OK, say what you want, but respect my right to my individual choices in life. I choose not to be a sports lover or fanatic; in fact I choose to really disdain sports of all kinds altogether. Maybe it’s because I was not athletic as a kid and when I tried to do sports, I had bullies making fun of me, I don’t know. But I just don’t give a rat’s ass about sports. When I lived in Vermont, everybody was a Red Sox fan and I went along and pretended to watch games, but I never really cared one way or the other who was on the team, who got traded, whether they won or lost… I just didn’t care. Football I care even less about. If you want to have more ammo to throw at me, I’m an animal lover, so long as the animals are in the wild and in their natural habitat, but I do not like domestic animals and do not understand why people need them. Dogs and Cats just shed and pee and shit and make your house – and you – smell bad. Besides I’m allergic to cats. I respect people who love their animals but I draw the line with treating them like they’re part of the family. Same with Sports. Your favorite sports team is just a big gigantic money making machine and the whole thing is commercialized to the point of being ridiculous. But that’s my opinion. Oh, and I also don’t love the US Government and I do not think we’re the greatest anything on earth, let alone country. We used to be, but then greed and corruption got a finger hold into our Government before the ink on the founding documents dried.

But not wanting to be totally anti-american, having disdain for sports and dogs and cats and general delusional patriotism, I thought maybe I was missing out on something with the whole Super Bowl thing. So I turned to my wife while we were on our way home with some Chinese food (damn Chinese are taking over everything even the dinner table) and said, “you know, I’m just throwing it out there, not saying we should, but if you were interested in watching the Super Bowl tonight just to see what the fuss is all about, I’d be willing to give it a try. Besides, some of the greatest commercials on earth appear on the Super Bowl, and maybe we’ll enjoy those.” To which she said OK and that was that.

So for the first time in our Married lives (nearly 25 years) we decided to watch the Super Bowl. Disclaimer: I may have been present in the room where the Super Bowl was playing on a TV in the past, but I wasn’t watching because as I’ve said I generally don’t give two shakes of a rats ass about any kind of sports. We started watching at the coin toss.

As predicted, the game was, well, really boring most of the time. They should call it the “Super Bore”. In North Korea that’s how they pronounce it, I’m sure. I had a hard time following who had the ball, and the language was beyond my understanding. There was a computer generated yellow line on the field and I kept coming up with theories for what it represented, because it was always moving and was never where the ball was. This is sort of how Religion was created, by the ignorant and unknowing, looking at something they had no idea what it was, and inventing their own ways of explaining it with really pious sounding language. The truth is they, as well as myself and my wife, had no idea what they were talking about. Line of Scrimmage. End Zone. Field Goal. Pass Interference. I had no idea, but I thought the yellow line represented the End Zone or something till them moved it on me a few times.

The commercials were good. Some of them were really good. Some were “Meh”. Some were proof that George Carlin was right and we are fully entrenched in the “pussification of the American Male”. My favorite was the Walter White as a Pharmacist commercial. “Say My Name”. “Sorta You”. Bwahahahaha. Too bad I don’t even know what company it was for. That’s a great commercial but really shitty marketing.

Remember this edict: When you are creating Marketing Materials, make certain the person will remember the name of the company or product you are advertising. It should NOT be a footnote. In some overpaid Madison Avenue R-Tard’s mind that might be chic or cool, but it’s not. It’s stupid.

But in the end, that 60 minutes of play time had 4 excellent scoring plays in the second quarter that made the first half worth watching. And Seattle had a scary, unsettling way of upending things in the last few seconds, wouldn’t you agree? That last touchdown in the last few seconds of the 2nd quarter was pretty impressive, even if everything leading up to it was like getting my gums scraped.

I did mention that I hate sports, right? So don’t be mad at me we had TiVo’d about 20 minutes of the game play in total while pausing to talk to our kids or get up to go to the bathroom or taking out the trash for the Monday morning trash pickup. After the half-time show, which I actually enjoyed (Katy Perry is so smoking hot), we decided to just fast forward to “real time” and lo and behold the score was 24 to 14 in the 4th quarter with less than 8 minutes to go! Wow! What happened? I didn’t care enough to go back and look, which basically speaks volumes about and pretty much sums up my feelings about sports. I don’t care who wins, I don’t care about the score or how they got there. In the moment, at that time, it was 24 to 14 (Seattle) with less than 8 minutes left and I had no more fast forward on my TiVo, so I resigned myself to watching to the end.

And now I may sound like a hypocrite, but man oh man the last 20 seconds of that game just blew my mind. Why? Well, not because of the upset that occurred to what was about to be Seattle’s win – it looked like they had it in the bag, they should have been celebrating already, but you know, they say it ain’t over till it’s over and wasn’t that the case with this game? That rookie (I don’t know his name because, well, I don’t follow sports and don’t care enough to look it up) stole the win from Seattle by intercepting that pass and won the Super Bowl for the Patriots. And since my initial reason for wanting to watch the Super Bowl in the first place was because I thought maybe I was a bit too unpatriotic and un-american by not watching, it was The Patriots after all and I was born and raised in New England and the win – well it just felt good. Satisfying.

Watching them get their trophy and watching the faces on the players of the Seattle team melting off of their skulls made me realize something I had never thought about before: Winning DOES matter. Losing DOES matter.  It’s basic human nature, and what got us to the top of the food chain and created a species of animal that has created a world for themselves out of nothing but a spirit of Winning. Winning is, well, not losing. It is the basic fundamental instinct of our very survival. To win. To not lose. To conquer.

I still laugh at the Walter White commercial, thinking back on it. Does anybody know what company it was for?

Have an AWESOME Day!