The first song I heard this morning was “Don’t Worry Baby” by the Beach Boys. It came on as I pulled my car out onto PCH, I appreciated the timing.
I was a little worse for wear this morning- and, for one New Years, it wasn’t because I’d mixed Whiskey and Champagne despite every other time I did that and it ended poorly. I hadn’t slept and spent half the night before tearing around LA with friends, new and old.
Driving down PCH, I tried to remember a trick my ex taught me.
When we met we were at FYF. The sun was setting over Los Angeles and there were lanterns hanging from trees near the beer garden/pupusa stand and he stopped, suddenly and made me look at the trees with him.
“Look.”
“What am I looking at?”
A breeze picked up and the lanterns delicately swung in the air, a bright tangerine against a Rainbow Sherbert sky. In the distance some electro-ambient band was finishing a set.
“You have to look at it and try to remember it. It’ll never look this way again. Ever. You look at it like a movie so you always remember it.”
And it’s true, I’ve never forgotten. I remember his face against the sunset while he stared at the lanterns and the smell of pupusas and warm August air.
So I tried to remember last night as best I could. Like a movie about my life, a montage saturated in reds and oranges blues with bright streetlights against Downtown’s skyline.
My Lyft driver arrived in a black Mini Cooper with lights strung up in the interior of the car, strobing and changing color in time to the Motown he was playing.
We got talking about synchronicity.
“It’s just, like, you have to be in awe of the ways the Universe works to get two people into the same place at the same time.” He told me as I stared at the crystals in his coin dish. “Once you start noticing all the patterns, it’s so moving. Everything makes sense- even if it hurt at the time.”
I told him I was glad I got into his car.
He dropped me off at a very try-hard hipster establishment in the Arts District that I secretly love. It’s partially outdoors, with firepits and a massive circus tent and painfully cool bartenders.
It should be said I was there to meet a gentleman for the first time for New Years Eve. I hope he doesn’t care enough to google me and find my past three months of dispatches from the Depression Hole. I stand by my work but feel that my deepheld need for other humans to tell me they love me and buy me food is probably not the best thing to learn first about me. Maybe we’ll start with improv or how much I enjoy nice-smelling, dark-haired men and pupusas.
And I could talk about the gentleman and how pretty he was and how perfect the night was as a standalone moment in my life. How when he kissed me at midnight, confetti fell from the ceiling and the bartender who looked like a beautiful silver-haired fairy sprayed us with champagne. Or how we found ourselves in a Barcade in K-Town with bubblewrap hanging from the ceiling and a Norteno band playing in the corner. Or how he made me nervous so I probably talked a little too much about myself and my best friend in a strange, Leslie Knope display.
I could, but I’d like to keep that one to myself. It was a nice night that reminded me that I could be fun and hopeful and weird again. Even if it never happens again or I never hear from him, I’m okay with that. I’m grateful to be allowed to have had such an experience.
But there is one moment I want to share with you all.
A moment of human beauty and truth.
While we were waiting in line at the bar, we started a conversation with the bartender who looked a lot like Blake Anderson.
As he mixed my “Diet Coke and the Cheapest Whiskey you have because I don’t know the difference”, he asked if we’d managed to stick to our New Years resolutions.
We said no, and like normal polite people, we asked if he had as well.
And then he said the greatest thing I’ve heard in all of 2015 and possibly 2016.
“My New Years resolution was to eat an ass this year and I never got around to it.”
We giggled nervously and looked at each other, waiting for him to continue or for me to wake up from this stress dream triggered by my fear of spending New Years alone.
Instead, he tucked a ginger curl behind his ear and continued, “I mean, it wasn’t for lack of options. They presented themselves but I choked.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” The gentleman said.
I said, “Well the night is still young.” Because what are you supposed to say to that?
We were supposed to check in again at midnight and see if he’d been able to fulfill his dream of tongue-punching the dirt star but found ourselves distracted.
I was happy to find that I could still be surprised; That I could find myself downtown with a pretty stranger listening to a man talk about putting his tongue where people poop while a hipster band played covers of 90s R&B.
I thought about the driver, and how he talked about the Universe and how it twisted and weaved things together, working to get certain people in the same place at the same time. I thought about what it took to get me in this bar, with this dude, listening to this bartender talk about booty. It’s good to know the Universe has a sense of humor- I’d almost forgotten mine.
I’m okay with 2016, so far. All things considered.
