Sinister: mourning the lack of space odyssey revivals

[stacey dahling]

My family has this weird New Year’s tradition. It all started 25 years ago 
with a bottle of cheap champagne. My parents were getting together with this 
other couple on New Year’s Eve, celebrating a midnight over said bottle of 
champagne, brought by the non-host couple. When they emptied said bottle, 
someone had the brilliant idea of writing out their New Year’s resolutions 
and predictions on teeny slips of paper, slipping them inside the bottle and 
sealing the bottle with wax. Then the bottle was handed over to the host 
couple with the words, “next year you come to our house, with the bottle, 
and we open the resolutions and see how many came true.” So the host couple 
did just that. A year later, they showed up with the bottle, but the silly 
young things that they were played a trick on the other couple, pretending 
they had forgotten the bottle, disguising it in a fruit basket or something.
Thus began a tradition that continues to this day. Every year, this couple 
meets with my parents, they alternate locations. The bottle is brought, 
decorated or disguised in clever ways. One year it was baked in a cake. 
Another - my favorite - a Cabbage Patch doll was beheaded, stuffing was 
removed, and the bottle was slipped inside and carried in all swaddled in 
clothes, looking suspiciously like a real baby. The bottle is bursting with 
25 years worth of resolutions and they have great fun reading them all over 
again each year. Imagine reading resolutions at 50 years old that you made 
when you were 25! Every other year, however, around Dec. 27, my parents 
start running around the house in a mad frenzy, trying to come up with ideas 
about how to decorate the bottle. It gets tough after 25 years, I guess. 
Last time I think my dad rigged up this complicated mini-fireworks display, 
propelled out of the bottle. Silly nuclear physicists!
Anyway, my sister and I tried to copy this tradition, with the couple’s 
daughter, with a ginger ale bottle, when we were 10. It didn’t work as well, 
nor last as long. Maybe someday I’ll have someone to do this with.

There is a Greek saying that, roughly translated, goes: “Those who walk the 
streets at night get poo on their shoe.” I giggled when I first heard this. 
But now now I know it’s true. I was up walking the streets this morning at 
the ass-crack of dawn, apparently before all the earnest old ladies attack 
the sidewalk with hose and broom. Don’t fret. I didn’t get any poo on my 
shoe. But under veil of night I just mighta. There was shit everywhere! And 
not just in neat lil piles, but in smooshed lil streaks, as if someone had 
not only stepped in it, but slipped and fell in it. My heart went out to 
these poor souls. I imagined them walking home along the brothel street 
after a nice end-of-the-year paid shag, feeling quite pleased with 
themselves, when suddenly… “Shit!” Literally.

Speaking of weird sightings at 8 a.m. - today I saw two children walking 
from storefront to storefront jangling bells and singing songs. I thought 
this very odd at first, another syndrome of the weird 
Christmas-is-over-but-the-Athenians-refuse-to-admit-it thingie. Carolers? On 
Dec. 31? Then, as I was sitting here writing this and the doorbell went off 
three times at fucking 8:30 a.m. and I was cursing and wondering what the 
world was coming to, I heard the distant sound of more bells and children 
voices. And I remembered something about some tradition... children… door to 
door… singing for change or candy or something? Oooh! How exciting then! 
Another cultural first! I must research.

Eek! I just looked in the mirror and realized I have Brady-Bunch era 
Florence Henderson hair today! Well, at least I can comfort myself in the 
knowledge that the rest of me does not look like Florence Henderson. This 
woman at work really did look like Florence Henderson. I wonder what that 
feels like, waking up one day, at age 55, and realizing you look like an old 
Florence Henderson.

Let it be noted that I will be seeing out 2001 wearing black knickers, a 
racy black bra, and black and white striped socks. Such things are 
important.

Okay..off to certain death at the hands of a pair of eight-year-old devils, 
on armed with a brand spanking new BB GUN. How can parents be so dumb?

Kronia polla!

MWAH!
~dahling


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