I Wandered Until Dawn

Since they were seven years old, director Michael Apted has been chronicling the lives of fourteen disparate souls in a series of films together regarded by many as the greatest documentary ever made. He releases these little socio-economic masterpieces every seven years, and it just so happened that 28 Up was to play at the Bloor Cinema on my 28th birthday, a film in which everyone would be exactly the same age as me—and who wouldn’t want to see something like that? Except perhaps my girlfriend, who had already made plans with her friends. So, I watched it alone.

By August, then, the papers announced that the upcoming lunar eclipse would be the best for the next forty years. But what they didn’t mention was that my buddy, Tim, had a house on a hill facing south and that my girlfriend was already going out somewhere else and that Tim’s sister-in-law would show up all drunk and sexy from her office baseball game, and that then, come the great blackout in April and my dark romp downtown, I would finally figure out that I had never had so much fun with my girlfriend as I was having without her.