Midnight Madness

My original plan for New Year’s eve was to be at Freshwater beach with a select few friends while tripping on shrooms.  Freshwater beach is pretty quiet on New Year’s.  I wanted to go there for the seclusion and scenery,  though certainly not to swim because last time I swam at Freshwater, I was 12, and the undertow came close to drowning me.  As a sidenote, Freshwater beach has no fresh water, just salt.  It is the ocean after all.  Is there even such a thing as a fresh water beach?  Anyway, we’d have a bonfire, I thought, and maybe even bring a tent, and have a rollicking old time, like a Hunter S Thompson re-make of an Enid Blyton novel. 

Instead, right at midnight, I was doing none of the above.  Oh I was on shrooms, but the wrong kind, the ones with no cool visuals, and I was at the one house I promised myself I wouldn’t end up.  In fact, instead of being on a great beach watching hippies fire-twirl, I was in their bathroom, taking a piss.  I knew it was midnight because all of a sudden I thought we were being bombed, but it was actually the Harbour Bridge fireworks.  I thought to myself "Great, the New Year is here and I’m urinating".  

When I finished taking a slash, I spent 10 minutes looking around the bathroom like it was the Louvre.  I’ve been in that bathroom a dozen times before, but all of a sudden it was really interesting.  The paint on the walls is cracked and peeling, the bath is a really old-fashioned one and probably hasn’t ever been cleaned, and the clear shower curtain just reminded me of that show, Dexter, for some reason.  It looks like a bath that you’d cut a dead body up in.   The house is really old and one day will be demolished, so the people who live there are allowed to throw knives into doors and turn cellars into bedrooms and squeeze about 5 people more than really should live there.

I sound like I’m complaining – my New Year’s was actually pretty fun – it was just how I spent midnight that bothered me. See, I have this stupid superstition that how I spend New Year’s will influence how my year goes.  I know it’s irrational and it’s been proven wrong so much, but I couldn’t help but think that this was an omen that my year will be like a toilet full of piss, in a run-down bathroom, with me distracted and disoriented under the influence of sub-standard hallucinogens. 

Meh…  I’m off to Freshwater now for someone’s birthday and to eat that ice cream they make at Manly which involves smashing chocolate bars into it.