I will not bite my nails. I will limit my recreational drinking to three days a week. I will not throw up in crowded family restaurants.
Too late.
I didn’t ever find New Year’s Resolutions to be beneficial. Partly because I have never adhered to them. But also because I usually concocted them on New Year’s Eve, just hours before drinking heavily in to the wee hours of the new year.
This New Year’s Eve I didn’t bother with resolutions. I didn’t even bother avoid getting blackout drunk. One half bottle of rum, one half bottle of champagne, two starry nights and a good time later I am one half conscious in a Bob Evans with two of my roommates while a little person asks us if we’d prefer a booth or a table.
On our way to the table, I considered striking a pudgy adolescent for bumping in to me but decided against making a scene.
Our server, a wild child and worthy contestant for the Biggest Loser took my order: one water, one coffee and the farmer’s choice. My thick-framed sunglasses couldn’t mask surliness and the server quipped about my agony. “Still a little out of it?” I let my head cock to one side and moaned in agreement.
One look at my coffee sent me to the men’s room. I shoved my way through the crowd of people waiting for a table of their own; most of who smelled like dying.
I went in to the first stall, cough, gag, release.
After rinsing my mouth out I returned to the table a new man with a new appetite. A man ready for the day. A man mistaken. I took just one bite of the home fries and rushed back to the men’s room.
I stumbled into the stall I had previously marked as my own with last night’s mistakes and released a horrific stream of liquor and bile into the bowl. It was then and there; peering into the murky waters of regret that I realized it was January 1, 2010.
It was then that I decided that a day is a day just as a year is a year and celebrating the New Year is not about drinking yourself in to oblivion or making empty promises to yourself. It’s being thankful for one more set of tomorrows and the gift of being able to regret the night before.
Life is short and the days are long so that we can sip our drinks and take it all in one year at a time.
Eli Samuel Johnson, a gentleman
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