50-48 #51: THE DEGREES OF SEPARATION BETWEEN BOBBY PETRINO, CARL SNAVELY, AND ED GENERO: THE OFFICIAL 50-48 OLE MISS RANT

50-48 #51: THE DEGREES OF SEPARATION BETWEEN BOBBY PETRINO, CARL SNAVELY, AND ED GENERO: THE OFFICIAL 50-48 OLE MISS RANT

For those who only read the stat sheets, Bobby Petrino’s return to coaching with the Arkansas Razorbacks was marred by a 23-21 shellacking by the “University” of Mississippi Rebels at Donald W. Reynolds Razorback Stadium on Saturday. But this contest wasn’t about one football game. It was a test of one man’s ideals. The Razorbacks did the school proud, and they did that man proud. Bobby Petrino. He won because they played.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: We here at 50-48 are confident that 50-48ican Peter Samuel “Cards” Aiello will fully cognize and appreciate the above reference, but we are unsure if others will. Ladies and those under 25 have something of an excuse. For all others: We will not tell you from where the reference comes. You ought to know. For shame.]

So, the Razorbacks lost to the Rebels this weekend. But we here at 50-48 are not decimated by the defeat. But before we get into that, let’s briefly recount the salient facts of the game:

We take comfort in the acknowledgment by reporters and pundits from both sides of the Mississippi River that the Razorbacks were robbed of victory by a completely bogus call by a dirty necrophiliac pedophile of a line judge. We appreciate Mississippians’ candor at such an admission, and we acknowledge that such acknowledgments are what make the great state of Mississippi not Texas. But there were actually THREE horrible calls, all made by line judges, that grossly affected our chances:

THE PHANTOM GROUNDING CALL: In the first half, Casey Dick (in the throes of yet another in a long line of horrible games) threw a pass to the Ole Miss sidelines after moving outside the tacklebox and finding none of his receivers open. The back judge, whose duty it is to make intentional grounding calls, recognized this, whistled the play dead, and moved to re-spot the replacement ball for the following down. But the line judge standing by the Ole Miss contingent, upon hearing their boos, decided that though he was nowhere in position to make such a call, he would go ahead and call intentional grounding to satisfy the irate and imbecilic fans behind him. Dear Ole Miss fans: The tacklebox and the hash mark are two completely different entities. We here at 50-48 understand that you know far more about alcoholism, illiteracy, and the intricacies of stringing innocent black people by the neck from trees than you do football, but a little effort isn’t asking too much. Or maybe it is. “Book-learnin” is not an undertaking formally practiced at the “University” of Mississippi. (For verification, see the current veneration of John Grisham and compare it to the former veneration of William Faulkner. Or just talk to anyone from Oxford. Dumb fucking assholes.) Regardless, they had every right to boo. Expressing one’s ignorance is an important part of the football experience. The line judge, however, has no excuse. This is one of those pricks we knew in college who would snort the white shit on the table because he saw Al Pacino do it in a movie. Fucking wannabe. Fucking loser. His goal in life was to be a referee, and even at the advanced age of middle-fifties-ish, he’s still a line judge. We—like everyone else who believes in truth, justice, and the American Way—hope he fells himself by one of his own bullets the next time he traipses out to the woods at 4 am to experience the joys of “huntin season.” But he wasn’t done fucking with us yet:

THE PHANTOM TOUCHBACK: After an Ole Miss punt sailed into the endzone and that very same assfaced line judge marked it as a touchback, he once again heard the befuddled, ignorant Rebel fans booing. So he kept his arm raised, walked out of the endzone, and spotted the ball on the two-yard line. NOTE TO FUCKSTICK LINE JUDGES EVERYWHERE: Stealing 18 yards from a team won’t make your wife come back. She’s still fucking that stockbroker. It won’t make your hair grow back, your dick get bigger, or that collection of Star Trek action figures you keep in your closet grow any more complete. The limited edition Captain Kirk doll, the one where he’s having tantric sex with the green robot woman, will always elude you. You will always be nothing. You will always be a fucking child. You will die alone, and no one will ever remember you exist. You are meaningless. And speaking on behalf of 50-48, Razorback fans everywhere, and all people already consigned to hell: I hope I see you there you dirty motherfucker. After the snakes remove themselves from your eyeball holes, I’m going to personally skull-fuck you while the rest of your body is writhing in fiery agony.

