It's Here! It's Here!

The following is "O.T.," you say. Well, it truly is not among our usual concerns, but it is quite on topic, in a subrosa sense--because "it" contributes to my morale, welfare, and recreation program. Without it, I tend to get the shrivels dealing year-round with Islamists, fifth columnists, and the vast American wasteland of nitwit media personnel, politicians, and bureaucrats, to say nothing of the cesspools overseas.

What am I talking about?

FOOTBALL!

It's back!

This Thursday starts the college season with the South Carolina Gamecocks--SEC, I might add--and their new coach, Steve Spurrier. This team will bear watching because Steve might do for South Carolina a lot of what he did for us Gators.

A week later, the National Football League season begins formally. Until then, we will watch the final pre-season games as teams winnow down their rosters to the final 53.

Who cares, you say? I do. I am not much of a sports nut, except for American football (that pussy football from Europe and South America doesn't qualify for consideration). American football is, well, so American, and so darned entertaining.

For months now, we have endured the presence of basketbore, basebore, glop (golf), the Wimbeldonian who-cares trots, but have mercifully been spared hockey. Too bad that's coming back.

Now, it is smash-mouth time. It is time to take names and kick ass. It is time to open lots of cans of whup-ass. Break out the blue language manuals, Ma; it's time to refresh!

The most cerebral I want to get about American football, and that adjective is redundant, is to say how much it exercises underutilized emotions and does so safely. You can despise, hate, vituperate against, castigate, scream at, threaten a team on the television from the safety of your living room, and it all gets vented to the outside of you, leaving your equanimity restored and your behavior returned to socially acceptable levels. If your guys win, or if you witness great plays and athleticism, you know that football has put a cattle-prod into the cockles of your heart.

The start of the new season reminds me of the 1931 film Frankenstein. Seeing movement in his critter, Dr. Frankenstein has an ecstacy-spasm: "It's alive! It's alive. I tell you, it's alive!"

Wow!