new_year_new_you raze they were burning phone books to make themselves warm. we stayed inside and stared at white noise on the tv screen. i said the words, and you said them back to me, but they didn't mean anything to us. the year before was better. no one was burning anything. i was celebrating one thing becoming something else in a different house with a different pile of people. somewhere there's a picture of me smiling like i'm screaming, unless it doesn't exist anymore. i remember the shirt i was wearing. i still have it. it's swiss cheese now, but if i fight it long enough i can coax it into hiding almost half of my body for a while. we played this song that seemed like it would never end. the same four chords kept descending and repeating. "big monster coming along," matt growled, and it never struck me that the monster he was singing about was the year we were about to step into. they're smaller monsters now. their teeth aren't so sharp. they've been domesticated. but every once in a while, animal instinct kicks in, and one of them will let loose with an ancestral howl fierce enough to shake the bones of every year that's come before. i wonder what this one's going to grow up to be. 220101 ... tender_square i went to the_loop because i didn’t know where else to go. twenty bucks in cover later and i was given party glasses with the two lenses shaped as zeros to usher in 2009. we were about to enter 2010. i thought i’d run into people that i recognized, and perhaps i did for a time, but they were drunker than i was, i couldn’t penetrate their private jokes. or maybe i was drunker than they were and i'd withdrawn into myself. i stood in the middle of the dance floor as bodies twirled and kicked and punched the air, the strobe freezing movements in momentary snapshots of frenzy. all i wanted was someone to hold me and kiss me at midnight. when that didn’t happen, i drank more gin, pushed my index finger down my throat in the ladies when my state left me more vulnerable than i intended. i wiped my mouth with my hand, tottled in my heels to the sink and tried my eyes in the mirror. then, i descended the bowing black stairwell as i gripped the handrail, got my too-thin jacket back from the coat-checker and froze my feet in the fresh snow as i walked six blocks home, alone once more. 220101 ... unhinged i popped open the french bottle of wine that was supposed to be a birthday gift for someone i ended up never seeing again and went to bed thinking 'damn, this bed is gonna be cold tonight with just me in it' i woke up a little later than normal, looked into the numerology of the new year and discovered a small glimmer of hope for the coming year 220101 what's it to you? who go blather from