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On July 6th, 2003 I walked from my old and awesome loft apartment in Chinatown to the grounds of City Hall to see Gord Downie and The Country of Miracles perform as part of the Ottawa Bluesfest.
It’s funny how skipping through existence at the mercy of linear time (whether it be an illusion or not) forces us to walk around in such a fog of ignorance. I mean, what if the veil of future had been lifted and I was privy to not just the world as it was in that moment and had been in the past, but also to how things would change? If I could’ve seen that present then as I can see it now and contextualize it as the cog in history that it was, how different would that moment have been for me? For everybody?
Let’s just say (for example) that as I was putting on my sneakers to go to the festival I knew that five months later I would be running out of that cool loft apartment to escape a raging fire on a cold wintry morning and that I would suddenly find myself without most of my collected worldly items. Would I have paused and taken a good lingering look around, or perhaps played a quick game of pinball before gong out? Probably.
If I had known when I arrived onsite that the Bluesfest would grow to be such a huge annual focus for me; a festival I would come to work for, write for, and play at, a festival that would present me with an unpredictably huge amount of entertainment over the coming 15+ years including (but not at all limited to) Bob Dylan, The Flaming Lips, Further, Widespread Panic, Van Morrison, Rush, BB King, John Fogerty, Iron Maiden, John Prine, and ZZ Top (where I would meet my future wife), well, I might have relished the relative intimacy of the concert I saw on this evening, and probably even looked forward with expectant glee at the intimacy of getting married to someone.
But most of all, of course, if I could have somehow known that this would be the only time I would see Gord Downie perform his solo material with his band The Country of Miracles, well I would have made it a different experience altogether. Instead of hanging out near the back and chatting with friends over a few plastic beers I might have made my way to the front and hung on every word of Canada’s greatest rock poet, Canada’s most revered frontman, and Canada’s most honest musical biographer. I would have stared hard, trying desperately to burn the rare image of Gord leading his hand-selected band of excited backup musicians through one sonic commentary after another (including Dave Clark and Dale Morningstar from The Dinner is Ruined and fellow Monctonian Julie Doiron, formerly of Eric’s Trip). In short, I would have tried to make this concert mean more to me than it did.
But at the time I considered Gord Downie’s set as merely the best thing on offer that night, and the few fleeting moments when I was actually paying attention it was mostly just to verify that I considered his solo show to be vastly inferior to a full-on The Tragically Hip concert.
I mean, sure I generally stop to smell the roses, but shrouded as I am in this fog of ignorance I usually do so in such a nonchalant way that the (linear) future me could kick myself. When, oh when will I ever learn?
Oh right: Not until I can finally see beyond the illusion of linear time. As they say, Christmas is right around the corner.
Todd Man Out 