The End of Something Abominable

I'm talking about football. Or what the Americans roguishly call football. For twenty some odd weeks those us for whom football is at the very least a bore and at the very most an injurious affront must endure what manifests into a monster-show of hysteria driven by violence and latent sexual appetite satisfied through this violence, a-few-strips-of-fabric-shy-of-being-nude cheerleaders to further wet that appetite, overpriced (and awful) beer, and slow, lurching entertainment mixed with mass consumer marketing trying to pass as athletics. The question, "did you see the game?" becomes so ubiquitous that the words are spoken almost as a nervous tic instead of genuine interest. Cashiers at corner stores linger when ringing you up, their eyes fastened to the upper corner of the ceiling, where a television hangs like something dead and alive the same time. People, normally once active, hole themselves inside for paralyzing blocks of hours at a time to watch a sixty minute game that somehow winds up taking nearly three hours. And then after one final orgiastic hurrah -- it ends. How did Eliot put it? Not with a bang but a whimper? He could have said just as much about the American football season and been equally as spot-on.

I've got around the next six or seven months to recuperate in the blissful silence returned to me while footballs spends its half-year hibernation hungover and tending to its chronic bruises. Baseball, while I harbor just as much disinterest in the sport, doesn't clatter and roar with the same kind of fervor as football. Because it's spread out. Football is acute and winnowed down to only a few months of drunken, body-painting, jersey-wearing, inclusive-we-speaking intensity. Hell resurfaces in October when the end of baseball and the beginning of football converge to bear a freakish spawn of unsettling American boredom and misdirected focus. Until then, I'll be enjoying myself quite wholesomely.