Last night I spent New Year's Eve at home, with family, we had sour kraut, hot dogs, and beer. We watched ten minutes of “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.” It was a horrible affair (Dick Clark, that is…not the beer and sour kraut), what had in years past been a brief but nostalgic interchange between a small cluster of native Pennsylvanians in a beer and rotten cabbage scented living room and those consummate revelers crowding Times Square had become more of melancholic reminder of our human frailty.
The event had undergone a sinister metamorphosis. What was once a happy slice of Americana served up hot and steamy on the plate of my traditional Holiday experiences had become a morose chunk of cold and slimy SPAM that had somehow gone bad while still in the can. My annual 10 minutes of revelry with Dick Clark was not as much a brief glimpse into the annual Big Apple festivities as it was a long rueful look into the dark recesses of my own mortality.
Dick Clark looked horrible, and sounded worse. I thought to myself “If that guy can’t outrun the Grim Reaper, then I am doomed.” I mean, I think it is great that the guy was able to grind out another Rockin’ program, but for the love of all that is good, did the American populous have to be subjected to the carnage that would ensue? It was like watching a train wreck.
I kept praying, “Dear God, make it stop.” But segment after segment, Mr. Clark kept going…kept smiling at me through my television set, reminding me that I too would one day get the shit kicked out of me by Father Time.
Happy New Year.