Unfortunately, however, his wasn’t the call that hurt the most:

THE PHANTOM INTERFERENCE CALL: London Crawford has had a rough career. He’s really fast, and really nice, but can’t catch for shit. Still, he’s been improving, and when he came down with Casey Dick’s horrible pass with less than thirty seconds left in the game to set up the game-winning field goal, his redemption with Razorback fans was finally complete. Until, that is, the line judge watching the play called offensive pass interference. It seems no use to delve too deeply into this one, as anyone who has seen the game or the replay clearly admits that no such interference exists. Again, let me give a quick nod to all of those professional sports watchers who actually acknowledged the bad call. It is refreshing. That call cost us the game.

Or did it?

We here at 50-48 stopped blaming officials for losses after an inglorious career in pee-wee league basketball. (Well, we didn’t. But we’re trying.) You don’t like the grounding call, then throw it to one of the TWO receivers who were open when you threw it away in the first place. How many balls did Casey throw to the sidelines prematurely? A gazillion.

You don’t like the false touchback? Drive down the goddamned field and score anyway. The bottom line is that if you had told anyone in that stadium that the SEC officials would have made three bad calls in the game, s/he would have said, “Well, no shit.” SEC officials are terrible. That is why 50-48 has always advocated for the Big Ten system, whereby officials are reviewed and graded each week, then assigned to games accordingly. If this were done, both of those line judges would be bartending next weekend. Fucking cunts.

The last call is a bit harder to shrug off, as it came at the end of the game and quite literally stole victory from us. But the core reality of the thing is this: if you don’t want a call at the end of the game to steal victory from you, play better in the first three goddamned quarters. We missed a field goal in the first quarter, which would have given us the win. Chris Gragg dropped a sure touchdown pass in the second quarter. That’s ten points in a two-point game!

But then there are the two major culprits. Casey Dick is a walking, passing disaster. This was a game where we were hopelessly outmanned in most positions. After all, Ole Miss had Ed Orgeron’s players. We had Hootie’s. That was a disadvantage right there. And nowhere was it more apparent than at quarterback. Don’t be fooled by the fact that Casey had 75 more passing yards than Jevan Sneed. Snead was efficient and accurate. He spread the ball around, passed efficiently in all four quarters (instead of just the fourth), and found open receivers. This was the most important offensive discrepancy in the game, and if it wasn’t there, none of those calls would have mattered.

Of course, Snead was blessed that Razorback cornerback Isaac Madison was getting heavy playing time. Three-quarters of his passing yards came against Madison, including both of his touchdown passes. Isaac did not have a good game. It is no surprise that he is a Hootie recruit. Still, he’s only a sophomore, and with years of tutelage under Coach Petrino, he will get better.

So we suffered from some bad calls, missed some key opportunities, and had two players in important positions completely fuck up. Such is the recipe for disaster. Still, after all that, we only lost by two points. Though Orgeron’s players clearly had more size and talent than Hootie’s, we still came within two points of winning. Ole Miss ran the predictable, ugly Hootie offense, and he typically almost coached them out of a surefire win. Coach Petrino, on the other hand, demonstrated a complex and interesting game plan that, with even a modicum of execution, would have won the game.

