A cold war is being waged in this rural Pennsylvania town between the agents of two trumped-up organizations: the Steelers and the Ravens. From Pittsburgh and Baltimore respectively, the televised efforts of these two professional sports teams have so ensnared the imaginations – and, more importantly, the purse-strings – of the hard-working, blue-collar, middle-class denizens of this sad little place as to have hijacked the identities of people who spend what little free time they get eating potato chips, drinking cheap beer, and staring at self-illuminated boxes.
I imagine that the inner monologue of a fan of one of the many over-hyped national football league (NFL) teams goes something like this: “Do I donate to charity and help feed over three million starving American children or do I spend a hundred and fifty dollars on a ten-foot-high flag bearing the logo of my team? Do I perpetuate obesity and sloth within my family by stuffing cheese-doodles into my mouth as I sit on my financed couch with my eyes glued to an enormous television it will take me the next fifteen months to pay off? Do I send my check to an organization fighting poverty in this country's rust-belt or to a cluster of distant Chinamen cranking out solar-powered pathway lights emblazoned with an image of a highly stylized scavenger-bird designed by a wealthy corporation? You know what… fuck the poor, and fuck the kids – I need this overpriced bullshit so I can put it out in my yard and show my neighbor that I favor a different squad of men-in-tights than he does.”
I waste neither time nor money watching professional sports, preferring instead to read books on different and unrelated subjects, preferring instead to expand my mind by teaching myself languages and learning about organic gardening; I memorize neither statistics nor the success-rate of special trick plays, preferring instead to stay silent during useless NFL-related conversations, preferring instead to plumb the depths of my dark and twisted ego in order to bend it to my will, driving addiction and need from my life; I choose not to look on as angry fat dudes run into each other, preferring the freedom of a vigorous bicycle ride over sedentary slavery to a season of two minute warnings. I admit to puffing myself up here, to hoisting myself aloft in an attempt to differentiate myself from pig-skin-loving simpletons; as a Son of the American Revolution, however, and as a self-respecting and productive artist, I cannot afford to waste any more of my precious life on foolhardy pursuits than I have already wasted trying and failing to satisfy the root of mankind's evil, the ego. This, in my humble opinion, is part of the attraction of professional sports: they very often serve as proxy identities for persons too lazy or weak-of-will to do something unique with their lives worth talking about; they give pack-runners whose existence revolves around the act of consumption a topic to discuss that does not have to do with kids, jobs, or failing health. It is wrong of me to judge and to ridicule people for paying top dollar for jerseys or pennants or banners proclaiming that, “This Is Giants Country,” or something similarly absurd; the words I have written here are just as much driven by a darkly thrusting ego as are the shouted cries of thirty thousand star-struck fans. I am a worthless cunt for spending time crafting this article, but these thoughts well up inside me when I am shredding through town on my velocipede, and I know not where else to turn for release. On some level, I don't give a flying fuck (IDGAFF) what other people do, although I wish sometimes they wouldn't be so fucking flagrantly lame. Oh brother.
© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)
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