Both Christmas weekend and now New Years weekend have displayed an amazing dearth of Mill goers, especially evident in our local proselytes; the drum circle has not suffered as greatly from this winnowing as there were still at least three drums this NYE weekend and they rumbled on.
We hit the Ave about 9:30p.m. with my friends Omni and Rico. Omni decided to bring Rico on a leash with a leather collar, which commentary went that nobody even looked twice at someone drawing a bright-orange afroed boy about with a metal chain leash—welcome to Mill! I’m sure that stranger things have been seen roaming the streets now that Drum Circle is exiled from our usual place at 12a.m. because of newly enforced park regulations.
I got enough time to sit around and speak with the usual goers and find out how their lives are going. The Ave isn’t usually so calm on the outside of a Saturday night, so it gave a little time to sit down and actually hold some discussions with various folk. Without the usual lively forum produced by the preachers there wasn’t much reason to hang around the corner, so I spent most of my time around the drum circle itself.
There, I passed out almost half of the copies of Have a Merry Vexing Christmas that I had on hand and enjoyed myself with people that I know there.
Later, we trotted off to Zia Records, a place that I haven’t visited in a long time. It’s just off of Mill near University. I bought myself a copy of Memoirs of a Geisha.
Adding to the ghostly lack of people on the Ave were barricades being set up for the next day’s festivities. The New Years Eve block party apparently was going to block off a large portion of the Ave itself, with large metal archways with a logo proclaiming “Insight!” (The next day I would return to the Ave for the block party and discover a lot of the street rats already inside—we are nothing if not resourceful for getting into or already being inside of these events when Mill gets shut down. Tickets were $20.) Some tents had already been set up, a huge white pinnacled tent rose up on the spot where Long Wong’s used to sit, selling ASU and various NYE Tempe paraphernalia. I was not interested.
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