Current mood:

gloomy

The Plight of a Bears fan
So football season began again, a time I truly look forward to all year long. Sure things like faith, love, friends, and purpose are nice, but we're talking about football here. Sunday morning comes, and I wake up eagerly like a kid on Christmas morning (and those who know me know that me waking up eagerly is an astonishing fact). I bust out the old Bears journey and take a jaunt over to Tinhorn Flats, the local Chicago watering hole.

The normally sleepy and quiet bar is jammed full of people this morning, all decked out in Chicago Bears regalia. Strangers who don't even know each other are buying drinks for other people and trading football minutia facts. There's truly a sense of community here.

The game begins, any my Chicago Bears do what they do best, lose. You'd think somewhere along the way I would have reconciled myself to that fact, that the Bears always lose. Somehow though, hope always springs eternal. It's partly the teams fault. Rarely do they ever get blown completely out of the water, they always have a way of hanging in there to the last possible moments and then choke.

Perhaps there's an upshot to this somewhere, a silver lining amidst all the gloom. I have a tendency to be a calm and temperate person, even in the face of adversity. It's a rare occassion when I let emotion overide common sense in my head. That might come from being a Bears fan. Years upon years of constantly beng let down by them has taught me how to deal with dissapointment, but not to let go of hope for a better future.

In some ways, my love of the Bears is like a dysfunctional relationship. It's like I'm in love with a woman whose never going to be quite what I want or need her to be, but I love her too much to ever let go of her. Sure, she seemed nice and pretty when I married her, but now she's become a hard core alcoholic with bouts of bi-polar disease, schizophrenia, and rampant dimensia. Yet a sense of loyalty and hope for the future just won't let me let her go.

Oh well, there's always next Sunday.