Field of Fragments

Aging is a wonderful gift. Yeah, the knees start to hurt, the memory imperceptibly but irrevocably fades, your doctor starts making you get colonoscopies (if you’re over 40, ask your doctor whether you should get one – they give you Cheez Its afterward at MNGI!), and realizing you may have less years to live than you’ve been alive is quite the trip; but, man, the wisdom and perspective you gain really slap.

Individual things and events become less urgently chaotic with dichotomous outcomes and more open to nuanced appreciation. There’s a pause between input and emotional response that wasn’t there before (I’m certain that’s due to geriatric synapses rather than any mastery of mindfulness, but give me this cope). And the world starts to narrow just enough that it’s a bit easier to see what matters most and where you should spend your next minute of life.

The wildest thing, though, is the massive collection of lived experiences we accumulate through the years. On the sheer basis of continuing to stay awake and marginally aware, moments of unbridled joy, bottomless despair, laughter with friends, career successes and failures, love, apathy, ennui, hate, and reconciliation all get turned into a delicious, if sometimes bittersweet, broth in the Instant Pot of our lives.

Meet The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss

It is generally not good to write while angry, and inadvisable to allow a game played by 18-year-olds to affect your happiness.

Nevertheless, on one of the last beautiful days of Fall we spent our afternoon watching what has to be one of the worst coached games of the PJ Fleck tenure reach a familiar end.

Our North Star

Photo Credit: Patrick O'Leary, Regents of the University of Minnesota 2005

September 2, 2000 was a sunny Saturday at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis. Just after 10:30 AM that morning, I and 270 of my new best friends run-cadenced out of the Metrodome tunnel for the pregame show. It was my first time on the turf where my Minnesota Twins idols had played, and my first Gopher football game.

2000 was supposed to be the year Minnesota took the “next step” after going 8-4 the previous season, Minnesota’s most successful since 1967 and first bowl game since 1986. Talk of the Rose Bowl was in the air and even the pockets of Twin Cities media was starting to shrug off their cynicism and believe that maybe Glen Mason was going to finally do it.

F.A.M.I.L.Y.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z5fH_DQmFY

Sportsball. 

Whether from right or left, RETVRN Twitter or Bluesky elders, it implies lack of seriousness and commitment for those of us who choose not to spend our lives in the studied contemplation of productivity or accelerationist revolution.

There is little point to debating the merits of fanhood. I think most of us who would post on Bluesky or read about it here are aware of the realities of dedicating such time and deriving such enjoyment from watching other people (generally much younger) compete on the field, court, or ice. We are aware of the downstream effects and can reflect on our own contributions good and bad.

Existing within this ambiguous state is called being human. Few things are clear-cut, good and bad can be found just a few layers deep. Taken to the extreme, any hobby or distraction could be classified as an immoral waste of resources depending on the perspective of the objective observer. It is worth exploring these questions and doing the moral calculus individually. But in a broader sense, who is to decide what past-times are beneficial and which are not? The strict alternative might be to seek joy only in toil and work, but few are capable of doing so. Somehow we all seek the spirit of a life well-lived.  

The Friends We Made Along the Way

As one of the 6.5 people who read this blog, I suspect you also had elaborate plans to see the Gophers in the Rose Bowl.

There aren’t a lot of things you have the benefit of planning for decades – retirement and maybe one’s death if you’re particularly frisky in your morbidity – but Goldy and the crew were extremely generous in giving us time to nail down every last detail. A Minnesota child born on January 1^st, 1962, the last time the Gophers played in Pasadena, was ejected out of the womb outfitted in a maroon and gold onesie and promised a lifetime of college football glory. Second Rose Bowl in a row, national championship winners the year before, the smug satisfaction that comes from cheering for a perpetual winner was this their manifest destiny.

That child has been an AARP member for twelve years, just qualified for social security, and is using the money they never had to spend on a Pasadena trip to buy a winter condo on the Alabama coast. What a ride that must have been: from expecting a national championship in childhood and adolescence, to early adulthood in the penury that was Gopher football in the 80s and 90s, almost reaching the mountaintop but falling to their metaphorical death at 41 in 2003, convincing themselves Brew and Kill were the answers in their 50s, to hitting 60 and having college football pull the rug and make getting to the Rose Bowl a near impossibility. Truly a life arc sponsored by Lexapro, ketamine, and Headspace.

Tailgates & Tums

The vibes were immaculate.

The tailgates lots around the stadium were filled with heavy traffic of smiling, excited Gopher fans. Black and gold flags, tents, and shirts were in the minority on a day of August weather, the earliest in the season that Floyd of Rosedale has ever been contested. A late afternoon downpour failed to dampen spirits or send people packing; nervous energy and cautious optimism followed the crowds to Huntington Bank Stadium.