This is something we can be happy about. But there are others:

Hootie proved what a gutless fucking coward he was in typical Hootie fashion, proving to everyone with a brain why he is taint-scum. With the Ole Miss players and cheerleaders ready to run onto the field prior to the game, and with the security guards screaming at them to go, Hootie held everyone back until the Hogs took the field so that he wouldn’t be booed. NOTE TO HOUSTON NUTT: You should have been aborted in the first trimester. You are lower than shit. NOTE TO OLE MISS FANS: Thinking Hootie is a good football coach makes you a fucking idiot. It is just a signal to everyone else that you know nothing about the game in any of its myriad facets. This, of course, is not a problem. There are billions of people around the world who don’t understand football. But thinking Hootie is a good person makes you complicit in all of the heinous things he perpetrates. It makes you no better than his whole dirty family. Anyone who thinks Houston Dale Nutt is a decent person does not deserve to breathe the same air as sentient beings.

Towards the end of the game, the Ole Miss fans in attendance began chanting “Houston Nutt, Houston Nutt,” as if we, the Razorback fans, would be somehow moved to jealousy by the refrain. Here again is demonstrated why the “University” of Mississippi is on the verge of losing its accreditation. You can’t hate them, because they’re just so fucking stupid. It’s easy to hate LSU fans because they’re mean, and at least they understand what’s going on down on the field. But poor little drunken, illiterate Ole Miss people are just so sad. They’re like the retarded boy at school who hits one of your friends. You can’t get mad at him because he’s retarded. He couldn’t help it. Poor little retarded Rebels. So, the “Houston Nutt” cheer fell on deaf ears, I’m afraid. The entire lot of us wanted to say in response, “Oh, no, sweetheart. You don’t understand. We want you to have him.” But they wouldn’t have understood. Autistic monkeys don’t understand anything. And the Ole Miss fan section was peopled with autistic monkeys.

That whole campus is peopled with autistic monkeys. And now they have a leader! “Houston Nutt, Houston Nutt, Houston Nutt!”

Of course, the best part about the game is that 50-48 was there in person! After we lost, I walked through campus happy. It is better to lose with 75,000 of your best friends than to win by yourself down in the south Louisiana hellhole in which 50-48 resides. For those of you 50-48icans who hung out with me, I really appreciate it. That is exactly what I needed.

So, there are some lessons, I think, to be learned here: 1) Hootie is a rat-fink fuckface. 2) The mothers of potential SEC line-judges should be eugenically sterilized. 3) Casey Dick is four short games away from graduation! 4) Being in Fayetteville, being in the presence of the Hogs, seeing that helmet, and singing those songs: that is the greatest feeling on earth.

So remember, Rebels: The next time you’re coming down from the high of victory, probably (we assume) by lynching a black boy for glancing at one of your buck-toothed, ugly-ass Mississippi white women, just know that we wouldn’t take Hootie back for all the money in the world. It is better to lose with dignity than to win with that pederast on your sideline.

You know, in 1940, the undefeated, #1-ranked Cornell Big Red entered a game against Dartmouth and won 7-3, extending their win streak to 19 games. But after the game, Cornell coach Carl Snavely reviewed the game film and realized that the Big Red’s only touchdown came on an inadvertent fifth-down. He consulted with the athletic director and with his players, then voluntarily forfeited the game to Dartmouth. That instance is by far my favorite in all of college football history. It demonstrates the kind of class and sportsmanship that is supposed to be part and parcel of the game itself—that which separates it from cruder professional forms.

Of course, Hootie and the autistic monkeys over at the “University” of Mississippi won’t concede the game to us even though they acknowledge that we were robbed. Their coach has neither class nor sportsmanship. But I imagine if he did, the lead in the Daily Mississippian would look something like I imagine the lead would have been in the Cornell Sun following such an honorable move:

For those who only read the stat sheets, Carl Snavely’s return to coaching with the Cornell Big Red was marred by a 3-7 forfeit shellacking by the Dartmouth Big Green at Schoellkopf Field on Saturday. But this contest wasn’t about one football game. It was a test of one man’s ideals. The Big Red did the school proud, and they did that man proud. Carl Snavely. He won because they played.

