Information Blues.

New Year’s Eve 2008 found me in Central European Time, Barcelona, Spain. Something about being in an alternate time zone to celebrate a few seconds’ transition seemed extra arbitrary to me. Beth and I were walking down a narrow worn brick corridor in The Raval towards Plaça Catalunya. We didn’t have a real plan; we were out to see what might happen.

It was as if the Plaza had its own gravity. People were jogging in its direction–five minutes to go. All of the narrow streets and alleys were capillaries of humans toting bottles of cava and speaking in rainbows of tongues. Ah, Barcelona, where someone is always speaking yet another romance language you can’t understand.

With three minutes to go we were still a block or two away as I started to complain about how nonsensical New Year’s is. It’s an arbitrary measure, a celebration of an intangible and almost meaningless artificial unit. But wait, she said, it’s not arbitrary at all. We’ve successfully traveled one more time around the sun. We’ve traveled one more time around the sun! It’s so obvious, but I was too busy registering superficial complaints to realize it.

As we fed out of our capillary onto the Rambla, a freeway, we hit a gridlock of revelers. Everyone was looking for something, waiting for things to change. I was still overwhelmed by the movie playing in my head of the Earth in orbit, pictured in collage via 80’s NASA photos as hung on bedroom walls. I used to have a holographic postcard of Saturn.

Somewhere people started counting. I looked at Beth and said, let’s go over… there! Fireworks, corks, Beth cheering as she began stuffing twelve grapes in my mouth. Uno! Dos! Tres! (Wait, why am I the only one in my vicinity with so many grapes in my mouth?)

After I’d eaten my twelve we popped our cava and took a few liberal swigs. But then some folks up on a balcony popped some cava and began to treat us like a forest fire. A sea of drunk revelers waiting for something to happen seemed to think that was a great idea, that was really something, so more corks popped and firehoses worth of cava went streaming through the air.

It was about this time that something else happened way over on the other side of the Rambla and police in riot gear sprinted at the horde. And when they’re holding plastic shields like that, just like targets, I suppose it’s irresistible not to take a few shots… EXIT BETH AND SCOTT FROM THE RAMBLA.

It was a beautiful night off the Rambla. Major streets were closed and everyone was happy, walking down the middles, drinking and laughing and admiring the repeating xmas neon that adorned the ways. When we got home it was finally the right moment to sit on the Honda Scoopy Scooter that’d been parked on the sidewalk since we got there, finally the proper moment, now that we’ve gone one more time around the sun, to celebrate, and to align ourselves for a new year with new goals, thoughts and experiences:

FELIZ ANO