Monday, January 24, 2011

This Post is About Football, At Least The Way I Watch Football

In the beginning of the century, the Wilds lived as split, right up the middle like the old worn out mountains that divide the continent. And on the coast, the tribes had been powerful too long, and their people grew loud and proud with themselves. On the other side, once strong centers of industry had faded into rusty ghosts of their former selves, and still farther west, the tribes still loyal to the pantheon of animal gods, backwards and waywards in their intent.

Everyone had sensed the balance of power shifting, wandering around unfocused. There had been skirmishes all year, small raids among the less powerful tribes. As the winter set in, two immediate events happened.

The first was that the bears woke up early, and had nothing to eat. No one knows why they woke up, possibly a shift in the magnetic poles, or someone had been meddling in caves where they shouldn't. But wake up they did, and since there were no berries or fish or small game this late in the dead winter, they followed their noses out of the woods to the developed lands, where they could smell the meat coming from the slaughter houses.

The meat Packers had worked in those factories for generations, and for hundreds of years they had defended those rusty bloody buildings from marauders. Even against dozens of starved fierce desperate bears, and maybe because of the desperation, they knew how to take care of their own. And thus the bear clan was slaughtered. And their god Ursa became angry and plotted revenge for her children.

The second event was that hostilities came to a head between the coastal CEOs and the laid off steel workers that lived in the hills, the ones that had fed the CEOS and built their towers and their arsenals with blood and sweat wrung from now defunct factories. Confident they could easily quell the uprisings, the CEOs sent in their armies of unmanned death drones, The Jets as they called them familiarly, speeding across the woods and rivers to attack the poor and bitter militias of Pitts. They strafed the ridges, destroying homes and families. But you can't send robots against the common man. The common man will always win. A general with an alliterative name, stamped on his steel torso by his makers, cannot hope to survive against men who have already fought hard just to survive in their homeland. So the drones were brought down with force, crashing burning in the river, and their scrap metal was used to repair the roofs.

The neighboring villages recognized that now was the time to align themselves between the two armies of Man, for a final war was coming, the fight for domination of a land with no industry no money no hope, but one where they all had to live anyway, so fuck it, somebody has to win.




@BridgetCallahan Laid off steelworkers should easily beat unmanned robotic jets, if they use their ground cover wisely. #footballmakesnosense

@BridgetCallahan And starving hibernating bears should easily crush the meat packers, because meat packers never have health insurance #footballmakesnosense

@BridgetCallahan Also because they smell like meat. Why would you ever go to war with bears while smelling like cow? #footballmakesnosense

@BridgetCallahan Bears, I am so disappointed in you. WHERE WAS YOUR MAGICAL ARMOR?

@BridgetCallahan Dear Jets: where are your jetpacks? Where are your unmanned death drones? I don't understand this game. You suck.

11 comments:

  1. excellenso!
    makes me want to stay up to 4 am to see the clash after all!

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  2. I think if football were only on at 4am here, I would watch it all season long.

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  3. Ok, now I see the appeal.

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  4. Also the drinking, the shouting, and the boys. Also that.

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  5. Oh, I BET you do.
    Let's go get a motel room in Southern New Mexico and watch the Superbowl there while eating tacos.

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  6. NOW I finally understand this American Football thing. (Sorry. To me FOOTBALL is round and for kicking around...) You explained it so much better than this long list of men who have tried at various times in my life to explain American football to me. Like my old boss used to say, "Stick a fork in my eye!"

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  7. This is a very true account. It's exactly what it's about.

    Also, I thought the other one was futbol.

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  8. I see ghosts ... I wrote about the Giant-Patriot Super Bowl in a symbolic fashion... I tend to see football that way, period, if not all of sports.

    Man, you are a wonderful writer. I wish a big-time publisher or a hooked-up literary agent did too, so I can see the film version of your book after I read it...

    Take care, fair madien...

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Who wants to fuck the Editors?