Monday 10/4/21
All of that nonsense and hype about a football game. A celebration of monomania. You know what I've learned? For most people, the infrastructure of their lives is a kind of manic fixation on repetition of the same very simple things. They don't branch out. They have no problem with the same things repeated to them again, again, again, again. But take something like publishing, where this is also prevalent. That same person who fixates on the same thing, the same hype, the same nonsense--it's like seeing the same annoying commercial 1400 times a week, but not being bothered by it, or not so bothered that one won't watch--will receive different brilliant works from the like of me, and that empty, soulless hypocrite, will tell themselves that I'm a pain in the ass and they will never deal with me again. When all they do is fixate on an endless parade of the same shit repeated in the same shitty ways.
That's often the official reason they manufacture in their minds, such as they are. Because the official language can't be, "I'm so fucking jealous of this guy, who is so fucking beyond me in every way." But get two different great stories? Three? Four? Hate. But the same shit, again, again, again, that's no problem.
Sort of similar to the nonsense over the football game. And what did you get? A boring 19-17 game in the rain between one bad team, one not very good team, and then an avalanche of tweets from sports experts--such intellectual masters--with their gifs, their lols, their brilliantly inventive language of "just sayin,'" and sports cliches stolen from juvenile middle aged bros on horrible podcasts about how the Patriots are racist and Cam "would of" won. Men in their fifties with guts that make it look like they have a person wrapped around them (ever see those scallops with bacon wrapped around them?; a lot of people make me think of those scallops), and their broken English and their Edelman jerseys.
It's like, you're fucking fifty-four, dude.
I think if my dad had been like that, how I'd have felt. I'd be like, "What the motherfuck is wrong with you, man? What are we fucking doing here?"
I would have intervened.
Maybe, I don't know, go to bed, get up early, listen to a Miles Davis record--try Miles Smiles--and run stairs, do a little reading, maybe a couple journal entries from Thoreau. Ponder the world and your next moves in it in the pre-dawn. Explode--with thought, care, purpose--into another day.
No one is going to fucking do that, are they, though? And it's exactly the same, for that middle aged, moronic heart attack-waiting-to-happen person, and the ice princess who came from the money and went to the prep school and Yale. Just different things they lock in on, and the sports fan at least gleans some pleasure from what they care about, whereas the ice princess pretends, so that she can feel superior to King Bratwurst and his ilk, and everyone else, because she knows, of course, that she's better than no one, but the illusions have to be maintained because otherwise the self-hate and self-doubt makes getting up each day impossible.
You know what else I've learned? I write about football, talk about it, do stories about it, but there isn't anyone who knows fuck all about football. It's a sport that attracts the stupid. You can find people who speak and write intelligently about hockey and baseball. There isn't anyone who does so with football. I'm listening to Matt Cassel last night, laughing at the not-very-subtle dye job he's performed with his hair, thinking this guy knows nothing. Nor can he go two sentences without saying "at the end of the day." Now, are you so dumb you don't know you're doing that? Are you so helpless you can't stop doing it? And does the producer of the show have their head so far up their anus that they can't fucking notice this is happening? Can't be like, "um, hey, man, really need to do less of the 'at the end of the day.'"
Look at these half-wits. Shannon Sharpe. Drew Brees. Skip Bayless. These are dumb fucking people. Notice, too, that there aren't passionate football historians who write nonfiction books about the sport and its history? You get that a lot with baseball. If you go on a hockey history discussion forum, you'll see people who are well read who know their stuff. About hockey. They are laughably inept with other sports. It's like a minor miracle, though, when someone knows one thing, so I'll take it.
But you will never see intelligence when it comes to football. Can you be stupider than Mike Florio? But you read William Sloane's To Walk the Night, and he has the two guys going to a game at their old school. Sloane was a Princeton professor. And he fucking knew football. He gets every detail right. I'm not a flag-waving, jingoistic person. I'm a morals and values and truth and beauty person. A human person, for humans. I don't care about signage. But when I see football culture on TV, I'm embarrassed for the country. That someone in another country would see that. You just see these fucking boobs.
Also, the whole Brady and Belichick thing--everyone has that wrong. It's not like you and your "frenemy" or your falling out with your crazy girlfriend or your toxic roommate or the spouse you blamed for not letting you be you, when the reality is that was a you thing, because there just wasn't much there and it's always easier to be a fucking victim than to take accountability and try to make something better, fuller. Things end. People are human and they say shit, and if they know each other well enough, each knows what the other one doesn't mean. And what they think and feel. There was never some giant rift. It's two guys who get each other, who are close. Close can mean a lot of things. It doesn't have to mean bosom buddies, or guys who will phone each other for long conversations later in life, when they're both done with a kind of phase they shared.
There was never any fucking drama here. The media just wants people to think things for clicks. It's shallow and soulless and it's dying. The media isn't about truth. No one respects the media. Ironically, people will follow along with the media narratives, though. Because people will follow anything simple and shallow and stupid if enough other people are. What are they going to do? Go out and find their own interesting things to care about? Why do you people act like they care about politics that much? They don't actually fucking care. It's just what's in front of them. It could be a fucking bottle of Windex if enough of them were talking about it and it was in the news cycle. People would rather waste their fucking lives, rot their brains, becoming stupider by the day, than get off their ass and look for something interesting. They won't look. They're not even going to pull up a new search field and type something in. There has never been, in the history of anything, anything lazier than a human in 2021. That's as true a rule as there is to life. No one is going to look for anything. It has to come to them. Be put in front of them. So the media will just lie. The media will lie without knowing it's lying because the media isn't fucking smart enough to tell down from up. The media is only looking at the analytics for their clicks. And the media isn't even fucking good at that. Religion is the opiate of the masses? Not now. It's the media and social media. Hell, social media has replaced friendship, love, connection, self-awareness, mental health, honesty, self-sufficiency, sanity, truth.
Look at what I said in these pages on Friday, with the unsold op-ed. That was the fucking truth. There was exactly one person in this country who said the truth about what was happening. There you go. Right there. I challenge anyone to find anything remotely similar. But what you get instead are perpetual adolescents--which isn't fair to adolescents, because they're often smarter--saying the same shit, in the same language, a billion times over. Why the fuck would anyone want any of it? There's nothing fucking there, and then it's all just fucking repeated until your fucking eyes all but explode out of your skull.
Like, cool? This is good? This is what we want? More of this, please?
