The Super Bowl

The big day’s less than two weeks away, so I figured, why not write another unsolicited sack of my stupid opinions?

I normally don’t watch sports because they are often mindless displays of violence and bad sportsmanship. Overpaid steroid-popping genetic freaks get paid more for a single season than I will in an entire lifetime. And of course they strike whenever they feel that this system is somehow unfair to them, because as we all know, janitors and emergency medical personnel have it so much better.

The Super Bowl is the only sporting event I watch. (Well, I do watch women’s gymnastics during the Olympics, but that’s not a sport – it’s soft porn.) I enjoy the Super Bowl not so much for the game as for the parties. Once the new year rolls around, nothing much in the way of social events happens until Easter except for the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras, so what better way to beat the winter doldrums than to wear team apparel, eat junk food and cheer for uniforms! That’s right, uniforms. Not the players. For example, if your favorite player gets traded to another team, do you then cheer for that other team?

I feel sorry for football fans who have to miss the big game for frustrating reasons, such as that their wives have the audacity to give birth that weekend. Guys, if you want to avoid this, then never have sex in late April or early May. At least not with your wife.

I hate the interviews they do at the end of the Super Bowl, or any football game for that matter, because the winners sometimes give Jesus the credit, while the losers blame themselves. Just once I’d like to see a player on the losing team say, “Yeah, we almost won this game - until Jesus made me fumble.” Of course, they’ll never say that because they don’t want to piss off any fundamentalists. They also don’t talk about their nine illegitimate children or the eight-ball they snorted the night before or their wife’s black eye.

Whenever I see rabid sports fans at the game dressed in nothing but paint and yelling at the camera, it warms my heart to see such energy and enthusiasm go into something with such cosmic importance. All over the world people are dying from disease and starvation, and getting beaten, raped and murdered. The air, land and water are being polluted with toxic chemicals. But sports fans have the presence of mind to reserve their righteous indignation for the ref who made a bad call.

I think the Super Bowl is a better occasion for partying than New Year’s Eve. Why? Because it’s over by 11:00. At my age I don’t have the energy to stay up until the wee hours pretending to be enjoying myself when all I want to do is get home to my own warm bed. I generally stay awake during Super Bowl parties until at least the third quarter.

It was only a few years ago that people started inviting me to their festivities again. You see, for a while nobody forgave my infamous “farting the alphabet” incident, so there was a run of about five years when partying during the Super Bowl meant putting a sweatshirt on my dog and tying him to a chair.

So have fun watching the game or the two-and-a-half-million-dollar commercials or whatever floats your boat. If your team wins the game, then buy a team jacket so you can jump on the bandwagon and consider yourself a winner by association. Don’t forget to flush your toilet at halftime in order to wreak havoc on your local utility company.

And call me Monday to let me know who won.