Not just the Lions (who perpetually break my heart) but the NFL in general: Millionaire babies taking to the field to shuck, jive and juke for elderly billionaire plantation masters. The players who do take a stand by kneeling are vilified, nullified and ostracized. And fans continue to subsidize this cirque du soulless in some publicly funded, corporate-owned stadium with the audacity to charge ten dollars for a cup of warm beer, eight dollars for cold hot dogs and ninety dollars for jerseys bearing terminally concussed gridiron legends’ names and numbers.
Dear God.
Never mind the fact that the rules of a once-simple sport have become so complicated that it takes a team of Harvard Law professors to unravel them during a two-minute time-out or a video penalty challenge.
Football’s not a game anymore.
It’s two-hours of Wall Street traders, stock analysts, happy-ending-massage-parlor escapades, drug addicts and wife-beaters bashing helmets.
It’s Spartacus without the honor or drama.
The morning after tangling with the Jersey boys, I gave up on my usual black coffee and SportsCenter. Tatina had asked me if there was any news on ESPN of Stabæk recruiting Undagu from Strømsgodset. I told her she might be suffering a stroke because she was speaking gibberish. She punched me hard in the forearm. She’s in quite good shape. Rather than hurt myself trying to understand Norwegian “football,” I dressed and Tatina and I went shopping for ingredients for my father’s chili. Our shopping took us to Eastern Market, where the cops still had an overwhelming presence at Shed 3.
“You?” she said as we drove past the shed.
“Me,” I answered.
Tatina kept her questions concerning my previous evening’s activities short. I obliged her with answers that were equally succinct. I was certain Tatina had seen the unimaginable in Somalia. She was no stranger to blood. And as such, a few details were all she required to form a full and telling picture.
Her one question that I had no simple answer to was: “Is it over?”
After a few seconds of thought, I said, “I don’t think so. I’m not sure.”
“If you’re not sure,” she said, “then it isn’t over.”
At about noon, Tatina and I made chili from my father’s recipe: coarse-chopped jalapeños, coarse-chopped Vidalia onion, a healthy amount of smoked paprika, ground beef, stew beef (sautéed in bourbon, which I wasn’t allowed to drink, molasses, butter and coarse-ground black pepper), thick-chopped applewood-smoked bacon and just less than a cup of brown sugar. Instead of adding my father’s usual two bottles of Guinness stout, I poured in one bottle of New Holland Brewing’s Dragon’s Milk for no other reason than I liked it better.
The thought was to take some to Elena and Tomás, who was home and making Elena’s life as a caregiver miserable.