Of course it’s quite possible all that’s in part a fault of the weather (East Tennessee in January is especially gloomy), or it could be a product of no longer ingesting six fish oil pills per day. (I’m told Omega-3 fatty acids are good for mental health.) Either way.

I told Chris I look forward to being old because old people have perspective.

“That’s interesting,” he said.

I’m not sure it is. And I’m not sure old people have perspective. I read somewhere that every person, no matter the age, has an “ideal age,” which is the age they picture themselves. All evidence could indicate a person is 85 and, physically anyway, pretty freaking gross. But that person, that pretty freaking gross old man of 85, pictures himself as 25.

But to continue being boorish. This guy named Donald Hall. This Donald Hall, he wrote a short essay for the New Yorker about perspective. It was about being old and watching “squirrels—tree rats with the agility of point guards” steal seed from birds. But it’s about perspective, I decided. Donald Hall was America’s Poet Laureate in 2006. He’s 83. He spends his summer looking out the window of his childhood home in New Hampshire and watching Red Sox games. Poets are people too.

Decades followed each other—thirty was terrifying, forty I never noticed because I was drunk, fifty was best with a total change of life, sixty extended the bliss of fifty—and then came my cancers, Jane’s death, and over the years I traveled to another universe.

Maybe the word I was looking for is detachment. This Donald Hall guy wrote eight words to describe a decade, and he was drunk for seven of them. Maybe old people have a certain detachment from life I find appealing. Old people are all, I’m rubber, you’re glue, everything you say and do bounces off me and sticks to you. That’s what old people are.

Old people are also all, Honey, I’ve got blood in my urine again.

Donald Hall

I tell you all this because after Chris and I sat at that table in the mall foodcourt we went and watched my and your beloved Auburn Tigers lose to the Tennessee Volunteers in Thompson-Boiling Arena. Not that I was expecting Auburn to win. Sure, it’d been nice. I wanted Auburn to win. But Auburn basketball post-Cliff Ellis (and his alleged system of cash money benefits) has taught detachment.

I’m comfortable with detachment. I don’t always like being detached, but detachment and me have reached one of those détentes. “The only way I know to exist within a group is to alienate myself from it.” This guy named David Shields wrote that in this book called Black Planet. More about Black Planet in a minute.

Groups make me uncomfortable. I never raised my hands when the mic man said, “Raise your hands for Two Bits.” (Partly because Two Bits sucks.) I often give false names at functions requiring nametags. I’m suspicious of the necessity of the National Anthem at sporting events. I usually keep several sections between the athletes and myself.

But for the AU-UT game Saturday I sat courtside. Like the first row. The row where Jack Nicholson and bored, pretty women sit at NBA games. I didn’t have a camera, but I took this picture with my phone.

So you see I’m not totally full of it. I don’t have courtside connections. But my dad does. He got the tickets from a local bank owner. The tickets also came with access to the Ray Mears’ Room. Ray Mears was the man who deemed East Tennessee “Big Orange Country,” and his room was full of free food and rich white people. It was something like Southern Baptist Heaven.

Courtside detachment has a face. Two faces actually. And they’re both angry and connected to squat man bodies with biceps like beach balls. Most of the event security personnel at SEC sporting events look like normal people, just some guy or girl who needed a job. Not these guys. These guys had ended lives, probably while somewhere in the “hot” portion of “the Middle [blanking] East.” Or so Chris and I decided. We decided the two of them combined had killed between 6 and 10 people. “But they didn’t consider them people,” Chris said. “They only really killed one man who was worthy.” I laughed. A large portion of our shared humor involves inventing elaborate and perverse backstories for people we don’t know.

Another instance of our shared humor involves a play on the typical Knoxville sports talk show listener. (Substitute Knoxville with Auburn, Tuscaloosa, Athens, Gainesville, et. all.) “Jimmy,” Chris will say, “Jimmy, Coach Dooley, he just, he just needs to get these PLAYERS into shape. Jimmy, these PLAYERS, they just ain’t got no discipline. I’ll hang up and listen to your answer. Go Vols, Jimmy.” Special emphasis is given to the word PLAYERS, because that word is a placeholder for a far different word.

It would be impossible to overstate the degree to which sports-talk radio is shadowed by the homosexual panic implicit in the fact that it consists almost entirely of a bunch of out-of-shape white men sitting around talking about black men’s buff bodies.

That’s from Black Planet. David Shields, author of the more recent Reality Hunger, spent the 1994-95 NBA season following the Seattle SuperSonics for the book, which is subtitled “Facing Race During an NBA Season.” It’s an honest exploration of a middle-aged white intellectual observing himself care much too much about the actions and outcomes of young black males. As such it is often embarrassing and painful to read.

I will say this about race and the modern SEC athlete: I don’t know what to say. The subject is too big, the moving parts too many. I don’t want to say it’s too soon. Can it be too soon? To talk about such things as they should be talked about? I don’t know. I just know such topics and considerations are outside the abilities of this particular person and this particular column. I’m not Harper Lee; this isn’t To Kill a Mockingbird.

It’s not futile to try. I wouldn’t say it’s futile to attempt nearly anything.

Auburn basketball is refreshingly futile. I mean, aren’t we all tired of this striving toward “victory?” Right? Right! Winning is so tiresome. Anyone can be a winner. It’s not that hard. But to be a loser, to really and truly fail, well, that’s something that takes effort. I don’t know much. I’m dumb and selfish and tired. Mainly, I’m pre-maturely tired. But I love losers. I think I might be a loser. And I love nothing more than I love myself.

No one learns anything from winning. Winning just justifies. Look at America post-World War II. Everything we do is great . . . because we did it. Millionaire presidential hopefuls call this American Exceptionalism, which is a corollary of Manifest Destiny, which is another way of saying, “We’re better than you . . . because we’re better than you.”

Auburn basketball will win again some day. We shouldn’t be too worried. While we wait, we should focus on “losing with dignity.” Which is a term winners use to keep us born losers in check—a sort of sly word warfare. You got to watch out for words. They’re tricky. Stop paying attention for a day, a decade, a century or two and they (you know, them) will have you chained in place with nothing but words. Duty, honor, sacrifice, the greater good, the silent majority. You got to check yourself before some balding alcoholic plutocrat from Kansas convinces the country dropping bombs on little brown boogey men is the only way we can be free. And, of course, then we’ve wrecked ourselves.

I’m saying give me a loser, a true blue loser. There’s beauty in striving. What else can we do, but strive? I don’t want to get too dour, but, but yet, but all this, your reflection in the mirror, your car, your house, your favorite hat, will be gone in a cosmic blink. Don’t let that depress you. You know this. We all know this. It’s boring to type. But yet.

But yet type it I did.

Writing about sports. Uggh. Is there anything less conducive to interesting, cliché-free language than sports? I’m sick of myself already. I can’t even imagine how tired you are. I can barely keep my eyes open.

So should we celebrate futility? I don’t know if celebrate is the right word. We should accept futility, because it’s our default condition. We should fight futility, because anything less leads to fetal position sadness. We should strive toward what seems to be the sun, even if we know our stupid wax wings will stupidly melt and send us spinning toward the stupid puke brown ground.

Forget everything I said earlier. We shouldn’t be detached.

Jeronne Maymon won’t always have 19 rebounds. Frankie Sullivan won’t always shoot 2-12 from the field. Auburn will one day score more than 49 points and shoot better than 30 percent on the road.

“We are what we are offensively, so that’s not surprising,” said Tony Barbee.

Which made me think of these lines from Vonnegut’s Slapstick:

I addressed his scribes directly, speaking over his head. “History is merely a list of surprises,” I said. “It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again. Please write that down.”

Top photo via Rocky Top Talk.

…

Keep Reading:

* Dear Cam: You’re the Best
* LSU girls love Auburn Men, says HBOs’ “Treme”
* Fantastic photos of Bjork inside Jordan-Hare Stadium
* The Great Bo Jackson A-Day Race of 1984

Follow us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.

I have a confession.

I love LSU.

I know, I know. Give me a couple hundred words.

Let me explain like this: Let’s say you’re married. Your wife’s name is Jennifer. Jennifer says to you one day, “Honey, if you never met me would you have dated Kate?” Kate is a mutual acquaintance who lives in the neighborhood with her husband Steve, Steve who smells vaguely of sulfur and looks like a normal-sized version of the lead dwarf from Time Bandits, which is odd, because Kate is pretty and smart and she cooks delicious Mexican food.

“No, of course not, babe,” you say. And you mean it. You do. You’re a stand-up dude. You don’t want Jennifer to have any reason for insecurity, and you suspect Steve is the vengeful murdering type. But, somewhere in the back of your mind, shelved right next to memory of the time you stole $3.25 worth of quarters from Ms. Walter and the realization you found your 47-year-old 3rd grade teacher oddly attractive, is the thought, I would’ve totally dated Kate if I’d never met Jennifer. And then you think, If Jennifer is ever devoured by a pack of roving wild dogs in Moscow, well then . . .

And of course you shut down such thoughts, because you love Jennifer and you couldn’t be happier. No really. Did you see what she did last January? You say, “You’re my girl forever and always.” You give her a little kiss and she saunters away satisfied.

Of course you in no way wish for Jennifer to get devoured by a pack of roving wild dogs in Moscow. That is decidedly not the plan. But you’re a worldly guy. You scan the headlines of the newspaper you’re using to line the birdcage. You took World Studies sophomore year. You know things. You realize it is totally possible that Jennifer will be devoured by a pack of roving wild dogs in Moscow. Just like it’s totally possible Auburn will one day receive the Death Penalty.

And then you’re left with Kate and LSU. These aren’t your first choices. You didn’t pick Kate or LSU. Not per se, as we say. You don’t want to be a fan of either. But a pack of roving wild dogs in Moscow is divvying up what’s left of Jennifer and that balloon-necked children’s nightmare Milton McGregor is one routine traffic stop away from getting caught funneling 34 17 and 18-year-olds Victoryland money. And, dammit, Auburn, the Yella Fella took to using live ammo during his commercials. He’s already killed two personal assistants and an extra, and it’s rumored he crossed the border somewhere near Ciudad Juárez. Which has nothing to do with Auburn football receiving the Death Penalty, but it’s still important for world building purposes. Because the Auburn Board of Trustees is either the Jedi Council or the Legion of Doom. Maybe both. Somehow. I don’t know. Solomon Grundy is the bagman.

