looked like a demented domestic warzone, all this smoke and sparks among squat houses and parked cars, warped streets and outdated Christmas displays.

But where was I for the big moment, where the boys spent the last and biggest rockets and people were screaming from the radio broadcast in Jasckson Square? I was in the house, staring at the phone, waiting it to ring. I was to get a call from a friend, Shmuel, I have only talked to online, and I was determined to get it, so I just sat there, waiting. It was his idea to call me at this awkward time where everyone is likely to pick up the phone just to see if it works, so in this house I kept watching people who lived there pick it up and call friends to wish them Happy New Year. I couldn't snatch it out of their hands, so all I could do was hope that he would keep calling until he got through.

This would have been the first time we were to speak on the phone, and I was eager to hear his voice. I had heard his singing voice on an MP3, but, you know, it's not the same. Fifteen minutes went by and I was beginning to doubt. I had stopped drinking an hour ago to be nice and sober for this call, and it looked like I had just wasted a head buzz for nothing. I laid down on the couch and fell asleep.

Then Sandi's husband starts yelling for me and hands me the cordless. Shmuel said hello and then I did. Then we pretty much talked the way we do online, and I was just trying to hear as much of his voice as I could, since by this point the whole backyard was coming inside to make mudslides. But it was hard because he was so soft and I was so loud.

I don't remember much of what we talked about, but I remember I wasn't nervous like I'd thought I'd be. He told me he shaved his head as a start of the new year, and I wished to myself that he was there with me to keep me company, to be my friend in this house of loud and thick-headed strangers. To drive home with me after everything had blown up that was expected to.

We talked for a half hour or so and he said he had to go with his friends before the bars closed. He was an hour ahead of me, so New Year's had come and gone before he called. So I said goodbye and then went back out to the slowly dwindling chaos as the boys ran out of things to blow up. After a while I conked out again on the sofa, waiting for the time when I could drive home, when I could sit at my computer and put my thoughts into words in an attempt to use this phone call as a way to start the year off right.

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