School Spirit

I was never much for school spirit in high school.  Being firmly on the "geek" side of the social spectrum, back when that wasn't cool, meant that sports and sporting events and pep rallies and GO REBELS FIGHT WIN HURR DURR was more or less an archaic religious ritual wherein we glorified the stupid cocksuckers that made my life difficult every day.  I'm not here to whine, but my high school experiences left me with a sort of low grade PTSD according to my string of court ordered therapists...and I couldn't (and still can't) fathom the brazen idols we made out of these mouth breathing reprobates.  When our high school basketball team went to state, I bet against them in every game despite my lack of interest in gambling, just because fuck those fucking fucks.

The effect stuck around with me through my abortive attempt at college.  My family were all big cradle-to-the-grave IU fans, and me going to IU was a crowning achievement for most of them.  But I wasted it; I was too turned off of school spirit as a concept and I spent the entire time in college avoiding the collective insanity this town suffers during basketball season by cowering in my dorm room.  Oddly enough, this was regarded as kind of cool by the shady characters I was running with at the time, a collection of pseudo intellectuals and limosine liberals who thought I was just the tits. They had pretty well soured me on academia and liberalism by the time I dropped out and I left college without ever having gone to one sporting event.  Oddly, I regret that now-but probably only because I was never smooshed together in a class project with a sports hero.

As an adult, over 30 and disillusioned, I've come to appreciate sports in the tribal sense.  I root for the Colts and for the Hoosiers, for Notre Dame in football even though that has been massively disappointing lately, and I sort of understand what I didn't understand then-that athletics has a sort of primal appeal.  After all, the home team is "Us" and the away team is "Them" and all else being equal, I am much happier if 'We" are beating "Their" asses into a bloody pulp.  I enjoy the collective madness even if my participation is limited, I enjoy the easy pussy flowing like a river across the whole town, and I enjoy especially the fall from grace that comes from sports scandals busting open wide on the internet.

It has taken me a long time to overcome my instinctive loathing towards those who have done nothing to me, who merely share some vague characteristics with the retard monkeys that my high school class was begging to perform abasements for.  I enjoy sports spectatorship and I even enjoy playing sports.  But my favorite position in modern sports is still "Grand Federal Prosector" so maybe my cynicism hasn't retreated too far.

Go Hoosiers.