Red Letter Year
Perfect city Sunday. Slept in late and walked up to AdMo to read at Tryst and sample Brody's chili at the chili cook-off at Grand Central - it turns out the three judges were Media Matters people (all of them from Texas. we call them the Texas mafia. they are staging a totally unsubtle take-over, it's alarming). Brody was disgruntled that I couldn't have shown up sooner and rigged put in a good word for him, but his team got first runner-up anyway and their chili was spectacular (team name: Wok of Shame, and now you know everything you need to know about Brody).
I've been trying to explain to my boss why I'm a football fan, why football is totally worth obsessing over, what it means to love football, and I fear I've failed to convey the passion, but today the city answered the question for me, as it sometimes does when the karma's good and the weather's right. I stopped and Dunkin Donuts on my way uptown and the same guy was there who's there every day, high out of his mind as usual. He and a co-worker were rigging up a tiny TV, twisting cables, cutting wires, standing on their left legs whilst doing jumping jacks and facing the rising sun etc. Every now and then they would find the right spot and the familiar sounds of a football announcer would come blaring through and they looked utterly triumphant. When they finally found decent reception the screen was in black and white and fuzzy, but the sound was clear and the picture was - well, it had a picture. Everyone who wandered in stopped for at least a few minutes to watch the game, and a couple of people pulled up chairs. And sitting there, in a city that is in many ways a microcosm of my country's worst problems, of the barely suppressed racial tensions and the growing chasm between the haves and the have-nots, of the undue influence of those with money and the increasing anger and powerlessness of those without, everyone in that place was friends. It didn't matter that the men were black and poor and getting paid less than I did to work harder, didn't matter that I was 23 and they were between 40 and 50, didn't matter that the women and men who stopped to watch and chat with us were hispanic, or white soccer moms, or black professionals - no one could have cared less.
Sunday football is the great equalizer. A bigger or better TV doesn't give you any more influence on the outcome of that game than an ancient fuzzy set in a basement Dunkin Donuts. The draft keeps everything on an even keel; every season is surprising. I got to watch the Pats dominate for years, and now the Bills are 4-0, and I don't care; we'll be back on top. All football fans are created equal. Money won't help your team win or lose. But money will buy you a few hours of a candidate's time, allow you to talk policy and bend their ear in a way that broke kid in Dunkin Donuts will never have the privilege of doing. And yeah, in the end, everybody gets one vote, and there's something to be said for that, but the inevitable disappointment goes one of two ways. Maybe your candidate loses and you're devastated, thinking all that work had no impact, and now the country's going to go to shit. And maybe your candidate WINS, and the economy still goes down the tubes, and you still lose your job and end up on welfare, and you know your vote counted, but it didn't matter. Football will never let you down that way. Football is a break, not an investment in your future, and every Sunday it's a break you share with half the country.
I was reading one of the magazines I like and I'm wondering how you get an article published that way. Do you need to know someone? I'm going to look into it. I have a few ideas shooting around I want to try.