Numbers racket

As a younger man, the transition into a new year seemed somehow significant, a major event of sorts. Friends and I would gather around a TV to watch the ball drop in Times Square; and then, as with any big-deal moment, we’d consummate the celebration by cracking open bottles with swashbuckling pirates etched into the glass, tip back our heads, and awaken hours later in a tangled mess of limbs and confusion: Did I really dance the tango with the neighbor’s dog? Where are my pants? 

 

I’d say you can’t buy memories like that, but calling them “memories” would be misleading. It implies remembering things.

 

Fun at the time, but years later, I’m glad to have left that era behind. Partly, of course, this is due to age; you can’t do that kind of thing forever, at least not without the feeling that your head is filled with burly construction workers, feverishly jackhammering blocks of concrete. Increasingly, though, I find the whole New Year’s phenomenon curiously arbitrary. 

 

I mean, we kind of made the whole thing up.

 

The Gregorian calendar, which most of use, has sort of become the de facto international standard, but it’s basically an invention of the Roman Catholic Church, whose timekeeping ability is only surpassed by its predilection for really pointy hats. Back in the day (1582, to be exact), the robe-enveloped men who ran things were pissed off about Easter, the date of which kept floating around like Keith Richards’ lazy eye after a coke binge. They wanted the holiday, which is tied to the spring equinox, to come about a little more predictably. So they reformed the old Julian calendar. Which itself was a reform of the Roman calendar. Which was based on Greek lunar calendars, which were based on some guy in a toga pointing at the sky and yelling, “Hey look, the moon!” This is all according to Wikipedia, which, as we all know, has never been wrong about anything.

 

As for January being the start of a new year, well, we owe that one to Roman dictator and Shakespearean murder victim Julius Caesar. When he wasn’t busy revolutionizing the salad, he was inventing the Julian calendar, whose months were named after Roman gods. January’s namesake, Janus, was the god of doors and gates, and had two faces, one looking backward and one looking forward, a physical trait envied by algebra teachers the world over. So January, thought Caesar, was a natural fit to kick off the new year, which was typically marked by riotous celebrations and wine-fueled orgies. Nice to know some things never change.

 

All this is to say that our demarcations of time are random, the historical equivalent of a blindfolded child trying to pin the tail on the donkey. That Wednesday marks the start of 2014 – that we even recognize it as 2014 at all – is the result of happenstance. While human beings were building civilizations and devising ways to more precisely define time, the earth was oblivious, spinning on its axis and Tilt-A-Whirling its way around the sun with perfect indifference. We’re still the only species that cares that it’s 4:07 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 27. To the planet, and everything else that lives on it, time is a rhythm, not a number or a name. The sun rises; it sets. Seasons change. For most living things, that’s enough.

 

Not so for we people, with our watches and clocks and Garfield calendars. Humans like to compartmentalize. That’s what timekeeping basically boils down to: dividing our lives and our history into digestible chunks, so we can ascribe to them significance, meaning. As midnight approaches on Tuesday, we’ll be the only ones taking note; while owls and anteaters plod on with their lives sans ceremony, we’ll be wearing goofy plastic 2014 glasses and sipping champagne to the tune of some awful boy band draped in feather boas. We’re weirdos, you and me. Okay, mostly me.

 

I guess when you deconstruct it to that degree, it’s easy to condemn New Year’s celebrations as being superfluous. They mark the passage from one arbitrary number to another, while absolutely nothing of note actually changes, except of course for varying levels of drunkenness. But subdividing an abstract does have one advantage: It allows a person to cut off ties with one era and look to the next with optimism and – is it too corny to say? – hope. I’ve never put a whole lot of stock in New Year’s resolutions; if it’s June and I need to drop five pounds, I’m dropping them in July, not waiting six months. But sometimes people need that dividing line, a looming threshold on which they can fixate, so they may galvanize their will. It’s like a boxer psyching himself up for the big fight, except when all is said and done, most of us won’t be bleeding from the ears and sport a face that looks like a chewed Trident.

 

In other words, it’s sometimes helpful to erase the slate, even if we have to invent the slate in the first place.

 

I still don’t know if I’ll ever truly get it, this fixation on a number, but that’s the way I’ve got it worked out in my head, and it’s fragile. So as 2013 slides into its grave and celebrants toast its successor, I’ll stifle my confusion and go with the flow. It’s all you can really do during this strange period between celebration and living.

 

As the minutes tick away on Tuesday, my only thought will be: Do I still have a 10-year-old bottle of Cuervo stashed in some forgotten cupboard? It’s gotta be around here someplace.