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Hut! Hut! Brrrrrrrrrrrrr!

Today, I’m going to a Patriots game. Let me set the meteorological timeline for this event, for those of you not residing in the greater New England area right now:

Friday morning: Sunny. Fifty-ish degrees. Almost shorts weather.

Friday night: Darker. Plus windier, and a bit chillier. Around forty, maybe.

Saturday: Cold, but sunny. Thirty-five or so.

Sunday: Thirty. Snowing. Wet. Cold. Welcome to winter, chucklenuts.

And so, I bundle. Not so much to weather the elements during the game, mind you. Sure, that’s three hours of football, but for that, I’ll be sitting wedged in the middle of forty thousand of my closest friends, with hot nacho breath steaming down at me from the rows above and toasty ass breath (also nacho-flavored, I fear) bubbling up to me from rows below. It won’t be pleasant, for certain — but it should be warm.

Meanwhile, there’s the three-and-a-half hours before the game, when we’ll be standing by a sputtering grill in a Foxboro parking lot, trying desperately to roast our weenies — but not our ‘weenies’ — and drink enough beer to forget that we can no longer feel our torsos. Now that’s FOOTBALL, people.

And so, I’ve layered. Every part of my body is, right now, swaddled in two layers of apparel. Some parts, three. And one particularly important part, wrapped in SaranWrap, duct-taped secure, packed in foam peanuts and stuffed in a sock.

(What? So I take special care of my left pinky; without it, how the hell would I type ‘a’ or ‘q’ or ‘z’?

Don’t look at me that way. What did you think I was talking about?)

At any rate, it should be a good game. And by good game, I mean ‘rout by the home team’. That’s how it works, if you actually attend the game in person. On TV, I like the nailbiters. Back and forth, scrap and claw, and make that one big play in the waning moments to seal the victory. That’s three hours of exciting football, and that’s what I pay the TiVo bill for.

At the stadium, it’s different. When you’re barely able to see the field through the snow and frozen eyelashes, and you’re leaving your seat every twelve minutes to buy a beer and every nine minutes to deposit one, you mostly hope that the good guys will go up by six or eight touchdowns in the first quarter, so you don’t miss anything important.

(Especially when you’re bundled up bigger than the little whiny kid in A Christmas Story, and you have to find the little boys’ room. It’d take a SWAT team, a blowtorch and a battering ram to get into these pants right now. I may be collecting Social Security before I see my penis again.)

So look for me at the game, if it’s airing in your area. If you see an idiot out there with his face painted red and no shirt on, with a big ‘P’ on his chest… well, that’s not me. I’m too old for that shit. I’ll be one of those motionless lumps of flannel and goose down you see hunkering into his chair, rubbing his armpits together to stay warm so his genitals stay on the outside, where they belong. Or I’ll be passed out in the mens’ room, succumbed to exhaustion while fighting through my fourth layer of long johns, trying to clear a path for the Guinness train to get back out of the tunnel.

Damn. Do I ever love football!