It's really late to be making an entry here, but what difference does it make? Does anyone read this thing? Probably not. Very few, at best. I'll try to go with the general sense of detachment that usually sets in at this hour.
The General managed to see Wayne Gretzky play live just one year before he retired. I can't believe I waited his entire career before making a concerted effort to see him play live. His skills were diminished but still awesome. Something about the last few years of Gretzky's career suggested that it wasn't he who was finished (though his bad back was obviously bothering him), but that the league had passed him by, changed its style. When you see highlights from early in Gretzky's career, you realize how open the game was in those days. The players didn't hook and grab and obstruct nearly as much as they do now. The equipment was smaller, on the players and the goalies. The goalies played a stand-up style that contributed to many awful goals, goals in which the puck would hit the inside corner of the net and the goalie would seemingly just wave his foot at it, like he wasn't really trying. The butterfly style of goaltending just seems more natural, and one scratches one's head looking at old footage of NHL games in which goalies seemed unaware of the possibilities of the butterfly. Cover the bottom of the net, goddammit. At least make them work for their goals.
On Saturday, as most Canadians know, there was an old-timers game played outdoors in Edmonton. Oilers (including Gretzky) and Canadiens from the past twenty-plus years reunited for a spirited game of pond hockey in front of more than 50,000 fans. I was surprised how many of the players I recognized, especially secondary journeymen like Craig Muni or Dave Hunter. Even Montreal goalie Steve Penny appeared courtesy of some kind of hockey voodoo: two minutes for being obscure. Even though a cynic (like The General) could riff on the needless spectacle that it was, one couldn't help but feel a bit enchanted by the incongruity of the whole affair. Gretzky seemed to enjoy the proceedings, though his play was inconspicuous. I'm sure he could have "turned it on," but there was no need. In some sense it was just reassuring to see him on skates, like the way it's comforting to know that your parents, or your friends, or some familiar artifacts "still exist".
Urban hipsters always ridicule nostalgia. Partly, I'm sure they do it to celebrate their youth, to demarcate themselves from the obsolescing (though that separation is pure fantasy); and partly, I'm sure they think nostalgia is a false emotion, born of weakness rather than strength. But nostalgia simply reflects the way we situate ourselves as individuals, the way we need a frame of cultural reference to know who we are. How dispiriting it is to see our frame of reference tarnished, lost, or destroyed, to see friends become unfamiliar, to see landmarks turn to dust, or to see loved ones die. How debilitating it is to feel the impermanence of identity, to know that who you are depends so steadfastly on things that move, change, degrade, evolve, or simply disappear. The urge to flee, that desire to escape time by escaping place that haunts us all, is often diminished by the realization that place is so much of what we are, that time follows us from place to place anyway.
The fallacy internalized by Milton's Satan in the early books of "Paradise Lost" is his belief that he can evade his punishment by simply thinking differently. "The mind is its own place," he figures. I'll just imagine my Hell is Heaven, and everything will be alright. But, of course, Milton won't have that. It turns out that everywhere Satan goes he brings his Hell with him. Wherever he is, there is Hell. The mind cannot make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. But Satan was only half wrong. The mind IS its own place. The fiction that changes is out there, but the mind remains the same. You can run, but you can't hide from yourself. Change of scenery won't change the biological contours of the brain, the petrified remnants of a life lived, the perceptive faculties that long ago stopped conforming to new stimuli, and now must hold their shape and degrade. The fallacy of Milton's Satan was not his solipsism; it was the agency he believed his solipsism made possible. We may be free to choose, but our choices are so circumscribed as to be almost redundant.
So I watched Wayne Gretzky play hockey on Saturday, and I enjoyed it.
2:52:34 AM 
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