50-48
Fuck Texas
WPS

50-48 #50: THERAPY (WARNING: NEITHER FUNNY NOR INTERESTING…SORRY)

50-48 #50: THERAPY (WARNING: NEITHER FUNNY NOR INTERESTING…SORRY)

Of all the horrible things that have happened to us here at 50-48 this semester, none was as terribly gut-wrenching, as punch-in-the-belly disastrous than Saturday’s loss at Kentucky. Sure, the vandalization, damage, and robbery of my car will have more long-term consequences. My inability to function at a normal work pace, too. And, while I’m thinking about it, I’m starting to come to the very real conclusion that Scampers the Friendly Opossum might very well be a figment of my imagination. I don’t even want to fathom the possible repercussions of hallucinatory monsters on my overall mental wellbeing. But on the sliding scale of guttural emptiness and depression, nothing comes close to Saturday night.

Casey Dick was typically horrible. But still, with seven minutes to go, we were up two touchdowns! The Kentucky fans had left the stadium! Then the Curtis fumble. Then the touchdown. Then many more in a vast menagerie of penalties. Then the second touchdown. Game over. We here at 50-48 have never felt so crushed. Never have we felt so strongly the desire for victory as an actual physical need. And then the collapse. Everything went black.

The consistent failure of the University of Arkansas football team has sapped our will to live. It has certainly sapped our will to insert some sort of bargain-basement levity into the process of coping that we are all engaged in at the moment. It is not—if we might be so bold as to engage in a bit of armchair psychoanalysis—the loss itself that provides the pain. It is the pride that we take in the team in spite of that loss. It is the full run of gaps in the synapse fire of our identity transfer from self to team. We lose ourselves, then see the overhead projector representations of ourselves fail us. And the entire negotiation, of course, is based on a core of dissatisfaction in the first place. But at the same time, the expectation of loss was always there. We do these things in spite of ourselves.

So it isn’t the guarantee of victory that invests us. We make this transfer willingly, even though we know that our own abilities and proclivities would probably serve us better in the great game of self-making. We see that white pig on that metallic red helmet and we melt.

We melt, we melt, we melt.

It’s what makes us fans. It’s what makes us Southern.

We here at 50-48 have, in the last couple of weeks, been engaged in a long-running discussion with a number of people, including some 50-48icans, about the nature and constitution of the South. At its heart, I think, is the fundamental fact of our loss to Kentucky. We knew going into the contest that we had hitched our wagon to a sinking ship (to mix a metaphor across land and sea), but the fact of that hitching didn’t serve as a source of shame or embarrassment. Instead, it grounded our self-conception, even though we knew the possibility of loss existed. Even though we knew that the recent history of Arkansas Razorback fandom is rife with trials, hurt, and embarrassing moments. We see a pig flag and all of that shame goes away. Or we talk to an LSU fan and it all goes away.

Such is the nature of Southernness. Even though we know that the history of the South is rife with racism, conservative illogical thought, illiteracy, et al., we claim it as our own. We subsume ourselves into the broader cope of its identity. We see a confederate flag and all of that shame goes away. Or we talk to a fucking yankee and it all goes away.

None of us like Casey Dick, but we find ourselves in his success or failure every time the boys take the field. None of us like the glut of right-wing fucksticks that run the governments of the former confederate states, but we somehow forget their myriad failures when we embrace the grander ideal. And, this, of course, comes on top of the fact that we don’t like the grander ideal in the first place.

Whatever the grander ideal was this week, it collapsed on top of us. I don’t really know what my point was about the South, but maybe it was this: We here at 50-48 are having trouble understanding why the things we so truly love—the things that encompass the core of our own self-conception—continue to pummel our goddamned guts out.

A car isn’t part of that self-conception. Neither is money. And so those pains are different, stable. Distanced, perhaps. But when the things that constitute your selfhood—your work, your team, your region—conspire against you, you are left outside your building, staring at an opossum that may or may not actually exist.

