We Think About Things
In a manner of speaking, anyway. We like hearing about troubling things, acknowledging them in our own ways (“Jackass” or “Ah, damn,” usually) and moving on as soon as the tribute spot on the television allows us.
If you had the remote in your hands, you would want to bypass that, but – oh, dear! Sorry – the sponsors paid for guaranteed placement during the primetime slot, which means you have to sit through it. What was that person’s name again, and what happened to them?
You either sit through it and start to care about something – the specific crackle of bacon in a Wendy’s breakfast sandwich, Oregon football, undiagnosed psoriasis, the orientation of your couch with regard to where your dog likes to sleep in the middle of the afternoon – or you give it all up and retreat.
If you care, congratulations! You’re the consuming winner, the one who knows enough to prefer Jimmy Dean to Johnsonville, who likes the speedy but unfortunate Ducks, who does need to get that checked out, who looks at poor Maple after daylight saving has gone into effect and yearns.
The alternative is to retreat: Uninviting because it looks familiar. You know what’s back there. Glazed eyes gaze at a television, one you don’t remember turning on and cannot imagine ever being off. Thoughts you don’t remember having become scripture that you hold dear.
You don’t know anything else, try as you might (canceling all subscriptions to anything because fuck them, how dare they take my money; Hollywood assholes think they know everything and want to rub it in my face, but I actually do know everything because I’ve been around, see, so I know where this is all going. I’m never surprised. I’ve never been surprised. Even when I was born, everybody looked at me in astonishment, including the doctor. “And you’re a doctor?” I said. Those were my first words, and I haven’t stopped talking since).
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who did he support? My guy? YAY! I don’t need to know anything more about him or his product, whatever it is, because I bought them all up right before they went bankrupt
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Not in any manner of speaking: on Saturday, a man in Philadelphia was hospitalized in stable condition with undisclosed injuries after he was struck by the vehicle earlier in the night. That man will likely be away from his job for a while, but at the very least, he isn’t dead. That’s a W.
Earlier in the week, another man, on behalf of the institution which had so generously bothered to allow him to matriculate there, was immobilized playing a sport for show. It was the second time in around a year in which a person looked as though they had perished on-field, brought to you by the good folks at Anheuser-Busch of St. Louis, Missouri, and also by DraftKings (promo code: SPINALTAP23 for a dollar-for-dollar match up to your first $200).
This was the second time in the past twelve months someone was hurt while playing, well – a kid’s game, as so many remind themselves, but so many adults get injured playing it. Was that the joke? Got him! (That is, if he is a man; men don’t get hurt, generally speaking, unless they are Johnny Cash covering Nine Inch Nails, so if they’re not Johnny Cash covering Nine Inch Nails, then they aren’t men if they are hurt, or at least if they admit it.)
Because – as I stated earlier – I know everything and am never surprised, I have a (correct) idea as to where any of this is going. Talk to anybody, all of whom I know, and they’ll tell you about the squeeze they’re under. Their specific squeezes may differ; your accountant’s lost timeshare may be your dentist’s forgone vacation may be your daughter’s lost job, but it will never be anybody you hear about on a parasocial basis losing anything except their lives, and fuck them anyway because they don’t matter, because we don’t know them, but we, you and I, know each other, right?
Right?
Right around when Pedro Acosta had finally been crowned the Moto2 champion of the 2023 season in Malaysia, a long-awaited coronation that had already shimmied Pol Espargaró off of a KTM ride after he himself had once been a Moto2 next-up darling, I was watching a #Pac12AfterDark situation that merely faded at dusk – sorry, Caleb Williams. I thought you were the one, too.
Espargaró, literally incidentally, was involved in an accident before the initial race weekend of this season in April, in Portugal. He’s been over the hill, if ever there was one; it more seemed like he was canvassing valleys of his own enjoyment when he rode, at times, but my eyes aren’t trained to things like this. I see a man on a bike, albeit one who never looked like he wanted to be doing any more or less than what he was doing at that time. I see a man content in Pol Espargaró, or at least I did. Again: I don’t really know, it blinds me how obvious it is that I don’t really know, but let me commit summary judgment on this person and his craft anyway.
Sometimes I want to turn away from sports entirely. It’s nakedly melodramatic; I know everything is sports, and that sports are everything, and that they can only grow until they collapse unto themselves and either merge or create their own channels that then collapse and merge into each other (in this sense, I mean more “sports leagues” than the games that turn into sports, but if you aren’t making money or trying to, what good are you anyway?), which means they can’t collapse, which means we’re sending Joel Embiid to Mars to compete against the Saudi Arabian home team that somehow already exists there.
Where once there was a way out, there is now an ad. Actually, there are many, and you get to click through them for the privilege of seeing more. You very happily and angrily voted for this, seething as you hit YES on every ballot initiative you hadn’t read up on because you see something you don’t like – but don’t really remember why, but you KNOW you don’t like that, how DARE they – elsewhere, and while some of them may affect you, you don’t care about that because, again, you didn’t bother to read up on it and anyway your preferred person spent so much more money in your district so as to drown out anything other than what you want to hear. What you want to hear is that your money is going to that guy instead of that other guy, both of whom will outlive you, or won’t, and in any case will have never heard of you. But you’ll sleep happy tonight and die happy eventually because you know others aren’t. You did that. This is a team effort.
If the purpose of sports is the exhibition of the absolute limits of human physical capability, as I’m generally led to believe it is, we’ve long since lost the plot. Forced TV timeouts are a start; abolishing things that limit human capability entirely (the four horsemen of the football apocalypse: injury, illness, paralysis, death, but, yes, I carry a one-pixel sized picture of a flame in my heart for the New York Jets season, any of them) would be a better start, but we can’t allow that to happen so long as certain things stand on certain crutches that allow certain people to continue telling us that these things are important.
I thought I knew once upon a when, but my blindness is increasing, and I’m starting not to hear: what is important? What makes you think that’s important? What makes you think you’re important?
(What makes you think you aren’t? Alright, one more time: what makes you think they aren’t, to somebody who isn’t you?)
Tuesdays With Horry 