the profound luck

They told me there'd be a party. "Yes, New Years is the biggest party of the year." And of course, I believed them. That's what we do on New Years, we party. We start early that evening and end early the next morning. Then after a day or two, get back to work and get it all started again. When New Years evening came around, nobody was about. Just the host family. Just a few empty glasses sitting on the table, with a bottle of champagne alone and forlorn, a lighthouse warning the ships of New Years wishes and resolutions to watch where they head in the fog of the future. Something was wrong. Was I going to ring in the New Year like this? Quietly? I don't think I'd ever done that before.

Well, there was that one time with Misha in Dallas. We were running late. We had a bottle of 100 dollar champagne, Cliquot or Dom Perignon, I don't remember. And as the minutes ticked closer to the event, we were racing down the highway. I had to pull over into a parking lot, and there we sat on the frost covered concrete, passing the champagne bottle between the two of us, a Russian folk band blaring from the radio of my car, the steam of the exhaust wafting by us, visible in the headlights. But that was different. That was something. And that was with one of my closest friends. This here, this was different than that. Here I was completely alone. With these people, but none of whom I could really call my friends. Not yet. It takes something to get into my heart. It takes a night of listening to music and heavy drinking and talking of God and eternity and war and peace to get to my inner sanctum. Something I really haven't shared with my host family yet.

I resigned myself. I would not obscenity. I would let things pass. That was the lesson here, that slowly I'm learning, though within me burns a kind of mad fire that's always consuming and sometimes lets out. No, I needed water. I needed calmness. I needed my center of gravity in a universe without mass. I walked outside, flask in hand, taking lonely shots of vodka while waiting and waiting. And then it happened.

It started with one rocket here, one tracer there. From my vantage point in the mountains, I watched this sleepy Caucasian town wake up. Fireworks were booming from every house throughout the valley, launching into air, explosions everywhere. People were coming out in the streets with pistols and rifles, firing up into the air. It was like some futuristic battle scene from some anonymous science fiction film. It went on for a good thirty minutes. Explosions, gun fire, general racket and glares throughout the sky. And when it stopped, it didn't all stop at once. It petered out slowly. A general silence fell, but it was only general. Here and there, a bomb blew up. Another firework launched. More gunfire. All the way until morning.

"Shawn, what are you doing boy!" someone called. "Get up here." So I went back up to the family and we sat and had our quiet little supra, they got on skype and chatted with family and friends all across the world. And I sat back watching. Good for them, good for them to be together like that. I'll have another shot of vodka please, thanks. And all was fine. They were happy, and that's a good thing.

The rest of the night passed in a neighbor's house, drinking more and more glasses of wine. The Georgians have an art of making toasts, and with each glass, the longer they last. They praise everything. They praise their friends especially, showering each other with love and compliments… so many that a suspicious mind like mine only thinks that this is some sort of Amway sales pitch. But they're not selling anything. By 7 in the morning, by the first traces of the dawn streaking across the sky, leaking into the glassless windows, toasts were going on into thirty minute breaths. How they love me, how they adore me, how they are thankful for what I'm doing for them here. And here, in my dark, wine riddled mind, I can only think, "What do you want from me?! I'm not that great. You have no idea." When I hear compliments, I only punish myself, I only think of all that bad things I've ever done, I only think that I've never done enough, never could do enough, to live up to what's being said. A compliment is a little miracle to me, and it breaks my hardness with a shock. Maybe they are being honest, maybe there is something to me.

And for this New Years… I'm going to try to do what I've never been wholly capable of. I'm going to quit taking people for granted. But it's hard. This world is peopled with so many great and interesting individuals and I get distracted way too easily. Hell, even the people who I know are reading this blog, and who I've gotten the profound luck to get to know in one way or another. I try not to take you guys for granted. I try not to take all my old friends and family for granted. But the madness seizes me all too often and sometimes it's like I've forgotten them. I wonder how they feel about that, when I just disappear for months and years at a time, off on my own crazy crusades. And I don't always come back. But still, without each and every one of the people who have touched my life… I would be less. I don't ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for me.