Monday, February 5, 2018

Reflections on (missing) last night's game.

I didn't get to watch last night's game, which by all accounts was a real barn-burner. Mostly because I am far away, three hours later than New York time, and in a country where they couldn't care less about football and its brain-rattled practitioners and the Norte Americano gladiatorial extravaganza.

For all the talk about cord-cutting and the world beyond the three networks, I could find, from the land of samba and waxing, no way to watch the game. 

I tried to "stream" the game online. I dutifully filled out more forms than K did in Kafka's "The Penal Colony," but I came up blank. I looked, or attempted to look for it on the giant screen in my hotel room. But after figuring out a remote that had more buttons than the cockpit of the original Apollo capsule, I gave up. Truth be told, I couldn't figure out how to turn off the giant TV now that I had it on, and wound up unplugging the monstrosity.

And so I decided the world wouldn't end if I didn't watch the commercials that cost, in media time alone, more than $5 million per. I can see them all online tomorrow, I reckoned, and besides the latest book I'm reading was calling, and to be blunt, the strength and health of my mind means more to me than being able to talk about the game.

That said, I'd take a break from my pages every 15 minutes or so and see the Eagles of Philadelphia still ahead of the Patriots of New England. I'd register that, hope that my daughter's team would wind up prevailing over my cousins' but really, in the lingua franca of the day, I realized I couldn't give a rat's ass about any of it.

So with the sounds of a giant city outside my room, and the cool comfort of air-conditioning around me, and the subtle aroma of lavender in the air, I peeled through my pages and became further more estranged from the living life around me.

Oh well.

Fuck that shit.

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