Welcoming in 2013: The Advent of Infant Culture

Cursing the prolonged full moon achieves little except joining the chorus, last night's chilly festivities an exclamation point to over two weeks celebrating the febrile, the stupid, the inane.  I started this New Year's Eve shift tired and disinterested still in disrepair from the weekend.  Saturday was a push throughout, with the weekend destined for financial disaster save for Sunday's intervention, one of my best short shifts ever.  Maybe that was just that like the  current full moon, laughing at me, twisting my nose. labelling me the idiot I am.  The Sunday Seahawk game loosened up the business terrain, at one juncture having four consecutive rapid-fire thirty dollar fares in a row.  But throughout yesterday and the past two weekends too many alcohol marinaded fares snarled at the taxi moment, a persistent surliness marring the pastel holiday fabric. This morning my taxi was physically attacked, denting the left passenger-side door, one wonderful individual even chasing and pounding the trunk. When you are too drunk to get in, you are, regardless of all wishful thinking. The driver, my friends, decides who get in, not the passenger, quickly administering a mental sobriety test.  Too many fail my fairly lenient standards.  Part of the problem were the inadequately clad post-midnight thousands clambering for rides in the freezing 30 degree Fahrenheit early morning. It is not an exaggeration that perhaps five to ten thousand revelers were trying to get into my solitary taxi.  This was Five O'clock Manhattan minus all sophisticated patience, chaos the amateur celebrant's theme, desperation the prevalent emotion resulting in hysteria and minor hooliganism. I suppose when you are culturally breast-fed, never weened from the mother's teat, you reside in perpetual primary school from first to final breath.  This is your kindergarten existence.  This is your permanent delusion.  Go to the Space Needle cheering the midnight fireworks.  Drink until you are soaked. And never give a thought to what actually might be or is or can be, potentiality a perverse notion, substance a hamburger seasoned and favored by secret and mysterious sauces.  You are a modern early twentieth-first century coddled and pampered American citizen.  And like the big baby you are, tantrum is your favorite pastime, histrionics a personal anthem, your will and testament to misguided and wasted privilege and screw you, I Am The Most Famous Person In The World Though I Have Done Nothing Whatsoever To Warrant It.  I am an American and I am a fool.  Pay me my monthly pension and give me a new car!  I am wonderful, I am a heat generating star!