Notes from my best New Year's Eve in recent memory...

I held the world in the palm of my hand.

My good friend Steve Chamraz, a news reporter for ABC affiliate WKOW-TV in Madison, Wisconsin, brought along a mini hand-held television for our New Year's festivities, so that we could watch some of the ABC worldwide coverage as the evening progressed. When we were at Navy Pier, we noticed that it was almost time for London to ring in the new year. So we whipped out the TV and tuned in ABC.

I stood at the edge of Navy Pier in Chicago, Illinois with a three-inch screen in my hand and watched a crystal-clear color image of events happening across an ocean. It's constantly amazing to me just how small the world has become.

Peter Jennings is a god.

For twenty-four hours straight, this man presided over the ABC news coverage of the rollover into 2000, with his longest break at eight minutes long. Four changes of clothes, no shower, most of the time dressed in a series of tasteful suits--though he did don a tuxedo for all of ten minutes as New York City celebrated at midnight, and he did spend his final hours wearing a casual sweater and button-down shirt. During the marathon broadcast, he didn't confine himself to a chair behind a desk, as one might expect. In fact, most of the time he strode around the studio behind his desk, beaming down on the huddled masses in Times Square like some benevolent dictator. The man is beyond unflappable--he looked just as together at four a.m. on the 1st of January as he did at four a.m. the night before. He even weathered visits from Dame Edna Everage, an Australian guy in drag who's got his own Broadway revue, and a surprisingly unfunny Al Franken.

Deep down inside, I firmly believe that what really held the world together as we worked through a potentially disastrous couple of hours wasn't the dilligent work of thousands of computer technicians, but the calm, confident presence of Peter Jennings, watching over the world in its hour of need.

So hey, nothing really happened.

Which I'm sure disappointed plenty of folks, like that family who was working on learning "rudimentary dentistry" and locked themselves in a bunker with twelve months' worth of canned food. Or the store near my workplace that had an old Apple computer set up in the front of their store, with a giant plastic bug coming out of the shattered screen and a sign on the window that said, "Y2K Store." I'm not gonna lie and say I didn't prepare at all--there were a couple of bottles of distilled water in my pantry and enough canned foods to keep me alive for about a week. But rudimentary dentistry? Come on.

I wonder about these people now. Are they ashamed by their wild behavior? Are they just glad nothing bad happened, and satisfied that they're set up with all the spam and canned peas they'll need for the next year? Or are they just planning to move on to the next crazy mania that grips the nation and obsess over that instead?

Then again, rudimentary dentistry might not have been such a bad skill to learn, considering this press release I recieved from a guy named Rob Johnson, who appears to be head of the Robert W. Johnson Educational Foundation of North America, "a not for profit Foundation organized for the benefit of Dentistry and the health care professions." The release speaks for itself:

"DENTAL OFFICES ARE AT HIGH RISK FOR YEAR 2000 COMPUTER GLITCHES OR CRASHES according to the latest U.S. White House white paper just released. In this report, many industries and business sectors who invested in a test and fix program were found to be compliant and ready for the new millennium, but DENTISTRY, HEALTHCARE FACILITIES, AND SMALL BUSINESS were found to be behind, and lacking a test and fix protocol. Worse yet, thousands of dental offices--over 60,000--were found to be at risk, but they don't believe a  problem exists in their offices because their practice management company says they are compliant."

I must confess, I never contemplated the effect of the Year 2000 bug on dentists. I guess I just assumed that your average tooth drill, water spitter or mouth vacuum didn't contain any circutry that required date information. But hey, I don't want my dentist's office going crazy with a computer glitch anymore than the next guy, so I sure hope they figured it out.

I made some resolutions on New Year's Eve.

I do every year, but this year I'm gonna stick to them, for sure. Wanna hear them? I knew you did.

1. Eat better. No more shit food for me, at least not on a daily basis.
2. Start a rock band. I got thirty original songs gathering dust in my head, and there's always more being added to the pile. Me rocking out is long overdue.
3. Be a better friend. I always make this resolution, because I think it keeps me vigilant over my relationships.
4. Have sex with three different women. You hear that? THREE DIFFERENT WOMEN. I want to date, and I want to date well, so I'm setting this tiny goal. I hope it won't be that hard to achieve. Not surprisingly, I haven't narrowed that number down yet. We'll see what happens.
5. Write five hundred words a day, every day, for myself. Hence this Rage.

At the stroke of midnight, I found myself with seven of my friends on the shore of Lake Michigan. We found a spot where we could watch six different fireworks shows at once. A few of them were just tiny blips in the distance, but three of them were huge. I turned one way, and there were the fireworks at Navy Pier and Grant Park; the other direction, the show at Monroe Harbor. We huddled together shivering and sipping cold champagne. I felt very lucky to be alive and surrounded by amazing people. It was one of those moments. So thanks to my friends who shared it with me...it was quiet, it was intimate, and it was sweet.

I wrote the preceeding without using the words "Y2K" or "millennium" once. You're welcome.