It's just another derby eve . . .

another night like all the rest.

I can't remember a time in the last 20 years or so when I've been less spirited about the greatest 2 minutes in sports. Maybe it's a malaise brought on by the growing signs of impending apocalypse--dwindling petroleum, disappearing bees, lingering wars, warming climates, contaminated food supplies, giant pigs, spreading fire ants, and violently self-righteous religious folk. Maybe it's just a function of my having preceded the normally climactic Derby weekend with one of those once-in-a-lifetime trips, to the New Orleans Jazz Festival last weekend. It was a fantastic trip, but it left me ragged. Maybe it's a side-effect of the repressed anger brought on by the deep and tragic remains of the great natural disaster that was Katrina, and the great civic disaster that is our national inability to fix what's broken there. An editorial in the paper, from a "crank" suggesting that we throw rotten fruit at the Queen rather than welcoming her to town did in fact remind me of how, over time, our mortal enemies the despotic Windsors have become our closest allies despite how they cling to what we're supposed to always have believed is an immoral and unnatural form of un-democratic government. Makes you wonder who in 400 years we'll be bombing (throwing wooden spears at?) and who we'll be welcoming (on their wooden sailing ships with their terrible diseases and tales of far away adventure?) to our shores. Or maybe it's just that I've been away, not caught up in the hype of the week and too busy to stop and ponder that all this can happen because some folks are gonna get some horses together and run them around in a circle and see which one gets back first. Really, it's pretty eccentric when you think about it--and for some reason, that still makes me smile.

So whatever is keeping me so mellow about it, I think it's time we all suck it up. Put on your fancy hat or your rain gear and your mud shoes and grab all the cash you can find and all the smokes you might need and let's go. Let's go roll in the mud, pay too much for sugar-watery bourbon, show our privates to strangers, eat too much, spend too much, drink too much, and have a blast. If our chances for revelry are running out, we'd better seize the day. And if they're not, well then we have something to celebrate.

Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: for that shall abide with him of his labour the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun.

I'm calling it for Nobiz Like Showbiz or Circular Quay.