I could never understand the appeal. And I really don’t know how anyone can possibly sit through three hours (sometimes longer) of such a brainless display. One that, in turn, makes you brain-dead from just a few minutes of “absorbing” it. Not that I ever can; it seems that whatever I’m “perceiving” on the screen goes “in one eye and out the other,” so to speak. I am so unamused and unentertained that all I want is to run screaming for the hills where I might find a library to sit and read in. But not those around me. Those who, for whatever reason, I’ve allowed into my life. Because, in truth, maybe it says more about me that I’ve attracted the sort of ilk that watches football than it does about them. Granted, there’s really not much of a “selection” in this town, people-wise. Or anything-wise, actually. So naturally, football is “a thing” here. As it is in most all-American towns. All-American being, in the end, a euphemism for all-dumb. For it’s no secret that this is a country that’s always prided itself on “ingenuity,” not intelligence. Though some might be convinced that one can’t exist without the other. Americans have proven that’s simply not true. 

Walter Camp, the “Father of American Football,” displayed as much when he made some “slight” adjustments to rugby in order to create America’s odious favorite “pastime” (which extends more to watching it than playing it)—sorry baseball, it ain’t you. Some like to say that long before modern football, even the Greeks and the Romans were playing some variation of it (harpastum, to be exact), so surely it must have some intellectual value. Ha! If you think a civilization shoving shit up each other’s holes was intellectual (and Caligula certainly did), then sure. Place a high value on that little factoid. I’m not going to. I could never understand all this reverence for the barbarism of the Greeks and the Romans. And besides, their “civilizations” ended. Not much of an example then, are they? By the same token, I know it’s just a matter of time before our own so-called civilization reaches its (un)natural conclusion as well. As a matter of fact, one could argue that we ended during the decade of “open season” on any “overly political” public figure: the 1960s. Maybe some would even say the Industrial Revolution was the beginning of the end. For all things that are assumed to be “progress” are, in truth, symptomatic of a regression. The same goes for the “invention” (or rather, accident) of football. 

Perhaps only Nicholas de Farndone, a mayor of London in the 1300s, said it best when he declared, “…[f]orasmuch as there is great noise in the city caused by hustling over large foot balls in the fields of the public from which many evils might arise which God forbid: we command and forbid on behalf of the king, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city in the future.” Unfortunately, such a decree didn’t stick…internationally anyway (for it’s true that you don’t see Brits playing football—unless, by football, what you mean is soccer). And whatever primordial form of “foot ball” he was talking about, it made its way to the U.S. eventually. In fact, it’s only fitting that football is, at its core, just a bastardization of rugby, for everything “American” is ultimately some bizarro world version of British culture and tradition.

I don’t bother trying to say this aloud to any of the psychos screaming vehemently around me, all of whom genuinely believe that their “good vibes” and “positive energy” are going to determine the outcome of the game rather than, oh say, sheer dumb luck. There’s that word again: dumb. The premier descriptor/synopsis for anything surrounding a discussion about football. Except that when people try to “discuss” any such topic with me, I mostly tend to glaze over and shut down. Again, I don’t know how I’ve found myself in the orbit of so many “friends” who deign to watch football. It’s just, like I said, a matter of the available clientele in this town. Nay, in this country. 

You would think that, by now, the fervor for football that reaches a crescendo in January and February would have motivated me to leave the country. Given me the final push I needed to flee from a place so steeped in its own stupidity. Rolling around in it like a pig in shit. Or, in this instance, an “ol’ pigskin” in shit. And, by the way, “ancient” footballs weren’t just made of a pig’s skin, but, more precisely, a pig’s bladder. In truth, there’s something more morbidly fascinating about the idea of watching a group of grown men kick around an inflated bladder and calling it a sport than there is to watching “modern” football. At least there was more honesty in the stupidity and barbaricness of it all with that bladder. Now, football is all about Being Serious. And being taken seriously. Something every player wants to make sure that people do so they can rest assured that their multi-million dollar salaries aren’t called into question.

Well, I’m not calling it “into question.” I’m merely calling bullshit on it. Anyone with even a quarter of a brain ought to know that what football players are really being paid for is their willingness to dispense with most of their brain cells. In other words, their willingness to surrender to the inevitable effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. But what about my chronic traumatic encephalopathy as a result of being subjected to this kind of banal, mind-dulling content (and don’t try to tell me that I should be feeling the same sense of “adrenaline pumping through my veins” as one of the players because of how invested I’m supposed to be in the outcome)? I might as well be getting my head bashed in—the results would feel the same. 

Of course, I can’t say any of this out loud to my “friends,” or else I might risk being “shunned.” And then I think: would that really be so bad? To at last tell them all how dumb I think they are? My fear of having no friends is starting to wear down anyway after so many wasted hours spent watching football with them. They say too much time alone can turn you dumb in its own way, but I’m starting to think the opposite might be true.