These were Matthew's apt words, perfectly summing up the essence of last night. But let me begin at the beginning. After a really nice lunch in the morning, a crazy trip in my Chevette to buy $90 worth of alcohol and other stuff for the party, a totally whacked-out outing to the Stanley Park mini-train (complete with a visit to the petting zoo, featuring creepy overweight chickens and a sullen turkey), an awesome dinner at Tanpopo on Denman (complete with a nosebleed on my part during the meal and a poem afterwards), we finally made the mistake of going to First Night, the shittiest $15 party and the worst New Year's ever.

Imagine -2/-3°C weather and bone-chilling wind. Now imagine wandering outside the horribly-bottlenecked CBC building (which looks like a really bad CS map), at first just trying to get in to see and hear something, then giving up and just trying to get in to warm your sorry ass. We've had a 1984/Half-Life 2 moment with concrete, cops, and what looked like the G-Man overlooking the crowd from a CBC citadel's office window. Beautiful.

Well, having finally gotten into the "CBC Big Boom Ballroom," we found a sound stage fashioned into a really shitty auditorium where this asshole was playing really bad jazz and some sort of swing to which some people danced, but we couldn't see shit because a) the place was full of creepy 40+ year-old couples that immediately started dancing with each other and b) everyone just crowded around.

After Matthew and I got (quite willingly) separated from the others, we have discovered an even more surreal experience. Ten metres from that sound stage there was another room where they broadcast whatever was going on in the first room and where those who couldn't take the hard-hitting swing action of the first room sadly sad at tables lit by 80s-style purple/yellow/pink lights. Well, Matthew and I joined this "Loser Room," as I dubbed it, where we took a breather from all the bullshit and made a point to remember the survival techniques of staying warm and properly hydrated. I also took the chance to write another poem.

A real New year's party makes you happy, since in happiness lies ignorance and in ignorance lies bliss and temporary forgetfulness of mortality, disappointment, sadness and depression. But with no good times, no alcohol, the worst possible weather and a shitty, corporate countdown to boot, all we could muster was "yeah, happy New Year" and "happy New Year, anyway." 2004 ended not with a bang but with a whimper, and it was all downhill from then on.

For one thing, we got a really great chance to experience the wonderful changes that TransLink had undergone in the last few years. Amongst the new features were busses that would not pick anyone up, busses that would come once every hour or more, and busses that never came at all. Oh, and there was running. A whole lot of running.

At the end, it was our sense of sarcasm and irony that kept us warm through the night, once again supporting my belief that it doesn't matter what I'm doing, as long as I'm in good company that I am one hundred percent comfortable with. So that's that.