I think I hate hockey: A not so Indie-related rant

I grew up in a fairly traditional french Canadian family with a father and an older brother who were obsessed with hockey and yeah, at one point in my life, I was sitting in my living room or at the very top of the molson stadium with my brother chanting “Go Habs Go!”, but man, I’m just not feeling the hockey fever right now. Last night, I realised I hadn’t left school since I had entered it at 7:30AM that morning, so I left my nearly permanent spot at my sewing machine to go get some air and was greated with the sounds of the two bars on the block that were screening the playoffs, with some cheers because our dear ol’Canadians had scored a goal. I smiled and remembered when I used to care about those things and wished I was sitting there with a beer and some friends cheering along, but as the night grew and 10:30 hit, I packed up my things and walked out of a school with a throbbing headache and this time there was full blown chaos. Thankfully it was still just happy “yays” and high fives and honking, but my brain who seemed to be expanding painfully and playing pinball on either sides of my skull just weren’t feeling all too stocked about the win. I walked painfully to the metro looking forward to the quiet underground until the metro hit Lucien L’Allier station and a few hundred over-joyed hockey fans walked in, chanting names of players and the “Les Canadiens sont la” anthem. I burried my head in my friends shoulder, wishing I was home until halfway between 2 stations, the metro stopped, the lights shut off and the controller announced a power outage. A kid joked that “it was probably a Boston fan that had jumped in front of the train” and for the 15 or so minutes that followed, I wished hockey had never been invented and felt so much anger for a group of (despite that horrid suicide joke) happy and harmless sports fan. I got home safe and made it to the pharmacy on time before it closed and as soon as the aspirin started to kick in, I felt a little bad about how much hatred I had felt for these guys. After all so much solidarity is kind of beautiful, I’m a fan of complete strangers being happy and patting each others backs over such a simple thing.

But that guilt was short lived.

I got a text message in the middle of the night from a frightened friend of mine who lives downtown that read “What’s going on in this city? There was just an explosion outside my house!”. I woke up to visions of world trade center-type trauma and then checked the local news websites to read about the riots that were happening downtown, something like half a dozen police cars being torched and the store fronts being destroyed. Yeah, hockey fans, not so harmless! Keep in mind the team WON which makes me wonder what would have happened if they had lost and mainly makes me scared about what would go down if they won the series. A parade in the streets blocking traffic, sure. Hockey-themed graffiti art even, but a full blown riot? Really? I’m a little terrified about history repeating itself.

To make up with this very “dear diary” type entry on an indie arts website, here’s probably one of my very favorite songs that somehow was the first one to come up on the shuffle option of my itunes earlier today and is frighteningly fitting with last night’s events.

Do you Remember the Riots? by Jens Lekman