I Have Nothing To Say About The Iraq Elections
Happy Hype Week, everyone!

This is the built-in week off between the last football playoff round and America's favorite secular holiday, the Super Bowl. Baseball doesn't start until April, hockey is on strike or locked out or... well, who gives a shit really? It's hockey. The NBA is only worth watching when players are punishing the people who paid big money for courtside seats by beating them within a inch of their lives.

I'm not really sure what the purpose of Hype Week is supposed to be, but I suspect it has something to do with preparing us for Doomsday: the day after the Super Bowl, when football is gone forever and the light of televised sporting diversion goes out until the NCAA basketball tournament starts in March.

Unless you're in to fishing shows. But seeing as I have all my own teeth and have never required an alibi for murdering someone close to me, fishing holds no interest.

What I could do--what we all could stand to do--is reintroduce myself to my family now that my Saturdays and Sundays are free.

But hang on! Such drastic measures are not necessarily required. If we, the anesthetized horde of sports-watching husbands and fathers, suddenly started showing our wives and children interest and affection all it would do is cause confusion and fear. For their sakes, alternatives must be found. Outlets must exist that segregate men from the people around them, that allows us to hide in plain sight, taciturn and aloof, in the scant few months until we can start mowing the lawn twice a week again.

Here are some options to help fill the unfillable void you used to not fill up with football (but not for lack of trying):

1) Start drinking. I mean really drinking. Look, you were doing it anyway all season. If you put on a replica jersey and a foam hat shaped like a cheese you can drink 48 beers in 3 hours, you could call it "tailgating" and people will think it's charming. If you do it in the absence of the trappings of fandom, then you're just a rotten, surly drunk. Run with that. Embrace it. If people think you have a serious drinking problem, they will leave you alone. Right up until the intervention, which is a nuisance, but odds are your liver will give out before then anyway.

2) Take up a hobby. Physical abuse of your wife and/or kids does not count as a hobby, at least not without the built-in alibi of football-game-result-induced irrational anger or excessive drinking (see #1). You need something you can do in the house during the remaining cold-weather months that you cannot do with other people and appears to require absolute concentration, which has the further benefit of discouraging attempts at conversation or requests to "help around the house" which, let's be honest, is what we're all about here anyway, am I right? You can learn to paint, plant some plants in a window box, develop a bonsai tree. If you're worried some of those seem "kinda gay", you can always build models. Cars, ships, buildings, any kind of models, just so long as you can get your hands on some of that sweet, sweet model glue. Keep the windows and doors shut and after an hour or so and that knot of existential anxiety that is constantly tearing holes into the lining of your stomach... well, it will still be there, but you won't really care.

3) Pretend to have a serious, deblilitating, non-fatal disease. This is a tough one as it requires research. You can't afford to get your facts wrong once you commit to this one. Also, fatality is out because there's a pretty hard end-limit you're going to run up against unless you're planning on killing yourself anyway. Your best bet: narcolepsy. Drop off to sleep whenever you feel like it and blame it on your malfunctioning brain. After a while, they'll just step over you where you fall in the hallway. Some people prefer epilepsy, but I think that's kind of showy not to mention way too much work. Plus, sooner or later your wife will suggest you get that surgery where they remove half your brain if you go to the seizure well too many times. It's important to pace yourself.

Well, that should be enough to get you started. Of course none of this applies if you're an evangelical Christian and you have all this biblical back-up to make your wife and children be humble and submissive to your will or risk the eternal fire of damnation. Man, those bastards have a sweet set-up.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 6.3


Pops

- posted by Pops @ 9:24 PM