UPDATED: It’s 4:51am on Tuesday morning. History is stupid early.

I started blogging shortly after George Bush was inaugurated eight years ago this Tuesday. He was the reason. I kept a political site called Times New Roman and wrote about the excesses of his domestic policies and foreign adventures for a few years. I was away at school and thinking that maybe I could fathom it all and maybe distill something of whatever it was that I learned. Instead, I found myself getting more frustrated than properly informed, and I ended up shutting it down in disgust when he won again in 2004. I just couldn’t take investing that much time on someone who was guaranteed (short of impeachment) to continue to bug the hell out of me for another four years. So, on the bones of Times New Roman I started blogging about something that I’d been up to since the late Triassic, and that was working in restaurants. Shortly thereafter I got a job at the paper doing the restaurant review thing, and I’ve been writing for a living ever since.

So I guess I owe George Bush for whatever I’ve duct-taped into a career. it’s a very strange situation, like a bat biting your face and somehow making you taller. I’m grateful for the work and the path that he put me on, but it feels discomforting nevertheless, as if I made a Faustian bargain with a clown without knowing what happens once the show is over.

Everything that MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann lists off above in his “Special Comment” on the end of the Bush Presidency I either watched unfold in anger or dreamed in fear of it happening only to wake and see that it had. I assume some of you have felt the same oppressive weight on the mind, the same blanketing frustration at Americans for voting for him twice, and the same disgust that comes when something he has done is remembered. I’ve known such torment longer than I’ve known both of my children. When he hands over the reins I may have trouble knowing what to think, but I know what I will do.

I’ll be getting up at 5am this Tuesday morning to watch every minute of Barack Obama’s inauguration. I’m going to TIVO it and then watch it again when my kids get home from school, and then I’m going to open the first beer of the day, a day that will – regardless of how I spend it – go down comparably to one of absolute planetary alignment, with whipped cream clouds and minutes made of marshmallows. And then I’ll watch it again.

Christmas can’t touch this.

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Andrew Morrison is a west coast boy who studied history and classics at the Universities of Cape Town and Toronto after an adolescence spent riding skateboards and working in restaurants. He is the editor of Scout Magazine, the weekly food and restaurant columnist for the Westender newspaper, a contributor to Vancouver and Western Living magazines, and a proud board member of the Chef’s Table Society of BC. He lives and works by the beach in Vancouver.

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