DRUMMOND CHALLIS, TONY MAYLAM

Olympic Spirit

I think of stress as a budget. Everyone has the baseline they’re carrying around, and then on top comes whatever is happening to them at a given moment. As long as your baseline stress is manageable, then the little things that come your way are also manageable. The trouble is when your baseline approaches your maximum capacity. In that case, the tiniest additional stress can be the difference between ok and not ok. It can push you over your ability to manage.

I’m currently at a high level of baseline stress. My job is very far away from my house, creating an unsustainable commute. It doesn’t make sense for my family to move closer, and it also doesn’t make sense for me to leave my job. My wife is pregnant with our first child. The world is a mess and both countries I feel a belonging towards are doing things that I cannot support.

None of that has anything to do with this documentary. The reason I mention it, is that I wrote a piece about this film earlier today, one that I was pretty happy with. Unfortunately, that file was almost immediately lost. As I stared at the blank screen where my thoughts had been, I realized that this stupid little setback had pushed me beyond my stress capacity. It felt like the biggest deal in the world. It isn’t, but that’s where I’m at.

So, I can’t wrap my head around trying to rewrite a worse version of my thoughts. In their place, I’ve written this explanation.

About the film I’ll just say that while it’s clearly a Coca-Cola commercial pretending to be a record of the Olympics, I enjoyed it. It’s twenty-seven minutes long, and made in lieu of any actual documentary about the XIII Winter Games, which sucks, but for what it is it’s still a nice piece of weird early-eighties art.

The rest of my presumably brilliant analysis will have to remain confined to wherever bits go when they die. - Jul 14th, 2019