Friday 1/6/23
The sports-loving meathead--who loves sports as he does because he has nothing else and cannot rise to an emotional and mental level where he would--loves when sports are equated with war. This individual has no clue, no perspective, no awareness of anything beyond, say, a five-foot radius of his body. On a thoughtful day. Ask a meathead about the Civil War accounts of Shelby Foote, and you may well get a Rex Ryan foot fetish joke in return.
The equivalency of sports with war validates something in the meathead. It also allows them to cry, but to cry in posed profile. A meathead will cry, but it must be manly tears for a "brother"--as in, a brother on the gridiron, the field of war. Never mind that the meathead isn't on a gridiron himself.
He believes he shares the same spirit, is made of the same dirt, grass, spit, and blood, and there was that time in high school when he might have snapped his ACL, but he didn't. He does not formally wear eye-black, but if he did, people would know and understand why. No explanation would be necessary.
If the world is ending and those that remain must be led and the meathead steps forward after donning his eye-black, the look will make perfect sense to everyone. Here is a chance. Follow this warrior. Say he looks like a raccoon at your own peril and folly. He doesn't need to save you. He's just going to, because he's that kind of guy, and someone has to.
The meathead will also enjoy when poems he has never heard of--because he has heard of no poems--are cited to make points about sports by one of his fellow meatheads, an ex-player turned would-be pundit who did a Google search, which puts him at the level of a space-traveler who has been to many worlds compared to his brothers. He is the blower of minds, this worker of the search engine. It's as though he's the only living soul who is aware that such a thing exists. He is the wizard.
The meathead is above all selfish, and will treat the poem like it were written for him, as he feels "deeply" about a fallen player. These feelings leach out of the meathead, but only between his most important sinews. Those that glisten more than the others. Walking past a car, the meathead will look at his own reflection in the window. Yes, his jaw line looks well-defined today. And how the emotion registers on his face, even with the glare. Sometimes the sun is not as powerful as it thinks, the meathead will himself think, unsure if he's come up with one of the smartest thoughts anyone has ever had. But maybe.
The meathead will say the words "trauma" and "too soon," though the first opportunity the meathead gets, he will be sitting on his couch, sliding bratwursts down his throat and binge-drinking, ironically moving himself forward to cardiac events of his own, glad that men are destroying their brains for his entertainment, because what else is there?
This meathead and his fellow meatheads talk in the terms of war and tragedy, but really they are akin to a group of rich, suburban housewives who love drama and break completely when fronted with any real adversity. They are adults who have never stopped playing dress-up, and never will.
Lathered in his pretend concern and heroic, manly emotions that go back to the dawn of humankind and makes the meathead think of how he could have successfully wielded a spear and took down one of those big elephant things with the sharp teeth, the same as he would have successfully wielded a bayonet and dodged the gas as he dove into another trench, the meathead may cry, but as he does so, there is a power ballad from a metal band playing in his head--but not too loud, because it's his moment--and he is jutting his chin forward as if being sculpted from the side.
If you could translate the meathead's emotions into words at this juncture, they would be "Do me in bronze, baby, do me in bronze."
Thus the meathead and his brethren are weak little drama queens capable of distorting a case of bad luck and the realities of things that just happen in human life into the stuff of a gossip-y gabfest where they get to play wise, compassionate souls, but really they are modeling a bathos befitting the people they normally seek to mock with their alleged soft, "womanly" qualities that meatheads attribute to their preferred targets in the cowardly manner of the gang.
The meathead likes to say things like, "Take the skirt off, Sally," when speaking to another meathead, and "mangina" can be a fun word, but the meathead often has a veritable annex of such skirts--in the skirt-deriding fashion--adjoining his man cave. The meathead typically uses the word "girl" as a pejorative, but he's quite the big, emotionally gassy girl himself, all for show, and without an inkling of sincerity.
Do me in bronze, baby, do me in bronze.
