I'm Watching Football, Which Is Odd as I Hate Football in a Hyperbolic and Clinically Revealing Way

• Woke up with that in my head - I found the tape I used making it in a box in a closet late last night - and because some of you have asked me to post some of these I'm whore enough to provide. I know there will be a post tomorrow - it's a High Egoslavian Holy Day. It's already done, it's scheduled for 7:00 AM at which time we will be on I-70 towards Ohio for what might be our penultimate trip to visit Planet at college. There will or won't be posts over the weekend.
• Dead flowers: i'm irritated that the right is using a principle which i do regard as sacred - the right of individual conscience to secede from the demands of the state or to refrain from activities which violate it - to get me nodding along with an underlying bigotry. i'm irritated at the left for relentlessly blowing this small thing up and using it as a club. really, i'm just sick of our politics, which never asks what's true or false or good or evil, but only how people can be manipulated to join up by defining and hating an enemy. in that situation, there's no difference between symbolic and substantive issues.
• If you went on Yelp to the page of that pizzeria in Indiana and posted a photo of your dick fucking a pizza in the name of Liberal tolerance for diversity, fuck yourself.
• A spectrum is haunting Texas.
• Water in the Great Plains. Posted for itself, but also in case you do a weekly compilation of water news or something. 
• Archives.
• A documentary of Flann O'Brien. I keep meaning to go back and reread - it's been 30 years - but somehow I never think to do it when I'm between books.
• Crime fiction is leftwing, thrillers are rightwing?
• Post-exotic novels.
• Mark Strand's last interview. 
• Lawrence English.
• Lightning Bolt playing Rock and Roll Hotel May 12. Wanna go? Buy me a beer, I'll buy you the ticket.
• It's not out yet, but from what of it I've heard of it on WFMU this is going to be one of my favorite albums of the recent past:

I HEART YOUR DOG'S HEAD

Erin Belieu

I’m watching football, which is odd as

I hate football

in a hyperbolic and clinically revealing way,

but I hate Bill Parcells more,

because he is the illuminated manuscript

of cruel, successful men, those with the slitty eyes of ancient reptiles,

who wear their smugness like a tight white turtleneck,

and revel in their lack of empathy

for any living thing.

So I’m watching football, staying up late to watch football,

hoping to witness (as I think of it)

The Humiliation of the Tuna

(as he is called),

which is rightly Parcells’s first time back in the Meadowlands

since taking up with the Cowboys,

who are, as we all know,

thugs, even by the NFL’s standards. The reasons

I hate football are clear and complicated and were born,

as I was, in Nebraska,

where football is to life what sleep deprivation is

to Amnesty International, that is,

the best researched and most effective method

of breaking a soul. Yes,

there’s the glorification of violence, the weird nexus

knitting the homo, both phobic and erotic,

but also, and worse, my parents in 1971, drunk as

Australian parrots in a bottlebush, screeching

WE’RE #1, WE’RE #1!

when the Huskers finally clinched the Orange Bowl,

the two of them

bouncing up and down crazily on the couch, their index

fingers jutting holes through the ubiquitous trail of smoke rings

that was the weather in our house,

until the whole deranged mess that was them,

my parents, the couch, their lit cigarettes,

flipped over backward onto my brother and me. My husband

thinks that’s a funny story and, in an effort to be a “good sport,”

I say I think it is, too.

Which leads me to recall the three Chihuahuas

who’ve spent the fullness of their agitated lives penned

in the back of my neighbor’s yard.

Today they barked continuously for 12 minutes (I timed it) as

the UPS guy made his daily round.

They bark so piercingly, they tremble with such exquisite outrage,

that I’ve begun to root for them, though it’s fashionable

to hate them and increasingly dark threats

against their tiny persons move between the houses on our block.

But isn’t that what’s wrong with this version of America:

the jittering, small-skulled, inbred-by-no-choice-

of-their-own are despised? And Bill Parcells—

the truth is he’ll win

this game. I know it and you know it and, sadly,

did it ever seem there was another possible outcome?

It’s a small deposit,

but I’m putting my faith in reincarnation. I need to believe

in the sweetness of one righteous image,

in Bill Parcells trapped in the body of a teacup poodle,

as any despised thing,

forced to yap away his next life staked to

a clothesline pole or doing hard time on a rich old matron’s lap,

dyed lilac to match her outfit.

I want to live there someday, across that street,

and listen to him. Yap, yap, yap.