Blogging Idiots

Y’know those angry rants that litter online journals? This is one of them.

I’m not a big sports fan, but I love rooting for the home team, especially when the home team is the Indianapolis Colts going to the Division playoff. I get a tip from a friend on the Brian Michael Bendis message board that I can go to a bar that has Sky, get them to turn it to the US Sport channel, and watch it live: I’m ecstatic! When I go to the nearest pub and no one else is watching anything, and when I actually have someone to watch it with, I’m genuinely happy. When they’re selling bottles of Grolsch for only two pounds, I know I’ve done something right in this world. And then it’s ruined.

I talk in pubs. How dare I. When I talk, you’d pretty much have to be deaf to not notice I’m American. There was a group of rugby players at the pub at the same time, and they were not deaf. They were drunk, though, and were very interested in me coming over and chatting with them. Me wanting to meet new people and all that I agree, and at first things are fine. They want to know bits of trivia about the States, hear me say things differently than they say them, and so long as I can watch the game I’m okay with this because I get as much as I give.

They keep drinking, and in doing so they go from being rough-around-the-edges rugby players to college-drop-out sports twats. The “Say What We Say the Way You Say It” game went WAAAAY too long to start. One guy starts giving Duncan a back rub which doesn’t work on any level, and that wasn’t cool (or comprehensible). Same dude spills beer over my shoes, which I still control myself over because it wasn’t my beer. But it keeps going. They get racist, they get sexist, they get more violent first with each other and then with us. At one point I stood up and the only reason a fight didn’t break out was that they thought I didn’t know what standing up to drunk, dumb rugby players means. (By the way, it means you’re ready to fight, and I knew exactly what it meant when I stood up.) As we were leaving one of them wanted to shake my hand, to say they were just having a bit of fun. I refused.

It really killed me to leave. One, I had as much right to be there as they did. Two, I was a more polite patron than they were (when the American’s the nice, quiet one, you know something’s up), but the barkeep didn’t give a crap. Three, and this is what really burns me, is that it was the end of the third quarter when we left. I didn’t even get to see the end of the game. We went home and I pulled up the scoreboard on ESPN, Colts win 15-6. I would have really liked to see that last quarter.

Epilogue: Inbreeding hurts the emotional growth of the participants, the family, society, and the gene pool as a whole. Letting such doomed offspring play sports and have free reign of pubs is like putting a pretty little patch over a hole in a haz-mat suit: it doesn’t do anything.