Although the echoing of July 4th fireworks has just barely died down, already folks around me--friends, foes and in between--are making plans for New Years Eve. Why the rush, you may ask? Allow me to drag you into my depression by pointing out that New Years Eve is when everyone is expected to share the night with that Special Someone, even if you have both agreed that one another will only be Special for that one night, after which you will ignore each other's existence.

No, that's not enough pressure for this year. Already the hotels, the champagne hucksters and limo companies are building up the pressure to not only have sex to bring in the new year, but great sex; the best sex. We're not talking the best sex of the year, or the decade, or even the fucking century, but the best sex since our ancestors were painting their faces blue and worshiping rocks when they weren't getting raped and/or decapitated by Vikings or Visigoths. Those feeling a tad too much pressure at this point, raise your hands. I thought so.

The closest I've come to making plans is vowing under my breath that when it comes down to that special moment, I'll be at an appropriately named website, in front of a camera, dropping trou with "The new millennium can kiss my skinny white ass" written across my butt with Magic Marker. Clearly more preparation is in order.

I don't know about you, but usually sex with the most wild abandon is the dreaded "kiss-off fuck;" when someone is planning on blindsiding you (romantically speaking) and decides to assuage the guilt by offering you a buffet of sexual delights and intensities that not only have you not sampled up to this point, but goodies that you weren't even aware anyone was serving.

By taking you to orgasmic heights you've never known, the thinking goes, you'll be less likely to lunge for the razor blades once the bomb gets dropped the next morning. Yeah, right. That's like telling someone, "We've got winning lottery tickets here, and we're giving them to people all around you. You will never get one if we have anything to say about it, but we wanted you to see one before spending the rest of your life watching other people get rich."

If there was ever a golden opportunity for this kind of psychological torment, 12/31/99 is it. Hell, if you want, you can make it sound like a pine Prophecy: "Only once every thousand years am I able to debase myself with someone . . . plus a goat, several gardening implements and certain Beanie Babies . . . and now that I have fulfilled my destiny, I must move on."

The only alternative to the above is to invoke the other venal hypescam at the close of 1999. When someone asks what you did to rock your world into the new millennium, you can just hang your head and mutter in a mournful tone, "Goddamn Y2K..."