Watching the World Cup is bringing me into the flow-of-time musings that such every-four-year events tend to suck people into. First, I must say that one of the great things about watching the World Cup in the USA, when one has no TV and has to hit a local watering hole to see it, is the weird vibe of drinking pints of beer at 10:30 in the morning; and this situation is probably contributing to the sappy melting of time into one big candy bar that you see in this post. Anyway -- I just needed to post that I can't #@$%&* believe the last World Cup, which I watched in Berlin while I was living there for nearly half a year, was four @#$%* years ago.
At that time I needed for various emotional reasons to flee New York, which had become a stale graveyard of stories gone wrong for me, and I had the good fortune to find a time and place to exist in a kind of suspension of normal life in Berlin for the spring and summer of 2006, where, to my surprise, the World Cup happened to be happening. That had not been part of my plan. It was rather beautiful watching the games unfold in the laid-back cafes and bars of Prenzlauer Berg, where I was living. An American friend was in town watching some USA games, so I started to watch with him, and after getting involved and then seeing the USA team knocked out I found myself sort of falling in love with the game, and in particular with the German team. They played clean and undramatically, had a great passing game, great strikers, and were the tender targets of the rather civilized, laid-back love of the Berliners, who (I was meeting them for the first time and falling in love with them simultaneously) were a bit sheepish and self-conscious about rooting too hard and especially about flying flags -- the flags were beginning to come out and this made many Berliners uncomfortable, if I recall. But in the besotted state I was in, I was supportive and encouraging of the nationalistic sports-boosterism, things I usually ignore or dislike.
I eventually became quite involved and nearly wept when I watched, in Amsterdam on a July 4th visit, the final elimination of Germany by the Italians (see picture below of the screen where I watched that game, as the lone German fan in a cafe full of Dutch screaming for the Italians). Ok, I'm exaggerating, but it was a landmark discovery for me -- in a way, in tune with the whole trip-- this discovery of the emotional openness of internationalism. The USA can feel so insular, like its sports; isolated by oceans and ideological narratives of history, by power, by the peculiarly dominant American forms of weirdness that have been so culturally fruitful yet now seem to be outliving much of their usefulness; watching the World Cup in a recently-unified nation that was the epicenter of so much of the worst and shameful history of the past century, yet seemed to be tentatively reviving and hopefully looking into the future, inspired me and revivified me (as did the visit of an intensely great woman, seen in front of the giant football on Unter Den Linden in front of the Brandenburg Gate; a woman who is now my wife).
Watching it again now, and seeing the Germans play so beautifully again, and, I must admit, seeing the Dutch beat the Brazilians as they did so beautifully today (not that I hold any grudges against the Brazilians, of course), recalls to me my lovely European friends and brings me back to the appreciation I still feel towards those who welcomed me in Europe when I was alone and slightly broken, who showed me things I didn't know, and who helped revive me with feelings of possibility and hope. I lift a glass to the World Cup and to the community of peoples who play it together.
I know this is just a sappy personal musing sort of masquerading as a larger thought when it's not, but isn't that what blogs are for, sort of?
