I didn’t ring in the New Year last night, but I’m kicking off the New Year this morning with a throw-back to ye olde days of blogging. I say it all the time: I MISS BLOGGING. Blogs came up when I was in college and I loved documenting the odds and ends of my life, some exciting, some humdrum. Then, blogs were monetized, pop-ups got aggressive, Google Reader was deactivated (RIP Google Reader, I miss you most of all). Then, of course, Instagram, vloggers, TikTok, etc, etc, etc.

Content is visual now, which I don’t hate, but I have a harder time with pictures and video than words.

Irony, maybe, that it was this documentary, posted on YouTube that popped up on my Instagram that finally is giving me the drop-kick to figure out how to log into my very skeleton website and start blogging again.

30 years ago, Treb Heining, a balloon man (that is, a man who made spectacle out of balloons, not a man made of balloons) was asked to level up the NYC Times Square count-down. Having worked on Disney parades and football halftime shows, Treb landed on throwing thousands of pounds of confetti from rooftops.

“I knew it had to be by hand.” This is what he tells the documentary maker when asked about confetti cannons. It’s just not the same when you launch from machines. So, they have up to a hundred volunteers stand on buildings surrounding Times Square and hand toss it out as the countdown begins. (Sign me up)

I was in Times Square for New Year’s on the 2002/2003 midnight with two of my siblings and one of the most striking memories of the event (besides playing the I’m Thinking of Someone game for like 6 hours straight) is the confetti. It absolutely, 100% made the waiting, the crowds, and the cold all worth it. I’m on a mission to dig up photo evidence of that night, which was pre-cell phone camera by a few years, but here’s a photo of my family on that trip.

All to say: Treb’s dedication to hand-made spectacle paid off, for me personally in 2003 and millions of others before then and since then. And if you watch the documentary you can tell, this guy is having an absolute blast doing what he’s doing. This, I realized, is what I love about art (because let’s be real, dropping confetti is good as performance art), and what I want to blog about: people who are creating things (myself included) and what it makes me think about.

Sound interesting? I’d love to write things people will read.

And if not, I’m reminding myself out loud (in words) that this is as much for me as it is for anyone else.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!