Tomorrow night is the big New Year's Eve party, for which I've co-rented a local bar to host a passel of former friends as well as a gaggle of complete strangers. In the manner of most good parties, it has the potential to be either a complete ass-kicking good time or a horrible, stupid, boring waste of an evening. The uncertainty is exciting. If I enjoy the night, it will seem like a gift from forces beyond my control.

The whole idea of the party came up when I heard that a bunch of my old friends from Peace Corps were going to be in town over New Year's. I haven't seen many of them in two years or more. My excitement was mixed with a pretty heavy dose of trepidation. I've allowed myself to fall off the radar screens of most of these people; in some cases, I practically invented personal Stealth technology to remain outside their detection range. It's hard to explain why, except that I often purge one group of friends when I go to a new place and start over. It's been historically difficult, to say the least, to hang on to those friendships, however much they may have meant to me at one time. Thus I have virtually no contact with anyone from high school, college, my days as a reporter, or the Emergency Medical Services team in Ohio. The Peace Corps group represents the most recent friendship set preceding my move to Washington DC, and relationships with them have become increasingly strained. I accept full responsibility, but I wonder if I've caught on to the trend too late to reverse it.

I recently talked for the first time in over eighteen months with former quasi-girlfriend and object of unwelcome obsessional affections Elizabeth, who has become married in the interval of silence. Despite the questionable health of our former sexual relationship, I once counted her as a close friend and confidant. But when she got married, I didn't bother to go. I wasn't afraid that I would become depressed and drunk (that honor went to another marriage guest, as it turned out), but because the prospect of so much Past in one setting sounded like bad magic to me. The past generates its own gravity, and slowing down too long in its vicinity can pull you around in unpleasant ways.

Loads of our common friends went to the wedding and had a lovely time. They are apparently impervious to the deleterious radiation of emerging through these little windows into the past.

Months later, our conversation was... fine. There was no sense of loss on my part -- and, I can guess with extreme confidence, her part as well. There were no recriminations, no real emotional turbulence at all. There also wasn't much sense of joy at rediscovering the underlying friendship we'd forgotten. We just chatted and then got off the phone. This is what I hate about these friendships: watching the way they inevitably change, slacken, and grow feeble. It seems to expose some hidden defect that must have always been in the relationship, but which I could not perceive. I feel utterly unequipped to handle it -- it's so much easier to move and start over with a new crowd. Yet this only makes the decline more precipitous, and I end up where I am today, wishing I had done something to slow it along the way.

So organizing the locale for the New Year's Eve party was like a sign to those people that I'm still here, and perhaps a demonstration of my willingness to reenter the fold. In moments of pessimism, I'm struggling with the realization that when a living thing has become this ill, it can be very difficult to bring it back to health again. If there were anger between my old friends and me, it would be cause for hope. But I'm concerned that we'll only find more of what I experienced in my conversation with Elizabeth: apathy. It's almost always an incurable condition.

About a week ago, I hatched a plan to invite two random readers of Tales of Sin and Virtue to the party, to enhance the ambient level of surreal random jolliness and perhaps make for an amusing evening for two total strangers. This idea seemed truly inspired when it entered my mind at one o'clock in the morning. Knowing that few people at the party would know more than a handful of others, I figured the invitees wouldn't feel too socially handicapped, and might be able to score some potential friendships/romances among the legion of people who will be there. From my perspective, it seemed to offer the possibility for some unpredictable and harmless fun, and I might get the chance to actually meet someone who reads this journal and verify that they do, in fact, exist.

But I've had to scrub the idea, after I received only two emails in response. One was from someone who loved the idea but wasn't yet old enough to legally hang out in bars, and the other was from a reader who thought the whole idea was a huge, steaming pile of dog poop. She saw it as me playing the 1990's Gatsby, entertaining my guests with the convenient appearance of a couple unwitting fools.

I was surprised that there weren't more people out there who thought crashing a random party would be a perfectly satisfactory way of inaugurating the New Year. But mostly, I felt discouraged. Receiving the one recent letter from an avowedly frequent Tales of Sin and Virtue reader made me momentarily imagine a vibrant community of fellow readers out there. It was a beguiling hallucination. I haven't managed to dissect my deepest reasons for posting the Tales for anyone to see, but I know it's pleasing to share personal information that my shyness and social reticence would keep silent in the everyday world. If I were only interested in writing and chronicling the banalities of my everyday life, I would scribble on a note pad and stuff the completed entries under my bed, or in the fireplace. Knowing that people will see the entries, and return to know more, is meaningful and motivating in way that I don't yet fully understand. It feels a little embarrassing, in an eight-year-old's-birthday kind of way, to issue an invitation that gets no RSVPs.