My Saturday and College Football Escapism (Or Fear and Loathing in an Employment Bardo)

Every once in a while I get personal on this blog. I have this belief that no one reads this blog outside of a few friends and my parents, which I’m thankful for. It is difficult putting out content when you think no one is really reading it; that’s my own insecurities on display in the WordPress insight tab. But with that it feels weird to get personal, because I have to see these people, or communicate with them. I promise, this blog will actually contain college football and escapism talk.

I’m writing this after a very weird week in my life. An even weirder Saturday followed that week. And I couldn’t process it, so I wrote this.

I think every guy my age who starts a sports blog is trying endlessly to emulate Dave Portnoy. In everything I write, I failing endlessly at pursuing the legacy of Bill Simmons and ESPN’s Page 2. I’ll be the first to admit I discovered Bill Simmons after he started The Ringer, but Bill Simmons (and to some degree Hunter S. Thompson) has been the litmus test I compare everything I put out too. So, if when reading this, the language gets a little too purple, or it reads like I’m trying recapture what I felt the first time I read Bright Lights, Big City, go leave a mean comment on The Rewatchables.

One Week to Give Up 27 Years

Most of my life has been spent in and out of day dreaming. Tik Tok taught me a term – maladaptive daydreaming – and I think that’s the closest description I can find of how I daydream/ed. Now, it’s really not that because I don’t think it’s a mental health descriptor or a determinative of my upbringing. It’s better indicative of how I dealt, and still at times deal with, my life.

I hated school. Not because I wasn’t good at it, or that I found it boring, or any of the usual reasons. I wasn’t even bullied (except I will say “I was bullied, but I deserved it” because I love the Norm MacDonald school of comedy). No one cared about me; I spent most of my school years on my own.

Sure, I had friends, but I never really hung out with them on the weekend, was rarely invited anywhere, and never went to a school dance. Now, these aren’t sour grapes. I spent time dealing with all the subtle issues I’d developed during those formative years. But, it is to say, daydreaming was my way out whenever I was sat at a desk thinking, “this has to get better.” It was easy escapism from my reality.

And that thought process carried over to my adult life. I was able to thrive in escapism and focus on the future. I am terrible at focusing in the moment. My life, up until this point, was filled with segments, to where I could point to the future as an idea. It also means I had time to get to that future. Time to relish in escapism and pretend that it would all get better. So when I realized that I was presently stuck in the future, the Jorden who had spent so many years stuck in grandiose daydreams had to remember how dirty reality can be.

After 27 years of making the smartest choices – after making the smartest choices that every person would have been told to do – I made what is ostensibly a stupid choice. I quit my job without a new one lined up, because I was miserable. Now, the job wasn’t a good fit either. But the main reason I quit was because in all the hours I was dedicating to the job (which were a lot), I found myself in that perpetual dream state as an escape to get through the day. I found myself in the future, without any of the goals I had mentally feasted upon to stay sane.

So, this Friday I find myself unemployed. A thought even a year ago that would dumbfound past Jorden. And probably disappoint him, to some extent. The thing about always growing, but always remembering who you were, is realizing that growing means killing yourself in the process. But I find myself so worried that in a grasp go attain realistic escapism, did I squash 27 years of hard work (probably less because 3-year-old Jorden was heavily invested in Scooby Doo) with one decision.

Sure, I’ll probably find another job that gives me the time to pursue my passions. I’ll be able to dabble in the side projects I love, like this blog. But like I told my mom, I essentially decided to bet on myself and what I think I can do with the skills I have outside of academia. And that’s terrifying. Because most days, I’m not that much of a fan of myself. So to decide to bet on me seems like the kind of gamble you take when you’re trying to hedonistically die in a Las Vegas casino.

Simple Escapism

I know this may sound like incredibly dumb questions, ones that don’t need to be asked, but I’ve always been incredibly interested in how football became America’s sport. Sure, baseball is America’s pastime, but just like the steroids that created the last golden age of baseball, the heart seems a little weak these days.

You could blame that on Rob Manfred, or the length of games (even though baseball has modernized in that respect) , or the fact other, faster-paced sports became more widely available and dispersed. You could also bring up the fact that basketball has gained steamed, but it also seems like the NBA has lost that spark it had during the Warriors-Cavaliers era. Either way, football dominates America. There is a thriving industry just around a general manager simulator that is effectively just Dungeons and Dragons for guys who’ve seen Tayvon Austin highlights.

