Cleaning The Slate

Friday January 1st, 2010 - Eau Claire, WI/Lake Villa, IL

Waking up on New Year’s Day is never any different for me than any other day. Since I’m not a drinker at all I’m not hung over, so that always starts me out ahead of the game from almost everyone else. I checked out of the hotel this morning and there were quite a few people really suffering. If I was a real ass I’d have brought an air horn, but I’m nice.

The whole alcohol thing has never attracted me, and that’s down right miraculous since I was born and raised in Milwaukee. I don’t know of many others who never drank at all, but none of the ones I do know are from Wisconsin. That state can suck down the hooch.

Everywhere does, except maybe Utah. Even there, I’ve seen people get hammered once in a while, and every one of them looks like an idiot. That’s one thing my grandpa drilled into me at an early age. He showed me how people look and act when they’re drunk and it really hit home when I saw it. Gramps was brilliant, he knew all the right buttons to push.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with a few cocktails on New Year’s Eve, and I’m not a prude at all. I’m just saying for me, alcohol was never a problem because I saw what the results were from an early age and never wanted that obnoxious drunken sot to be me.

I’ve got enough other problems, and that’s what I set out to work on solving today. It all starts in the head, so that’s what I’m focusing on first. I already read my first book for the new year and that makes me feel like I accomplished something. It’s only a book of trivia, and I’d started a few pages already, but I sat in the hotel room and finished it before I left.

This is going to be my year of paring things down. I want to get rid of as many physical possessions as I can, and that includes EVERYTHING. Books, DVDs, sports cards, every single object that I don’t absolutely need will hopefully be jettisoned. It’s time to focus on creating the life I always dreamed of. I can buy possessions, but a life has to be self built.

I’m really up for getting rid of the extra physical baggage, because I want to free myself to go higher creatively. This is a year I want to look back on and say I tied together loose ends and actually finished projects I only said I’d was going to do. Action is what I need.

Wiping the slate clean and starting over again is good, but it has to be a 100% complete cleanse for the full benefit to truly take effect. That includes forgiveness, something that’s been very difficult for me over the years. I can’t carry grudges into the new year, or all the work I’m hoping to do won’t mean a damn thing. I’ll have wasted all my time and energy.

That being said, I tried to think of absolutely EVERYONE I have or had a jag with over the years as I drove back from Eau Claire from my family to comedy to radio to everyone else I could think of. I pictured every one of them in my mind’s eye and forgave them for whatever they did. It doesn’t mean I have to like them or talk to them again or forget what they did. It means I’m no longer going to concern myself with them and remove their bad energy from my life. A true cleanse starts from within, and this was a great way to begin.