And so there you go. What are you going to do? You have to move on with your life at some point. You might even have to admit how arbitrary your choices of Jennifer and Auburn were. Who’s to say we have any control over anything? You certainly can’t control a pack of roving wild dogs in Moscow or Milton McGregor.

"Hey sweetheart . . . bingo?"

So you see I’m not saying I am a “fan” of LSU. I’m just saying I like the cut of Les Miles’ jib and I read this great book by former LSU football player John Ed Bradley called “It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium” (probably the best book ever written by a man named John Ed) and Baton Rouge is 45 minutes from New Orleans whereas Auburn is 45 minutes from Montgomery. I’m just saying if Auburn ever exploded I would change my name, move to Louisiana, and try to marry into old-time Cajun money.

I’m just saying it’s best to be prepared.

Something we Auburn fans should never be prepared for: feeling shame over celebrating an Alabama loss.

Take a look at this picture.

This is our enemy. Our enemy is sad. Our enemy was defeated. Thus, we are happy.

I’m a fair-minded enough person. I consider myself a member of the silent majority champions for civil liberties, free speech, and the rest. I did my time with the Liberal Arts. I read at or above a 5th grade level. I sometimes force NPR upon myself.

But I’m also a person. And this is my outlet for hate.

The insistence that we should not celebrate the loss of an opposing football team — The Opposing Football Team, and the greatest representation of our ideological enemy — is boring and a buzzkill. Please step aside, as I have some celebrating to do. I might even set some personal property on fire in a safe and responsible manner.

Photos via The Birmingham News, Press-Register, and 30FPS.

…

Keep Reading:

* Vintage War [Effing] Eagle shirt great for JELL-O wrestling
* Dean Foy celebrates Bama’s loss to Vanderbilt, crowd surfs at Toomer’s Corner
* Mississippi state trooper crashes Tiger Walk
* Top American pale ale first brewed in Auburn bathtub
* Volleyball player commits to Auburn by painting AU logo on exotic tortoise
* Harvey Updyke Halloween costume
* Guy crashes Tiger Walk, gets arrested
* Auburn English professor on “Jeopardy!”
* TWER interviews one of Auburn’s “Girls of the SEC”
* John Travolta in an Auburn shirt
* Auburn grad stars in new National Geographic reality show
* “Glee” star Naya Rivera wears Auburn shirt in FHM photo shoot

Like us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.

I don’t remember seeing Cam on campus. I think I might’ve, once. There are vague memories of a giant man, much too giant to be riding a scooter (where did he think he was, Gainesville?), puttering out of the parking lot below The Quad, the one next to the new Student Center, and leaving behind a large group of students, myself maybe included. That might’ve happened, and someone might’ve said, in a voice I might’ve thought was much too breathless at the time, “I think that was Cam.” It could’ve even been my voice.

But just because I didn’t see Cam around campus, and it’s not like we should’ve crossed paths in any way — he wasn’t crawling with me toward the finish line of a journalism degree — doesn’t mean he wasn’t around. I’m sure he made appearances. Though, I’m not sure he had a declared major. And I’m not going to pretend like I’m not OK with that. He could’ve rode circles around the bottom of Lowder on his scooter every day for six hours wearing a pinwheel hat and pantaloons as part of the electrical engineering program and I would’ve clapped and told anyone who would listen he should be valedictorian. (Ben Tate spent the majority of his senior year riding a bicycle around Haley Center’s 1st floor, no doubt trying to solicit Facebook fans. Kenny Irons spent his last semester waiting in line for a Playstation 3 and scaring freshmen by suddenly emerging from behind trees and bushes.) I admit to being one of the Auburn Family’s black sheep. “So what do you do?” “Everything. I do everything.”

But no matter. I knew he was there somewhere, being great.

Just what does it mean to be great? Do you think about that? These are the things you have time to think about when you’re not a 6’6” 250 pound star quarterback for the Carolina Panthers and the biggest part of your day involves donning a robe you and your girlfriend stole from the Ritz Carlton in New Orleans and checking to see if Netflix has overnighted you John Woo’s Hard Boiled. If you’re Cam, you don’t have to think about greatness. Greatness is, you are.

So I think about what it means to be great a lot. I read books by and about great men and women. I watch movies, I listen to music, I look at pictures: all to find greatness. But I’m not totally sure greatness can be found or sought or grasped by effort. There’s a baseball quote: “.300 hitters are born, not made.” It’s pithy, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. It also doesn’t mean it is true.

Most people I would consider great are more idea than person. Think of Gandhi or MLK or JFK or Jesus: they were people, yes, but the idea of Jesus, his ideology, is more important than the man of Jesus. But do athletes have an ideology? I guess you could say their style of play is in effect an ideological choice. Is hardnosed an ideology? Is finesse or power or speed an ideology?

Existing, that’s the word I think, existing, not being, on campus with Cam was what I imagine being in Paris in the ’20s or California in the ’60s or, heck why not, he is the Blessed Individual, with Jesus in 30 A.D. His presence pervaded everything. The town kind of existed in terms of Cam and Not Cam. The totality of Auburn: the scandal, the cheers of the studying, chatting, and meandering in the Student Center when it was announced, “Cam is in the clear,” the black lettering on barbeque restaurants, the signs and jerseys and leers of middle-aged white women, all the ardor of amateur rappers, the old men in barber shops, the rolling of the then-living trees, the shimmies, the shakes, the S on his chest. It was a moment. A special moment even. If you were there (and if you’re crazy like me), you know.

Existing on campus with Cam for a year reminds me of one of my favorite books, A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley. A Fan’s Notes is about a lot of things, like all good books, but at its heart it’s about being an unwitting outcast in post-World War II America. It’s funny, honest, and sad. I’d recommend a read, if you’ve got the time or urge.

Exley had his own Cam Newton back in the day, except he was named Frank Gifford. Both Exley and Gifford attended USC. Exley and Gifford, like Cam and me, didn’t cross paths but maybe once. Gifford was an All-American, on the tip of every beautiful Californian tongue. He went on to star for the Giants for years. But this is what Exley thinks to himself when he sees him in a diner during their USC years.

I did, however, want to shout, “Listen, you son of bitch, life isn’t all a [blank] football game! You won’t always get the girl! Life is rejection and pain and loss”—all those things I so cherishingly cuddled in my self-pitying bosom. I didn’t, of course, say any such thing; almost immediately he was up and standing right next to me; waiting to pay the cashier.

I don’t begrudge Cam. And I don’t think many, if any, Auburn fans do. (Every other fan in the Southeast, now that’s another matter.) But part of you has to ask, What makes you so great, Cam? Which leads to, Why aren’t I great like you, Cam?

Before Gifford leaves, he smiles at Exley.

With that smile, whatever he meant by it, a smile that he doubtless wouldn’t remember, he impressed upon me, in the rigidity of my embarrassment, that it is unmaly to burden others with one’s grief. Even though it is man’s particularly unhappy aptitude to see to it that his fate is shared.

If I ever saw Cam I’d try to say something like all that. But I’d probably just say something dumb, something like, “War Eagle.”

By my rough estimate there were more Auburn No. 2 jerseys than Carolina No. 1s at the Panthers-Falcons game in Atlanta. A lot more. If pressed, I’d say something like 2-to-1. “Where are all the Panthers fans?” a girl sitting a row behind us asked her male friend. “They’re all disguised as Auburn fans,” he said. “War Eagle, errr, I mean Go Panthers.” And they laughed. They were SEC fans of some sort. LSU maybe. The main focus of their conversation: Cam Newton. “Cam’s a better player, but Tim Tebow is a better leader.” A bunch of crap like that. He was fond of his own voice.

“It’s a scam,” a man in Bama regalia yelled after Cam broke out of the pocket and completed a long third down pass. “A scam!” Another guy, a red-faced Falcon fan wearing a visor topped with gray hair, looked directly at me after Cam threw his second interception and said, “Roll Tide.” I looked around. Who me? He nodded. Yeah, me. Roll Tide. Me? Surely he didn’t mean me. I was wearing a teal shirt, not quite Panther teal but also obviously not implying Falcon sympathies, and hadn’t so much as yelled “War Eagle” or “Go Cam Go” or “Go to hell, Julio.” Granted, I did raise my hands in synchronization with the referee when Cam ran for a touchdown. And I did laugh and smile when he did his Deion Sanders’ inspired dance. And I might’ve even yelled about how he was a “freak.” But I most certainly did not do anything Auburn-y. And yet this seemingly drunk man knew. Yeah, you, his face said. I’m branded for life.

Of course, he was right. I was there to watch Cam.

I’d never been to a pro football game before that Sunday. I don’t have any real interest in professional football. If I’m looking for lack of passion, I just go to work. (You should never hire me.) Maybe my experience would’ve been different if it was a playoff game, or if the Falcons had been playing the Saints, or if the game mattered in any way whatsoever. Of course there were passionate fans. The red-faced Roll Tider for instance. But mostly it was real meh.

But of course I wasn’t there to watch the Panthers and Falcons sleepwalk through three-and-a-half quarters of football. And I suspect a large portion of my fellow SEC fans were there for Cam, too. Maybe you made the trip to Atlanta for similar reasons.

I’ve told several people, complete strangers on buses and random sidewalks, that Cam Newton is the best football player I’ve ever seen play in person. It’s an experience watching Cam play. There’s something ethereal, sublime even, about watching someone do something you care about more than you can explain so well.

I suspect I wouldn’t like Cam all that much if we were to meet. I suspect he’s not the humblest of young men. I suspect we have nothing in common. I suspect you should never meet your heroes, especially if they’re athletes.

That way you can love the idea of Cam. Reality has no place in sport.

There’s a large grassy field in Auburn off Donahue known as The Beach. On clear, pleasant days, students gather in small groups behind trucks with black, yellow, and chocolate labs and Frisbees to be college students. Some seated, some sun-bathing, some drinking cheap beer. It all looks very idyllic and nostalgic, like something you’ll remember later in life when you’re dragging, literally dragging, your third child around the supermarket looking for flour. You’ll suddenly see a guy in his early 20s and, for just a second, you’ll wonder how you got from The Beach to here. And maybe you’ll be sad until Fred Jr. starts screaming about how he wants a Coca-Cola and you’ll remind yourself to think about it later.

Several times, driving along, I imagined what would happen if I took my 11-year-old miniature schnauzer Cooper to The Beach. Cooper and I moved to Auburn in 2006. We only knew each other. Consequently, we’ve had many conversations about the importance of bananas to a well-rounded diet and the state of contemporary American literature.

