This is the final day of 2014…big deal. Tomorrow will be the first day of 2015…and what of it? I feel great about a lot of stuff, mind. Best time of my life. I just don’t care about New Year’s Eve bullshit, and staying out until 3 am ruins the following day. This is a lousy town to celebrate in anyway, time-zone-wise. Everyone has already whoo-hoo’d and guzzled the bubbly and stumbled home and gone to sleep by the time midnight hits Los Angeles. Paris is the place to be.

The cooler and deeper you are, the quieter and more away-from-the-madding-crowd your New Year’s Eve is. I know a lady who says she always does it solo — meditating, painting, incense. Okay, maybe that’s taking it a bit too far in the other direction. I suspect that those who take really long showers are almost certainly among those who whoop it up on New Year’s Eve. In both instances they’re looking for comfort, for that womb-like security and sublime relaxation that comes from steaming hot water and alcohol and the embrace of fair-weather friends.

Every new day is a renewal, and the time to celebrate that is the early morning. And yet I’ve known people in my life who actually wake up in a bad mood. (My ex-wife was one of them.) How is that possible? How could the metaphor be lost on them?

I’ve written repeatedly that I’ve experienced two legendary New year’s Eve celebrations in my life — Paris in ’99 and Times Square when I was 18 or 19. Four of us took the train in. The crowd was so dense and packed that you couldn’t move. It moved you. It took all your strength to just hold on and roll with the crowd waves without going under or getting separated from whomever. The smallest guy in our group was in fact swallowed by the mob and disappeared for a couple of hours. And yet somehow we found him around 1:30 am at an all-night diner in the west 40s.

It’s a cold day in Los Angeles — 52 degrees now, dropping to mid 40s by midnight. Last night it felt colder due to severe blustery winds. One way or another I plan to be standing somewhere on Mulholland around midnight and looking out at…well, probably the San Fernando Valley. You can see and hear and feel it all from that vantage point, and it saves you from their company.