As I have for the past decade or so, I intend to spend New Year’s Eve in front of
the television, watching reruns of “The Twilight Zone” on the SyFy network. A 48-
hour marathon, with episodes running back-to-back. All the classics, some of which I
remember having seen as a kid when they first came out.
“You’re traveling through another dimension – a dimension not only of sight and
sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of
imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead – your next stop, the Twilight Zone!”
As far as I’m concerned, it beats sitting around waiting for the ball to drop, or, in earlier
times, staggering around drunk, looking for a good time. New Year’s Eve has never
been one of my favorites, but entering the Twilight Zone – sober – has definitely helped
elevate it into a night I can actually look forward to.
Toward the end of my drinking I have unsettling memories of a New Year’s Eve spent in a bar someplace in Vermont – and in the snow outside, chasing after a girl who didn’t even know I was there. The evening was split up into awkward fragments, like pieces of a broken mirror reassembled out of sequence. In one shard I was sitting at the bar drinking Labatt Beer (in a stroke of blind luck I had walked into a Labatt Beer Festival); in another, I was walking outside in the snow wearing a winter jacket I had stolen from the bar’s coat room; and in another piece I was driving my car out of the bar’s parking lot directly into a snow bank on the other side of the road where a tow truck had to come and pull me out on New Year’s Day.
Having spent plenty of time in that drinker’s Twilight Zone, after getting sober myself
I’ve also watched others entering into it. Most memorably, there was a dinner my wife
and I attended at a restaurant with some of her relatives. Her cousin’s husband was
reputed to be an active lush and I was not looking forward to sitting through the dinner
watching as he threw back the cocktails I no longer chose to order for myself.
But an interesting thing happened that made me extremely grateful. I watched as this
fellow inadvertently entered into – and suddenly returned from – the Twilight Zone.
Having had a number of cocktails during dinner (and Lord knows how many before we
arrived), this man suddenly disappeared. Of course, he never moved from where he was
seated, across the table from me, but I watched his eyes as he passed through some kind
of membrane, a membrane I had passed through numerous times myself. One minute he
was sitting there with us, and the next, he had vanished. I could see it in his eyes; he was
literally out there in the Twilight Zone.
I knew if we were patient, he would return, and eventually he did, gliding in for a soft
landing. But I also knew that if I were to ask him where he had been, he wouldn’t have
been able to answer.
Personally, I love the Twilight Zone. But most of all, I love going there sober.
By Ames K. Sweet
A Twilight Zone New Years! What a terrific idea. I’ve been wringing my hands about how to spend the big eve, and I’m thinking I’ll do that. I had many New Year’s Eve’s in “a land of both shadow and substance”, this year maybe I’ll stay in “things and ideas”, and without using. Thanks!
Thanks Ames, I could hear the T-Z’s pulsating theme in my ears as I read your piece. Well done. I still occasionnaly recall an episode about a group of scientists or doctors that were working to convert a volunteer from breathing oxygen to nitrogen. He nolonger looked human. The idea, as I remember it, was to send this volunteer into outerspace in a rocketship and have him return to earth with a threating message about his world invading earth. The idea was intended to encourae the earth’s population to unit agains this new enemy from outerspace. I’m amazed that this memory has stayed with me and wonder if it even comes close to what that show was about! Does “global warming” have that job now? bob s.