You invent invisible monsters and wait for things to change.

But they probably won’t change. Nothing changes. The light at the end of our football tunnel, made so slightly visible by our win against Auburn, has now disappeared again. Experience says that it won’t be back for a while.

But then again, the boys take the field again in six days, and this time I’m going to be there in person. There is always a much greater comfort in being a loser when you’re surrounded by 75,000 other losers all suffering from the same crisis of definitions. Even if they don’t know it.

Sorry this wasn’t funny. If it’s unfathomably boring or confused, sorry about that, too. I’m not even going to go back and read it for errors. Your role in this transaction, whether or not it’s always obvious, is as my quiet, unassuming therapist. And if this session wasn’t our most productive, I do apologize. But after that disastrous fucking nightmare, I can’t find funny anywhere.

50-48
Fuck Texas
WPS

50-48 #49: THANATOSIS

50-48 #49: THANATOSIS

It strikes me now as I sit down to write this installment that I barely remember the rules on how to write an update following a Razorback victory. But I’ll try to remember.

OFTEN IT IS NECESSARY TO BEGIN WITH A QUOTE, DESIGNED AS IT IS TO GROUND THE REST OF THE INSTALLMENT, PROVIDE A THESIS, AND DEVELOP A THEME THAT CAN BE RECALLED THROUGHOUT THE TEXT, FOR EITHER A POIGNANT OR HUMOROUS EFFECT:

Noted self-hating Arkansan Douglas MacArthur once argued, “There is no substitute for victory.” I’m not sure when he said it. I wonder if it was before or after he was having his ass handed to him by the teeny-weeny Chinese, scampering as he was to get back below the 38th parallel before a North Korean mercenary sent a fiery hot bayonet into his brain. Either way, I don’t think this is the right quote for us. After all, there are plenty of substitutes for victory: drug addiction, for instance. Or maybe some other form of chemical dependency. How about Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder? That one’s always worked for me. Or suicide? Joining a traveling circus? Chronic masturbation? And then, of course, there is the most puritan of all the answers available to us, and the one, unfortunately, that we’re probably most familiar with: losing.

Defeat is a substitute for victory.

You see? Douglas MacArthur was full of piping hot shit.

So that one won’t work. How about this one from noted periodical magnate Malcolm Forbes: “Victory is sweetest when you’ve known defeat.” That’s a little more like it. I have known defeat. And all of us have in this season of troubles and doubt. But such is the lens through which we experience our victory over Auburn’s Tigers this weekend. And it is all the more glorious in its effect.

MAKE SOME BRIEF COMMENTS ON THE GAME ITSELF, HIGHLIGHTING THE PLAYS AND PLAYERS WITH WHOM YOU ARE MOST ENAMORED. DEMONSTRATING YOUR GIDDY PRIDE WILL ENDOW THE READER WITH A SENSE OF CAMARADERIE, A FUNDAMENTAL UNDERSTANDING THAT IT IS OKAY, EVEN ENCOURAGED, TO REACT IN A SIMILAR MANNER:

Matt Harris’s interception with twenty-seven fleeting seconds left in the contest gave me a spiritual erection. Or, perhaps, it was the cosmic cock ring that sustained the spiritual erection I first felt one lonely minute earlier, when Kodi Burns’s fourth-down pass sailed over the head of his receiver and ended Auburn’s potential go-ahead drive.

But none of that (what Emerson might have called my connection to the Divine Mind) could have happened without the foreplay of Michael Smith’s 35 carries and 176 yards. There are, of course, obvious flaws with Auburn’s offense, and our defensive stops were more a creature of the Tigers stopping themselves, but no one would deny that Auburn’s defense is stout. Or they wouldn’t have. Until, that is, little five-foot-seven Michael Smith took the ball 35 times and compensated for all of Casey Dick’s ugly, ugly errors. He had, as Emerson might have noted, “ma[de] [him]self necessary to somebody.”

