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Farewell, Sweet Sundays

Two quick things before tonight’s post:

1) The ‘Dana Wireless Fund’ (see Tuesday’s post for details) is up over eight dollars now.

Huzzah! Eight dollars, in less than a week!

At that rate, my ‘Blog-A-Day for a Year’ period can start at about… let’s see, carry the one… adjust for inflation… pile on the sales tax… well, at about this time next year. So please to not be holding the breath for that, just yet. I’d hate to lose anyone to asphyxiation; you readers are precious to me. All three of you.

B) Call me crazy, but I got the urge to be a part of one of those ‘million things on one page’ dealies that are making the rounds on the ‘net lately. I chose to pay $1 to snuggle an icon into the OneMillionBlogs.net project.

It’s new. It sounds impressive, if it takes off. On the other hand, I was #63. Out of one million. And as I type, they’re up to #67, which — in case you slept through your statistics lectures back in school — is what scientists call ‘pretty damned far away from’ one million. It’s a technical term. Don’t strain yourself.

So thanks to Dave for my sweet commemorative button, proudly displayed on the left sidebar here. And here’s hoping I’m ‘in on the ground floor’ of something big, instead of… well, the alternative. Go check it out, if such things interest you.

Now, down to bidness.

For NFL fans like me, today is ‘Black Sunday‘. It’s the first Sunday in months during which there’s no pro football whatsoever. And that’s a hard pig to skin, folks.

You see, many of us develop a routine during the football season. It’s a complicated dance, involving fresh beer, stale chips, and ridiculous team paraphenalia. Jerseys, face paint, team logos shaved into back hair — you name it. Most weeks, we start prepping at noon, or even before. And that’s for us East Coast folks; I don’t know how you Cali-side people do it, getting up early enough to be ass-deep in cold lager and Chee-tos before the first game starts at ten am your time. Ten! The whole lot of you must be saints on Saturday nights during the season, just to avoid the possible hangovers. Now that’s dedication, football fans.

It’s true, of course, that the entire playoff run disrupts the routine. There are less games, and by this time of year, even rabid fans — hell, especially rabid fans — are down to one or two teams they’re rooting for. It’s simply not as much fun when you’re, say, a Cleveland Browns fan, to vilify the ref and fling nachos at the TV like so much monkey poo when a call goes against the Rams. Or the Patriots. Or Indy. Sure, the spleen is in it, and there’s still foam around the mouth and that wild, raised-by-maneating-badgers look in the eyes… but you can tell the heart’s been broken by yet another case of the ‘maybe-next-year’s.

But still, we watch. Living in New England, I was horrified a couple of weeks ago when the Denver Broncos — Denver, for chrissakes! — nipped the Pats’ Super Bowl hopes in the bud. We were all pretty shaken up. There were a lot of long faces and sackcloth suits evident on the Monday afterward. But did we stock up on beer and pretzels and park ourselves in front of the tube when Sunday rolled around again?

You bet your wild woolly widening winter’s ass we did. That’s football, man. The primo excuse, for six months at a time, to put those ‘Sunday chores’ off until after the season. “If it didn’t get done on Saturday, then it’ll just have to wait until next week, dear. The beer is chilled and the Giants are driving; don’t talk to me until midnight tonight!”

But alas, that outlet is not available to us this week. Oh, what a cruel mistress, irony! In this, the week just before the big game — the party of the year, the match for all the marbles, Super Bowl fever itself — there’s no football to be had whatsoever. It’s the first taste of our sad, lonely march back to the land of the dreaded Sunday ‘Job Jar’. Of grass mowings and attic cleanings. Of gutter cleanings and errand runnings. Grocery store jaunts and — dare I mention it? — afternoon trips to the mall. For shopping. Oh, the horror.

Thankfully, there’s still one more Sunday of football bliss to go. The home team’s not involved this year, but that’s not so important now. The cheering is merely a formality at this point; this barren empty Sunday today has reminded us all how things will be after the Big Game, so our only job is to live it up like there’s no tomorrow.

Or, more accurately, ‘no next Sunday’. Because after next week, no matter for whom you cheer, there really isn’t. Not until August or so, anyway. Just pray you’ve emptied out those ‘Job Jars’ before then.