Television: not all I had imagined it to be

I was pretty excited about this weekend, my first in quite some time with a working television and satellite access that I would have all to myself. I've been craving football, and other than a few glimpses in sports bars and the kind indulgence of friends, I haven't had a chance to catch a complete, non-streaming game all year. Streaming has been all right, but it's just not the same as the glory of a full-size set, a full-on stereo, and the stability of a dedicated satellite TV connection.

Although we've been house-sitting for a couple of weeks now, circumstances have previously dictated that I be back in town on weekends since we have been here, so it's just as if I hadn't been here at all. I'm looking at the same situation for the foreseeable future, so I had a lot riding on games happening this weekend, at least mentally.

Unfortunately, it was a bye week for the Huskies, and the dragging Seahawks were up against the newly reinvigorated, Favre-led Vikings. Of course, my worst fears were realized; the Vikings gave the Hawks a merciless beatdown, one that wasn't even particularly exciting to watch. So the whole TV thing, at least whatever I had built it up to be in my mind, has been kind of a dud.

Don was wondering why I seem to be so uncharacteristically absorbed with football lately, and I didn't have a ready answer. I think I finally figured it out, and maybe figured out why it is that a lot of people are so absorbed by sports in general. Football intrigues me because of the intellectual aspects; once you get past the hitting, it's actually a pretty complex game, and when executed properly, it's a sort of elegantly violent ballet, a beautiful exercise of physical prowess and mental agility. But that's not really why I've been so interested lately. Rather, it's because it represents an escape. Because it's something you can be absorbed in, can lose yourself in the permutations of and the technicalities. It takes you away from some of the frankly unappealing elements of day to day living, elements that have been more prominent in life lately than I might otherwise prefer.

So I'm watching the game today and a Chevy commercial comes on, one of those melancholy John Cougar Mellencamp versions showing the stolid, suffering but persevering blue-collar culture that represents the company's target market, and I realize that a lot of people are, and always have been, in that same boat. I'm probably just projecting, but if I was an assembly-line worker recently laid-off, or a farmer whose fields had turned to dust, I'd probably be pretty eager to lose myself every Sunday in the travails of the team of my choice, too. So maybe that's why I am so eager to do so now, and so displeased that the teams of my choice either aren't on, or aren't performing well enough to allow me to participate in a vicarious victory right now, when I could badly use one.