Well then, Vodenica folks, Happy New Year
An eternal topic, frig the stork... I hate New Years from the bottom of my soul... I've never been able to stand them... I don't like them one bit... I harbour a terrible animosity towards them... for the following reasons:
1. OBLIGATION. I am obliged to be cheerful and in a festive (proud and dignified) mood. Obliged, just because of an ordinary change of date, to wish everyone around me (loved and loathed alike) the same things, along the lines of "lots of health, happiness, and may all your wishes come true", even though, from being repeated so often, the words mean absolutely nothing at all. Obliged to be warm, smiling and decently dressed (I mean, more decently than the other 364 days of the year, weddings and funerals excepted), freshly shaved, with freshly washed hair, spritzed with the Salvatore (Ferragamo, you know) my daughter bought me for my birthday the year before last — in a word, I am obliged to be what I'm not. And what I don't want to be.
2. DEBAUCHERY out of DEPRIVATION. And then the pre-New Year parties with my colleagues from work are something that drives me out of my mind. I go to all of them; I haven't missed a single one in all these years. And I always come to the same conclusion: it turns out we're a very unhappy people. So unhappy, so hemmed in by prejudice, so weighed down by bad choices of spouses, so untravelled and so starved of life, that even Caligula could envy our office New Year's parties. In the parade of drunkenness and kitsch department, that is. Chochek dancing on the tables, fat guys with their belts undone, unbuttoned aunties (with fake perms) with their tits half out, minis hiked up to the neck, forehead-slapping to a favourite number by Šemsa Suljaković or Šerif Konjević (oh wow, colleague, you're so paranoid-schizophrenically attractive tonight, come outside a sec, I want to whisper something to you, etc.) — in a word, a pitiful attempt to escape ugly reality for at least a moment, to conjure up, for at least a nanosecond, a flicker of something we're not.
3. ABSURDITY. And why, really, should I be happy about New Years? Because I'm older? And with that, thinner and greyer hair? And one more wrinkle? Because with every passing year I get uglier and uglier? Oh, come on, quit screwing with me. What are we actually celebrating? Our transience? Our approach to the final checkout? Come on, somebody here is really drilling into somebody's brain ("come on, come on — dzhinkrlaka dzhikica, dzhinkrlaka dzhikica", colleague, come on, step outside for a sec, I really do have something important to tell you).
4. TRAUMATIC RETURN TO REALITY. There's some screwed-up law at work in the fact that the poorest month of the new year we "welcomed with joy" is precisely January. The only bright side of this month is Christmas Eve, Christmas, the carollers, and especially the bonfires lit on the night before. And on that very night, I go visiting my buddy Shteki in Zhdanec and seriously overdose on hot plum brandy. To forget the traumas of New Year's. And after that... a brutal confrontation with reality. Counting the days to the next paycheque (hey neighbour, you wouldn't happen to have a thousand-denar note on you? I'll pay you back around the first), nerves with the wife, neuroses from the kids, bad debts with the mistress...
So that's why I hate New Years, frig the stork that invented them. That's also why I can't bring myself to write the piece on what unites Macedonians, and that's why I took a beating like a bastard from the late Kljak (him to me — Neno, happy New Year, may all your wishes come true; me to him — I've only got one; him to me — and what's that?; me to him — to bang your sister; him to me — a punch in the left eye).
Well then, Vodenica folks, Happy New Year, may all your wishes come true!!!
Невен Китановски