At The Pointe of No Return: Somewhat Eulogizing 2008

I can see 2009 from my stoop. It’s right there, fast approaching, swerving like a madman all over the road. I lean in closer to foster scrutiny. 2009 curses at the driver of the limousine it rides in on. Both 2009 and it’s driver are evidently inebriated as they fondle for their almost empty champagne bottles in the extra-wide-cup-holders. I hear 2009 yelling from the back seat through the open sunroof to the driver that the whole road belongs to him, and that it doesn’t matter if they are in America or Britain or China or the goddamn Crab Nebula, they’ll adhere to no law. 2009 appears just as formless and hopeful and ignorant as 2008 did a short year ago. It has all the expectations we so greedily granted it, worn like a pageant sash across what I think is its shoulder. Through the limo’s tints, I selfishly try to see if its passengers are something I could use, like a decent salary, success, love, better eyesight, a one way ticket to Fiji, shit, even coupons to my favorite Chinese Buffet, or worse, Death, but it’s a blur.
In the opposite lane comes 2008, looking long in the tooth and driving just as erratic, fleeing like an escaped convict or an ambulance remote from the hospital. It drives with its beaklike nose just barely above the wheel, slouching with the posture of a jumbo shrimp. In its senility it chews its own tongue, letting its jowls droop where they may, like that of an old bulldog with a bad under bite drooling, and dentures mistakenly misplaced. Its lopsided hairpiece waves in the wind sucking through the open window.
Innocent cars pull over to let it pass, good riddance goddamnit!
I’d imagine that if I were close enough 2008 would reek of whatever the love child between cheap cologne and hamburgers would be.
Phone rings. Excuse me I have to take this.
Burger King already made a cologne that combines cheap cologne and burgers, my secretary tells me, and it’s called Flame. Thanks for that upsetting fact Betty, (not Betty Page. Betty Page is dead. 2008’s got her corpse stuffed in its trunk along side Moses, The Joker, Cool Hand Luke, Rufus, Chef, Mr. Clean, and Dolomite, just to name a few.)
Flame. Homoerotic Drive-Thru Cannibalism? My secretary and I ask each other at the same time, scoffing, before hanging up.
Behind glasses as thick as coke cans 2008’s dark sunken eyes harbor grief and celebration and unease all at once.
2008 might not feel fulfilled or close to revelation but now it knows it can retire down south, and prune its way into a lazy and impish pre-paid burial plot. 2008 presses into the gas pedal and pulls back the wrinkles worn like lines of a contour map from over its eyes to better stay the road. Bangs of skin?
2009 is expressionless but alive. It has yet to stake a claim in anything but startling the neighbors and myself by sounding its horn. In a drunken stupor, like a kid demanding attention, 2009 hurls its empty bottles out the sunroof, and they smash just in front of 2008’s path. The debris interferes with nothing.
2008 and 2009 approach one another like two trains in the night. For an instant I wouldn’t mind if both years meet over the double yellow lines, but they veer away from each other in just the nick of time. 2008 doesn’t acknowledge its heir and 2009 pays no recognition to 2008, as if too good to identify with anything but itself. They narrowly avoid collision and none of us know if we are thankful for it or not. As it blindly barrels further from us I catch 2008’s bumper sticker. There Are No People In My Paradise. T.A.N. P.I.M.P. It must be a Floridian/Retirement joke. That sticker looks like it had been hastily pasted over an Obama/Biden sticker, that looks like it had been pasted on top of a McCain/Palin sticker that had been pasted over a Bloomberg Third Term sticker and under that it looks like there was a… is that a Bull Moose Party sticker… oh it’s too hard to tell and I think to myself… why would 2008 keep putting political bumper stickers on top of one another like that? Can you even register Bull Moose Party? If only we could resurrect Teddy.
Both 2008 and 2009 blow their respective red lights and once again I can tell myself that I did my best to pay them as close attention as I possibly could, but still here I stand in their dust and I barely understand either. I lean back off my stoop.
The roads don’t look safe.

Betty, hold my calls. Excuse me while I take this much-needed vacation.

