This is the end. One more year, one more ring for the tree, a new skin for the snake to drop, an old year is dead and a new year is born.
Birth of a new year is an invitation for a birth of a new mind, of new perceptions, a chance to become a better person, as if in the contract with life, there’s a tiny paragraph in small letters that says that every single human being has the chance to reborn with the new year, to erase the rigid disc and be able to begin from zero again.
Indeed, this is what makes this life stunning, and one of the few things which I understand as a unique characteristic of men, mmm…yes, and women, and that is the capacity to start again, just like starting over or that big phrase in the chest of artists for every square person looking for keys, ‘show must go on’.
We are absolute beginners, and it’s summer, it’s hot, the shores are full of strangers dressing in a strange way, yes, in fashionable underwear, wondering why this race chooses the same beach resort to get fresh sometimes, finding you a metre away from ten other people who are also one metre away from another 100 and that won’t stop. Why? Why am I here, in underwear, watching girls and guys and the mamas and the papas and grannies in coloured underwear, with sticky lotions on their face and shoulders, feeling my white officinal skin getting pink whilst a burning sensation invades every inch of my skin? Why, I am not in a desert!? So I say to myself… that’s why a new year begins, to change my philosophy, to start taking things more easy, and throw away the old burden, and maybe a good way may be beginning by loving my lotioned co-beach habitués wearing their fashionable coloured underwear or at least not being snob or with complex about esthetical standards. Let it be. This is just the beginning. Baby you can drive my car, and maybe I love you.
So what is the point of this column today? This Year 2007 has come to its end point. So that is the point.
What is the point of this ‘travel’ column today? Enjoy this new beginning, wherever you are, the coast, the mountain, the desert, or even the city, or the pampas or your bathroom wherever you are staying, you have another chance to make your book look better, the book of your own life, forgiveness is at your feet as well as your dreams in the bottom of your stomach desiring to float in the quintessence of nature.
Yes, I know, what is the guy recommending?
This guy, I sincerely don’t know, and I sincerely didn’t choose the title for this column, though thinking this last question better, I definitely recommend Bob Marley & Wailers songs to begin your 8th year of this third millennium since baby Jesus came from immaculate mum’s belly to this planet called by an egocentric baptiser as planet earth, when we now all know that in a democratic environment it must have been called planet Water, as 70% of this planet is filled of it, as well as your body, well… counting caipirinhas as liquid, ergo as water. Maybe planet Agua would sound better.
So let’s start again and insist, this is the beginning, welcome to your new life, your new chapter, your new page, and remember you are not the only one having these thoughts: all the lotioned people around you feel it too, even in other latitudes. A drummer of a big old band is planning a final tour after 20 years of anonymity, even the prince may think this year maybe a good one to try other feet in that shoe, cause last year went wrong with Cinderella, so lets make this world a better thing, at least for a year, at least in this beginning.
Enjoy the sun, enjoy the storms, enjoy the silence and the raving to the joy fantastic, you are clean, you are no longer good or bad, you are a new person, so this is your time to begin reinventing yourself, picking the good fragments of your history and choosing the new steps in your present, step by step, leg to leg. Ain’t that good?
Have a nice time, hope next year is a hit for The Argentina Independent and for you and for me, I must add too, my thankfulness to this paper for offering me a window to express myself, I want to thank you…and you, reader more than anything, especially if you managed to follow your way to the end of this article. In a way we reached together to this single point.
2007. Just a memory. And it used to mean so much to me.