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