As a sidenote, Emerson also said, “What we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.” Auburn did not find this to be true.

Then again, no one at Auburn knows who Emerson is anyway.

INCLUDE A SEEMINGLY OFF-TOPIC, PERHAPS BIZARRE STORY TO KEEP THE INSTALLMENT FROM FOCUSING SOLELY ON SPORTS OR YOUR OWN ANGER AT WHOMEVER YOU MIGHT BE ANGRY AT THIS TIME AROUND. DO YOUR BEST TO MAKE THE STORY AT LEAST TANGENTIALLY RELATED TO THE BROADER TOPIC (OP CIT ABOVE), FOR THE SAKE OF CONTINUITY, BUT DON’T WORRY TOO MUCH ABOUT IT IF YOU JUST GO OFF ON A RAMBLING, INCOHERENT DIATRIBE. ALWAYS REMEMBER THAT YOU REALLY LIKE RAMBLING, INCOHERENT DIATRIBES:

I have, regrettably, taken to smoking again this past month or so, a habit that I figured I had put away long, long ago. I hope to put it away again soon. But what damage it does to my consistently metastasizing heart condition is quelled in compensation by the presence outside my apartment of a cute little opossum. I go out and smoke those delicious, damaging Winstons after dark and see Scampers—I call him Scampers; it was the cutest name I could think of. Scampers is very nervous about my presence outside the apartment. His reticence has led me to believe that he is, in fact, a secret agent sent to destroy me. Or if not, he might very well be the product of witchcraft: a well-meaning but overly-curious young boy who wandered into the woods and ran across a kindly old woman with a hideous skin condition. “You’re green,” Scampers might have said. “Yes, I’m green,” she’d say, the venom that comes from hiding from society soaking the syllables of her voice and diction. “Why are you green?” “Sometimes little boys ask too many questions.” “My mom says that there’s no such thing as a dumb question.” “Your mother is a whore.” “What’s a whore?”

Oh, Scampers. You little devil.

So then, of course, the witch took him into her cottage, waterboarded him, then turned him into an opossum. So now he roams the night, hiding in the dark corners and wondering if I, too, might be a witch, waiting for my moment to call his mother a whore. Sometimes, when it seems that we’re alone, I’ll move as close as I can and whisper, “Your mother isn’t a whore, little Scampers.” But then one of my neighbors will walk by and punch me in the neck and tell me I’m a lunatic. Scampers just scampers away.

But Scampers never punches me in the neck. And he doesn’t think I’m a lunatic. He climbs up into the tree on the side of my building, then hangs upside down by his tail.

GOOD LORD. WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT? NOW PROVIDE A BRIEF REMINDER TO YOUR AUDIENCE THAT YOU HAVEN’T FORGOTTEN YOUR INITIAL PURPOSE HERE IN THE FIRST PLACE. YOU OWE THEM, IN ONE RESPECT OR ANOTHER, A PAYOFF ON THE INITIAL THESIS PRESENTED IN PART ONE. THEY HAVE, AFTER ALL, READ DOWN THIS FAR. DEMONSTRATE YOUR GRATITUDE BY NOT FUCKING THE REST OF THIS UP:

Much like the teeny-weeny Chinese, waiting as they were on pins and needles to teach a certain self-hating Arkansas shithead his manners, and much like Scampers, felled as he was by circumstances beyond his control, the Razorback football team has been (if we’re lucky) playing opossum lo these many weeks. But our patience now seems to be paying off. As each Hog sluffs off his thanatosis in his own way and time (still waiting on you, Casey!), each Hog fan gets closer and closer to the kind of cathartic release that only comes from boiling his tormentor in her own fucking cauldron.

We have suffered through tonic immobility. We have feared our tormentors and even our would-be friends. But now our fate is starting to turn.

Winston Churchill, who coincidentally was also tortured by psychotic old woman, once said this: “Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.”

