There's supposed to be more to New Years Eve than this. I know, I know, its cool to be hip about these things, stay off the roads, watch television, build a fire, but everybody's doing it these days and cool and hip keep their own time and they don't dance with "everybody". Ever.

Something's happening somewhere out there, some improbably hip and especially cool jamming of the tribes, double technicolor fantastic for those who can appreciate. In other words, A VERITABLE PHOTOGRAPHIC OPPORTUNITY for those with a steady hand and a light meter, you just need the address. Yet here the Sole Proprietor sits on New Years Eve.

Were he younger, he'd be packing his Nikons into the dark. Strange deserted streets with the odd lamppost decorated with streamers, confetti littered about the base. People in ones and twos, men dressed in tuxedos (Men don't dress in tuxedos any more, do they? Perhaps they do.), women walking on their arms, slurring their words, but nicely, like characters in a play where the meaning has to carry to the people in the back rows.

Ah, come on, it's cold tonight, this New Year's night. Out there. And its dark. And his reliable Bentley automobile isn't really a Bentley or reliable or much of an automobile either. And there are people on the roads. He knows this. What kind of people would be out on the road on a New Year's night besides the Highway Patrol? Drinking, all of them, no doubt. Carrying on. So he's sitting here at his computer. His cat, Mr. Woose, is curled up in the box formed by the keyboard, the Sole Proprietor's arms and his chest. Not quite enough room, but there's time enough to correct any typos, so he'll not think about going out.

He'd like to say its because he's getting old (no! no! wise, he's getting wise!) But that's not it. He's not old. You've been staying inside on New Year's Eve for some time now, haven't you Sole Prop? Remember all those years in Napa? If you hadn't had all those twisted hedonistic wine collecting wine drinking dope smoking friends (who also just happened to like to party), you'd have sat on your butt just like you're doing now. Those years before that in San Francisco don't count.

Do men still wear tuxedos? Are you kidding? They wear tuxedos, they drive in cars three death wishes beyond that heap you call your own and never bat an eye. You sit there with all the imagination of Mr. Woose (lets not run down the Woose. He'd be a regular pistolero if he hadn't had that operation.) writing this drivel while you could be out rocking the town. You do remember the town, don't you Sole Prop? Not that scrubbed white in the day's light traffic snarled reality you go to work in every day, but that Smokey Joe's Cafe wailing sax til midnight rooty kazootie dancing doo-wah-diddie-daddies and lassies shootout emporium over in blues town. Take the cameras if you like, but leave them in the trunk. $10, at the door.

What do you say, Mr. Woose? The tag on the collar says Mr. Woose because the Sole Proprietor didn't know how to spell Wuse until he saw it in one of the journals the other day. What say you Woose, should the Sole Proprietor get out and see the town? Watch some fireworks? Play?

Mr. Woose is not talking. He's a member of a species in which its always time for a nap and Mr. Woose is napping. The Sole Proprietor isn't sure he's been listening at all. That's why he's a Wuse.