How do you get yourself up to hate an opponent when it is not a blood feud? When you are the emotionally married fan of a team that cannot give you success without suffering, how do you give yourself the psychic power to try to curse the other team with your mind thoughts and help the favorite team just perhaps get that one little quarter ounce of universal energy it needs for that last second field goal to make it inside the crossbars, or for that last second finger tip to alter the final pass just wide enough to make it all over? How do you do it?
It is a struggle. I sit here in the darkness of my house, everybody asleep, desert sage lit and purifying the ancient air. My house’s main part was built in 1905, and it is not a fancy place. There are dark memories buried deep in the walls, and no matter how much we try to not follow this pattern, our house is full of painful clutter and dread, especially in the hallway. We have attempted multiple exorcisms from multiple religious angles, yet it still is as it was when we moved in ten years ago. Maybe not so bad – the radio does not cut onto static even though the off button is still off, nor do things fall off the wall in the front room. That same room is where me and my wife now sleep, and I cannot have a good night’s sleep, ever. No matter how much I drink, no matter how much I don’t drink, no matter what I do, it is tossing and turning and the corner of the sheets comes undone, nightly, and by morning I have a crick in my neck and we are sleeping on bare ass mattress from the nipples up, both me and my wife.
But it is what it is, and I can live with it. Ghosts chase us all; I am just lucky enough to recognize them. There was a fluff piece on ESPN earlier this week about one Daniel J. Snyder, owner of the Washington Redskins, and he is obviously chased by the ghosts of his dead father, trying to impress a man who is no longer here to be impressed. He is chased by the ghosts of Jack Kent Cooke, who brought the three Lombardi trophies that Mr. Snyder is now in the fantasy possession of, parading into public view whenever he feels he has done something to prove he is actually trying for a fourth. And that man, Mr. Snyder, he fills me with a hate, the type of hate that causes men to do dark things that get buried in the walls of structures and haunt for hundreds of years. Yet I cannot indulge those demons. He is a man of prominence, and I am a piece of shit in the dark corners of the internet, the dark corners of the earth, struggling daily to keep the dirty oxygen of my world filling my lungs. He is a childhood fan of the Washington Redskins, as am I. He owns the team and has allegedly insightful pieces on him on cable television to make his relationship with the public a more positive thing. I wait for Sundays and my family hopes the television shows good things. When it doesn’t, their day is ruined. I burn the butternut squash soup. I slam the bathroom door. I threaten to throw away every toy on the kitchen table if it is not picked up immediately. It is the darkness of this home and the darkness of my personal history and how the darkness of this Redskins team – its very name a denigration to an entire race of people nearly wiped from the goddamn surface of the earth – only compounds it all.
Yet I get my hatred up. It is easy with divisional rivals. You know the Cowboys are the Cowboys – a team full of crackhead sodomites with the most dislikeable fans on earth. Black guys with no soul who lust for shiny stars and shiny cars, mongoloid rednecks with brain wirings crossed the wrong way from too much satellite television transmissions into their compact homes, norteno beaners who no longer walk the way of their motherland. It is easy to hate Giants fans – Jews and Italians and the other greasy varieties of white people that breed like macaroni rascals in the petri dish of the greater New York metropolitan area. It is not hard to shit upon Eagles fans – alcoholic degenerates who masturbate to homosexual donkey porns, before work. But how do you hate those other ten games of the year? How do you get worked up for everyone else.
Lucky for me, this week, I had no problem whatsoever. My belovedly wretched Washington Redskins are hosting the Meatpackers of Green Bay, Wisconsin, in an early Sunday afternoon game. The Packers, after years of Favredom, are now led by the young and glorious Aaron Rodgers, heir apparent to NFL QB Superstar status once either Peyton Manning or Tom Brady die or retire or both. And personally, I have no beef with Aaron Rodgers the human athlete. But there is a thing about him, an uncanny resemblance to a former long-time boyfriend of my youngest sister, that fills me with an immense hatred, to where I hope somehow this week the Redskins are able to have Brian Orakpo concuss Rodgers like Lavar Arrington hitting Troy Aikman, and then before he falls to the turf, Laron Landry snaps his leg like L.T. the I hitting Joe Theismann.