In my head, it was always something like this*:

Cooper and I will pull up in my Nissan Frontier, made conspicuous by its lack of mud and normal, tiny tires, and I’ll get out and take a deep breath. Smells like success and Skoal. I’ll lower Cooper to the trampled grass and prepare myself to be welcomed by my fellow beachgoers.

But no one will welcome us. Cooper will bark and sniff and bristle at the larger, more laidback labs and golden retrievers as I self-consciously sit on my tailgate feeling like I wore the wrong shirt. A mixed group of guys and girls that is Brett Favre away from being a Wrangler ad will be talking and laughing and laughing at their own talking several car lengths to our left. At some point Cooper will wander over and start posturing with their black lab. (He’s a little alpha male, bless him.)

And one of the guys will say, “Hey dude, control your dog.” I’ll call Cooper, making some joke about how he thinks he’s bigger than he is. But Cooper won’t listen. It will go on like this until I wander over myself. By then, Cooper is in a rage, growling, barking, the hair on his back stiff. One of the girls will insult Cooper’s size, the implication being I’m less of a man because I have a small dog. I’ll say something back, probably something biting and mean, because I have a “smart mouth.” All the guys will puff themselves up, assuming their most manly and intimidating stances. I’ll keep talking, because I never know when to stop in such situations. The words will escalate quickly, and we’ll start shoving.

I’m tall and lanky, built for speed and retreat. They’ll be tall and bulky, built for clubbing and protection. I’ll be shoved to the ground. Cooper will growl. And then, for whatever reason, I’ll say this:

“I love all of you Auburn fans, even those of you I don’t know, probably especially those of you I don’t know,” I’ll say to them as I rise to my feet, wincing a bit for effect. “I love you and I want you to know I don’t want to think Auburn paid Cam Newton for his services. I really don’t. But maybe we (or in such a case does the pronoun become they?) did use money to influence Cam’s collegiate decision. I don’t know. Money moves in mysterious ways. But can we be adults about it, my brothers and my sisters in War Eagle, and say that we don’t care and/or it doesn’t matter if Cam was paid? Because if there’s one individual right we have on this planet, bestowed upon us by The Ten Commandments or The Magna Carta or McDonald’s, it’s that we get to choose what we believe to be real and important and meaningful, even if we’re terrifically, stupendously, radically wrong.

“Did we pay Cam Newton? I don’t care. If we did, I hope we paid him all the money. I hope he has a Swiss bank account stacked with YellaWood cash money. I hope he invested in gold. I hope he has 14 wives and a 54-room mansion in Slovenia. Because you know what? It doesn’t matter. He played for Auburn. I went to Auburn. I’m an Auburn fan. It was fun and good and I’ll always remember that season. And now he plays for the Panthers. And I’m going to cheer for him. And I don’t care how snarky or cynical opposing fans get. I’ll cheer for Cam and all that what he represents, good, bad, or undeterminable. Strike me down if you must.”

They’ll look at me with shock, and one of them, a guy wearing a green T-shirt with one of those front pockets, short khaki shorts, and boat shoes, will say, “Maybe we should call the police.”

That’s when Cooper and I will make like a pair of one-legged Cam Newtons toward the treeline.

*Yeah, that’s a lie. I drank three cups of coffee and it just kind of channeled itself into a Word document. I apologize for lying to you. It’s true in spirit, if that makes you feel any better. If you made it this far, thank you for reading. I know it was long and this is the Internet. I’m sorry it was so long. I’ll try to be more concise next time. All right, goodbye. I love you.

Related: The same guy talking about his five seasons in the Auburn student section / And all God’s people said ‘War Eagle’ / We didn’t pay Cam Newton.

…

Keep Reading:

* Fear and Loathing in Tuscaloosa
* Friday Night Life
* Former Auburn cheerleader stars in ‘Best Worst Movie’
* Auburn’s Miss Universe contestant, Audrey Moore
* Auburn amputee has tiger-striped prosthetic legs
* Two campy degrees of separation ‘twixt Auburn and Swamp Thing

Follow us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.

David Housel exudes largeness. Like a Chappy’s booth is the known world. Mirrors upon mirrors inside mirrors around his head. David Housel is and isn’t David Housel like everything is and isn’t everything else. Nose crooked. Voice of the same sort. Arms up. Wide. Like this. Like he’s hugging a big old grizzly bear. “Live life like this.” Eyes on eyes. Them two arms signaling a score for the good guys. “Not like this.” Hands on shoulders, arms crossed. Choices upon choices inside choices.

Asked a cab driver how he was doing. “I’m not one to complain,” he said. “Shit could get a lot worse.” That’s New Orleans right there? Yeah? There’s the fatalism of abandoned houses, rundown districts, and leftover fatality Xs from Katrina. A man pushing a shopping cart full of broken glass and flaked rubber and the heap of a woman on a stained mattress underneath an overpass. Today sucks but tomorrow could suck more. So shut your mouth. And Auburn? “Ahhh, so you got to see Cam Newton play?”

A dirty bearded man, a homeless man it can be assumed, was laid out on Canal Street. Out cold as it is. Outside a CVS that sold liquor. A girl in a dress, a pretty girl it can be said, fashionable and blonde and young, stood holding an iPhone. There was a boy with her, a young man, her boyfriend it can be conjectured. He looked down at the body, still breathing it was hoped, and then around, furtively. She motioned hurry. He thumbs-upped over his fellow sleeping human being. She wiggled her thumb and shazaam! For The Facebook. They went into CVS. To laugh and frolic, it can be theorized.

Visited several museums. Seen all sorts of art. Seen Jesus die a baker’s dozen. Seen some inbred-looking fools staring fisheyed into the middle distance. Seen the mentally ill be congratulated for their mental illness. Best art wasn’t in a museum. Best art was on the wall of an abandoned train depot and an old unused store and what looked to be a fleeced apartment. The best art is living. Walls are born. They mature. They crumble and fade. Then they collapse and return to the earth. A regular circle of life. What’s a tattoo here and there along the way?

The above and below are Banksy’s. Banksy visited New Orleans at some point. 2008 maybe. Who(m)ever Banksy is or was. He (or she) painted a dozen or so murals around the city. Subversive stuff, The Full Banksy Treatment. Reportedly or allegedly or internetedly, any surface painted with an authentic Banksy appreciated $75,000 to $200,000.

Looking at all that’s left. Fellow named Fred Radtke, aka The Gray Ghost, and some other well-meaners covered the rest. Art is art until it isn’t art. Tomorrow, today, who knows when the decision is made. Remember the eye of the beholder. Behold but don’t be held.

Met an artist. A painter he said. Lived out back in what he termed his studio but what was really a garage turned living space. All his pants had paint stains. His right eye was more bright blood red than white. Beer cans and cigarette butts scattered hither and yon. Place smelling of warehouse and dog. No car. Few clothes. Power shut off. Out the door with a boot at month’s end. Made it seem he wasn’t all show. Silly that. Said he was post-impressionism. “Always said I don’t know what art looks like, but I can show you.” Nodded like that was all that needed to be said.

Met a man named Jack at bar named Mimi’s. Jack walked in and ordered a “three-dollar beer” and handed the nervous bartender three crumpled ones with a shaking hand. “All right, Jack,” the nervous bartender said with a tone of inevitability. Jack had bad teeth, cutoff jeans, and a bobblehead. “You’re a cool cat,” he said, one stool over. Couple minutes later he said, “You’re young and a real prick.” Two lawyers wearing matching white buttondowns and hipster glasses were drinking cocktails and saying words like “due diligence” and “moot” with pride and volume in the closest corner. Decided to leave before Jack finished his beer. Stood and shook hands, he glancing at his beer. He wanted to leave, maybe follow, maybe rob, maybe tell a story of sorrow and woe. But there was the three-dollar beer. Jack stuck with what he knew.

Heard Jack used to live on a guy’s porch in the neighborhood, a little alcove that wasn’t the street. Deal was Jack would maintain the lawn and protect the porch from other wayfarers. Guy even gave Jack a little money here and there to keep him going. But then the guy moved. The new tenants, two girls, one from Uptown, the other from South Carolina, didn’t want Jack living on their porch. Understandably. They even offered to give him food now and again. Jack didn’t like that. Not at all. He hated it so much he broke a beer bottle and chased the smaller of the two yelling about how she was a “bitch” and he was going to “slit her throat.” The other roommate grabbed a bat and chased after Jack. Picture it: Small girl from South Carolina, works in a vintage designer boutique, being chased by a shaky homeless alcoholic with a broken beer bottle who’s being chased by a girl from Uptown, who works at the same boutique, brandishing a baseball bat and yelling. Luck’s all around. Jack’s an aging alcoholic and the girl just jogged in a circle until he went double. The police came and did police things.

Seems life’s about perspective. Look close. Or don’t. Happiness is blurriness. The best one can do is find one’s way of looking.

New Orleanians are hardy. And hearty as long as we generalizing. They’re proud too. There’s the Saints and jazz and there’s Katrina. Those Xs are part of the pride. This couldn’t kill us and that won’t either. A lot of the houses, the shotgun doubles and narrow two-story singles, have new paint. Or what looks to be new paint. But there’s that X. At once hope and sorrow.

New Orleans is and isn’t New Orleans like Auburn is and isn’t Auburn.

Ben Bartley recently graduated from Auburn University with a degree in journalism. He’s a bad journalist. But he tries very hard. He is currently seeking writing opportunities. For a modest sum (like real, real modest, like a chocolate milkshake), he will handle your e-mail correspondence with your mom, write personalized love letters to either sex, scribble a sonnet about the two hours you spent bathing your cat, and/or much more. Contact him at thepigskinpathos@yahoo.com.

…

Keep Reading:

* And All God’s People Said “War Eagle”
* Fans equate Iron Bowl losses with the end of the world—now confirmed by science!
* Auburn is the question, Cam the answer on Jeopardy!
* Derek Jeter’s guardian angel spotted—and he’s an Auburn fan

Like us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.

Mr. Coach Gene Chizik tell The Toro The Toro “not academically eligible” for play against The State of Utah. Ha! The Toro tell Mr. Coach Gene Chizik The Toro not attend class since time at Auburn. The Toro mucho ocupado creating new Spanish translation of In Search of Lost Time by The Marcel Proust and raising turtles who fight the other turtles. The Toro have not time for class! Sometimes Mr. Coach Gene Chizik cerebrado tan mudo y pequeño. The turtles, Mr. Coach Gene Chizik, they fight!

