The Dingle Jingle Ringing in the New

My son is very good at telling me what people want and don’t want.  They want hair clips, they don’t want yoga studios. They don’t want what people want them to want, they want what they want.  I noticed this last night.  The networks and TV channels conveyed what people wanted, the bright blue Nivea hats, the worldwide light shows and above all,  celebrities ushering in the New Year.  A black man in a fur coat sang “Imagine” at midnight, followed by Frank Sinatra singing “New York New York.” Then one channel cut to L.A. and another channel stayed with New York before veering off to Moscow.  I don’t know about you, but I thought it was scary, to see Lady Gaga and Mayor Bloomberg occupying the same space, like matter and anti-matter, a stunning match up between two forces that in any meaningful universe might be opposed, but in this universe you could easily imagine Bloomberg in the rhinestone mask and Lady Gaga as a billionaire running the city. And then they smile at each other and the ball comes down and a New Year begins. Everything has become so ironic it is wierd, and I notice that I, once so ironic myself, never heard of that singer in the fur coat and don’t know who any of these people are.  What do people want?  The Bhagavad Gita reminds us there is more to life than getting through the holidays and taking advantage of all the sales—There is also mindfulness, which many practiced last night in the form of “mindful drinking,” a phrase coined by two newlyweds of my acquaintance, who have taken it on as a New Year’s resolution.  Here at the Dingle Jingle I join Lady Gaga and Mayor Bloomberg, a witness to what is seen and unseen, on New Year’s Eve, which already seems like yesterday.