Dear Madonna: Because of you, I have to watch the Super Bowl. Bitch.

All right, disclaimer: I think football is stupid. The most stupid of any sport currently being seriously played in the US, actually. And here is why:

1) Mostly, I’m just not wired for competition. Blame my French “loveur not a fighteur” heritage, blame my dad for not tossing the ball around with me more, but I just don’t get competitive sports. This can sometimes include dating men (I don’t compete for attention, best-in-show, nothing; I either win by default, or not at all). Generally, when faced with competition, I pull a Cartman: “screw you gays, I’m goin’ HOME.”
Case in point: I <3 the sport of skiing. No competition there. It’s just you, kinetics and nature.

2) Football’s unique Strike 2 is that if it MOVED like other sports do, it would be done and over with within 45 minutes. And that would be OK. Fact of the matter is, this makes football an excruciating one-two punch. I don’t believe I could watch a baseball game, or a soccer game, etc., if every 30 seconds the “pause” button was hit, and you go to some numbnuts in suits strategizing like they’re on the field (see, I have actually tried to watch football; this isn’t just an ignorant opinion). My point is: I inherently have Sports-ADD, being immune to “the thrill of the competition”, however whatever attention span I have left over, to actively seek to invest in understanding/”enjoying” sports, goes down the crapper because football moves at a snail’s pace.

My point is– I’m NOT bashing sports, or competition, or even football, here. We, as human beings, ALL have our “stories”. Stupid crap we obsessively follow. Maybe it’s how many husbands Erica Kane has had (see: “All My Children”), or, in my case, the who/what/where/when/why/how of Madonna. At any given moment.

So for ME, that’s enough to get me to re-examine my attention span, and how to invest it this Sunday. I kid you not that every time I have ever watched a football game, I have needed it RE-explained to me, because the data seems pointless and not really something I could even invest mid- to long-term memory upon.

My first experiences with football would have been visiting my dad’s brother and his far-more-sporty-than-ours family. I would join the menfolk in the basement while they watched sports, and I WANT to say, in hindsight, that it was for male-bonding purposes, but… the basement is where they had all their toys for when little kids came to visit, so realistically– that was probably it. The football was just background; the male-bonding, coincidental.

By junior high, I was faking being sick all throughout the [flag] football unit in gym class. My brain could not grasp “firsts,” “downs,” whathaveyou, cursing my father under my breath, because at that age, NO boy would admit he didn’t know how to play football.

By adulthood, attending Columbia College, we were ALWAYS told to watch the Super Bowl for the commercials. That… never resonated with me. We have Tivo so we don’t have to watch commercials; we time bathroom and feeding breaks so we don’t have to watch commercials. I’m paying you $650 a credit hour, and… you’re telling me to watch commercials. NO FREAKING DICE.

Still, I love doing anything that my brain finds curious and/or novel (absolutely nothing about football induces either of those, inherently). So if I’m trying to impress a boy, or bored, or in a particularly intellectually curious kinda mood, I’ll attempt to relearn the minutiae of “football rules.” Each and every time I’ve tried to absorb them, they seem particularly stupid (you have X amount of tries to move the ball Y amount of feet, in order to get continuing chances to keep moving the ball?)… and that old rule of the pause/reshuffle/guys in suits talking smack inevitably makes it IMPOSSIBLE for my brain to be able to retain the rules.

Enter Madonna. I’m notsomuch excited to see her performance, moreso it’s just her as a CONCEPT. THAT she was invited (I’m sure I’m being generous by saying “invited”– it’s most definitely all about the money) is a pretty big gesture, in my opinion. Part of me anticipates dumb-ass mouth-breathers in the Super Bowl audience booing her, but… still. The juxtaposition remains: I’m a gay from a time before gays felt comfortable in sports, and the Queen has been invited to perform for these people, aka Middle America.

Meaning yet another opinion of mine, on Middle America and its attitudes on the gays, may have to be rewritten. All because of money and/or Madonna. So yeah, to honor them both/all, I might actually do my best to sit through it.

Drunk, but sitting through it.

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