The Toro watch Barton Fink last night. The Toro like these The Coen Brothers. The Toro also see world essentially absurd and full of miscommunication and stupidity. The Toro like scene where The Fat Man with The Hat tells the smaller Jewish Man with The Hair about life of mind. “Do you see the life of the mind!?!?!” The Toro understand and believe it explain certain deep truths about process of creation and effect of creation upon creator. The Toro also sometimes “runs with the bull” to No Country for Old Men. The Toro respect Big Man with Funny Hair Who Kill and No Smile. The Toro believes you’re picking up what The Toro he is putting down.

The Toro create play to help The Mr. Coach Ted Roof keep job. You know . . . for the kids.

Tiny self-important white man wearing polo one size too big, does he think The Toro not see his hombre tetas?, ask The Toro, “Eltoro (The Toro tell tiny white man he wish to be called The Toro, yet he refuse), are you upset that, this being your senior season, you are not starting?”

The Toro pause. The Toro would like to grab tetas of hombre and twist. But The Towel Taylor tell The Toro he not able to do this after The Beat Hack complain about missing nipple forcibly removed by The Toro after The Beat Hack ask Stupid Leading Question that The Toro No Wish to Answer.

The Toro look into the middle distance. The Toro see The Barrett Trotter answer question. The Toro smile. “Do you think The Toro concern with when The Toro play?”

Some will say The Toro cop shtick of Tray Blackmon. (The Toro always say live and let live, mostly just before attempting kill.) But The Toro would like it to be know that The Toro, while he respect The Ball of Hate Who is Little, he, The Toro, is muy different person with more mature and more deeper thought process. That was two years past and The Toro will soon be College Success.

The Toro writes under the pseudonyms Jorge Louis Borges, Roberto Bolaño, Fidel Castro, and Patricia Cornwell.

Sometimes The Toro look into the night sky and he, The Toro, he see airplanes. And sometimes The Toro wishes these airplanes were shooting stars. The Toro tell The Darren Bates this at practice. The Darren Bates start laughing. The Toro confused. Why The Darren Bates laugh? The Toro opens soul and delivers deepest darkest gem of The Toro and The Darren Bates laugh. Between gasping, much like cat with ball of hair in throat, The Darren Bates explain to The Toro that a man name Bob have song with same lyrics and that he, The Darren Bates, thought The Toro was making joke. The Darren Bates to miss three weeks because post-traumatic stress disorder.

The Toro go to see The Jerry Seinfeld of television’s The Seinfeld in Columbus concert. Friend make home movie:

The Toro become enrage when The Jerry Seinfeld make joke about airplane and the food that is bad. If The Toro wanted humor of observation The Toro would hide in ship and return to Siberia and prison camp of Czar Putin. Muy ocasión para la observación! The Toro come to think The Jerry Seinfeld have muy funny show in Siberia. He call Racist with Tall Hair. They be wacky and have disturbance of the emotions.

The Toro not need Old Friend of Oprah to tell The Toro why the cage bird she sing.

The Mr. Coach Roof once tell The Toro “play by instinct.” The Toro find The Mr. Coach Roof muy hilarante. He think The Toro think on field? Oh mi amigo del coche! The Mr. Coach Roof is such hombre valiente. He need think less. The Toro have brain poked at year doce. No más de pensamiento! The Toro consider António Caetano de Abreu Freire Egas Moniz hero. You so silly Mr. Coach Ted Roof.

The Toro would like to offer one thousand bleeding heart of The Wicked Updyke to Huitzilopochtli, god of war and sun, for providing help of Señor Mark of The Auburner. Señor Mark is muy good man and friend of TWER. You should follow Señor Mark on The Twitter and say things good about wit and jovial nature. He good guy and he know how to mix the pictures and make new picture, much like devil!

How to say War Eagle!

…

Keep Reading:

* Bama fans boo Auburn gymnast for striking Heisman pose
* Hit Stanley McClover in the face for discounts!* G.I. Joe’s Auburn’s connection
* The Great Bo Jackson A-Day Race of 1984
* Actor named Auburn can’t get gig going by his first name
* How Fraternities Work
* That time Green Day played an Auburn house show
* Fantastic photos of Bjork inside Jordan-Hare Stadium

Follow us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.

Reading the Psalms as an Auburn Fan
T.C. Nomel

God & Football: Faith and Fanaticism in the SEC
Chad Gibbs

Alabamians will get riled about politics, no doubt. All sorts of half-heard opinions will emerge from even the mildest non-partisan. But to get someone really riled, to get them hopping mad as my mom might say, start opining on God and football. That’s when the rubber of patience meets the road of go to hell in Alabama.

I’m not real sure what God is like. I like to think he’s a big god: infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, alpha, omega, never beta. And I like to think He doesn’t shoot craps on city street corners or juggle galaxies for guffaws. And I believe in free will and might even think there’s a sort of peripherally-glimpsed crystalline determinism at work. But I also think God is a god of the infinitesimal: waterbugs and catfish, Walmarts and convenient parking, walks and catnaps. Let’s say God is somehow more and less than we can possibly imagine.

Saying all that, can we even begin to know if God cares about football? And, assuming yes, does He care about Auburn football? If He “cares” about Auburn football, does that mean He shuns and smites Alabama, Georgia, LSU, and all the rest? Are we His chosen people? Or do His rays shine on barners and bammers equally? (If we are His chosen people, how offended is He that I referred to us as barners? Which is to say don’t get all panty-wadded. That’s just what those dumb dirty bammers want.)

There’s probably a bunch of different ways to attack the “Does God care about football?” conundrum, but here are two books attempting to answer that distinctly Southern concern, each in its own way. And hey, bonus: Both were written by Auburn fans.

Bammers are never silent for very long, but, beating them does, in some cases, at least dampen their rhetoric temporarily, and so we are right to pray for victory over them, so as to slow the proliferation of their harmful ideology.

Reading the Psalms as an Auburn Fan is exactly what the title suggests — a reading of the Psalms filtered through an unapologetic orange-and-navy-tinted viewpoint, specifically focused on Auburn’s last three football seasons. The depths of 2008 and the heartbreak of 2009 are contrasted with the joy of 2010. Nomel interprets the three seasons through three different sections of the Psalter he labels as Psalms of Lament, Psalms of Thanksgiving, and Psalms of Imprecation. In these three sections, he goes verse by verse through various Psalms, relating them to the ups and downs of Auburn football. For example, a section from a Psalm of Thanksgiving:

You turned my wailing into dancing;
you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy,
that my heart may sing to you and not be silent.
O LORD, my God, I will give you thanks forever.
– Psalms 30:11-12

Which Nomel relates to Auburn’s championship season. “In 2010, our wailing was indeed turned to dancing, just as our offense danced around defenders to astronomical production.” And so go the other sections in a similar manner. This ex post facto reading of the Bible through the narrow view of Auburn football 2008-2010 gets a bit tedious. In Psalms of Lament he compares the psalmist’s guilt and heavy burden to Alabama’s 2009 season, writing:

While we may not see Alabama’s 2009 BCS championship as due punishment for some sin on the part of the Auburn Family, we must nonetheless recognize that we are all guilty of sin (cf. Rom 3:23).

Sometimes, maybe even often, these comparisons seem slapdash. Taking words of despair and Godly-seeking written a couple thousand years back when and applying them to, say, Auburn losing to Alabama 36-0 reads ridiculous at times. Sometimes the seriousness of Nomel’s goal gets oppressive.

But, as the book progresses, the reader has a choice: to either accept the narrative Nomel has created and let him lead you on a very (very, very) Auburn-centric reading of scripture or to reject his conjectures and find it all frivolous. If the reader accepts Nomel’s reading of the Psalms as an Auburn fan the book becomes a fun sort of ride, and the reading becomes a game of seeing how Nomel will stretch certain lines to fit the 2008-10 seasons. He gets extra points for repeated creative rewording of the fanbase-wide despair of both 2008 and Bama’s 2009 BCS Championship.

Theological Football

Nomel, unlike Gibbs (see below), attempts to provide scriptural evidence of God’s football caring. He quotes scripture from Psalms, Ephesians, Proverbs, Job, and other books to support his claim. John Calvin, John Wesley, and Thomas Aquinas are also quoted. Nomel writes:

To say that God is unconcerned with the outcome of a football game is to say that there is something, anything, in his creation for he does not care. That is simply not the God that we know through the Bible.

He upholds the logic of God cares about everything in His creation, therefore God cares about football, therefore God cares about Auburn football. But then if we’re accepting that God cares about Auburn football, and if Nomel’s going to base an entire book around the idea of reading His word through an Auburn perspective, why does Auburn ever lose a game? “The reality is that the win or loss functioned as part of God’s will.” Don’t soft-pedal me now, T.C.

The Auburn fan in me wishes he would’ve switched to nukes and convinced me through tangential verses that God really is an Auburn fan. I wanted to see the light and be baptized in Toomer’s lemonade neath our dying trees. But alas. Perhaps an idea for his next book.

Bammers, Barners, and Communiss!

The first answer to this question that I considered was that a bammer is anyone who accepts and promotes the legitimacy of Alabama’s late-modern claim of 13 national championships. My preliminary research, however, failed to produce an example of an Alabama fan who does not meet this criterion. Of course, not finding an Alabama fan who does not meet a proposed criterion for being a bammer supports the proposal that all Alabama fans are bammers.

My Bama fan girlfriend asked what was so funny. I read the quoted passage aloud. “I’m going to burn that book. Come here. Give me the book. Don’t you run.” I scurried to the far side of the kitchen table. “I always knew you were a bammer.” We made five or six rotations around the oblong table before I broke off and juked behind a chair. “That book is poison. It must be burned.” She made a swipe over the chair and I hopped back. “That’s something a bammer would say.” She eventually tackled me onto the couch and pried the book from my hands. I was the only one laughing. I suggest Alabama fans suffering from high blood pressure and early-onset Harvey Updyke Syndrome avoid this book.

Jokes aside, what is a bammer? Mr. Nomel:

A bammer is anyone who by their words and actions affirm the vailidity of the “rightful place” mindset.

Nomel’s distaste for the “rightful place” mindset returns repeatedly throughout the book; the idea frames his readings of the Psalms dealing with the “wicked” and those who have done the Psalmist harm, just go back to the first quotation above when he writes of praying for victory “as to slow the proliferation of their harmful ideology.” The man has passion. So much so that is makes one think a group of Bama fans drowned his puppy or kicked his mother. Though I’d bet those of us Auburn men and women born in Alabama understand the feeling. No hate from here.

