All Around The World
Song of the Day 08/30/2022
All Around The World by Oasis
Addiction is when you keep doing something even though you know you’d be better off without it. It’s when you harm yourself with an anticipatory pleasure that you can’t escape no matter the consequence. That’s why when people say they’re addicted to yoga or tea everyone around them can sense it’s a load of shit. That’s not addiction, says the drug, gambling, TV, food, and sex addicts.
Under the realm of TV, I can’t help but ask if the repetitive, time-consuming, unending watching of sports is an addiction. Not gambling on sports. Just sitting there, for hours and hours, every week, and hypnotically watching it, never mind all the more productive things one could be doing instead. Sports is pleasure. Playing it, watching it. It’s fun entertainment. But watching it regularly is not too different from sitting and watching the same sitcom for hours and hours on end, several days a week, watching commentary on that sitcom, podcasts about each episode of that sitcom, highlights of every memorable scene and frame. Those who elevate the watching of sports to something like intellectual analysis, or even a form of religion (see the often violent super-fans) are fooling themselves. Sports is Netflix live, with a whole industry devoted to not just the games, but also the backstory behind them. We sports fans are nothing better than any run-of-the-mill TV addicts out there, definitely no better than people who binge reality shows like The Bachelor or Real Housewives. It’s all, yes it’s all, entertainment. And our eyes, yes our eyes, our bulging out of their sockets.
I watch soccer masochistically, in a way that numbs. I often watch to enjoy the games, but even more out of an obscure sense of dutiful desire; I have to watch these games, I must know not only the score, but also what all the goals are like, even if I don’t take much necessary pleasure in watching them, even if every goal, game, commentary, and highlight is a complete recapitulation of the previous week, year, decade. It’s all the fucking same, but I can’t get enough. It would obviously be better to spend this time reading, working, catching up with friends, but I often choose the soccer instead. And worse, I like to watch games alone, or if I must, then only with one or two friends. This way, I can really focus on the style and course of play, often finding that the crowd-driven fan experiences take away from all the beauty the game has to offer.
It’s become clear that to watch these matches in such a devoted, nonsensical way is a desire to repeat the same predictable dramatic experience over and over again. It’s an easy way out of more nuanced, original forms of dramatic tension. And yet, even with all this supposed internal wisdom, I can’t stop watching. Stupidly, I need to know if Chelsea, the club I support, will win, if they’ll play well winning, if they’ll be able to come from behind while losing, and if not, I want to know why. What do I do with all this information? Nothing. What does it really give me other than a few useless facts? Nothing. Something primitive in me is drawn to this repetitive, predictable drama, the anticipation for anticipation’s sake, the love of a game I’d be far better off playing than watching, at least then I’d burn some calories. I am, though, perpetually injured. This is not God saying to watch instead of play. It’s probably God saying I should just focus on my writing, on my family, my friends, my life that has the possibility to exist right in front of me. And when I say God, I’m talking about the internal moral compass, my ethical structure, the feelings in my gut that I can’t explain.
As I get older, with all the knowledge that I would be far better off spending my mental energy elsewhere, my time elsewhere, with my 30s beginning to appear on the horizon, I wonder if, unlike most men, I’ll be able to outgrow this aspect of childhood I haven’t been able to escape. Only time will tell, because, if past patterns remain unbroken, it probably won’t be this weekend. Although, I think, so sick of this dumb, slack-jawed repetition, that it’s finally time to begin to change, to look up and ahead, to start listening to those feelings in my gut. I feel strongly that there’s something dear to me I need to sacrifice in order to get where I need to go. That something might be soccer, that endless watching of it.