Twenty Sixteen

All righty then.

Blew Thursday afternoon on shopping. I had a theme. The NYE party was going to be a disco glam thing with dance platforms and gold-painted go-go dancers. This meant I finally got to use the zebra-striped platforms a friend handed down to me a year ago. At a costume shop I found a shiny black and silver zebra-stripe shirt and in another a tight pair of white Angel Flight-like bell bottoms. I already had a belt with musical notes on it, black on white, and for accent bought a pair of bright red socks. My hair was of course long and wild and free, hardly any gray, and while my facial hair seems to be getting whiter, that didn't stop all the fine-looking middle-aged ladies from looking my way when I strode into the bar.

I was always a shy and humble kid, but associating with the charismatic and supremely confident Sunya has helped me extract my obnoxious inner Leo and I am enjoying that.

When I made my entrance a friend of mine was dancing on the bar. She was in tights and a wig and teeny tiny pasties and her smooth skin was spray-painted gold. She grinned when she saw me shouldering my way through the crowd. I reached up to her and she took my hand and planted a kiss on it, maybe two. From that point the evening was a fabulous progress of greetings and drinks and dances and smooches that went on for, well, a few hours anyway. I had arrived late. Barely one drink before midnight late. No worries, though. Alcohol wasn't the only thing I took and the press of time was never an issue.

The place was amazing. It's a two-story art-bar-restaurant that Sunya and her crew had spent many sleepless nights decorating and preparing. A day or two before year's end they emptied out the basement and painted the walls and installed a couple bars such that now there were three floors, with DJs and drinks on each one. Sacramento's older bars and buildings have basements because in the 1860s the city raised the streets on account of the river flooding, and all the old buildings' first stories went underground. It makes for fantastic ambiance in the right hands, let me tell you.

Security kicked everyone out around two. I'm still not sure why as I thought the thing went on till four. You can do that if you put away the alcohol. But no, so we went to the owner / chef's loft around the corner, and in time the gang returned to the bar and did more drinking with the doors locked. Dancing too? I don't remember. There was also a trek to the apartment kept by one of the dancers, an incredibly cheerful little gay guy who's in the Sacramento Ballet. All of the go-go dancers male and female were friends and acquaintances, which somehow just delighted me. Around sunrise I remember having left the ballet dancer's apartment but am fuzzy on how by the time I drove to the chef's loft apartment to get the keys and get into the bar to look for a missing purse, I had company. Be that as it may, we looked everywhere to no avail, and then, being somewhat acquainted from previous events and a hundred shared friends, made good use of, well, never mind that. Only let it be known that my sweetheart was only a little perturbed by this adventure out of concern that the young lady was too altered to be truly consenting. I assured her, and you, that she was not high at all, and was fully present. I'm not sure it wasn't her idea in the first place.

We had tickets to a New Year's Day party in San Francisco that started at six but were not terribly motivated to rush to it. At this moment I don't recall clearly what we did but hang out in the two apartments, moving slowly. Our crew of five finally piled into the Volvo and hit the freeway some time after noon and got to the thing about two or three. I was in the same clothes, having nothing else with me, and my feet were starting to feel the effects of those hard wooden soles. We parked next to a truck repair shop near the municipal railway's streetcar maintenance barn down among the piers and rotting factories along what used to be called Army Street but is now Cesar Chavez. Some crazy Burners had blocked off a few streets and taken over a converted warehouse for a big loud dance party that went on until sundown. Many friends were there, some who had been at the thing the night before and some who had not, as well as a few thousand regular Burners, mostly San Franciscans living up to their well-earned reputation of being way too much fucking fun. At party's end a dozen or two close friends trekked a few blocks to a loft space someone had Airbnb'd and, after I spent an hour tromping about in those zebra-striped clogs looking for wherever we'd parked the car so I could get the food in it, had a righteous and badly-needed potluck while the neighbors complained about the noise, two of our number having brought their DJ equipment. This loft was amazing and huge, some sort of apartment slash architecture design lab, with picture windows overlooking an industrial boulevard, and drawing boards and a kitchen and a piano and beds and couches strewn at random. I took a brief nap.

There was yet another party in another part of the City that was supposed to go on until three in the morning. Some of our people were planning to go to that. But Sunya and I had had enough and after failing to awaken the girl who had earlier begged us for a ride back to Sac, took our leave without her and went home. Sunya took a coma while I drove, and during the drive I managed to wake up exactly as many times as I fell asleep, which is as it should be. Got to sleep in our own bed about one thirty in the morning of the 2nd of January, 2016.

NYE

NYD