sports

I wonder what you did when you were a kid. Kids are always playing some kind of game or sport. I wonder if you just didn’t hang out with the pack that much. That would account with your love of authority, but then you also insist that authority must be doing the right thing, and when it doesn’t you go against it. That would account for how at the paper plant you were both a rad and a suck, or maybe it was that you were neither, and I think the words were different. Like you wanted to join the army and you wanted to be a company man, but then when you discovered that the army and the company were full of fuckups you lost interest in them, and mostly you want to go your own way.

Or maybe I am wrong. Just a cheap analysis from a guy who took a bunch of psychology courses in college, even though most of them were about rats.

I think the word hysteria is a little too extreme. I’m going to substitute the word passion. Although passion seems a little too positive the way it is currently being used. People like to brag that they have passion, people think if you follow your passion you can’t go wrong. But a lot of people with a lot of passion are big assholes and if you follow your passion you most likely will go wrong.

Well it’s in our genes, if we are going to take that forest from the other tribe, we will do better if we get fired up, especially if we are so fired up that we don’t worry about taking a spear ourselves. I think that’s where it comes from. I think that love of country is not far from love of your local sports team.

They both have their upsides and downsides. The love of country makes some sense because if the country does well, most of the people in it do well, but it also makes people do stupid and cruel things because they are too besotted by the sound of fife and drums to listen to the voice of reason. Sports is basically stupid, it is a lot of time and effort wasted, but on the other hand mostly nobody gets hurt.

I am not much of a sports fan, but I am a Cub fan. When I watch the game I get caught up in it, I am fired up, even though deep down I know it doesn’t mean shit. The six year old Cub fan in me is jumping up and down. It is fun to be fired up. The good thing is if the Cubs win, I let the six year old rule. If the Cubs lose, older wiser Ken takes over and says it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. So if the Cubs win it is a big deal and if they lose it isn’t, so it’s a profitable situation.

But there are a lot of excesses in sports, and the whole myth that it builds character is laughable, and that whole thing about casting a moral shadow on a win or a loss is reprehensible, and all the attention spent on something like the superbowl or the academy awards, while we are at it, takes up a lot of space in the newspaper when I would rather be reading about something else.

So I don’t think you are missing anything by not being a sports fan.