Tonight isn't as cold as the typical New Year's Eve is here, but it feels too cold for a typical New Year's Eve in Los Angeles, so it's not conducive to nostalgia for either place. Maybe it's a San Francisco New Year's Eve. The closest I ever came to being in San Francisco for the new year, I left on the morning of December 31, and went to a coffee house in Hollywood that night.
It had gotten down to around 40 degrees in San Francisco, and so Los Angeles felt rather warm to me and I didn't wear warm enough clothing and, full of northern viruses to which I lacked sufficient immunity, ended up coming down with a cold which lasted through the first week of January. Since I've felt like I'm coming down with a cold for over a week now, though I still haven't, I suppose I'll end up feeling nostalgic about that year. Not auspicious.
But the moon is nice tonight. It will be full tomorrow, and because there are lots of clouds but they aren't too thick the moon is only a bit hazy and surprisingly white tonight. Maybe it will still look that way at midnight. There might be noise. There usually is a bit, with at least a couple of people setting off cherry bombs in the distance, but the guy who used to run a siren hasn't been around for a couple of years now. And after the noise it will turn back into the ordinary, quiet night. Festivity is not characteristic of this backwater.
This century is getting old.
Sunday Verse
New Year's Eve
by Thomas Hardy
"I have finished another year," said God,
"In grey, green, white, and brown;
I have strewn the leaf upon the sod,
Sealed up the worm within the clod,
And let the last sun down."
"And what's the good of it?" I said.
"What reasons made you call
From formless void this earth we tread,
When nine-and-ninety can be read
Why nought should be at all?
"Yea, Sire; why shaped you us, ‘who in
This tabernacle groan'—
If ever a joy be found herein,
Such joy no man had wished to win
If he had never known!"
Then he: "My labours—logicless—
You may explain; not I:
Sense-sealed I have wrought, without a guess
That I evolved a Consciousness
To ask for reasons why.
"Strange that ephemeral creatures who
By my own ordering are,
Should see the shortness of my view,
Use ethic tests I never knew,
Or made provision for!"
He sank to raptness as of yore,
And opening New Year's Day
Wove it by rote as theretofore,
And went on working evermore
In his unweeting way.