A petulant frenzy
by Matt Worley

A wacky and weird new year. A sign of the times. Blood from the head of a rooster who was so kind to die for our supper. There is something interesting about this year--this new year--and it is hard to describe in a pithy column headline. Unexpected? No. I knew the new year was coming. Unpredictable? Maybe not. I could have guessed most of these happenings if I wanted to get a job at the psychic hotline. Strange? Well, that explains much of my life, so maybe we should go deeper and just forget labels. Maybe we should just look back--all the way back--to the beginning of 1998.

The new year began about six hours before midnight on December 31, 1997. I woke up from my nap. I had been at work previously in the day (from about 5:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.), had a few errands to run and finally crashed into bed around 3:45 p.m. There was no way I could stay up much past midnight on the five hours of sleep I had before going to work. A blank sleep of at least two hours followed. I don't know what woke me up, but my clock radio was telling me it was 6:08 in the p.m. And I could tell my time for sleeping in 1997 was over.

I stumbled out of bed, put my clothes back on (sleeping in jeans is just uncomfortable) and pulled those crusty mucus deposits from my eyes. The change had already begun. Someone (or a few someones) had rearranged the living room furniture. Furniture may be a misleading term for my fine readers. We prefer to have alternative furniture at our house--not just to be different, but because we haven't gotten around to buying a lot of real furniture. There are about five foam cubes (consisting of foam blocks sized 1.5' x 1.5' x 1.5' and a decorative fabric covering) my mom made for me when I first moved out of the dorms and into a house away from school. They are the most popular pieces of furniture in our living room. We also have a papasan that loves to either put the sitter to sleep or on the floor because of an off-balance move one way or the other. And then there are the rapidly deteriorating bean bags stacked on top of a single bed frame and mattress. This is our couch. People even call it a couch sometimes, probably out of habit. In my sleepy state, everything looked different. All of these elements of furnituredom were moved around and situated in a way to praise the god of entertainment we like to call television. I realized quickly I needed something to eat.

The refrigerator was stocked with about three cases of beer, and the two bottles of champagne I'd picked up on the way home from work. Y'see, we were hosting a party for the new year. Since birthday parties usually disappoint, we like to celebrate all of the birthdays on one day: New Year's Eve. It's the only holiday I truly understand the meaning of. Which is to get so totally trashed and out of mind that the bad stuff from the year before is so funny and idiotic it will never bother any of us again. From about 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., that's exactly what we did. We forgot about the bad stuff and made some new memories.

New Year's Day was for recovery. I wrote a short play consisting of a conversation between a critic and a writer (so much for old demons). And then I staved off the oncoming rush of hangover by going to sleep again.

Friday was for tying up business ends (as editor of a small press magazine, there are millions of small things to do--I did a few of them in the couple of hours between getting up and noon) and skiing. The lovely El Niņo has left his wet hands all over the state this winter, causing our ski mountains tons of joy and snow. On our last run down the mountain, we witnessed a young girl hit a jump wrong and slice her head open with her ski. The blood was everywhere, she was screaming and suddenly my friend and I remembered we were in Boy Scouts at one time.

We scampered over to the girl, calmed her down and finally got her mother to walk back up the hill to collect her child. The girl had quite a bloody head wound, but it wasn't deep. Her mother was quite calm about the scene, leading me to think that (1) this had happened before or (2) she just wasn't too concerned about her little girl (who was quite freaked out by the amount of blood on the snow, her head, jacket and everywhere else). I really hope it was number one.

Our good deed done, we drove back to Albuquerque, dragged a friend away from the TV for a few hours to eat and then returned to the TV to watch the original Scream. Quick Movie Aside: The first Scream is a much better movie than the second, but the second had better looking young people.

And then there was yesterday. I can't really describe yesterday without writing a whole new column. So I'll just leave that alone and mention this: There's a song called "Brick" by Ben Folds Five being played by almost every station in the country that plays rock of some kind. A nice little song about a strange little relationship. I've heard that song so many times in the last week or two, I'm beginning to wonder if I'm the brick or the one holding onto the brick. And whether or not it matters much which one I might be.

Matt Worley realizes this column probably doesn't explain a damn thing about the first few days of the New Year, but promises he'll be more coherent when the facts begin to present themselves in an orderly fashion.

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