Thoughts from five minutes of the Olympic opening ceremony from a bar with no sound

I saw five minutes of the opening ceremony for the Vancouver Olympics with no sound at a bar last night. I thought about how it is a performance that is not really supposed to be good. It's not supposed to be bad either, but goodness is not the measure that they are going for. It's supposed to be good in the way that it's supposed to be wintery and expensive. These are all boxes that must be checked, but they are not the ultimate goal. The goal is for the ceremony to defy explanation. It wants to be visually spectacular and register a "DOES NOT COMPUTE" across your system.

I find this sort of thing stratifies the available reactions for someone watching it. There is accepting, impressed and disgusted. I found myself mostly towards the first. It is what it is. They are supposed to do something so over the top, that you lose your feel for where the top even was. That's their job. I had some impressed too. Skiers air-slaloming vertically from the ceiling of a huge arena? Pretty cool. That and Peter Pan were all I saw. From what I understand it was too long to actually enjoy it all, but again, the point is not to enjoy all of it. Short things can be more easily explained than long things. One of the ways to hit the DOES NOT COMPUTE button is to make it long enough so that you have multiple moments of "Wait, there's more?"

Disgusted, accepting and impressed are three points on a continuum that reflect where you stand on the Olympics in general. If you see it as a massive waste of money and resources, then there is no better example than the opening ceremony. If it's just something that is, then it is, and if you get a shiver of "Oh boy! Here come the Olympics!" that will last you through most of the ceremony, which gets its significance from that feeling.

As for me, it's all those things. It's cool, it's a waste, it is what it is, and it's partially redeemed by my love of hockey. That sentence describes my basic attitude toward the Winter Olympics, which will come and go with only a few scattered blips across my mind, but it also describes a chunk of my adolescence: Cool, a waste, is what it is, partially redeemed by my love of hockey. I remember back in the day I would freak out for the Olympics. I bought every moment of its self-inflated meaning. Now I'm more jaded, pragmatic, less patriotic. I wouldn't mind seeing the Americans win the hockey tournament, especially because it is one where they are solidly underdogs, but my favorite player is Canadian, and I have an odd affection for the Swedes. None of it is likely to strike a chord deep within me, the way it all used to, or even the way the White Album did this morning. The Olympics is a circus. It could be more- a cultural celebration, a moment of diplomacy- but it doesn't seem to want this.

I guess it's all about what you believe in. I used to believe that sports mattered more than anything. I don't think that any more, but I still hold on to my arbitrary partisanship toward the Mets and Devils. It gives the stories meaning, the way gambling does. Most likely the Olympics will be gone in two weeks and I will barely notice, but if I happen to catch them at the right moment, if one of the unfolding narratives captures a greater meaning for me, if somehow it all takes on a much greater significance than a few people, miles a way, doing one very specific thing that they have made themselves very good at, then I'll get to enjoy a few moments of that cosmic power that instilled so much of my youth.