An Ode

I identify a difference between “happiness” and “joy”. I associate “happiness” with a state of satisfaction relating to a specific event or thing; seeing a dog playing or getting a free order of breadsticks. “Joy” denotes something greater; a wider state of mind and being that envelopes you with contentment.

20 years later - Michigan 2003

Sports aren’t important. Relative to family, friends, one’s community, religion, pets, and professional life, the performance of one’s sports teams really ought not to have a meaningful impact on one’s life. It’s just a bunch of people moving an object from one place to another using their hands, feet, or sticks against a bunch of other people trying to steal the object for themselves. It’s an absurdity that it garners any attention at all.

And yet, sports, in a lot of ways, are everything. They are a magnet that binds people of a certain affinity together while repelling groups with different value systems. They allow for the (mostly) healthy release of tribal energies, enable the resolution of regional rivalries that historically would have been solved with lots of fires and cannibalism, and create common experiences among people with widely disparate professions, faiths, and interests.

We dedicate meaningful percentages of our lives to our teams at games, watching them on TV, following recruiting, drafts, and trades/transfers. We vent our spleens on message boards, social media, at bars and tailgates, and in angry emails to GMs/athletic directors. They are deeply emotional. We share and treasure the moments of transcendence, when our teams do something we always wanted them to do - for years, every time we get together. And we commiserate with one another after particularly bad things, collectively sharing the trauma, comforted that we don’t have to experience that despair alone.

The World Wonders

Reeled from the sabre stroke

   Shattered and sundered.

Then they rode back, but not

   Not the six hundred.

-Alfred, Lord Tennyson

November 3, 2018 Minnesota lost a shocker to 3-5 Illinois, 55-31. The high score made the game seem more respectable than it was. No Minnesota fan watching in real time could have considered it anything other than an embarrassment. The next day, P.J. Fleck announced the firing of his friend, Defensive Coordinator Robb Smith, and his replacement with Joe Rossi. The change paid immediate dividends the following week against Purdue, a respectable loss against 9-5 Northwestern, and a win in Madison redeemed the season.

November 11, 2023 Minnesota lost a shocker at 2-7 Purdue, 49-30. The high score made the game seem more respectable than it was. No Minnesota fan watching in real time could have considered it anything other than an embarrassment. The next day…well, we don’t know yet, but it probably won’t be much. Joe Rossi has earned far more rope than Robb Smith did thanks to the performance of his defensive unit over the past several years; he’s not going anywhere, nor do I think he should.

This too Shall Pass: A tale of two tattoos

This is a weird one in that I feel it most in my teeth. Not sure that’s ever happened before. Can’t say I’m a fan.

 I’ve gotten pretty good at keeping myself distracted after a particularly inconceivable loss by spending time outside, going to get a nice meal, getting unimaginably high, or trying to feel something again by dying hundreds of times in a Sisyphean quest to complete Dark Souls-styled video games. Sometimes all of the above.

But, residing inside of a piece of meat controlled by a brain that is predisposed to do its own thing on occasion, I do regularly get intrusive thoughts. Saturday was like Christmas for the secret Santa responsible for these nuggets of fun, and it has since gifted me with joyous visions of our WR dropping a TD that would have won us the game, a laser beam going through the hands of our TE where a catch would have won us the game, and Illinois’ best WR running right through the defense we thought was on the ascendancy to win them the game. On repeat. For days. Like finding a wet turd in your pocket every time you reach for some mints.

Pretzel Logic

It’s been a fun week in Gopher fandom. Every day the Michigan message boards creep towards clarity. Michigan State’s athletics department capped off an impressive run of incompetence that started in 2018 by putting an Austrian on their jumbotron. Rutgers is bowl eligible. Oh, and Minnesota beat Iowa.

PJ Fleck and the Breaking of a Fan Base

I really hate Wisconsin. Like, an every-fiber-of-my being, diagnosable personality disorder level of hate. I get triggered when I see a Wisconsin license plate. I refuse to be anything more than minimally-friendly acquaintances with anyone who has ever supported that team. I won’t even accept a LinkedIn invite from a UWi grad, because fuck you. It’s pathological, really unhealthy, and mostly survived intact from what was otherwise a wholesale teardown of my thought patterns and coping mechanisms.

I’m mature enough to admit they broke me. Absolutely and totally. I simply couldn’t tolerate losing to our most-hated rival for over a decade, watching them win* the B1G, go to Rose Bowls, and get talked about as playoff contenders. Replace the running backs, quarterbacks, defensive coordinators, head coaches, walk-on linebackers from Minnesota, and our damned stadium and the results were still the same. We lose and I sink further into psychosis.