My contention is that football dominates because of when its on. I’ve looked into some when football began to be played on Saturday and Sunday, but it turns out that’s just the way it’s always been. It’s like Mr. Brightside being the third song The Killers wrote; sometimes you just get it right. And football got it right, because since the inception of both collegiate and professional football, it has dominated the weekend.

Which makes it wholly different from the other big four sports. Baseball has so many games it has to play almost every day throughout its season. Basketball and hockey have the same number of games in their respective regular seasons – 82. So they have to play during the week. And even when they play during the weekend, they’re usually at night (some Sunday baseball games are an exception). So, they can’t function as simple escapism. During the week, when those games are on, I’m either cooking dinner or watching the clock after I determine I have to fall asleep at 10 pm (it has not happened in months). Even when these games are on, it’s hard to indulge in the athletic spectacle escapism. It’s not possible to decline focus on tomorrow when it’s 9 pm; the Pistons incompetence can only distract a person for so long.

But football, football is the only sport that is played mostly on the weekend (those pesky 2 NFL games and MACtion make me legally obligated to include the “mostly”). On those weekends, it also runs all day. Need to fit 14 games in one day? Just schedule them so there are no breaks after the noon start time. For college football, it’s essentially the same. Have hundreds of teams? Just schedule it so that it runs all day and even encroaches on NFL territory (RIP Pac-12 after dark).

Football allows for escapism. A person who works toward the weekend can escape everything come Saturday, by sitting on their couch for 14 hours, with a nonstop stream of college football. Oh and you don’t want to worry about the upcoming week the next day? Why don’t you watch almost 11 hours of football. Football dominates the weekend, and allows for someone to live a gridiron dream for the entire weekend. There is no Monday report when Tulane are in the red zone.

Sports are escapism, but football allows a person to jump headfirst into a fever dream of titanic clashes. So why does football rule America? Because it rules the two days set aside for people to live harmoniously with their own interests.

Saturdays Are For Escapism

So that brings us to yesterday. I wanted badly to write about 3-4 blogs because I have a backlog of ideas in drafts. I was going to write about how I morbidly enjoyed Iowa football, because I love disgusting tactics that somehow relentlessly work. I have a draft about LED lights on cars and how I think I’ve become a worse driver. There are so many things in the drafts folder, that I could write a listicle blog of those ideas. Instead, yesterday, I slothed around. The only thing to write was the start of this blog.

Yesterday was supposed to be a nice reset day. I start to look into the new future, where daydreaming must become a reality. I had a whole day planned, capped off with multiple events and even old friends that night. But instead, I paced like a captive animal between my couch and my bed, with frequent stops to the kitchen where I’d make a beaker of French press coffee. I did that three times and drank maybe 10 sips, before leaving the cups in a little line next to my sink, like ceramic lemmings.

All day I was in some kind of limbo between wanting to make the most of the day, and wanting to rot away in my decision making. And I realized for the past 3 months, if there was a day like that, I could escape into YouTube TV’s 4-panel college football extravaganza. Sure, Army-Navy was on but that was a glorified bowl game. I watched some of the Heisman ceremony, but that’s like the Oscars if the only category was Best Picture, and whoever the ABC News anchor is these days (David something). I was left alone with me. And the escapism that was so ingrained on my Saturdays became a poignant reminder that I had to deal with my thoughts.

I’m not really sure what the point of this blog was. In some sense, I think this was a diary entry I tried to connect to sports through the lens of not wanting to deal with the anxiety that’s always in the corner of my eye. There’s a part of me that is incredibly worried I made this catastrophic decision and I’m now on track to become no one. The integral human need to be remembered is my green light that I stare at hoping that that’s my future.

Maybe the want to open a cookie business and make this blog successful overshadowed the stability that comes with a simple life plan. The life plan I was so assured of for so long. I am nothing if not a man subject wholly to the romanticized whims of a life worth living. A life worth remembering, that wasn’t set in an office, but set in the imagination of a child hoping that dreams do come true. The high of dreams can be crushing to a realist.

Sorry if this blog was disjointed and a grasp at the bloggers of the early internet. Some days are easy to get through. And some days the escapism of college football is all the reprieve needed.

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