Here is some real talk: my youngest sister was born two months premature at the ass end of 1980. She had a complete blood transfusion upon birth, and was not expected to live past the springtime. This was before the AIDS, so the family nervously didn’t have her tested until the mid-‘90s, just because of her hard luck. She had a multitude of health problems, and spent more of her life in the hospital than out of it the first three years of her life. It has instilled in her molecular structure a sort of recklessly abandoned attitude. She has been too far removed from worrying about life to not choose death for long stretches. Part of this time was when she was involved with a dude named John, who is the spitting fucking image of Aaron Rodgers.
To make a long story short, drug problems were had, my sister went through a dark period, John was an instigator in this, and somehow developed an actual crack habit that had him stealing from the video store he managed. Shit got ugly a couple times, to where I went to her house since no one had heard from her for months, and their rental was a dank pit of slow death, except with like 39 cats, and a stupid dog. Then they had a car wreck, which John ran off from because the cops were after him for embezzlement, and actually, as the memories were pieced together by all involved, it seemed as if John had wrecked the car on purpose to kill himself, with my sister inside. The car burned up, all her CDs and half her possessions in the trunk, and that was the cold splash of Oh Shit that got her back on a better track. John was eventually arrested, but was only charged with like one count of embezzlement, a minor felony, and was out in 20 months. I had wanted to kill him, not really, but yes, beat the ever-living shit out of him. My family did not want me to, nor would my wife appreciate me doing so because then I’d be in the same Piedmont Regional Jail next to the old dump on the western end of Farmville, Virginia, that John had spent an extended stay at. It is a privatized prison, which are the worst kinds of jails, because you can’t even get a fucking aspirin if no one has put $5 on your books.
My sister is good now, engaged to another dude who seems like a good guy, although he does wear Tapout shirts sometimes, but that’s the only red flag I’ve had with him. And when I was going home for a visit one afternoon, I stopped at Tom’s Country Store to fill up on gas, and there was John the Aaron Rodgers-looking felon crackhead who tried to kill my sister. He jumped in his car, because he knew the deal, and started out. I walked across the lot to make his way difficult, and he drove around, so I pointed at him, like Ronnie James Dio, and said, “Hey! What’s up, John?” And without making eye contact, he mumbled, “What’s up Raven,” and peeled the fuck out. I went back, finished filling up the truck, paid for it along with an order of chicken gizzards and a bottle of spring water that’s probably not really spring water, and went on my own way.
I have never seen John again, though I hear he has gotten married and has his own kid now. Yet those eyes, avoiding my own in that country store parking lot, and that pointy fucking nose, they still needing blackening and breaking. They deserve it. That is the darkness of these places I grew up at and live at and walk around – there are unpaid debts and drunkenly forced vengeances that haunt every fucking single one of us.
So this Sunday, the point spread means nothing to me. I know the Redskins are not supposed to win. I know the Packers are considered a powerful team by the sheltered and sterile people that are paid to contemplate such things in commercial forums inside the internet. But underneath it all, there is a darkness. I am breathing deep the desert sage, and letting my universal magnetics get negative, and shooting those magnetic energies into the new moon sky, hoping to fill the Laron Landry soul and the Brian Orakpo soul and the other defensive Redskin souls with that darkness. They all have their own life stories, many of them full of its own terrible tragedies and upbringings and personal homeplaces of tremendous hopelessness. But maybe with my little half ounce shot of GO REDSKINS FUCK YEAH can be that extra boost to gain revenge upon life. Maybe we will see Aaron Rodgers sprawled out on the grass, and that helmet will come off as the fat little trainer dudes in NFL-chosen apparel wobble out. And there will be John’s face, fucking John, grimacing in pain, feeling my vengeance. Finally, motherfucker.
Needless to say, I am amped for Sunday’s game. AMPED!
