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Scratched: On a Derby Day That Isn’t
On the absence of ritual, the luxury of frivolity, and of living through history when you don’t want to
Hunter S. Thompson was right. The Kentucky Derby is decadent and depraved.
What he may not have realized, though, is that’s neither a flaw nor a rebuke, neither judgment nor insult.
It’s just one of those things you aren’t supposed to say out loud.
The Kentucky Derby is a big-to-do for really nothing much at all, 150,000+ wearing outlandish clothes (or in the infield, very few clothes) drinking overly sweetened, watered down drinks crammed with crushed ice and paltry, wilted mint costing upwards of $12 a round, all to watch, or to come close to watching, maybe seeing from a distance, perhaps catching on a far-away screen, maybe just being in the vicinity of, a two-minute horse race — albeit the world’s most famous horse race.
“It’s what we always do,” the argument goes. “And we do it every year, on the first Saturday of May, like clockwork.”
The gears of every clock imaginable have now whimpered into a restless slumber.
What began in March as a distortion of days and nights morphed into a melting of weeks, skewing our perception of time passed and time to come, challenging us on how to fill the time directly in front of us.
