Sunday, September 9, 2012

The Worst We Have to Offer


Football is back, and once again I spend my weekends staring at a TV screen, watching people I only vaguely care about deliver head and neck injuries to their colleagues in the interest of advancing an oblong spheroid across an imaginary plane. This probably says something quite damning about my morals and character, but this is the culture in which I was raised and I shall likely continue to do so as long as I live in the Land of the Free.

I enjoy this all for some perverse reason, but it always makes me feel slightly gross at the same time. Nothing, though, makes me feel grosser than those uncomfortable times before and between actual football games. The networks that profit from this whole professional football thing place a handful of former gridiron tradesmen together at a table, place one slick TV 'personality' to their left, and leave them to talk about weekly goings on for hours at a time. I attempt to watch these displays in the interest of becoming better 'informed' about something that my brain already wastes entirely too much energy on, but they always make me feel bad about myself, my country, and my species. A sticky, gritty feeling starts brewing in my stomach, as if I had just taken one rather large lick of the floor of a New York City subway car.