Back from the Land of Sulk and Honey

Decided to take a few weeks off there because A) I'm beyond lazy and B) I was concerned of going off on an episode similar to my post-NDSU-Twitter-rage-out where I insisted every Gopher player, coach, booster and that giant turtle thing some Native Americans believe created the universe owed me a hand-written apology and an eightball of crack for the abortion that is this season. But I'm beyond all that, now, and ready to move forward as the bitter and broken shell of a man I am with my Gopher fandom still intact.

In the spirit of full disclosure to which you've all become accustomed here at SGH? we considered selling our tickets to the Nebraska game. As it turns out, our seats are pretty rad and would have fetched a price sufficient to cover the cost of the full season. But, for reasons I still can't explain, we didn't. We could have sold the tickets, bought a year's worth of bourbon, enough Robitussin to clean out an old-folks home and spent the game snorting blow out of the ass cracks of high-class hookers; but we didn't. No, instead we'll be in our seats at 2.30 this Saturday, no doubt surrounded by a sea of red, watching Taylor Martinez sodomize the Gophers in painstakingly slow motion.

We'll all have something like this tattooed on our retinas
by game's end. It'll all seem somehow worse with that pedo
Li'l Red replacing Brutus.

My wife asked me what the hell I was thinking when I told her I was still going to the game and I really didn't have an answer. She reckoned it was some perverse sense of loyalty, that I didn't want to profit by selling tickets to the red horde from the south. That's not it, though. That's the ethos employed by the raging, unwashed mob at GopherHole and, to maintain a modicum of self respect, I refuse to employ any rationale subscribed to by those knobs. Nebraska money will buy as much huff-worthy lacquer thinner as Minnesota money will. Conversely, it's not any real belief the Gophers have a chance at victory. After the Two-Girls-One-Cup-styled affair we saw at Ann Arbor followed by the Brazilian fart porn at Team Fiction last weekend, it's pretty clear the answer to 'still got hope?' is no.

So, we're going to the game and I'm not really sure why. TRE likes to give me grief that I ride a steep emotional roller coaster during Gopher football season: the car hits the peak in early August and then plunges to the depths by the middle of October. It was a shorter, steeper ride this year, to be sure. The one positive such violent emasculation so early in the year provides is the enabling of a sort of grim acceptance: I've now seen how bad we are and recognize we won't get materially better for the next year or two. My choices are to quit the Gophers and get really good at raking leaves on Saturday or blithely go through the rituals of supporting the team and celebrate the few nuggets of positivity as they arise.

That's a pretty shit reason for wasting a Saturday afternoon and turning my nose up at some decent quan; but it's really all I've got.