New Year’s Eve in Panama.  One word to describe the midday happenings here in the town of La Chorrera: hectic.  Street markets are overflowing with shoppers preparing for fiestas later tonight.  Pigs and chickens sold live are being taken home and slaughtered in preparation for the traditional midnight feast.  Fruits of all kinds are being bought by the crate-fuls. 

Some beer distributors will stay open all night for frequent revisits from partiers who’ll run low on stock in the wee hours of the morning.  Plans and preparations are well underway for an all-night long, town-square performance of the cumbia, a traditional, or ‘tipico’ Panamanian circle dance where couples taunt, flaunt, display, and submit their sexuality and sense of ‘coupleness’ both unto one another and unto society ritualistically.  At midnight precisely, as everywhere in the world, fireworks will be detonated.  But additionally, here in Panama, all the multitudinous displays of life-sized dolls called Años Viejos, or ‘the Old Year Ones’ which have been erected over the past week, will be torched, literally burnt to the ground where they sit or stand affront of houses and on public roadsides, to symbolize the infernal passing of all that’s grown archaic.

So what the hell am I personally up to?  Taking some pics, gathering ‘life-affirming intelligence’ (code words for ‘girl-watching and staying alive’), and pondering an hour-or-so late afternoon run in the 90-degree plus near-equatorial  heat and sun (thus dissing the ‘life-affirming intelligence’ just gathered—ha!).  I also bought a birthday cake for my daughter, turning 19 today.  And I bought four more chairs for a sizable crowd expected to arrive where I’m staying, rent-free, for a New Year’s Eve Party tonight.

Last words of the old year: Be yourself the arsonist of all aging decadence now encountered.  And rise from the char and ashes in the new year with a phoenix’s fresh wings!