Happy New Year. It’s 2007

Hope it has been good for you thus far. For me, yesterday was spent cleaning the aftermath of our small, yet messy New Year’s eve celebration. Confetti at New Years is like the sand from a day at the beach, it gets everywhere. Add to that the spills of champagne and you have a sticky mess of runny-colored paper, that requires three levels of cleaning – the sweep, the vacuum, and then the mop. And that’s just the floor. Next level up is the plates of leftover food, the streamers, the decorations that go back into a box, lights and extra chairs that go to the garage…

But it’s fun; it’s a fake mess – created purposefully. While doing this, on television we watched the festivities that were going on a few miles away, namely the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena. Because I don’t take parades seriously doesn’t mean I won’t watch the occasional one. However, I do watch them with a cynicism born of, well – watching parades. The Rose Parade is a relatively “cynicism free” experience. It’s a pleasant parade amazingly free of the strutting conceit and misplaced blue collar pride (not to mention the horrendous racket made by hundreds of banjos simultaneously strummed) of say, The Philadelphia Mummers.

Nor does it have too much of the militant bravura of so many American parades. While I take no issues with war veterans being celebrated in a parade, I do think that fourteen year olds, holding beaten-up wooden rifles with the grimmest and most serious of expressions on their pimply faces, are creepy.

With the Rose Parade, most silliness and self congratulatory waving was quaint – Yah for the Notaries of America and their ‘Squirrels buying their first house’ float!

Additionally, the floats are quite amazing, unlike the Hollywood Christmas Parade’s beaten up sadness, or the Macy parade’s balloons-o’-consumerism. Eventually, even the most jaded person has to admit that the hand built, all natural and in many cases, living – floats of the Rose Parade are gawker-worthy.

However, lest you think that I’ve gone soft, I did find one biggie, and Marianne (much less the parade cynic than I) standing next to me, also reacted with the requisite “oh my God”.

And it’s not the ‘Imperial storm troopers’ (Nazis really, in case you don’t get it) of the Star Wars celebration, marching down the streets of Pasadena while crowds cheered insanely – the geek equivalent of an SS Brigade marching the streets of Paris. That’s too easy on too many levels.

No, at the very beginning, just as a bunch of corn-fed, smiling Oklahoma’ians finished a song and dance routine introducing the parade’s theme, “Celebrating Our Good Nature” -- two fighter jets screamed past over head right behind a B2 STEALTH BOMBER. Yes, Our Good Nature – don’t you forget it. Have you seen our ICBM’s lately?

That’s America.

Later, shortly before sunset, we took a drive to Pasadena and drove down Colorado Ave., the parade’s ground zero. Besides the amazing amounts of garbage that lined the streets for the eight mile parade route, the streets were also crawling with tourists, determined to continue their celebrations, not nearly ready to call it a day. The Rose Bowl game was still in full swing down the road, so I’m guessing that the revelry went much later too.

So that was it. A beautiful, sunny New Years Day in southern California, hopefully the harbinger of the year ahead.