thoughts from an empty head

I think.

Good thing she didn’t show up on Battery Night.

Oh. My. God.

The White Sox, despite all my expectations, are in the playoffs. First game against the Devil Rays is Thursday.

And the Cubs are already in, as well. Please, God, let me see a Crosstown Classic this year.

I need a new White Sox World Series Champions hat.

Am I the only person in the world who doesn’t give a flying frack about the Olympics? The spectacle, the pageantry, the record-smashing feats, the wondrous special effects, the endless hoopla – it’s all a big steaming pile of meh to me. Not even the smooth, tanned bodies of the women’s volleyball teams can get me to watch. OK, maybe for just a few minutes, but sooner or later, the camera pans to the Village Idiot in the stands, and then I remember all his big talk about how Congress needs to get back from vacation to lower gas prices by drilling offshore, or some other voodoo nonsense of his, and I find myself throwing the remote across the room and loading up that special mod I made for STAR WARS BATTLEFRONT II, the one where every stormtrooper is wearing a Bush or Cheney mask, and the next thing I know, several hours have passed.

Where was I? Oh, right: I wish I could trace my Olympic apathy to something concrete.

I’m not avoiding the show as a symbolic backlash against the thugishness of the repressive Chinese regime – seriously, I live in a country that bestowed upon the world Abu Gharib and Guantanamo Bay and secret CIA prisons and the Bush doctrine of preemptive war and Dick Cheney as leader of the free world (twice!), and somehow my fellow citizens think that it is perfectly OK to throw stones at other countries solely because a genetic crap shoot determined that they were going to be born in this country? And for those of you whose ocular piece of lumber lies embedded further back in your cranial socket than just before the optic nerve: no, I’m not condoning China’s many grievous sins. I’m just saying that you’d better make real damned sure that your own country’s laundry is April fresh before you go digging around in someone else’s sock drawer.

Maybe I’m avoiding the Olympics because of the treacly, made-for-TV heartwarming moments of awwwwww that make me run to the nearest hospital in need of an insulin shot. Seriously, nothing makes me reach for the remote faster than a TV special that tries to warm my heart. Memo to networks: I got rid of my heart long ago and installed a mechanical pump that’s a good deal more efficient, so lay off the mush. If I want to feel a warm glow, I’ll get on my bike and pedal around the city for an hour.

No, the Olympics do nothing for me, which is strange, considering that I am one of the few people in my small circle who watched virtually every single of the World Cup, and who will watch any footbal game on TV, regardless of what league – NFL, Arena, NFL Europe, Aussie-rules rugby – is playing. (Except for Division I-A college football. Until they start cutting the players a piece of the enormous pie and institute an actual playoff system, instead of letting HAL 9000 tell everyone who it thinks won the season, I’m all done with college football. Seriously, if the NFL used that system, the New England Patriots would still be celebrating their awesome 18-1 season and national championship.) I’m more interested in which malcontent is going to be leading my beloved Chicago Bears into the jaws of yet another nightmare season of pain and suffering: Kyle “Grizzly Adams” Orton, the man who never met a drink he didn’t like, or Rex “Sex Cannon” Grossman, the man who never met a long pass he couldn’t make, regardless of which team he was throwing it to.

When exactly did I become an Olympic killjoy? Probably right around the time when I discovered that I really don’t want to watch that many commercials mixed in with my sports. I stopped watching much of what TV had to offer a while ago, and the thought of inundating myself with an endless stream of advertisements, especially during a spate of sports that I really don’t care too much about, has me wandering the video aisles in Hastings.

Meh. Wake up when it’s time to watch Peyton Manning eviscerate the Bears defensive line.