Alabama fans will call us barners and we’ll call them bammers forever, or we will until more clever and demeaning slang is invented. More depressing is the interfanbase use of bammer by Auburn fans. Attempt to use rational thought and logic, perhaps even questioning the rightness of an Auburn action? Bammer. Vaguely repulsed by the increasing incestual use of the term Auburn Family? Bammer. Hold Auburn and its people to a higher standard, a practice known as tough love or trying to improve? Bammer. Is your neighbor a Communist?

That last paragraph has nothing to do with Nomel or his book. He keeps with the traditional hate. We can all agree there. Screw those delusional bammers.

What I want is to be the kind of person who can enjoy college football without worshiping it, even though I’m not really sure what that means. I know I want to go to games, and I want to scream like a madman, and I want to celebrate victories like I somehow contributed. But I don’t want to wish death or worse on rival fans, and I don’t want to feel physically ill when my team disappoints — and I never, ever want a game to keep me from being the person God has called me to be.

God & Football doesn’t so much ask if God cares about football. The book is Gibbs’ exploration of if God cares if he, Gibbs, cares so much about football. And it’s also his search for fans throughout the SEC who have been able to place their relationship with God and their relationship with color schemes and education institutions in the proper perspective. And it’s a look at how neurotic and nuts college football fandom in the South really is. So it basically reads like the diary of a large portion of SEC football fans.

The book doesn’t work because it’s deeply insightful or full of spiritual truths. Gibbs isn’t going deep into scripture like Nomel. If Nomel’s a theologian, Gibbs is more of a sociologist. God & Football works because it’s funny and inviting and breezy without being vapid. It’s like reading a David Sedaris book if Sedaris grew up in Alabama, attended Auburn, wasn’t gay, and was focused more on church and God than trying to quit smoking.

Like Sedaris, Gibbs presents himself as a character to be laughed with and, sometimes, at. For these types of books — the non-fiction, rambling, essayistic sort — to be successful the writer-cum-narrator must have a strong personality, at once clever yet not too clever, because it’s always easier to laugh when the reader feels smarter and superior to the writer. David Foster Wallace said his on-page persona in his non-fiction pieces was always a little slower, a bit more gee-shucks and ahh-man than his actual self. Gibbs, whether consciously or not, succeeded in this with his book. If a writer can perfect that voice, and add the tics of his or her personality, the reader will follow just about anywhere.

“What you were describing as the Auburn family,” Jordan said, “is really what the church is supposed to look like.”

When I thought about it, he was right. In fact I think Auburn sometimes does a better job of being the church than the church does.

The meat of the book is Gibbs traveling from stadium to stadium and church to church, all 12 SEC schools getting their due representation (even Vandy, which is Week 1 actually). Through the 12 weeks of the 2009 season Gibbs spends a lot of time handwringing about how much he cares about Auburn football relative to how much time he spends thinking Godly thoughts. He suffers from a very Southern neurosis.

The journey, in theory, as presented by Gibbs, is supposed to end with a new found revelation about how football is just a game and God is eternal and what his main focus, all year, 365, even in the fall, should be about. And at points it looks like he (Book Gibbs, that is) might’ve reached the apex; he might finally have the “correct” balance. But then he, in his own eyes, regresses. But then he finishes strong.

Football is a horrible god. This one sentence sums up everything I learned in three months of traveling. . . . Sometimes I feel guilty, because in my mind I have constructed a god who fills the earth with wonderful things, only to become angry when we enjoy them. I should be thankful for football. Thankful I live in the American South, where I can enjoy the passion and pageantry of a game like no other. And thankful this game, fantastic as it is, is not my god.

One wonders how God & Football would differ if Gibbs chose 2010 instead of 2009.

(My Bama fan girlfriend would also like it to be known that she doesn’t believe Gibbs when he says he was a diehard Bama fan growing up. She refuses to believe one trip to Auburn weeks before school was set to start would convert a true crimson and white crusader. She also intimated that both Gibbs and Nomel can both burn in the place they both would very much like to avoid burning in.)

If you’ve stuck around this long, bless you. Both books succeed in their own way. Neither is the end all, be all account of God and football. But both give a more complete picture of the whole. And that’s about all anyone can ask out of a book, especially a book about God, maybe even more especially a book about this collective fever dream we call SEC football.

Hurricane Katrina changed New Orleans, forever maybe. I can’t fully grasp how much. I don’t think anyone can who wasn’t there. I’m not sure those of who haven’t lived and loved and lost in New Orleans understand what Katrina was. These four attempt to make some sense, each in their own way.

1 Dead in Attic – Chris Rose

I’m not going to lay down in words the lure of this place. Every great writer in the land, from Faulkner to Twain to Rice to Ford, has tried to do it and fallen short. It is impossible to capture the essence, tolerance, and spirit of south Louisiana in words and to try is to roll down a road of clichés, bouncing over beignets and beads and brass bands and it just is what it is.

It is home.

“I went from being a detached entertainment columnist to a soldier on the front line of a battle to save a city, a culture, a newspaper, my job, my home,” Chris Rose writes in the introduction to his collection of columns covering post-Katrina life week one to more than a year later. His account is sloppy, the type of sloppy any person with any sort of empathy would produce when watching his city destroyed by flood and the incompetence of government infrastructure. He’s sloppy and outraged and petty and loving and hopeful and depressed and pissed. But the reader understands, should understand, and forgives the sentimentality and sometimes bitter satire. Would you not be these things? Are we not these things? Rose wasn’t afraid to be pathetic. Which is also to say he was brave.

Special shoutout to my Column Writing professor Troy Johnson for assigning Rose in class. Troy was a column writer for several years at the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer (not sure how many, don’t want to date him too much) and an Auburn beat writer back in the day. For some reason he seemed to view students as adults worthy of respect and equality. He promptly returned e-mail queries, left long personalized notes on papers that made the student believe he actually closely read their attempts with care and compassion, and cared about writing as an art form. A department head or tenured professor really should have taken him aside and asked how he was going to have enough time for colleague undercutting and ingratiation when he was so busy teaching. He is, sadly, not currently teaching, but if, in the future, you have an opportunity to take one of his classes, you should.

Abdulrahman Zeitoun

Zeitoun – Dave Eggers

The true story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun’s (“Zay-toon”) post-Katrina events reads like a thriller. Zeitoun was (and no doubt is) the hard-working owner of Zeitoun A. Painting Contractors. In part because he wanted to protect his house and the houses of various clients, and in part because he, the Syrian transplant, had some of the same stubbornness of New Orleans and its residents, Zeitoun stayed past the recommended, and later mandatory, evacuation of New Orleans. The story unfolds thus: Everything was fine until it wasn’t.

Much more complicated than that of course. It could’ve been much, much more complicated (and untold) if not for the work of Dave Eggers. Zeitoun is what it is because of Eggers’ tireless reporting. To write a reworking of a true event that flows this well, with this much detail, with this much inner monologue and character development, takes weeks and months, maybe years, of interviewing and reading and talking and reading and probing and interviewing. Zeitoun is first and foremost a great work of journalism. Eggers, whose A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was all about flash and style, and who has molded himself into America’s Most Important Socially Conscious Writer with Zeitoun and novels like What is the What, wrote an extraordinary story of America (the best, the worst, the in-between), a city’s greatest disaster, and one family’s tribulations in captivatingly-clean newspaper prose.

When the Levees Broke – Spike Lee

Despite what some people have said, President Bush did not want black people to die in New Orleans. However, he did hope they would not relocate to any areas of Texas that he likes to frequent.
– Scott McClellan

Truism of history: When the crazy stuff starts hitting the spinning blades of doom the poor people get screwed. And so it was with New Orleans. Thousands of those unable or not willing to evacuate their homes — for most the only homes they’d ever known, the only homes they’d hoped to ever know — were living like subhumans inside the Super Dome, on the streets, and under overpasses. Old ladies were dying in wheelchairs, motherless babies were busting lungs, residents of the Ninth Ward, Treme, and other poor areas were left for days without food or shelter. Watching these scenes, now, then, anytime, makes one think: This happened in America? In 2005? The greatest country in the world, we say. Did we let this happen? Or were we unable to stop it from happening? Spike Lee builds a case for the former.

The HBO documentary is separated into four requiems. The first two largely focus on the storm itself, the third on the post-Katrina landscape, and the fourth on who’s to blame and what’s being done to insure a Katrina-like flooding never happens again. Many moments of grim twinging and pathos. Dozens of people are interviewed, including Kayne West, Michael Eric Dyson, and Wendell Pierce, who plays Antoine Batiste on Treme. Watch and draw your own conclusions. Be prepared to be angry sad.

Treme – David Simon & Eric Overmyer
Season One

Nothing much happens on Treme, which is the go-to critic slam of the show. It’s just like nothing happens you guys! OK, yes, nothing happens. Which is weird for a TV show. TV shows have plots. They have twists and turns and all sorts of gimmicks to keep us wide-eyed and chatty the next day. Treme doesn’t. Or not much anyway. The question is it enough. And the second question is how much is enough. And the third answer is it depends on the person. Welcome to HBO you guys!

At times it almost feels like Simon and co. are daring you not to watch. “In this episode Davis acts like a giant poophead to his friendly gay neighbors and the Indian chief guy sows feathers onto what’s implied to be a dancing suit before leering knowingly at the curly-haired woman from down the street while eating mashed potatoes. Oh yeah, and the cokehead from Amesterdam mocks the church kids from Wisconsin for not being from New Orleans. You can just like not watch if you don’t care about the real-life struggles of a musical cross-section of post-Katrina New Orleans. I mean, that’s like your choice not to be aware and able to talk about how tough it must’ve been then at your grad school outing to the local Biergarten.” (That’s probably not a real episode, but I think you’re picking up what I’m putting down.) David Simon created The Wire. David Simon could create a series about feral cats living on an Outer Banks island and people would watch. And by people I mean me. And by cats I mean rehabilitated former child prostitutes.

Treme isn’t for everyone. (Unless you’re a lady with a hankering for an Auburn Man. Oh. My. God. In that case, it’s definitely for you.) It’s not even for most people. It’s not even for many people. But it is for some people. And those some people like it. Those some people just renewed it for another season.

BONUS:

It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium – John Ed Bradley

I was only twenty-one years old, and yet I was afraid that nothing I did for the rest of my life would equal those days when I played for LSU. . . . But what if I never had it better than when I ran out under the goalposts on Saturday night, the crowd on its feet, my teammates all around?

It’s true that some men never recover from the loss of a game they played when they were boys. It’s also true that I was determined not to be one of them. . . . Standing there in Tiger Stadium, I squeezed my eyes closed and lowered my head. Then I wept.

