Do You Have Popular Mechanics?

Never watch football with me.

I grew up in a football lovin' household. My dad was a jock and loved football. And basketball. And tennis. And Greco-Roman wrestling. But mainly football.

I hated watching sports as a kid. Playing them was ok, but I never got the appeal of spectatorship. We didn't have a tv, so watching sports mostly meant going to a smelly and noisy high school gym or an ice cold ball field. I usually brought a book. My dad usually pretended not to know me when his friends came by.

I'm kidding. Sort of. My dad and I get along great, but I've always thought that my indifference toward football was my small way of rebelling. And that my love of baseball, which I discovered as a teenager and which my dad doesn't like, was an extension of this rebellion.

I'm not hostile to football, it's just not my thing.

But some folks came over to the Feemus homestead this weekend to watch a little college football. I admit--I was a lousy host. I've been so busy with work that I actually brought my laptop into the living room (nothing enhances the football watching experience quite as much the clacking of a keyboard). I wasn't watching the game. But it's hard for me to keep my mouth shut for too long, even when I don't have anything to say, so occasionally I have to yell out stuff.

If there's an incomplete pass, I have to say something like: "THAT'S gonna be a base hit."

Or I call players for intentional fouls. Or for icing. I just won't shut up.

It's a minor miracle that I have any friends.

Still, there's something about sitting around the living room on a Saturday afternoon watching men in shiny pants run after a ball that really is conducive to, for lack of a better word, bonding. So we sat around the living room and watched men in shiny pants and counted up the divorces and failed relationships between us. And someone said: "None of us may ever have kids."

Which, you know, we all already knew. But we made the obligatory "...that I know about" joke.

And the conversation turned, as conversations do, to sperm banks. We all tried to convince my friend, Jack, that he should make a donation. Because the world will be a much less hilarious place without another Jack.

And then the conversation turned, as conversations do, to what kind of *ahem* "reading material" such banks provide for their donors:

"If they're updated as frequently as other doctor's office mags, you've probably either gotta jerk off to some girl with Farrah hair or some dude with a Tom Selleck mustache."

"I wonder if they have, you know, specialty magazines."

"Such as?"

"'Juggs and Ammo,' maybe. Or 'Pony Girls'?"

"Um, that 'Pony Girls' reference was a little too quick, man."

"I heard about it from my brother."

"Sure."

"I wonder if they get any weird requests. It'd be funny to ask the nurse for specific publications."

"Like?"

"Sear's catalogue?"

"'Excuse me, Miss, do you have the Wall Street Journal?'"

"'No thanks, I don't need a magazine. I brought a copy of Jane Eyre."

"'I hate to be a bother, but do you carry 'Cat Fancier'?"



Ever since this conversation, every book or publication I think about I think about in this context. So work is becoming a little embarrassing. I mean, there are only some many times a guy can burst into laughter when someone mentions Kant's Critique of Pure Reason without getting a reputation as a bit of a loon.

I guess it turns out that this post isn't really about football. Let's blame the writers' strike for any thematic incoherence in today's blog. Agreed?