INTERIOR, NIGHT: Adults stiffly standing in groups. The atmosphere claustrophobic and morose. Life in suspension, treading water, regurgitating the past year, dreading a wobbly and spiteful future. Help me, I’m in the waiting room of a local airport where our flight has been delayed indefinitely. Thrown in with a group of tiresome, forcibly jolly passengers. An ex-military man is trying to convince me that the German surrender in World War II wasn't unconditional, a lady wants me to help her find a publisher for her novel about Amelia Earhart, and a belligerent Seventh Day Adventist is trying to sell me insurance for my dog.

Or: I am in my worst nightmare: I am trapped in a John Updike short story at some terrifying WASP gathering. I'm involved in some macabre and tedious ceremony not yet revealed, the house a grotesque embodiment of the Connecticut gentry, complete with an unhappily married hostess with a tray of bizarrely manipulated morsels of food, a former high-school athlete recounting a touchdown his senior year while the hero of our story is committing adultery on the coats piled in the guest bedroom. All exquisitely rendered in a prose as precise as those hors d'oeuvres. I demand to be released from this paragraph at once! Dear Lord, I'd rather be strung up by my skin in some Ghost Dance ceremony than be subject to such polite hells as these.

Once rowdy, raunchy, and reckless, New Year's Eve parties have become drab rituals barely distinguishable––except for the gadgets––from those of my parents. These were alarming affairs of such desperate hilarity that my sister and I watched in horror as the alcohol enflamed both memory and regret, and where every moment had its avenging ghost.

Like characters in a Bunuel movie, we await the stroke of midnight, condemned to some absurd fate—not an impending calamity but the curse of things continuing indefinitely as they are. Samo, samo, until the last syllable of recorded time.

My theory is that these New Year's events seem so dismal because—out of gentility, pusillanimity, the suppression of our god-given right to galloping superstition under the tyranny of determinism—we won't acknowledge the ghosts and demons knocking at the door (you know they're there!), the fiends climbing up the side of the house, and the dead dancing on the roof.

Give in to the barbaric spirit of the hour, I say! Consort with the demons of the past, set out bowls of milk and Wild Turkey for them or drive them out, but, for pity's sake, don't pretend they're not there. Bang on your cooking pots! Dash your broken pots to the ground! Do like the prescient Moroccan on the feast of ‘Ashura: insist that children and unmarried men leap over the flames, crying, "We shake out upon thee, O bonfire, fleas and lice and sicknesses of the heart and bones!" Or like the noble ancient Romans clash bronze vessels together and tell the swarming wraiths, "Go forth, paternal shades!"

The Athenians were so concerned at the possibility of disapproving spirits stirring up the past that at the festival of Anthesteria they cordoned off their temples with rope (good luck!) and daubed their door posts with pitch so that the parental ghosts would be glued there like flies and be unable to enter. What a ghastly thought: my sainted mum, always in the throes of the third act of some domestic tragedy, and my father seething in his life-long rage, buzzing out my name every time I step out the door.

But it's not the revenants of our parents we’re afraid of; what we really dread is becoming our parents. Repeating endlessly the things we said we'd never do. Perhaps that was the curse that ancient and tribal peoples understood only too well. Yup, I guess that's what possession is.

But it isn't only the cocktail-ghost habits of the poor blameworthy parents that must be exorcised, it’s also the ghosts of ourselves. All the selves of ourselves that have done things we wish they hadn’t done. Don’t remind me! Omigod, how could I have said that? Awright! Awright! Enough, spirits of the year gone by, enough! I’m a changed man. That stuff, why it’s all in the past, baby. Trust me. But no matter what I say, the hairy things just keep hanging around. Hell, I’m talking to myself, I’m arguing with people that ain’t there, rehearsing scenes in my head that already happened—how I’d do it different, you know. What I shoulda said, dig? Spirits, let me be!

Listen, tell you what I’m a-gonna do. I’m gonna build me a little old boat, yessir, just like the folks Ceram in the East Indies do. The villagers over there make a small ship, fill it with rice, tobacco, eggs, and a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. When the little sail is hoisted on the ship and it’s all ready to go, you call out in a loud voice, "O, all ye sicknesses and agues who now plague us. And all ye miseries that have visited us so long and wasted us so sorely. All the little humiliations we have suffered and all the little cruelties we have so heedlessly inflicted on others, we have made ready this ship for you. And we have furnished you with provender sufficient for the voyage. You shall have not lack for food or betel-leaves nor of areca nuts nor of tobacco. Depart, and sail away from us directly and go to a land that is far from here. Let all the tides and winds waft you speedily thither that for the time to come you may live happily and well but that we may never see the sun rise on you again."

Yeah, sail on sorrows of yesteryear, sail on and let me be.