Do you hear that Hogs? Scampers? Inner child?

FINALLY, CALL BACK A SEGMENT FROM THE OPENING SECTION OF THE ESSAY, BRINGING A CLOSE TO THE CIRCULAR PROSE AND GROUNDING THE ORIGINAL ARGUMENT WITH THE EXCLAMATION OF REPETITION, TRICKING YOUR AUDIENCE INTO THINKING THERE WAS A PLAN TO THIS WHOLE THING IN THE FIRST PLACE—THAT IT WASN’T IN FACT JUST SOME SLIPSHOD COPING-THROUGH-TYPING MECHANISM THAT ALLOWS YOU TO KILL THE MORE DIFFICULT PARTS OF THE DAY. THEN YOU CAN EAT THE REST OF YOUR CHICKEN NUGGETS:

It strikes me now as I sit down to finish this installment that the Hogs barely remember the rules on how to maintain a winning streak following a Razorback victory. But rest assured: they’ll try to remember.

50-48
Fuck Texas
WPS

50-48 #48: EMERGENCY UPDATE: FINALLY!!!!!!!!!!!!

50-48 #48: EMERGENCY UPDATE: FINALLY!!!!!!!!!!!!

GOAL LINE STAND WITH LESS THAN 1:30 LEFT! THEN AN INTERCEPTION WITH LESS THAN :30! HOGS WIN! HOGS WIN! SUCK IT, AUBURN!

We here at 50-48 are in the throes of the worst semester we’ve had since our comprehensive exams. Some of the lowlights:

1. Continuous financial problems.
2. Yet another in a long litany of failed relationships.
3. One of my students died.
4. A completely bogus speeding ticket coming off the Atchafalaya Basin Bridge.
5. David Foster Wallace killed himself.
6. My car was robbed and vandalized last night. Thousands of dollars in damage.

NONE OF THAT MATTERS TONIGHT!!!!!!!!!! I’M POURING OUT SOME OF THIS MILWAUKEE’S BEST LIGHT FOR MY BELOVED RAZORBACKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!

SO THAT’S WHAT WINNING FEELS LIKE. HELL FUCKING YES.

50-48
Fuck Texas
WPS

50-48 #47: UMBRELLAS

50-48 #47: UMBRELLAS

Thomas Hardy, flush with the wisdom that comes from being a Victorian’s Victorian in Victorian England, argued in his typical Hardyesque prose, “The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.”

Martin Luther King, flush with the giddiness that comes from being a revolutionary’s revolutionary in the Civil Rights South, argued with his typical Kingesque flourish, “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”

These are, quite obviously, two very different worldviews. The question for we Razorbacks is which ontological path should we spend our quiet afternoons lazily meandering down. Well, here’s some tools with which to make your decision:

EXHIBIT A: Thomas Hardy was a brilliant “Renaissance man,” so to speak, maintaining a successful career as an architect along with his writing. Not only did he receive the Order of Merit, but he also managed to score a major prize from the Royal Institute of British Architects. He was a tremendous influence on British letters, and without his literary output, it’s entirely possible that D.H. Lawrence’s semi-pornography and Virginia Woolf’s supreme brilliance would never have seen the light of day. Among his own gifts to the universe were Far From the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

EXHIBIT B: Martin Luther King was a Southern Baptist preacher who cribbed his dissertation.

Check and mate. Martin Luther King’s success stemmed from a rhetorical brilliance that Hardy couldn’t have dreamed of matching. But in the great game of secular logic, well…

Conclusion? This disastrous losing streak, continuing as it does with no end in sight, has scarred us all for life. No fulfillment in later, sunnier seasons will ever fully wash it away.

So, let’s talk about something else! How about some highlights from the 50-48 Great Escape From Lafayette Whirlwind Tour this weekend?

