In the waning days of pre-contact civilization on Planet Earth, perhaps as apt a symbol as any is happening for me tonight.
Earlier today I went to buy some groceries and the lines were so long that I had to drop the idea. I live just a short walk from the stadium in which tonight’s Stanley Cup final game is being played, as we speak.
On the street I pushed my way through crowds. The smell of marijuana was everywhere. People were jammed into every pub, waving flags from cars, hanging out of buses. Faces painted, funny wigs on, cases of booze under their arms. Special buses were carrying celebrants.
The game is actually playing out now as I write. By the deathly silence, I suspect that Boston is ahead.
Meanwhile I’m puttering away, rearranging the site to emphasize Disclosure.
Two solitudes.
When I wrote while at the Immigration and Refugee Board, I did so under the pseudonym (one pseudonym, anyways) “Brother Anonymous.” And I still feel like “Brother Anonymous” tonight as everyone huddles around their TV set, or is gathered at Robson Square as they did during the 2010 Winter Olympics, or is roaming the streets. We may as well be in two cities, them and I, and I must say I feel lonely, cut off from the crowd at a time of high excitement for almost everyone else.
Some time in the near future, I may be the only one cheering and I may again be cut off from the crowd. But then it won’t matter because our new/old family will arrive in town, in masses and droves. No horns blaring, no booze, no painted faces.
It has been a long, long journey and it isn’t over yet. While so many people around the Net are predicting Disclosure super-soon, it could still be delayed. Some people have been waiting since the 1980s and 1990s; most of us only a few years.
Waiting and disappointments at failed predictions change a person. One cannot go up and down so many times without having been through all the spaces a person can go through, short of experiencing a disaster. There is a weariness, a numbness, numerous wounds around the heart. And now here we are again, waiting once more.
I look back on all the people who have fallen by the wayside after stepping forward with a prediction that went nowhere, all the people who cheered their predictions on, and had their hopes dashed, like the Vancouver fans this evening who have fallen so quiet around me. We’ve lost many comrades along the way, although we’ll have them back in a flash when the skies explode with spacecraft.
Tonight, in the waning days of the old era, in the last hurrahs over the spectacles that so fascinated this generation, as I clean my room, metaphorically speaking, put away the laundry and look up at the sky, I feel like the wife expecting her husband back from the war. I am waiting, sighing, expecting, one more time.
Incidentally the crowds rampaged through the downtown district for perhaps three hours after the city’s loss to Boston. Not a good reflection on this town.