The Olympics are finally over, in a blaze of color and glory. I will miss the pageantry and the color, not to mention the sports excitement. Sports are one of the few things left in this drab modern life of ours where people can wear bright colors and make a lot of noise without being socially penalized for it. It gives me the opportunity, even if only for a minute or so, to step out of my position of irony, cynicism, regret, ambivalence, and pessimism, and simply celebrate some brilliant athlete's victory. Then it's back to the real world of energy dissipation, dust, laundry, and price tag signs for organic roma tomatoes.

I watched more TV than I have in years. I got a glimpse into the American culture which has passed me by, a multi-racial world of hip-hop and fast food and babes and glitzy cars. Sometimes the ads were more interesting than the sports. They certainly were loud. They will not induce me to get another credit card or to eat at McDonald's, though.

I also say goodbye to the poignant messages about "living your dreams." I know I am being emotionally manipulated, but I feel the emotions anyway. Like the charity solicitations that I mentioned in my last post before this one, the ads and "Olympic moments" are full of innocence and hope masking lifetimes of pain and disappointment. For every Olympian who won a medal of any sort, even for those who were there but didn't win anything, there are hundreds, thousands of people who hoped to be there but whose dreams came up short. What about them? How do you live the dream when you have failed? If you qualify for the Olympics, you are an intense competitor. How do you manage your frustration when your dream fails? The ads only reinforce how fallible and illusory such "dreams" are, and they also show why some of these athletes just keep coming back and back to try again. It is better for me not to draw any parallels or similarities with my own situation, lest I sink into poor taste again.

I now have a word for these cultural bits when innocence and hope cover an underlying reality of grim despair. All I had to do was look into a rather folksy vocabulary subset of ordinary English. These memes of sugar and darkness are bittersweets. For me, the Olympics were full of bittersweets, and I'm sure I'm not the only one to feel that way. Now back to the grey world of dread and irony, and six weeks of Lent to repent for things I have not done.

Posted at 1:50 am | link