New Year's Revolution

return of the peroxide blonde*this town needs a shithead*abject terror and more abject terror*Hawk Season 2012: a president for all seasons.*this nation needs a shithead

I have to tell you a story before I can tell you what happened. Sit down.

I've been up all night, racking my brain. I've been adrift all New Year's, wandering the usual spots with no luck. Turducken was doomed. Downtown was evil. Serpents and devils and shit buying drinks for other serpents and devils, the undead speaking in reverse tongues... working on their anagrams with renewed zeal.

See, three years ago I escaped Paris Hilton Island with my life and my life only. I had been there seven months, an idiot trapped by the promise of reality tv-delivered riches. I had been scalded with burning oil and set out in a fire ant hill. They made me eat sewage in a stunning $4,000 outfit and I still DIDN'T FUCKING WIN.

Since then, I've looked over my shoulder in dread that the Island Guard will find me and drag me back. Every time I hear a Justin Timberlake ringtone or a Honda Civic's glass pack I freeze and drop, paralyzed with fear.

But now it's the New Year. Several have passed since my unlikely escape, but the fear has yet to fade. I can't help the feeling that they'll be muscling me back soon, my fingernails clawing the ground as they pulllllllllllllllll.

So I've been drifting the defeated town, my face obfuscated with surrender paint, wondering if this will be the year we are all set free from Paris Hilton Island. The parties were death, the bars were vicious. I was surrounded by strange vampires, waiting to suck the fantasies out of my head and sell them to shitty authors. Panicked friends tried to fight, tried to stand beside me, but were all eventually thrown to the wolves. I wander this terrible town, mind clouded with bad thoughts, eyes clouded with the old year, begging the new one to come. Then, come the new one, I don't recognize it.

It's a wolverine in the nursery, gray at the edges of my optimism. It's the sweet taste of napalm on toast, the breakfast of a day already in shambles. Will this year be better than the last? Really, every year we say "it should be," but are never given cause to consider anything a win.

Next year I'm having a private New Year's. All my introspection this year took place in absolute crowd, and that just doesn't work. I hit all the wrong conclusions.

What I do realize, though, is that the beginning and end of a year are absolutely relative.

That said, I'm going to celebrate the Chinese New Year. By then I'll be ready.

Peace.