New Year’s Day
January 2, 2002
For New Year’s Eve, I woke up early… around 10:00am and drove up to Santa Barbara, CA with a few friends to have lunch and bum around, mostly just to get out of Los Angeles for a little bit before the actual celebration began.
Since I knew there was a mini-roadtrip involved, I haphazardly tossed together a last minute mixtape. On this tape somewhere was Andrew WK’s “Party Hard,” which got stuck in our collective subconscious during the ride up. This meant that as we were walking around town, each of us would randomly break into a part of that ridiculously stupid chorus. This was usually followed by a Rock-Lock, which was taught to me a long time ago by Matt Fraction. I blame this general stupidity on Adrian Langston, who made me listen to Andrew WK once. Do you hear that Langston?!?!
Anyhow, Santa Barbara was really nice. We had a nice lunch and wandered around downtown, realizing that all the stores there were just chains that we have in L.A. anyway. I did have the strange experience of running into some cracked voice clerk at the Brookstone who showed interest in my “What Would Joan Jett Do” T-shirt. This was followed by a look of confusion and the words “so… who’s Joan Jett?”
I swear I felt like punching the guy out, but he was pretty much just beyond help at that point.
We ended up at some pub in Santa Barbara and celebrating the GMT New Year there at about 4pm, with remarkably crappy champagne. Nisha pointed out that the ‘pagne smelled like urine, and that we should not doubt her for she lives in New York and is trained in the varying bouquets of urine. I declined to challenge this opinion.
With one New Year’s celebrated and we retreated and made good time back to L.A. We ended up at a small party of a friend of a friend’s and celebrated New Year Proper there. I was basically in a house full of strangers, but everyone was remarkably sweet, and didn’t even sweat me too much for being surly (this is pretty much my natural state of being, in case you were wondering). We drank, mingled and played goofy party games and played with the overly adorable Piglet, the Dog of the House.
By the end of the evening, I realized one of us was a member of the Mafia. One of us was a Cop. One of us was a Korean Pop Star. Beautiful Strangers are one of life’s real joys.
Posted in Endless Whining
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