Ringing in the New Year: A Modern History

New Year's Eve and I have had some interesting showdowns over the past 11 years or so. Perhaps that's why I can now very gladly kick back with a DVD and a glass of wine (or even a good hackable keyboard and a mug of Tension Tamer tea!) while the rest of the planet rocks and rolls and rings in the new year whilst banging out the old.

That is to say: here's my modern history in brief with Old Man Time and Baby New Year.

Ringing in 1995
About a girl
The Wetlands, New York City

The music was loud and funk-inflected and hipster-crunchy, the beer was good and cheap (and all the sweeter as it was somehow illegally procured, as I was three months shy of my 21st birthday at the time), the electric pulse of New York's night beat strong. I met a girl. We danced and later we kissed amongst the neon-spared shadows of the downtown cityscape. She happened to attend my university, and we wound up dating for most of the spring semester. It was a strange and awkward relationship that ended badly, but it doesn't erase the memory of a perfect New Year's Eve.

Ringing In 1996
Crash: taxi accident
Somewhere in the vicinity of 84th St. and 2nd Avenue, New York City

It was an ill-prepared and ill-arranged evening all around, perhaps symbolic of a sloshy year spent playing rugby and parties that drifted into one another as I waited for school to end and real world horrors to begin. A few friends and I bumped into several more pals and acquaintances and hangers on in New York City's chaotic Penn Station. We had a few drinks amidst the mad bustle before making hasty arrangements to divide into two cabs with the goal of meeting up at a friend of a friend of an uncle's goat's all night fiesta.

About a quarter to midnight, I sat in the passenger seat of a taxicab next to a driver of undetermined ethnicity. He had a habit of jumping off the mark five seconds or so before red lights changed to green, but I ignored it. Bad cab drivers are a New York institution, and besides, I had the notion of getting my party on draping my thoughts along with the several beers I had already imbibed.

Article Author: Eric Berlin

Eric Berlin is the publisher of Online Media Cultist. He's also prone to referring to himself in the third person in author bios in an attempt to make it look like someone Less Important wrote it for him.
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