Out on a limb to tie it all together

First of all, I can not allow you guys to talk that way about St. Patty's Day. It's just unacceptable. Okay, obviously no one needs a holiday as an excuse to binge drink. I mean, we're Irish, okay? That's all the reason we need. We just wanted to get everybody else a day off. Way to be uptight about it. Sheesh.

Ben, you are a braver man than I if you will admit to watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on purpose. And no, I won't just "give it a chance."

I spent the better part of this NFL season ignoring football altogether. That is because I only follow the Buffalo Bills and you cannot call what the Buffalo Bills did in the second half of the '08 season football. You could call it heartbreaking. You could call it painful to watch. You could call it surprising. But if you're a Bills fan, you just call it business as usual. Like Ben, one of my very earliest memories is of the aforementioned missed kick by the aforementioned kicker. I was a child, and had multiple neighbors who were season ticket holders. The entire block was at Bob and Dotty's house. It was gut wrenching for a six year old to see adults so thoroughly dejected, to see them robbed of their very souls, their breath stolen from them, their eyes wide in disbelief.

Clearly, it has scarred me. And I will be a Bills fan for life, for bad or for worse. (Clever, eh? Wait, is this really my first parenthetical? In the third paragraph? I am slipping). Unless they move to L.A. In which case, I will be freed of my burden. Yes, I said it Bills. Freed of my burden. You're like a first true love gone wrong; you make my heart hurt but I can't give you up.

Ben, you said some shit about the UFC, or whatever, and I'm going to do us all the favor of ignoring that. The collective bargaining agreement, though, is ripe. (I threw that extra comma in there in your honor Ben). You think this conflict is governed by what, exactly? Business? Lawyers? Money? Come on. This is the NFL. These guys play for the love of the game. They smash their own brains into mush for the love of the game. They get replacement knees and hips and shoulders and rods in their legs and backs and arthritis and seizures and paralysis and mental illness for the love of the game. That's sports, man, that's love! Sacrificing their bodies on the field, and you call it distasteful?

Is a baseball player willing to sacrifice his cardiovascular health and his testicles to hit another ten home runs a year distasteful? No. Is it distasteful for an American soldier to sacrifice his body on the field of battle? No. Is it reasonable for me to make this comparison? I think so. (Is the tone of this paragraph coming across? I hope so.) A football player is doing his patriotic duty. He's playing football. He's worth a dozen soldiers! Soldiers don't sell. But football sells. And America buys. That's why we love football so damn much: because it involves men willing to make sacrifices that no man should rightly have to make. It's tragic, but we can't look away. Football isn't central to our national consciousness--it IS our consciousness. Which is why no other country will ever appreciate it.

NFL Europe. Enough said.

Alright, who cares about the salary cap. Yes, the NFL is a paragon. Blah blah blah. I'll tell you what it's a paragon of. It's a paragon of heroic bravery. It's a paragon of Christ-like sacrifice. These dudes are giving their bodies up for our entertainment, man. Like hookers. Nothing could be more selfless. They need to be immortalized. And pitied. And paid well.

I do find your point about globalization interesting. I can only hope that it brings about the end of the NFL. That would be like the first nice thing globalization did for anyone. I mean, hell, the trade deficit is out of control. The world's great economies are crumbling, The rich are still getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer. And civil rights are in calamitous decline here at home and around the world. And we can thank globalization for all of it. But if globalization could just do this one thing, and put the NFL out of its parity-loving high-profit misery, a real sport could return to national prominence, to being the way we pass our time. The way things used to be. You know what I'm talking about, people. Pass. Time. Pastime. I'm talking about BASEBALL! In a minute, that is. But first...

Kyle, you want to talk about football as event, as spectacle, and you are spot on. (Yeah, I just repeated your cute little phrase. I hope you can see now how dumb it sounds). But I loved a couple of things you said (in a platonic and yet simultaneously not homophobic kind of way): "Because I realized that watching football usually has nothing to do with the actual game. Football is an excuse. Football is an excuse to have an event dedicated to beer, the clogging of one's arteries, and sitting on the couch." This totally supports my point that football IS the American consciousness. Beer, clogging our arteries, sitting around on our fat asses? Needing new excuses to do nothing? That's what this country is all about. Not only that, but the fact that football only gets played on Sundays (and Mondays, and some Thursdays...why Thursdays?) forces us to binge and purge. NFL games are like the crack of the sports world.

Well, I have no taste for the stuff. Crack, that is. Both in the literal sense, and in the more-than-literal metaphorical sense regarding football--I don't care for either. I'd much prefer beer. That's what baseball is: having a couple of beers on a couple of week nights. Chilling out. Relaxing. Letting the beers slowly build on top of one another. Like watching a baseball game. The anticipation is enticing. You can't look away. The longer the game goes on, the more twisted and complex the plots and subplots become. The text is rich with its own self-awareness, it own self-amusing irony...something like what this blog should be, in fact. In terms of structure, that is...steady, in it for the long term, ebbing and flowing and ultimately building upon itself. It ought to be like a conversation, as if the three of us were in the room together, in the midst of a lengthy conversation. We will follow it where it goes. How very fucking organic and bloggy of us. I love it (again in a platonic and yet simultaneously not homophobic kind of way).

(Just to be clear, I wasn't suggesting that this blog needed to be more ironically self-aware. I am sure that my memoir voice, infected as it is with my cheap attempts at putting my own spin on the styles of Dave Eggers and Chuck Klosterman, is thinly veiled and annoying to some of you. Memo to some of you: you've got to appreciate the ability of people to make themselves laugh just a little bit more. Maybe you wouldn't take these things so literary. I mean so literally. I mean seriously. Because I am laughing at myself right now. Are you capable of that? If you're not, than it's time to seek help. Or write a parenthetical aside that lasts a whole paragraph!)

I can laugh at myself, even if I have been guilty of acting like a crackhead, of treating this blog like it was my crack rock, like it was the NFL of blogs. I got all hyped up about starting this blog and I did it and I dropped the first post and it felt great. And then I purged. I literally thought I would wait until next Sunday. Why not wait? Why do now what I could put off 'til later? Then just do a whole bunch? But then I remembered: my blogging doesn't have to inadvertently adopt all the crappy qualities of a crack addiction and/or the fleeting and overrated NFL just because it's the week before the Super Bowl. I'm a baseball fan. I like things nice and steady. I like pitchers working out of the stretch. I like batters stepping out to spit and tap their toes and wiggle their bats. I like the pause between innings, the time to reflect, regroup, and prepare to respond. This gamesmanship, it builds on itself, and it leaves me plenty of time to prognosticate, to shoot the shit, to offer my analysis, to mark my score card, to read my program, to buy a beer and a hot dog. I have time to breathe it all in. That's what this blog is going to be like.

And for you, the reader, this is excellent news, similar or related to a point Kyle made about the pleasure...and dedication...of following the 162-game regular season. In baseball, you get to know guys. You see them every day. You understand them. There is routine. There is warm familiarity. Again, this blog will mimic some of the best qualities of baseball by letting us each take several at bats per day. In baseball there is the distinct sense of Americana and family values and hard work being rewarded and fun for the whole family. And while I don't normally go for that kind of crap, with baseball it feels authentic, it feels real. With this blog, it is authentic. Football has never felt that way. I am ready to bid it adieu. Are you, America? (How melodramatic!)