• I was almost attacked by three wild horses.
• It turns out the horses weren’t wild, and I got to pet them.
• Petting horses is awesome.
• I held a two-week-old baby and didn’t drop it on its head, thereby disfiguring it for life.
• Holding two-week-old babies is not awesome.
• An overabundance of those peppermints that sort of dissolve in your mouth as you suck them. It was, dare I say it, a veritable peppermint orgy.
• The Veronicas!
  
• Admitting you like The Veronicas is not awesome.
• There was a crazy game of poker!
• Admitting you like O.A.R. is at least a little more awesome.
• Maybe not. I don’t know from music.
• I’d like to make it one of 50-48’s ancillary goals to get “music” (or, perhaps, “popular music”) eternally removed from the list of fine arts. Sure, it’s kind of an art, like cooking is an art. You learn a skill and memorize the function of your instruments, then follow a fucking recipe to create an output. Everyone ends up with subtle variations one way or another, but in the end, green bean casserole is still green bean casserole. It all tastes the same. Same with music. It all ultimately sounds the same. It’s cooking with different utensils. That’s why the bulk of artists, writers, filmmakers, etc., are generally an educated, intelligent bunch. Musicians are fucking idiots and college kids. There’s a reason for that. If you can follow directions, you can be a musician. It’s a hustle. A dodge for creativity.
• I have no patience for music.
• Still, here’s one more fun song.
• I am sometimes a hypocrite.
• On that subject, the scar of disappointment talk notwithstanding, I’d still blow any member of the Razorback football team if he asked nice enough.
• I got off on a tangent there. Time to get back to my highlight reel.
• Skinamax!
• Porno is awesome.
• Tyrell Motherfucking Fenroy.
• I attended the Cajuns game against archrival NLU this weekend after suffering through the Hogs lackluster ass-raping at the hands of the Pilipino Circumciser and his comrades, and star running back Tyrell Motherfucking Fenroy rushed for 297 yards and 3 touchdowns. He would have had thirty more yards and another touchdown if the incompetent gaggle of Sunbelt Conference officials hadn’t made a bogus holding call that didn’t even affect the outcome of the play.
• He amassed those stats on 20 carries.
• That’s 15 yards per, for you non-mathematicians.
• It was McFaddenesque.
• Every time Tyrell broke another long run, I screamed and hollered and made the general ass of myself that I normally do at such contests, even though I was sitting amongst the NLU faithful.
• The young lady who attended the game with me was an NLU alum and was temporarily frightened that I was putting her life in danger.
• I was able to reassure her through the time-tested method of lying.
• She did not know the rules of football, so the lying project was very easy.
• I am sometimes a liar.
• On that subject, I’d like to go ahead and rescind my offer to blow the football team. That might have been a lie. But if Darren or Felix or Peyton or Matty-Ice are reading this: I am a phone call/plane ticket away, boys. And if it’s Matty, I’ll even bring the coke.
• Colombian eight-balls are not hard to find if you know where to look.
• Don’t do drugs.
• Unless that’s your thing. We here at 50-48 don’t give a fuck what you do in your spare time. Still, just like listening to popular music makes you stupider every time you do it, so too do drugs make you stupider every time you do them.
• I am sometimes overly moralistic.
• And I have no patience for music.
• Nor do I have patience for losing.
• If we don’t win another game soon, I’m going to kill myself.
• I will leave a suicide note here at 50-48, demanding in one way or another that all 50-48icans go back and study all the previous posts to gain a sort of scriptural perspective on the ultimate meaning of my generally pathetic life.
• In lieu of flowers, I will demand that all 50-48icans buy Matty some blow.
• You see what’s happened here? Even when trying to change the subject, the losing surges forward like an overwhelming cloud, devouring all the topics in its path. And we’re back to disappointment again.
• We here at 50-48 are incredibly disappointed.
• The German poet Freidrich von Schiller once noted, “Disappointments are to the soul what the thunder-storm is to the air”

Break out your fucking umbrellas.

50-48
Fuck Texas
WPS