Football starts soon. Like, yesterday.
Fucking awesome.
I have a framed copy of this sitting on top of my hope chest.
1. Most years, I get to spend most of the football season talking myself into the Broncos taking a run at the championship. They’re a good enough team that they can usually find their way into at least the first round of the playoffs, and even on the years that they don’t, they’re rarely mathematically eliminated until the very end of the season. Even last year, when they were 8-8, they weren’t knocked out of the playoffs until the very last game of the regular season, so I can usually spend a lot of time during football season talking myself into being optimistic about Denver’s chances. It’s not uncommon to find me on week five saying things like “Sure, we’re struggling right now, but if the Broncos can win their last ten games, most of the Charger’s starters die of swine flu, Kyle Orton has an epiphany like Neo at the end of the Matrix and Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Drew Brees and Philip Rivers enter a suicide pact and kill themselves the week before the playoffs, we’re right back in this thing!”
This season, I’m guessing that I have about three weeks during football season where I can talk myself into the Broncos winning more than three or four games. After that, I’ve got 13 straight Sundays penciled in on my calendar that are filled with alcohol and bitter, bitter tears. I have a very brief window to be optimistic this year, starting now, and ending, by my estimation, in about the third quarter of the Bengals game, when Cincinnati figures out Denver’s Defense and starts to make some plays and the offense continues to dink and dunk a few yards here and there, yielding a couple of field goals and a fluke touchdown in garbage time when the game is out of reach.
You sicken me, Jay Cutler.
Because of this, I’ve got to treasure what little time I have to be delusional about the Bronco’s chances this year, and Bill Simmons has earned himself a lifelong reader with this article: he picks the Denver Broncos as his 2009 sleeper team, predicting that they will go 10-6 and even make the playoffs. He then goes on to say that Jay Cutler “looks like a pissed-off trust-fund kid who can’t believe the valet scratched his Escalade hybrid” and compares him to the Iron Sheik.
Are you fucking kidding me? An ESPN columnist comparing the quarterback who turned on my team to a professional wrestling villain AND predicting that my imploding team will make the playoffs!?
Bill Simmons, I don’t have very much time to be excited about the Broncos, and you have done everything that you can to let me enjoy that time as much as possible before they lose in every way imaginable! This is like a last meal before an execution! I know you don’t read this blog, but if there’s ever anything I can do to thank you for all of this sweet, sweet false hope, you let me know.
2. Tila Tequila’s lawsuit against Shawne Merriman just got dumped by the DA. I was going to write more about it, but it boils down to this: As I said before, I’ll never know what happened for sure. It’s entirely possible that Shawne Merriman did beat her, she was sober and justice isn’t being served. What I do know for certain is that she should stop using twitter to defend herself. Her vague comments about how steroid abusers are violent, that she couldn’t have been drunk that night because she can’t drink alcohol because she’s allergic to it (although people have claimed that she was visibly drunk and it’s been verified that there was alcohol involved in the incident) or her angry tirades about what a shit head Merriman is aren’t really giving off a “This woman is a victim of an aggressive athlete!” vibe so much as a “This catty nutjob is throwing a temper tantrum because she’s not getting her way” vibe. Like I said, it’s entirely possible that she’s telling the truth, but her twittering is making her look like a bitchy 14 year old hot girl that isn’t used to being told no.
LIGHTS OUT!!!
3. Fall is in the air, and that means that I have to start putting “Round Up” by Sam Spence in HEAVY rotation. The song cracks me up, and it gives a sense of purpose to whatever I’m doing. Imagine an average day for me: I stumble out of bed sometime between ten and eleven. I check my email, facebook and google reader. I read on the can and then browse over some Internet porn. If it’s a school day, maybe I put some pants on and go try to fit in with a bunch of students who are ten years younger than me. At some point, I eat something, go back to the Internet for a few more hours, and then stumble into bed sometime after midnight.
Sounds kind of goofy.
Now, imagine me doing all of those things with this song playing:
EXACTLY.
Everything is cooler if you do it to that song. Bonus points if some announcer with a gruff, deep voice narrates the entire thing: “A lesser man would’ve given up on that chilly fall September day, but Johnny Castle was no lesser man. Come hell or high water, Castle was prepared for that majestic battlefield where heroes are made and legends are created, dig deep and do whatever it took… to make sure that he read a couple of chapters of a book while he took a dump. Only one question remained: After his heroic effort, would Castle have the tenacity to walk into the kitchen and eat a leftover chalupa from last night’s dinner? ”
Anyway, I have to put that song on repeat and go print out three hundred copies of Simmons’ article, throw them in the tub and rub them all over my naked body.
10-6, BABY! HERE WE COME!!!
I love football season.