John Ed Bradley played center for LSU in the late ’70s. It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium isn’t so much about his playing at LSU as it is about him learning to cope with not playing football at LSU. Bradley grew up in Opelousas, Louisiana. His dad was a high school football coach. Football was his life and dream. Then it was gone. Kapoof. The book is the now what.

You, whomever you are and wherever you’re sitting, like football, don’t you? I’m sure, I’m sure. So do I. Like Bradley, I’ve spent a goodly amount of time trying to hang some meaning on its broad back. Unlike Bradley, I’ve never played the game, certainly never played SEC football. He writes well, he played football. If you like those two things, I reckon you should read this book.

…

Keep Reading:

* Former Auburn Student Remembers Five Years of Auburn Football
* Pretty Auburn girl. In the Philippines. Saving Toomer’s.
* Rare candids of Pat Sullivan at the 1971 Heisman banquet
* My first meeting with Dean Foy
* Pompadours on the Plains: the 50s revival at Auburn
* Bear Bryant’s lost year at Auburn
* The Patchwork Pat Dye, Part I
* Science Fiction Made Easy

Follow us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.

Fortuna's a cruel wench.

I’m moving to New Orleans soon. As of now, it’s not for long. But who knows. New Orleans seems to get a grip on people, like the lapel grasp of a desperate mother seeking lost children. What follows could be called research. It’s not thorough research, and it’s not complete. I missed a lot: all of Tennessee Williams, jazz, antebellum movies, numerous historical accounts, vampires. My reading, watching, and listening was haphazard and loose and scattered, but here it is, in part.

The Awakening – Kate Chopin

She could only realize that she herself — her present self — was in some way different from the other self. That she was seeing with different eyes and making the acquaintance of new conditions in herself that colored and changed her environment, she did not yet suspect.

Near the end of Season One of Treme John Goodman’s character, who is a professor at Tulane, is talking to his class about The Awakening. What’s she saying about women in the late 1800s? What’s she saying about New Orleans? What’s she saying about us? he asks. No one has an answer. A pan of the students shows several typing on computers, a couple others texting, others talking. “Is this going to be on our exam?” one asks. Not long thereafter John Goodman jumps off a ferry and drowns himself.

The Awakening concerns the psychological awakening of Edna Pontellier. It can no doubt be read as a “landmark work of early feminism.” And, sure, it is, and that’s important, especially considering the time and place of the writing, especially considering women couldn’t even vote at that point. But strip away the hyper-focused reading of academia (thesis fodder and the like, all of that which no one reads by choice) and it’s a story of a woman in the late 1800s living in New Orleans who becomes a real, fully conscious human being.

New Orleans Sketches – William Faulkner

A dream and a fire which I cannot control, driving me without those comfortable smooth paths of solidity and sleep which nature has decreed for man. A fire which I inherited willy-nilly, and which I must needs feed with talk and youth and the very vessel which bears the fire: the serpent which consumes its own kind, knowing that I can never give to the world that which is crying in me to be freed.

Faulkner moved to New Orleans in 1925 at the age of 27 determined to write fiction. Up to then he fancied himself a poet. During his six month stay in New Orleans he published a group of “sketches” with the main New Orleans literary magazine, The Double Dealer. He also sold sixteen signed stories and sketches to The Times-Picayune.

Faulkner spent a portion of his time in New Orleans “sauntering in the Quarter and along the Mississippi River docks, and sitting at cafes and in Jackson Square” with the writer Sherwood Anderson. (The quoted section taken from the excellent introduction by Faulkner scholar Carvel Collins.) While in New Orleans Faulkner also began writing his first novel, Soldier’s Pay.

Take heart, aspiring writers and creators, for William Faulkner was not born William Faulkner. He had to work. These stories and sketches, which seem to flow chronologically, move from meh to good to maybe this guy will one day write As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, which was published in 1929, just four years after he’d decided to write fiction.

His New Orleans Sketches were written in New Orleans, but they aren’t really about New Orleans. Faulkner doesn’t necessarily focus on that which makes New Orleans what it is; his subject is people. And, unlike  his later creation, Yoknapatawpha County, these people just happen to live in New Orleans.

A Walk on the Wild Side – Nelson Algren

The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives. Why men who have suffered at the hands of other men are the natural believers in humanity, while those whose part has been simply to acquire, to take all and give nothing, are the most contemptuous of mankind.
– Algren

A story about the old French Quarter and New Orleans of the 1930s. A story encompassing midget pimps, legless former circus strongmen, Southern aristocrats suffering from “black mammy syndrome,” conniving door-to-door salesmen, prostitutes, hustlers, runaways named Kitty Twist, the sane, the insane, the homeless, the insane sane homeless masquerading as eighteenth century admirals, and condom factories. A story of delicate depth and one of those novels that works best when viewed as a whole. The thud of resonation doesn’t occur until the last few pages.

The language distracts at points. Sometimes it seems as if Algren was trying too hard for a singsong cadence in his prose — obvious rhymes, seemingly forced alliteration. But when it works, when it flows naturally, his language of pimps, prostitutes, and Prohibition (one tries anyway), which relates the story of Dove Linkhorn, a naïve 16-year-old from a tiny Texas town who finds his way to New Orleans, is unlike any other before or since.

Lou Reed has said his “Walk on the Wild Side” was inspired by Algren’s novel.

The Moviegoer – Walker Percy

He is a moviegoer, though of course he does not go to movies.

Percy was born in Birmingham in 1916. He attended the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and studied medicine at Columbia University. He was raised an agnostic but later converted to Catholicism. His influences were Kierkegaard, Camus, and Sarte. He was, for me, the best Southern writer not named Faulkner.

The crux of Percy’s novels and assorted non-fiction is his interest in existentialism. Which is to say he was one of those people who thought too much, or so it would go if you handed a majority of your Southern friends and neighbors a copy of Percy’s books. The man thought. A lot. And a lot of that thinking was about the South.

The Moviegoer, his first novel, was published in 1961 and won the National Book Award. The non-tale tale, the plot being beside the point, like most if not all existentialist works, is recounted in the first person by 29-year-old Binx Bolling. Binx should be a well-adjusted Southern gentleman, but for some reason he’s stuck in “malaise.” In Percy’s words: Binx was “a young man who had all the advantages of a cultivated old-line southern family: a feel for science and art, a liking for girls, sports cars, and the ordinary things of the culture, but who nevertheless feels himself quite alienated from both worlds, the old South and the new America.”

The Moviegoer is a mapping of existential malaise. It’s a look at what some would term depression. It’s a look at a man caught between belief systems, and all the uncertainty and inaction therein. Like all great books, it’s a mirror, reflecting and refracting reality.

Read it. More than any other book on this list. Read it read it readitreaditreaditreaditreaditreaditreaditreaditreaditreaditreaditreadit.

A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

“I dust a bit…in addition, I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.”

Chances are, if you consider yourself a reader, and if you’re from the South, and if you went to college, and if you have friends relating to or involved in the above, you have an opinion about A Confederacy of Dunces. Maybe you find it hilarious and think Toole was a misunderstood sensitive genius. Maybe you find Ignatius J. Reilly to be a hero of leisure and idealism. Maybe you think he was a fat man wearing a funny hat who farted entirely too much between bouts of complaining about his valve and berating his poor, borderline-senile mother. Maybe you think Reilly was both an ironical absurdist exaggeration of overeducated idlers and a sympathetic look at a man born several centuries too late.

Who knows what you think.

Regardless, unless you find Reilly a totally reprehensible figure, and unless your reading experience is shackled to relating to the protagonist, A Confederacy of Dunces is a very funny book. Often it’s hilarious. You might even laugh out loud at Reilly’s mishaps during his attempt to locate (and keep) work — Ignatius J. Reilly, Your Young Working Boy — in the French Quarter and New Orleans at large.

Toole was born in New Orleans and attended Tulane. He committed suicide in 1969 at age 31. Dunces was published posthumously thanks to the efforts of Thelma Toole, his mother. After numerous rejections and publishing apathy, Thelma got the novel into the hands of Walker Percy who helped it get published in 1980. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981.

Managing Ignatius — The Lunacy of Lucky Dogs and Life in New Orleans – Jerry Strahan

Deep down inside they were basically kind, loyal, and caring people, but these qualities rarely surfaced.

Strahan’s collection of Lucky Dog stories, most involving various forms of vagrancy and eccentric behavior, gives credence to Toole’s view of Lucky Dog vendors in Dunces. Like New Orleans, Lucky Dogs was (and perhaps is) an oasis for the misfits and outcasts, those unable to work a “normal” job. Strahan, a Tulane history doctorate dropout who managed Lucky Dogs for more than 20 years, manages to skirt sentimentality and portray a subset of New Orleans he loved with a comedic touch.

Letters from New Orleans – Rob Walker

Walker moved to New Orleans from New York in 2000 with his girlfriend. To entertain and inform his readers, and probably as a way to cement certain nebulous ideas, he wrote a series of “letters” from the city. On the surface they don’t seem much more than stories about forgotten neighborhood bars, socioeconomic clashes, and Carnival. But Walker has a keen eye and just the right amount of outsider’s awe to present a compelling picture of the city. He focuses on the specific — the history of the song “St. James Infirmary,” the life and final resting place of R&B flamboyant Ernie K-Doe, multiple prose picturesques of Mardi Gras — to develop the whole. His conclusion: Ain’t no city like New Orleans.

Second part forthcoming

…

Keep Reading:

* The Secret History of an Underground Iron Bowl
* Pretty Auburn girl. In the Philippines. Saving Toomer’s.
* Rare candids of Pat Sullivan at the 1971 Heisman banquet
* My first meeting with Dean Foy
* Pompadours on the Plains: the 50s revival at Auburn
* Bear Bryant’s lost year at Auburn
* The Patchwork Pat Dye, Part I
* Science Fiction Made Easy

Follow us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.

Growing up, sometime in the mid-90s, I had a white T-shirt branded with a stickman sporting crazy hair and holding a surfboard under one arm with “No Regrets” embossed next to his head. The two words were multi-colored and in a funky font inside a wacky circle. I wasn’t entirely sure what the phrase meant. But I made sure to jump extra high on my trampoline and climb my neighbor’s fence with an extra disregard for property lines when I wore it. “Ben, why did you steal Mrs. Clarke’s lawn flamingo?” “No regrets, Mom.”

