::Illusion

The fire is crackling high and we all huddle close, close enough to ignore the chill pouring through the holes in the windows.  This place is still a wreck and I won’t have it chinked up the way it ought to be before winter.  But there are always things to burn; plenty of things to toss on the fire and revel in the glow and the warmth and the comfort, and then to forget about after.  Old poetry and bad dreams and stifled complaints.  Let it burn, let it warm our cider and our toes while the fallen leaves dance the tango against the walls, telling us to turn up our collars and find our gloves.

My eyes are raw, maybe from the woodsmoke or the Hell Month it’s been at the office.  The inundation of the fall-semester idjits was, as usual, like shoveling with a spork.  It’s finally down to a dull roar, and I’m getting my bearings, still wobbly inside, as if my guts had been run over by a spectral truck, leaving the rest of me disturbingly whole – just feeling wobbly and raw and lazy.

And a little delusional, maybe, since I looked back over September and called myself a good poster – plenty of entries for you to gnaw on.  But I got called out, with a Goddamn, even.  And I looked back a fourth or fifth time and muttered, "Oy vey –  I really only wrote two entries about ME in September.  Rest of ’em were about some other guy that nobody cared enough to read about.  Well, fuck that guy, I guess."

So, yeah, it’s been a hard month – which you know if you’ve been reading – and I haven’t written as much as I intended when I came back and I’m sorry.  If you tell me how, I’ll make it up to you.  Plant a seed right here in this pot on top of the bar, and I’ll water it and sprinkle some fairy dust, and in a few days you’ll get a story tree.  We’ll eat the fruit together and see if it makes us high.  At any rate it ought to do something for this worn-down feeling and the sleepy eyes squinting into the fall wind, wishing for a hot beach and a cool spyglass.

I’m hesitantly joyous; it was a good weekend.  K is… well, she’s trying.  And I have to give her credit for that.  Maybe we will be okay.  My son is fantastic and growing more interesting by the day.  I saw my friends and rolled some dice and made up some lies about the post-apocalyptic wasteland, and that was fun.  And I got the good fortune to attend the best damn NFL game of the year.  

I think most of you here in my little cubbyhole are women, and I dunno how many of you care about sports in general, or the NFL in particular, or my team in specific.  But football is the first thing I remember doing with my long-lost daddy.  My earliest hobby, I guess.  I was a wee little thing, back in the halcyon days of Saturday morning cartoons and elementary school field trips.  And Dad and I sat down every Sunday and watched football.  Between Dad and John Madden, I learned all there was to know about third down conversions and lines of scrimmage and all the funky rules of the game.  And so we watched the wars and cheered.   In the years since, I’ve moved south and slowly became a fan of my new home team.  I’ve raged over losses and exulted over a Super Bowl victory.  And now my team is back at the bottom of the barrel.

Literally three decades since then, and Dad has moved on to the great wherever.  I still love football.  It’s war, it’s strategy, it’s passion, it’s art.  It’s blood and thunder.   And on Sunday we bled, we cried, we failed, we were crushed.  And then we stood up and fought back.  And WON, after a truly epic struggle.  My bottom of the barrel team came back from a beating, came back on a team that they should’ve had no chance against.  Like Rocky, like Maximus, like nothing I’ve ever seen.  I was in the crowd, you see.  Watched the metamorphosis and lent my voice and my sweat and spirit to the 60,000 others and the 11 on the field.  My throat is still swollen, thirty-six hours later, and my blood still quickens at the thought of the triumph. 

I have a male friend who hates sports of all kinds, and doesn’t understand my passion, my fandom, or why I’d bother spending all the money to attend.  I’m not even sure how to explain it to him.  It’s like there’s some chromosome he’s lacking.  Sport is pride and aggression, hero worship, art appreciation, and a dozen other things.  It’s honor and glory and identification with a group; it’s agony and ecstasy; strategy, tactics, and fodder for watercooler conversation.  It’s echoes of my father and the man he’s made me.  And something I hope to pass on to my son, when he’s old enough to learn about first downs and field goals.  A child’s game that somehow transcends all of us. 

What do you love, that not everyone understands?  

Anyhow, I’m eroded from work and play, and it’s not all a bad thing.  The leaves are falling and the winds are turning mean, and I could do with a tropical vacation.  But I’m not heartsick and dying inside; it’s more like that bone-weary you get after you spend all day moving furniture; you’re in the new place with a passel of boxes and the smell of fresh paint, sucking on a Coke like it’s the last drink on Earth and convinced you’ll never walk again – but it’s a GOOD thing.  I’ve had novelty and phoenix-from-ashes catharsis this weekend.  And even if it was football instead of sex or the cure for cancer, it still is love and rockets.  Good enough for me.