"The stadium stays. The game proceeds. Autumnal mists set in."

Fred Exley, "A Fan's Notes"

There is the slightest suggestion in the air of the fall. It is not cold, but it is also no longer hot. The air is cool, and when the wind blows, it is like an old lady coughing to politely signal she'd like to be wheeled out of the dining room. Yes, I see it, from my antechamber - the leaves taking on a barely perceptible yellow tinge. I strum my lute. I am disconsolate, for I despise change.

I belong naturally to either summer or winter, hot or cold, a dichotomy; I suffer on the fringes, where one bleeds into the next. But there is one fixed stratum, like a ring in a tree, which I always trace throughout the fall: football season.

It's a war game, and it's the most profitable professional sports league in America, and that is not a coincidence. Seven passing touchdowns for Eli Manning's brother, a jackhammering of the reigning Super Bowl champions, a drubbing of operatic proportion to kick off football season. It is a divine thing to see punishment so clearly defined and delineated, and to see even stupidity take on a cosmic force. In football, even the most jawdropping, shit-eating acts of stupidity take on a balletic grace.

Ah, but of course, that's only the battle on the field. What's inside is never so stark; it's always a slow, sad decay, far from any post-game klieg lights. But we don't see that. It's never the effects, always the spectacle. And it may be all well and good to watch and cheer the Battle of Lambeau, when the stakes are relatively modest, but here we go again on another round of "shock and awe," where our grifting politicians jockey to scare and cajole Americans into another all-too-real war.

I wait. I check the games that are on this week. And I do not change the channel to CNN. Just for a few weeks. Just give me a few months of this.

General Gandhi

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