Bad Faith

You ever google about the Nazca Lines? We don’t know a whole lot about the people who made them, but they must have been a remarkable lot. They built a monument of unfathomable scale and it has persisted on this earth longer than they have. The wider world didn’t even know where they were - they were only a legend! - until the invention of airplanes. All because the Nazca people believed in something bigger than themselves. Only the gods could ever have the point of view necessary to appreciate them. When you are walking over them at eye level they look like a strange line scratched in the dirt.

Sports is America’s civic religion. I don’t mean idol worship or anything like that, but that it’s the way we get together in big groups and experience pathos together as a collective (how many of y’all were watching when Jay Bruce clinched it?) Some folks, the ones with the Coexist sticker next to their kid’s little league number in the local school’s script, just wanna have a good time and are as happy watching whatever is on as anything else. The changing of the sports seasons - baseball in the summer, football in the fall, basketball in the winter - marks the passage of time just the same as a feast calendar.

Some folks are stolid monotheists. There is only one team I’ve ever cared about, one team I ever lived and died with. I mostly eat the same things. I mostly do the same things. Mine’s not a roaming eye, I guess. Without loyalty, who even are you?

I’ve long known my sports fandom was a deal with the devil. Anything that costs this much money to attend so clearly is. But I really felt like it was worth the cost of admission. Nothing’s free in America don’t you know that?

But now it is time to throw out the moneychangers. The Castellinis have profaned the altar with their corruptions like a Borgia pope. How am I supposed to watch this? Where am I gonna go? This is how people get into astrology. Or become Angels fans.