Why, MP, do you care about the Broncos and football?

The answer to that most simple of questions is quite complex really - there's no one thing that I can point to definitively and say, "That is why I like football." Part of it has to do with loving to play football but knowing early on that I would never play in college and that if I played in high school I risked horrific bodily injury as happened to several of my close friends. My spleen and I are quite content with our current relationship and my clavicle sits quite nicely and pain-free, I might add, on my completely mobile and also pain-free shoulders. But give me a ball, a park, and 9 friends (plus flags when possible) and I become a reckless trashtalking madman. I have the ability to catch nearly anything remotely close to me, and while I cannot run quickly or jump very high, the glue-like stickiness of my upper appendages has brought me no small measure of fame as well as hatred by those with more athletic ability but much less coordination and intelligence. When I score a touchdown at the park, I still envision myself celebrating in the South stands at Mile-Hi. For that moment I am as good as any NFLer. I like the Broncos because they are my unreachable dream, and since I am not a bitter person I feel their joy and weep silently at their inadequacies since they are my own writ large.

Also, the world is a big place and having a favorite team in a favorite city makes it a little less intimidating and a whole lot more cozy. For instance, I can strike up immediate, if not necessarily polite, conversations with denizens of Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Kansas City. And while football americano may not be a global language, it is certainly a national one with symbols and rituals and a nomenclature all its own. And I firmly believe that we don't have enough symbols and rituals in our post postmodern world, and without symbols and rituals we are in danger of losing precious parts of our identities. We can get together and bond over football regardless of the game being played on our TV's. Maybe it's our raison d'etre our maybe it's just our excuse. Either way it gives us a precious connection to faces and voices not our own. Like my beloved partner says: Who cares about the football? It's just an excuse for good food and good company. And there's so few things we can make a similar statement about. So football becomes in its own unique way a savior of sorts. It saves our souls from getting lost in the anonymous morass of post postmodernity; it creates an insiders club that is ironically and pleasantly open to anyone of any age, sex, religion, ethnicity; it is an energy field that surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds us together. . . .but I digress.

Football is like jazz. It is angst, culture, and improvisation all wrapped in one happy Sunday package. It is the violence of everyday life contrasted with the flowing grace of a spiral, a jump, a catch, a sprint, and possibly a silly little celebration of the kind that kids perform without hesitation or embarrassment. It is LaDainian Tomlinson, Michael Strahan, and Peyton Manning. And yes, unfortunately, it is Michael Vick and Adam Jones too. But that is America. And if it is too painful to confront on the streets, like the panhandler's eyes you avoid because of how they look back into your own, then perhaps we can confront it in our houses on our TV's in a fashion slightly more realistic than Friends. When we spend too much of our time lost already, it is a step in the right direction.