_{As you can see this is an embroidery of fireworks. I had a go at prompting the resident AI but result looked nothing like what I imagined.}

Somewhere in the post below I burst out laughing. “Good to meet you, friend. Cleaning out the cat’s litter tray? I did that too sometime that night as I too was ‘resisting the advent of the new year’.”

I didn’t even watch any fireworks this year. Just recalled the most amazing display I … I’m going to have wrote about this on my laptop because apparently on the mobile I’m limited??? To two paragraphs? A busy night maybe. The data centers running hot.

OK, now on my laptop and the day after where I can spread out.

I just recalled the most amazing fireworks I’ve ever experienced. It was the turn of the millennium, back at the moment when 1999 turned int 2000. Everybody was doing something special. I was driving in my little old car hurrying back to town after picking up my young teenager from friends in the country-side. Hurrying to town to pick up my mother and drive to the nearest seaside fiesta and fireworks.

Was never going to make that. A doof (feral music festival) in the district straddling the road network had all the single lane roads gnarled up with parked cars. (In that country side, at that time, all tarred roads were single lane. When you met someone going the opposite way, you both had to drive with your left-side on the grassy road shoulder … in Australia we drive on the left… to pass each other before continuing again in the middle of the road.)

I was having to take byways and dirt tracks, and finally knew I would not make it back to town in time. My teenager was asleep by then probably with a bit of clandestine alcohol in his system. I stopped the car, the uselessness of what I was doing giving way to wanting to see something, anything, celebratory on this momentous night.

Even sitting in the car I was high enough that I could see a long way south along the coast … maybe 30 kilometers and north a similar distance. The dark, moon-glittering ocean worried at the eastern horizon. Across the track, a bunch of ghostly people gathered in the long grass. They stared into the valley at their feet, the deep doof-doof of the bass drum beat reached me easily in the car.

When I joined the locals, and looked down into the valley too, I saw a huge heart pounding down in there, red and swirling pink fog pulsing to the techno drum beat. Then, far down the coast, a rush of fireworks rose and hung like a huge sparkling teardrop forever imprinted onto my mind. Then the town nearer us lit theirs. Another huge tear climbed up the sky and hung there for a long second before dying to embers that fell and died.

Four or five of the small seaside towns lit their fireworks one after the other all the way north. One after the other. As if calculated that way.

I’ve never again seen anything like it.

coffeenovelist.blog/2025/01/01/resisting-the-new-year/