Through middle school and a portion of high school my family lived across the street from an elderly couple. I went fishing with the man, John, a couple times on his boat. We didn’t have much to say to each other, that about being the point of multiple males fishing. His wife, Sally, was of poor health. She rarely left the house. I’d visit her on occasion, in part because I felt bad and in part because my parents were always too busy. We’d sit in her kitchen. She’d have a long, skinny cigarette in one hand (another reason why my parents didn’t visit often), she’d be wearing a nightgown, and she’d force-feed me ice cream sandwiches. She was born and raised in South Carolina. Her drawl had the aristocratic lilt of Southern women of a bygone era. She told me Charleston was being “ruined by the Negroes.” They were making the city “dangerous.” I’d guess she once considered herself beautiful; the timeworn idea gave her voice a certain authority. “High school was the best time of my life,” she told me, smoke drifting from her nostrils. She died last year.

After my senior year of high school five baseball teammates and myself took a trip down to Panama City. Before we left, one of our teachers, who was also an assistant football coach, gave the most mature and athletic member of our group — and therefore the de facto leader — an industrial-sized box of condoms. This coach was my keyboarding instructor junior year. One day in class, while I was copying and pasting the day’s assignment, he coerced the two most attractive girls into pushing a penny across the floor with their noses. When he gave my friend those condoms he probably said something like, “You’re going to need these where you’re going.” Or, “Make sure to wrap it up, son.” Or, “Let Galaxy at Tan Fannies know the statute of limitations has done come and gone, and so tell her she can go to hell.”

My condom-receiving friend dumped his girlfriend a couple weeks before we went to the beach. Several days before the dumping he took her to see The Breakup starring Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Anniston. Just so happens a girl not her, a girl he’d been liking from afar, was going to be in Panama at the same time we were. “no regrets man,” he texted.

What I wanted to be when I grew up, age 8:

1. Auburn Football Star

2. Civil War Hero

3. Jedi Master

4. Martyr for an outnumbered and hopeless cause

5. Veterinarian

What I want to be when I grow up, age 23:

1. Alive

2. Content

3. Getting Money, yet retaining modicum of respect necessary for “self-fulfillment”

4. International Man of Mystery and Leisure/ Eccentric Millionaire

5. Auburn Football Star

My family lives in Sevierville, Tennessee. Sevierville precedes Pigeon Forge which precedes Gatlinburg. Now, for a family wearing vacation-themed airbrushed T-shirts or a World War II veteran or an Eastern European stacking cash during the summer by helping tubby tourists get tubbier at faux-Western steakhouses, the Sevierville/Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg area is a regular cornucopia of wonder. There are go karts and drive-thru wedding chapels and “the Titanic of Pigeon Forge” and, most importantly, Dolly Parton, her cleavage, and all they’ve accomplished together.

But for a 23-year-old recent college graduate staying at his parent’s house for what amounts to an interlude between youth and official adulthood there’s not too much. And what is available is expensive. And even if it wasn’t I can’t help but look upon the masses of tourists with pity. And then my pity turns to self-reproach and the self-reproach to self-pity. I mostly sit alone by the pool.

My best friend Chris lives in the area and we often wander the GOP’s wet dream of gaudy capitalism together. Chris recently graduated from the University of Tennessee and is going through an interlude of his own before law school. We eat food, we sneak onto golf courses and have involved discussions about shiftless youth and the potential existence of aliens, I reassure him about the future ascent of Tennessee football, we get nostalgic for the very recent past.

At night we sometimes sit upstairs in my parent’s house and watch television. I don’t watch TV, except when I do. I suppose that’s everyone. But I’ve taken a certain liking to the Sevier County public access channel (officially the “community channel”). One afternoon I watched the second half of a girl’s basketball game between two local high schools. Another night I watched my former eighth grade science teacher distribute science fair ribbons to sixth, seventh, and eighth graders inside what was my middle school gym.

My favorite program on the community channel is the “advertisements” it airs for each of the area schools. In each, the school’s principal recites various facts and attractive aspects of the school as the camera wanders the halls and classrooms capturing students of all ages eating, talking, and listening to focused teachers with great intent. From what I can gather, these short segments are trying to attract undecided students to select the area school that best fits their needs. But only if these prospective students are awake at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday. The actual viewers: those brewing meth in various lawless hollers, shut-in insomniacs, and me.

My sister was a senior when the Pigeon Forge High School promo was filmed. She’s a smart girl, good student, involved, well-liked, and so she was one of the students PFHS highlighted in its tour. The principal doing the narrating was the first and only in the school’s history. (The school opened in 1999.) Everyone called him Coach [Surname] even though he hadn’t coached in a couple decades. He had a large, bushy, Tom Selleck mustache. Hearing his voiceover describing the many educational and athletic available at PFHS reminded me of four years of morning announcements. His voice always promised authority. It was the voice of commanding officers. It was the voice of someone totally in control of his life.

Coach retired this year from principaling. Next year he will be the head of maintenance for the county schools. More bluntly put, King Janitor. He shaved his mustache and bought a motorcycle. My sister saw him the other day at a local restaurant. He was insistent she step outside and see his new ride. It’s a Harley, large and loud. The back of his helmet reads, “I Live Life My Way.” Coach was dating my sister’s friend’s mom for a while. She kicked him out recently. He’s been trying to repent for whatever mistakes he made. He often repents in public. My sister and her friend refer to him as “octopus hands” due to his grabby public displays of affection. He’s no doubt doing his best like all the rest.

What’s more earnest than a mid-life crisis?

To my pre-college self:

(I’m writing about and to me. But it’s in the hope you’ll recognize some part of yourself in the words — supplying the specific hoping to appeal to the general. Can’t quite remember Emerson’s words, but it’s something similar: What is true for one man is true for every man. Grandiose, I know, but I’m doing what I can. At least believe me when I say it comes from a decent place.)

Leave your apartment spring semester freshman year. The three-season box set of Battlestar Galactica will never cheat on you.

Don’t let your surly 8-11 year old miniature schnauzer Cooper keep you from talking and interacting with neighbors.

Don’t leave that box of Daylight Donuts on the kitchen table. Cooper is crafty. He will eat all the donuts. He will then almost die. You will spend the first month of your junior year in fearful mourning. His near death will also be very pricey.

Talk more in class. No one cares.

Talk to more people in class. No one cares.

Your opinions are as worthwhile as the rest of your classmates. Don’t be intimidated by their bluster.

Everyone is afraid of public ridicule. You’re not alone.

Attend fewer classes.

Study less for multiple choice tests and BS more on English essays. Bump up the symbolic language and archaic word choice.

To succeed: Reword the professor’s nonsense. Always feed the vanity. Most need the reassurance and protection against insecurity.

Write how you want. Accept the consequences, positive and negative. No one cares.

Take off the stained white hat before the end of sophomore year. Can does not equal should.

And either get a haircut or let it grow out. The in-between is not a great look.

Realize no one is going to make you do anything. Success is in large part a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Set aside the results. Work hard. But work with purpose.

Talk to more professors during office hours and in general. They are friendly. Don’t talk about grades or assignments. No one cares.

Take more classes in different majors. Don’t specialize your knowledge. (Mainly applies to the free-wheeling liberal arts types. You with the actual job security, you with the hopes and dreams of a stable financial future, should approach all this with skepticism and hesitancy.)

Spend more time talking to Dr. James Ryan of the English Department. Likewise with Dr. Christopher Keirstead.

“Don’t judge people just because their beliefs teach them to despise you.”

Be less arrogant. These people know things.

Practice skepticism and selective learning.

Never refer to yourself as a member of the Auburn Family.

Find some sort of on-campus group to join before your junior year. Helps with the moving and the shaking.

Enter relationships with coworkers and those in your major with caution. You will see these people often.

Read more widely.

Take more walks.

Engage in the community.

Talk to old people.

Actually listen when people speak.

No really, listen.

Eat breakfast occasionally.

Control your anger when Cooper barks during naps. He perceives himself as an alpha male. It’s called protection and love.

More naps.

Spend more time in the library browsing and reading on whim.

Playfully mock those who take their intelligence and book learning too seriously.

Which includes you. Try to keep it light.

Be friendly to strangers, especially campus employees, especially Karl, the (perhaps) mentally deficient janitor who work(ed) outside The Plainsman office. Even if every interaction you have with him involves Karl grabbing you by the arm and telling you how “[Auburn’s every opponent] is gonna beat that ass.” Always return his “Roll [blanking] Tide” with a “War Eagle.”

Stealing from the library is stealing from yourself.

Spend less time on Facebook and mindless Internet browsing.

Expand the wardrobe beyond T-shirts, athletic shorts, and flip flops. Just on occasion. The “I’m not trying, I dress for comfort” look is a choice, no matter how often you tell yourself you’re opting out and trying to attract friends and those of the opposite sex through force of personality.

Eat more shrimp.

Start a serious petition to keep Nihon Express on Opelika Road from closing.

A real review of Nihon’s fine dining experience:

This place is the SHIZNIT. My typical weekday night. 2 tokes from the Volcano packed with some AK48 X BlueBerry (my personal strain, hit me up if your interested) Then I turn on Adult SWIM and watch a few episodes of AquaTeen Hunger Force.. followed by you guess it Nihon to get rid of those muchies.. then i **** my girlfriend and pass out..

Don’t be afraid to engage former classmates in conversation. Assuming they won’t know you and then avoiding eye contact and crossed paths on campus makes your fifth year unnecessarily stressful and convoluted.

Show up later to Auburn home games with fewer people. A team of two can almost always get a great seat 30 minutes before kickoff if you’re willing to boldly walk the aisles.

Don’t sing “God Bless America” in a loud mocking falsetto while whipping the back of the girl’s head one row below with your stringy shaker before the Arkansas State game. That’s just rude.

Be generous.

Guard your free time.

Write more.

Realize the good times don’t end with graduation.

Don’t let the pursuit of grades blind you to the enjoyment of youth and the freedom of university life.

Gather enough willpower and self-confidence to stumble through your post-grad years.

Try to avoid acting out of insecurity and fear as often as possible.

Realize it’s all just a ride.

Help others enjoy their ride.

Buy more candles.

Stay curious.

Eat less Taco Bell.

Some say time is a river, and that we’re propelled along its course like sad sacks of debris. Time cannot be slowed, sped, or stopped. Time moves, we move, clouds gather and dissipate, birds poop on windshields, lions maul newborn wildebeests, children in Africa learn basic English to develop e-mail frauds in an attempt to steal money from old people.

