So, this weekend, Saturday to be specific, I’m gonna be hosting the depravity down at the L and L tavern on Clark and Belmont. I’ll be trying to get your speed addled bodies back to a reasonable ground zero by putting beer after shot after beer in front of you (spoiler alert: You’re still gonna end up shitting your pants). Don’t be a pudwacker. Come down and celebrate the day before my mom’s (and Axl Rose’s) birthday in style.

You know what else is this weekend? The super bowl. That’s right, people. I’m sure it’s slipped everyone’s mind, since it’s kind of a low key event for understated sophisticates and everything, but I remembered. I actually mark it on my calendar so I can get out there and get my shit together before our nation’s stores of cheese poofs and guacamole are depleted. This sudden spike in junk food sales must make it a weird time to work in the frozen, oven bake jalapeno popper factory. Just a thought.

Well, I for one absolutely hate football. I find it to be boring and slow paced and hosted by smug mongoloids in bad suits and aimed at the kinds of people who drink pepsi right out of the two liter (and don’t get me started on that fucking dance-stepping robot/truck thing on Fox). The whole thing is loud and obnoxious and it sucks and it’s been bumming me out ever since I started forming opinions on things.

I know, I know. This makes me sound like some kind of lame, effete, elitist shitsack, and you know what? Fine. I’m a lame effete, elitist shitsack then, because as far as I can tell, the ONLY thing about football that’s even remotely cool is that it’s an excuse to get hammered and eat garbage on Sunday morning/Monday night, and that’s respectable for sure. But couldn’t we have come up with something that wasn’t so fucking dull? No? No one? I’m the ONLY person on earth that doesn’t give a fuck about football?

Fine. But hear me out.

When I was a kid, all I ever wanted to do was watch Diff’rent Strokes and Silver Spoons. These were the programs that got me through my week. They were like my Dinosaur Train, (if I can extrapolate what’s going on in my living room right now back a couple of decades), and I loved them. They came on Sunday nights, after football. This would inevitably lead to my shows being pre-empted for the final 3 minutes of some dumb game that for some ungodly reason would drag on for forty five minutes and ultimately lead me to miss Arnold and Willis all together and join Ricky and Alphonso already in progress, which, to put it mildly, was bullshit of the highest order.

This began my hatred of football, but it in no way stopped there. In gradeschool I was kind of a faggy nerd and I used to use recess as an opportunity to practice drawing comics and reading. Every once in a great while, for some dumb reason, everyone that was playing football would corral me into playing and of course it sucked because I was (here comes what‘s known in stand up as a ‘callback,’ folks) an effete pansy and had no idea what the fuck was going on. SO, after abandoning my markers and my sketches of Garfield, I’d go out onto some field with a bunch of kids that didn’t like me (for the express purposes of evening out their teams, that I couldn’t give less of a fuck about) in order for them to humiliate me and call me a homo because I didn’t know shit about their dumb game that I DIDN’T EVEN WANT TO PLAY IN THE FIRST PLACE.

So the hating of football continued.

When I turned ten my friend Nick turned me onto the Dead Milkmen and I started skateboarding and suddenly, I was no longer a pariah. I became uh…I guess whatever the ten year old version of ‘edgy’ is. I was, as a result, fully able to dismiss the gradeschool hegemony, including Aerosmith, Nikes and of course, football. Suddenly, rejecting football was making me kind of interesting. This lasted pretty much the entirety of my youth, through highschool and college and well into my adulthood.

But then shit changed. I was never much of a jock, but lots of my friends had super athletic backgrounds. I mean, I played team sports, but I either sucked at them or didn’t give a fuck about them or most likely both (an exception to this is hockey, which I played for 12 years until someone held me down and shaved my head with sheepshears, when I was 16 [a story worth its own entry] finally forever severing the last of my interest in sports) and at some point they all decided to start following sports again. Fine. I got no problem with that. I’m a pretty decent fair weather fan (which is fine, you drooling loons. If everyone painted their fucking stomachs, you wouldn’t even be a blip, duuuuude. It’s only in relation to the casual fan that the weirdos can forge their identities based solely on liking something that they don’t do, so relax).

I like baseball and I remember the glory days of bulls basketball (when I was buck naked on Lincoln Avenue and a truck of riot cops pulled up and rather than arrest me, they just said “hey, get your beer off the street” and drove off. Awesome), but one place that I could never follow everyone to was fucking football, the most popular and lame of all sports.

So suddenly, here I am, 34, surrounded by fantasy football, superbowl parties, a bunch of dildos in stupid uniforms, some dumb weekly trek to sit in some loud room while a bunch of assholes scream in unison and scare the shit out of my kids and all for what? So I can have a fucking beer and some nachos? Fuck that. I don’t care. The emperor wears no clothes. Football is still stupid and it’s still the pastime of mongoloids. And fine, I’m a lame, effete spoil sport, the worst kind of elitist. I can handle that. I’ve been that my whole life. Fuck you people and your dumb game.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some Garfield sketches to finish up.