For New Year's Eve, I decided to end the year 2011 where it began---in Boulder. I drove down in the early evening and treated myself to a movie, seeing Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows at the Regal Century, the multiplex that is part of the outdoor lifestyle center on the site of the old Crossroads Mall.
It had been a couple years since I'd been at that theater. The last time I was there was to see The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus in early 2010. I noticed that the tickets now cost ten dollars and fifty cents. Wow.
I really enjoyed the first Sherlock Holmes movie two years ago, but this new one was a real eye-opening. It simply confirmed how quickly Hollywood, and America as a whole, is disintegrating. The story seemed chaotic and meaningless, lacking all the cleverness and wittiness of the original. Gone was the intricate mystery-solving of the conspiracy in the first one, replaced with the blunt tropes of the War on Terror, projected back in time to 1891. This is what happens when we live in tissues of compounded lies, I thought. I takes it toll on art.
The movie got out just after ten p.m. I decided to drive up to the illuminated star on Flagstaff Mountain, where I spent midnight last year. It was much warmer evening this year---last year it was one of the subzero end-of-the-world cold type of nights. There was also much less snow.
I didn't stay and climb up to the middle of the star, as I did last year. I just stood outside in the mild air by the road and meditated on the incredible year that had just passed, and all the ways I felt so different than one calendar year before. A young couple was playing and sliding up in the lights on the mountain side. I could hear their laughter and voices. It was very pleasant.
But the best part was that above the star, hovering above the dark shape of the mountain was the bright light of the planet Jupiter, almost like a heavenly mirror of the star on the mountain side. It felt like a good omen for the year ahead.
With about an hour left before midnight, I decided to fulfill my resolution to spend midnight down at the Occupy Boulder encampment at Sister Cities Park. On the way up to Flagstaff Mountain, I had driven by it and seen the tents beside the creek on Broadway, just south of downtown.
On the way back down there, I stopped at a convenience store and bought several large cups of hot chocolate. I drove back down the hill on Broadway and parked on Arapahoe across the street from the library. I filled my backpack with several boxes of Clif Bars that I had been toting around as provisions for several months on my travels, and took them and the hot chocolate over to the encampment in front of City Hall on Broadway. It was ironically right across the creek from a hot dog stand that I had remembered visiting on my first trip to Boulder in 1978, when we moved to Colorado.
When I had driven by earlier, I had seen several people standing out by the tents, but now I saw no one around. It seemed like the camp was deserted. But I heard some guitar music from inside one of them. I called out "Free Hot Chocolate!" I guy in his twenties with dark hair came out. He said he didn't want any hot chocolate, but he invited me into the tent, so I went inside. There were two other people there, a guy with a beard and a young woman wearing a stocking hat. I took a seat in one of the shares. The young woman took eagerly took one of
cups of chocolate and started sipping on it. I poured myself some from the other cup, using a red squishy cup that was part of my camping gear.
A couple other people came into the tent after a few minutes until we were all crowded inside. Beer and other things were passed around. It occurred to me rather quickly that none of the people there cared anything about the political ramifications of the Occupy "movement." This was simply a homeless camp. Everyone there was simply trying to survive. It seemed a world away from the community meeting at the Nomad Theatre. None of those lawyers was done here tonight.
Everything seemed broken. It was hard to carry on any time of conversation with anyone, except the guy with the bear, whose name with Sean, and who said he had been homeless for three years. I tried introducing myself and shaking hands with the people who came in the tent, but the idea of greeting each other that way seemed to be a foreign concept. I felt like I was I was smack in the middle of the American Crack-up.
"Do you think we had actually make one complete brain here, with the people here?" Sean asked me.
"I don't know," I told him. "Maybe eighty percent of one."
I felt awkward being there---as if I were an interloper in some degree, but mostly because I realized how tense I was, and how the vibes of my tension were apparent when I was trying to hang out with these people. I could feel so strongly how have been under so much self-imposed stress lately. I felt like I was too high strung to be sitting there. I felt embarrassed and unworthy, as if I needed to peel off layers of ego. I had to struggle to overcome that. It made me wish I could relax more, and be a better listener.
I wound up emptying my backup of all the Clif Bars I had, and leaving them there, also with the camp glow stick in rainbow colors.
"Do you carry around a whole supply of Clif Bars?" one of them asked me, incredulous.
"You're not going to believe this," I said, "but I actually lugged these boxes of Clif Bars all the way out to West Coast and back."
That just blew their minds. "I took them to ocean and back," I said.
"Were they blessed by the Pacific Ocean?" Sean asked me.
"I guess they were," I said.
For a few moments things took a spiritual tune. Sean even did a rendition of Kum-Ba-Ya, which the young woman (whose name was Alex), hadn't ever heard before. Then we all agreed for God "to bless America and everyone else."
After midnight I went outside and showed Sean the planet Jupiter, which was still above City Hall. I listened to his theories on the "Collapse" that it is progress. He asked me: "are you one of those religious people?"
"Absolutely," I told him.
"What are you? Christian? Catholic?"
I thought about it a second. "Yeah, I guess so," I told him. "I try to be a bit of everything."
Then I said good-bye to him, giving him my pair of gloves, which he was grateful to receive. Then I went back to my car, walking back across the creek and past the old hot dog stand.
In a couple days from now the City Manager has resolved to clear out the camp from in front of City Hall. I could understand why it is probably going to happen, despite the efforts of the well-meaning progressive lawyers. But at the same time I was thankful that the tents were there that night, so that Sean and his friends could be inside a tent that night, and not out in the cold.
Now what about those layers of ego that I am carrying? What am I going to do about those?
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