But memories trick time. That which was is. And that which wasn’t is too. Memories trick time and people. Memories are not “real.” They didn’t happen. You don’t actually know what you know. Blame science. For everything. These untrue true occurrences mix and mash inside your head to become something entirely new: your brain filtering unfettered reality into recognizable bloops and blips for categorization and future recall.

Some other thoughts that may or may not be true: Memories exist outside time, consider vivid dreams. Negative memories occupy more space than positive. Planet of the Apes is the real story of humanity’s origin. Gene Chizik led Auburn to a national championship.

Here’s one last allusive (elusive?) tidbit glancing off whatever theme you happen to think I’ve been driving toward.

Sometimes I take a walk at the Sevierville city park. It’s a typical park — pool, playground, baseball fields, basketball and tennis courts. It’s situated in what I suppose would be called the poorer section of town. Lots of intricate leg tattoos, smoking, and stringy-haired women with intricate leg tattoos juggling screaming babies and cigarettes. It’s also where I played 11 and 12-year-old baseball. Back then, it seemed expansive and full of wonder and potential. But so did the cardboard box the refrigerator came in.

I’ve been back many times over the years, mostly under the pretense of jogging. But last week was one of the only times I’ve been back while baseball was being played. The implications are obvious. The kid in the green jersey pitching from the eroded half-mound wasn’t some other 12-year-old, it was me. The coach wasn’t a construction worker begrudgingly coaching his girlfriend’s son, it was my dad. The river was damned, time slowed.

After two laps on the path orbiting the park’s center, I called Chris. He asked what I was doing. I told him and he laughed. “Mommy, why is that man leaning against the tree crying?” he said in mock child’s voice. “Mommy, now the man’s collapsed to the ground. Is he hurt, mommy?” we were both laughing. “No honey, that’s just a boy, and he’s not right. He has issues. Promise mommy you’ll never do drugs.” “I promise.” “That’s my boy. Let’s go get my big man a chili dog.” “Yay!”

I left the park before someone mistook me for a pervert.

+++

During the Roman Empire, the life expectancy was 22 to 25 years. In 1900, it was 30 years.

Still waiting on that epiphany.

…

Keep Reading:

* Friday Night Lights Life
* The War Eagle Jeep in Vietnam
* 78 never-before-seen photos of the Kopper Kettle explosion of 1978
* Rare candids of Pat Sullivan at the 1971 Heisman banquet
* That time Green Day played an Auburn house show
* The G.I. Joe from Auburn
* Two campy degrees of separation between Auburn and Swamp Thing
* I Survived the Kopper Kettle Explosion and all I got was this T-shirt
* “Alabama Polytechnic is the best…” for Eugene Sledge in HBO’s The Pacific
* The Ron Swanson Pyramid of Auburn
* The Auburn plaque in 1984′s Tank

Follow us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.

"Ali's unbelievable. I thought he was hurt. I thought his body was hurt. He came back and he hit Foreman with everything he had. And he winked at me." -- Jim Brown after Round 5

The Fight
Norman Mailer
239 pages
Non-Fiction Boxing Novel

The best thing, not the only but the best, I can say about graduating with a degree in journalism is . . . well, is I realize I in no way want to be a journalist. Well, OK, clarification: I don’t want to be the guy who interviews 10 people and takes three hours to write a story that’s read all the way through by 2 percent of readers and skimmed by the other 98 percent. I don’t want to be the Who-What-When guy. The guy whose raw materials are rehashed and reworked by columnists and bloggers. The beat writer. Call it arrogance; call it craftsmanship; call it delusional. The passionate chef wants her food to be savored. The consummate optometrist wants everyone to see. And other analogies.

For the last week, I’ve been staying with my parents. While in East Tennessee, I browse daily the Knoxville News Sentinel and The Mountain Press (the local county paper). Browse is the important word. I can’t remember the last time I read a full article. Read the lead (or lede if you want to prove you went to j-school), skim a quote here, a quote there, check the concluding paragraph to make sure the gist is gisted. It’s the same concept as internet browsing. Read a section, scroll, read another section, scroll. Gotta keep moving, too much to see. (As perhaps you’re doing right now. Don’t worry. I won’t hold it against you. Go ahead. Scrollllllling.)

I do most of my browsing in the sports section. Having followed sports my entire life, having watched what probably amounts to years of Sportscenter, I’ve developed an intuitive grasp (or feel I’ve developed an intuitive grasp) for the big three. Give me the score, the stats, the key plays, and a funny quote and I’ll do the rest. I don’t want to be told how I should react to a certain game or play. Let me decide. I avoid you, PTI, Around the Horn, Jim Rome, “serious” sports radio, many sports columnists, most sports blogs.

I love features, books, columns, films, shows, whatever that contextualize sports: Friday Night Lights, Inning by Inning, Gary Smith, The Fighter, Raging Bull, Tyson, It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium, Bigger Than the Game, Go Tigers!, Gay Talese, all that. I realize it’s not an either or — well, it is in the sense time is finite, and doing something always negates the doing of something else — but, at the same time, I would rather immerse myself in the undercurrent than fret and fight over roster changes and the second-guessing of coaching decisions. I’ll argue and opine amongst friends, but I’m not going to spend bookoodles of time listening or reading or reacting to the arguments of others.

(Not a black-and-white issue. And I think parts of the above come from a place of arrogance and self-importance. But, I do think the sports culture of supposed experts and opinionated fools parading as pastime preachers and professional prophets should be deflated whenever possible. (Political and religious debate being a natural corollary.) The idea you, the reader, the American citizen, need someone to tell you — and that’s more or less what they’re doing — what to think about a situation, how to feel, how to react, is patronizing and an insult to one’s intelligence, which is more or less the role of the stalwarts of traditional journalism — to subliminally inform you of your own assumed stupidity. Journalism professors and newspaper editors consistently remind writers of the ignorance of the American reading public. Sport stupidity and punditry might be a mild, unimportant example of opinion shaping. Then again, maybe not, considering the role of sports in America. Critical thinking has to spark somewhere.)

I got to typing out some thoughts on Norman Mailer’s The Fight, but everything I typed was muddled and stupid. A total failure. So I’m going to take several hops to the rear and start simple.

I like The Fight because it gives a more complete view of one of the best and most interesting heavyweight boxing fights in history. I like The Fight because of Mailer’s voice. I like his prose and his on-page personality. I like how he refers to himself as “the interviewer” or “Norman,” acknowledging the separateness of Norman the writer and Norman the character. I like how he admits to what most critics and readers consider his greatest flaw — narcissism. I like how it’s also his greatest strength.

Now, our man of wisdom had a vice. He wrote about himself. Not only would he describe the events he saw, but his own small effect on events. This irritated critics. They spoke of ego trips and the unattractive dimensions of his narcissism. Such criticism did not hurt too much. He had already had a love affair with himself, and it used up a good deal of love. He was no longer so pleased with his presence. His daily reactions bored him.

I enjoyed his relationship with Ali. I like how he doesn’t try to hide behind objectivity. He is an Ali fan. He went to Zaire first and foremost to write an article, but he is also there to cheer for an Ali victory. I like how he contrasted the social relevance of both fighters without heavy-handedness.

I like how The Fight doesn’t just contextualize The Rumble in the Jungle, it raises the whole experience to art. (I type that last sentence in all earnestness, which is hard for me these days, earnestness. Blame the internet and snarky television.) This is where the split mentioned above returns. Mailer builds the fight into a battle between two forces. He returns repeatedly to the word “n’golo,” which he says is an African word meaning something close to force. Mailer portrays n’golo as always in flux.

Foreman, the champion, the favorite, has all the n’golo going into the fight. Many people, experts and not, think Foreman is going to seriously injure Ali. Foreman’s too strong, too fast, too young. Ali is getting older. His training has slowed. Mailer himself frequently references Ali’s pallor and his tendency to get winded before he should. Mailer follows along behind Ali and his retinue with an almost weary resignation. The only person who seems to think Ali can win the fight is Ali. And maybe Angelo Dundee, his cornerman. Mailer’s observation that Dundee loosened the ropes before the fight is one of those small details that frame any great feature.

He was all alone in the ring, the Challenger on call for the Champion, the Prince waiting for the Pretender, and unlike other fighters who wilt in the long minutes before the titleholder will appear, Ali seemed to be taking royal pleasure in his undisputed possession of the space. He looked unafraid and almost on the edge of happiness, as if the discipline of having carried himself through the two thousand nights of sleeping without his title after it had been taken from him without ever losing a contest . . . must have been a biblical seven years of trial through which he had come with the crucial part of his honor, his talent, and his desire for greatness still intact, and light came off him at this instant.

But of course Ali wins the fight. He “shocks the world.” The whole time leading up to the fight he told George he was going to dance with him. “We’re gonna dance George! Hope you got your dancing shoes George!” But he did the opposite. He went to the rope-a-dope and let Foreman punch himself out. George who could punch for days. George who could punch a hole in a man. George the quiet American Olympic champion vs. Ali the loudmouthed Nation of Islam extremist. Brawn vs. brains. Some sucker vs. the Haley Center Haymaker.

“I’m a boxing scholar. I’m a boxing scientist — this is scientific evidence. You ignore it at your peril if you forget that I am a dancing master, a great artist.”

If you haven’t seen the fight, and if you’ve got 40 minutes, you can watch it in its entirety on Youtube.

The split in the first section could’ve been simplified to indicate my preference for long-form pieces vs. the short-term immediate, and the then inevitable commenting on the short-term immediate, and the commenting on the commenting, and on and on. Mailer had the advantage of being in Zaire working on a story, a piece, he wouldn’t have to finish for weeks, maybe months. He had the time and the room to stretch. He got beyond the immediate, the surface details of winner and loser. The Fight is a long profile of Ali, Foreman, and a little Norman preluded by sociological considerations and bookended by great sports writing.

1,500 words condensed to 11: I like that which explains why sports sometime seem real serious.

…

Keep Reading:

* Luxury NYC hotel shouts ‘War Eagle’ to guests on cue
* Bama pays professional boxers to beat Auburn for the first time
* War Eagle IV attacks Florida player, Auburn penalized 15 yards
* The Great Bo Jackson A-Day Race of 1984
* Actor named Auburn can’t get gig going by his first name
* Muhammad Ali on the Haley Center concourse
* Auburn football radio broadcast in punxploitation classic
* Ronald Reagan was an Auburn fan
* That time Green Day played an Auburn house show
* Fantastic photos of Bjork inside Jordan-Hare Stadium
* Auburn buses still driving around Phoenix
* The Ten Best Auburn Games That Never Happened

Follow us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.