I couldn't watch the Super Bowl because I left my laptop charger at the office on Friday afternoon. I went to bed at 8:00 on Sunday after a very agreeable weekend. My wife and I had a guest, and the three of us worked through seven bottles of wine, a few beers, and a good amount of Botanist gin taken straight. (Don't worry: one of the bottles had to be dumped out because it had a bug in it.) We talked about literature and God and The Fox and the Hound; we listened to Horace Silver. It was a good time.
Even if I had remembered my charger—or owned a television—and had no other plans I still would not have even considered turning the game on. I hate the Super Bowl and everything about it, even the phrase itself. The words themselves make my blood boil. I hate everything they signify—I will not merely say "stand for," because, like a blasphemous parody of a sacrament, they effect what they signify. And what do they signify? They signify rapists being paid too much to play a boys' game. They signify talentless pop stars dancing and lip-synching. They signify sanctimonious ads about pay equality from auto manufacturers with a non-union workforce. They signify endless amounts of inane water-cooler conversation—"Did you see the Kia commercial?"—subsidized, even coerced, by glib, amoral marketing experts. They signify hundreds, even thousands, of thoughtless, scruple-free articles on the amount of money people have spent on nacho platters or whatever people eat when they watch this thing. The Super Bowl is not a symbol of the decadence and frivolity of our age—it is those things. For the sake of freedom, in the ancient sense of absence of constraints on my ability to pursue whatsoever things are true, honest, just, lovely, and of good report, I have no choice but to keep the whole thing of out my life and that of my children.
When I hear that something like 45 percent of Americans under the age of 40 want the day after the Super Bowl to be declared a national holiday, I have two thoughts: first, that this would be nothing but another sop to white-collar types who will probably have an easy workday regardless while the staff at Chipotle continues slogging through just as it would on Labor Day and Christmas Eve; and second, we are a silly and forgettable people, even by pagan standards.
The Super Bowl is obscene and idiotic, a gluttonous and obscene spectacle, a banal parody of religion for a country clearly enjoying nothing of divine favor.
All that aside, I was pleased to learn this morning that, per a video that aired during one of the commercial breaks, Stranger Things is returning this year on Halloween.