Wake Me When It's Over

Oh yay, it's almost Superbowl time again. Yawn.

For the record, I think football is stupid. Apparently that makes me un American and deeply flawed, but I don't even care.

I dislike most everything about it, especially the incessant "analysis" by armchair quarterbacks and the way people get so caught up in the hype. It's embarrassing. And you know what? Football Jerseys don't really look good on anyone except football players. They especially look retarded draped over the beer guts of grown men who we all know couldn't run 50 yards without collapsing. If a real-life football jersey wouldn't fit you, then you shouldn't get to wear one in real life.

I could completely ignore the fact that the Bears are in the playoffs, except I'm not allowed to, because it's being talked about every eight minutes on the news, playoff tickets are going for gazillions of dollars (what recession?) and Facebook is full of stellar updates like, "Go Bears!" and "Touchdown!" Here's a newsflash: Bears fans already know what's going on, and people who don't care aren't going to start caring because someone just mistook Facebook for Twitter and posted the score. Again.

I hate the way people act when they watch a game on TV. I hate the sound of the announcers blathering on about every second of every minute, even when nothing is actually happening on the field, and I hate the way "fans" will justify taking people they supposedly care about for granted when a "big game" is on television.

Fandom in general was fine in its day, but like everything good, it's gotten way out of hand, and its importance seems out of proportion to what's really going on in the world. Professional sports these days feeds into a dysfunctional, misogynistic industry, with football and its chest-thumping hysteria being among the worst. Any athletic grace or nuances of strategy that exist on game day are overshadowed by my dislike for it and everything it represents -- from the commercialization and greed to the beer-soaked sensationalizing of what being "masculine" is. And the fact that people get so rabid about it all -- it's become almost unpatriotic to not jump on the bandwagon. I think the only thing that's more ridiculous than that mindset is the frothing fervor of the so-called religious right (which is neither).