Unless it is coming through headphones there is no music allowed at the pool in my grandparents gated community in Boca Raton, Florida. Five women in one-piece suits perform water aerobics as graceful as children taking their first steps while their husbands debate Guantanamo Bay and blood pressure from beneath the awning at the side of the water. They are a chorus of low grumbling tenors and bass’s becoming more tired with every word they hiccup. It’s 10 a.m. and these men sound like they’ve already had a full day. One man, a sixth man, maybe the widower of the group, sits with his back to the men, spewing opinions while he surveys the pool population. His scowl falls on me like a boxer sizing up an opponent. I can’t tell if he deems me fit to suit his granddaughter of probably the same age as me, or if he thinks me a threat to the rules and regulations that govern this pool. I want to join in their conversation… and possibly meet this granddaughter I’m assuming he has.
One of the men speaks from behind his local paper.
Gloria got a coupon in the mail for a casket at Costco. We’re going Sunday. Bernie picked one up, has it in the garage. His kids just got down here yesterday. Ha-ha. He’s a real piece uh work. Knowing him he’s using it when he plays hide and go seek with his grandkids. You read about these pirates? They’re still at it, making a killing at sea. Ransoms for battleships! Good for them Goddamnit. Somebody’s thinking.
We are a consortium of the retired, the disabled, the diabetic, the diapered, and quizzical idealists, and full time vacationers, part time sunbathers, and adolescent romantics. Some of us can hardly walk from the kitchen to the car to the pool. And we don’t mind. Others of us squat in the Jacuzzi like lobsters, squinting in the sun.
For the past week I have eaten like them, talked like them, waited impatient for my TV programs like them, and didn’t have sex like them. There is a thin line here between purgatory and paradise. We stumble through the days, through the thick swampy everglade air panting like dogs, waiting for the crocodiles to leave the lakes in our backyards so we can throw a steak on the grill.
Between meals infomercials sell me blankets with sleeves. Blankets with sleeves. Some of us laugh. Others jot down the 800 number.
I get the urge to drive down Atlantic Blvd. in a leisure suit and sit at the slots blowing my social security check at the casino across from the noody bah. But I’m underage in these parts for that kind of geriatric behavior.
I feel this way because I haven’t journeyed outside the ten-foot high perimeter of bushes that border the entire community from the outside Floridian world in days. These sexless clusters of cul-de-sacs are as beautiful and quiet and as uniform as the cemeteries that are evenly distributed between each private neighborhood.
Emerald Pointe. Valencia. Memorial Gardens. Luxuria. Kings Point. Centuri Village. Cascades. Tivoly Isle. Eternal Light.
Vacationing here alongside all the one piece polka dot and leopard print bathing suits that hold together what gravity has loosened and robbed from these women and their husbands has forced me to retreat into a state of mortal ambiguity. I’m afraid I am going to be them, that we are all capable of being this. We are. I am confronted with the legacy of human nature here in the profound swampland sun. It is here that death is nigh and we are reminded of it evermore by the dark houses with empty garages, the constant wail of ambulance sirens, the funeral home on every corner, the sunspots on the heads of bald men, and the surplus of frail limbs that are tanned and tangled as the exposed roots of a dying tree.
Vacation days bleed into nights and time loses meaning easily. I forget for a moment that I am not retired and that this vista is not my last but rather just a simple breach of my part-time-jobs-full-time-school routine. So I suppose I shouldn’t send in my name along with a $25 check to enlist in the Emerald Pointe Shuffle Board Club because there is much to accomplish still at home?
I lay idly next to my Boca brethren who look exhausted from their lifetime of achievements and heartache.
More days pass.
Back at the side of the pool is the same old choir of comedians and their wives who chirp in the water. Their quaffed silver hair reminds me of Bram Stokers Dracula and looks dry as desert rock. Bronze lips. Leathery alligator skin. At the sight of a young girl taught beneath her bikini, the men refrain from whistling but don’t hesitate to ask for her age and grade. Grandpas to some are the dirty old men to others.
A lone woman does backstrokes like a beetle fighting for its life with its legs kicking straight up at the sky.
In this sun, in the heated pool, in the stench of chlorine, and suntan lotion, sweat, and hair-dye, I understand this to be the party before their funeral and it is as dull as putting the garbage out on the curb. This place makes you feel guilty for being young.
It’s too safe here.
But what does it all mean?
Well, at least we’re still here. In some form, breathing. At least most of us have family and friends who we can each best relate our shittiesness and un-shittiesness to. The best we can do is laugh at ourselves. It’s hard not to. If we can’t laugh at ourselves then we might as well be dead. And here I am in the bosom of my Floridian getaway, at the cusp of all these pruning ladies and gentlemen’s ceremonial farewell to Earth and I long for the shitty responsibilities waiting for me at home.
Amilli aspirations race at amil amil a million miles per hour through my mind. 2009 may actually be survivable. Insufferable probably, but survivable sure. It’s up to us, and only us to demand from 2009 what we deserve.

I hear a car screech to a stop and park outside the clubhouse. The door creaks open and slams shut.
I can see 2008 from my complete recline. It throws its robe onto an empty chair and walks carefully down into the pool. Its breasts sag. Stegosaurus spine. The men stop barking politics to watch 2008 submerge its bulbous lower half. None of us can tell if it’s a man or a woman. Whatever it is, we all somehow acknowledge some strange resemblance of ourselves in it. I can suddenly see every year I’ve experienced up until this moment. They are all right there sprawling out in font of me from 2008 like Medusa’s snakes.
The everglade weather has softened my skull as 2008 lies buoyant in the chlorine water making me nauseous and I realize it is time to vacate this vacation. Images from a year I will gladly repress begin to bleed and spill and spread out into the filmy turquoise water.
La Piscina de los Anos Muerte! (Oh 2008, I think I left some of my heart in Mexico this year, but I’ve come to terms with this.)
The young children in the pool take notice of crotchety ol’ 2008 and put a good distance between it and them.
Before I get sucked into an early retirement I decide to take my chances with 2009 back home and its hysterical driving because Time here has expired. And as nice as it is to step outside of Time, it is Time to throw my hat back into the ring.
I’m not ready to buy my casket at Costco. These old men may not yet carry my corpse to the cemetery waiting just beyond the high well-trimmed hedges.
Whether or not 2009 is dressed for a funeral or for a wedding I resolve to join its ranks. Let us make most of it while we’re still here.
I dry myself off as I see 2008 schmoozing poolside with the men. They disgust me as much as I love them. Without them none of this would be possible. 2008’s cell phone is going off. It’s buzzing on the chair 2008 chose when it arrived. I doubt 2008 can even hear its own phone. On my way out I have to walk by the phone as the tune it plays gets louder and louder. Still 2008 doesn’t answer. It’s a rendition of the song What A Wonderful World but the voice is unfamiliar to me. It’s a raspy alto that sounds like it is accompanied by cigarette smoke as each note escapes the singer’s lungs, not at all like the gargling toad voice I’m accustomed to. What A Wonderful World. I walk by the chair and look down at the phone.
I see skies of blue. Clouds of white
Bright blessed days. Dark sacred nights
And I think to myself… what a wonderful world.
Incoming call from 2009. It must’ve somewhat sobered up and is calling to wish a happy new year.
I’m home, I checked the news and I realize there is still a world out there waiting for us to fuck it up more or make it our own or both. So go do something. Happy New Year. Stop reading this.