New Year's Eve

I don't know how I survived the New Year's eves of my youth without:

• getting a drunken-driving ticket
• wrecking my car
• injuring or killing myself
• injuring or killing someone else

More than once, I'd wake up on New Year's day and go outside and be unable to find my car. It'd eventually find it parked in some strange nearby location, and none-too-well. I wouldn't remember driving home. If I did run over someone, it never traced back to me. I assume it would have, so I assume I didn't.

Perhaps the worst time I do remember was driving home in LA from a party, being aware I was loaded so trying to drive very carefully, and at one point stopping the car because I saw a tree ahead. I got out to discover that I had been driving along the grass separation part of the divided highway! Somehow I'd missed the little trees there, though I suspect I ran through some gardens, and who the hell knows how long I was driving there, but I got off and onto the (fortunately abandoned) highway and returned home. I helped my odds, I suppose, by driving at late hours when traffic was thin, even for New Year's eve. 4 and 5 in the morning.

Indeed, in all my drinking-and-driving days (and everybody in my crowd did it in that era) I only had two solo car accidents, fender-benders (mine) without injury.

Like I say, I've been one lucky reprobate.

So now, an old far who can't even stay up until midnight most of the time, I recollect the New Year's eves of my youth and shake my head. Kids.