The weekend between the NFL Conference Championship games and the Superbowl is a bad one for football but a great one for soul searching. I love football and I fucking hate soul searching. As far as I’m concerned, soul searching is like cleaning out the produce drawer in the fridge- I know that something is creating a god-awful stench in there, but the last thing I want to do is reach in to the murky depths and pull out the putrefying bag of brown liquid that used to be bean sprouts which were purchased for a salad that would never get made (I hate salad more than soul searching.) I’d much rather just hold my nose while I grab another beer and close the fridge door as fast as I can so the smell stays inside so I don’t have to wallow in stinky salad failure while I try and watch the game.  

Sadly, the only game on this past weekend was the Pro-Bowl, the NFL’s annual Make-A-Wish Foundation trip to Hawaii for really good players on terminally bad teams. As football games go, it’s only slightly less exciting than Joe Paterno’s Memorial Service, but still more fun than watching the Jets this past year. DAMN YOU SANCHEZZZZZZ! STOP SUCKING!!!!!! PLEEAAAASE!!! YOU’RE KILLING ME!!!!!!! Anyhoodles, with the Pro-Bowl as my only option for sporting distraction, I decided the time had come to face my stinky demons. So I rolled up my sleeves and got ready to clean out the festering vegetable drawer in my soul.

Let’s be clear, though- I know that I’m very lucky. I have a wife that I love, job I enjoy, dog who puts up with me and a house which I own. In many parts of the world, my problems would be considered “champagne problems” – or, more to the point, “guy who has food and whose family wasn’t butchered by rebels in a brutal civil war” problems. Still, just because I’m a couple of floors higher on Maslow’s Pyramid (Psych 101, bitchez!) (that’s all I remember) than the next poor schmuck in Darfur doesn’t mean that I don’t have real, legitimate problems. Like, for instance, I’ve got a whole season’s worth of Fringe episodes on DVR and I’m deathly afraid that I’ll run into the only other person on the face of the earth who actually watches the show and he’ll totally ruin it for me by telling me whether Peter is still alive on some alternate dimension or if he’s disappeared completely or whether there’s a huge and completely fabulous catfight between Olivia and Faux-livia when Olivia finds out about Faux-livia’s baby, if they can even remember who the father of the baby is because the Watchers totally made Peter disappear from existence after he got into the machine and went back in time to heal the rift between the universes and if you have any clue whatsoever what the hell I’m talking about then please DO NOT FUCKING TALK TO ME ABOUT IT. LA LA LA LA LA LA. I CAN’T HEAR YOU, I CAN’T HEAR YOU. I swear I’m going to get caught up next weekend just as soon as I’m done watching Castle. Oh, Nathan Fillion, you roguishly handsome devil, you. Me-ow! Huh. That got a little weird there for a second didn’t it? Let’s just pretend that never happened and talk about manly stuff, instead. Go sports! Scotch and cigars! Beef, it’s what’s for dinner!