Notes from the Editor's Desk -- 8/2/22
Thinking back on it, there was, of course, nothing explicitly wrong with Park Ridge. I have to remember that the places I travelled where an intellectual capacity was ostensibly valued were also places where I found little more than decadence and disorder, spiritual or otherwise. Park Ridge’s values were robust, if staid; earnest, if though they were also limited. Where one is, or has been, or, indeed, will go, matters less the more one’s understanding of these irremediable settings can be articulated. Football was, for the professionals whose station it was to focus on a limited portion of larger, often banal enterprises, a form of engagement with coherence. These enterprises, whether related to insurance, or law, distribution, or finance, when their whole scope was considered, often remained incoherent. Why football seemed a question with an obvious answer.
Football does possess an essential beauty. Different physical capacities and talents, different strategies, adopted in part to ameliorate differences in talent, are confined all within a framework and set of rules that allows for strategies and the successful implementation of strategies to produce differential results. A greater portion of life was more akin to football than to office work, or so it would seem, if a study of the ancients can produce a fundamental insight into this matter. A captivation with life has largely been abstracted away in Park Ridge, Illinois. When life’s dynamics cannot be intuited, an obsession grows for the phenomenon that is a metaphor for life. An emphasis on youth sports, when viewed through this lens, becomes sensible, if though it is also sad in many ways, as it allows one’s child to discover what is missing from the locality’s adulthood. It is, however, narrow-minded. The best from a town of several tens of thousands of residents are unlikely to even start at a division one school, and even they, when their meagre careers are through, have no practices to fall back upon that would produce an engagement with the brain’s need for coherence. Practices of differential utility that scale throughout each stage of one’s life are essential. Sports fandom is, in a sense, a snow globe for the place in one’s life where coherence had been discovered, but where it is no longer recognizable. But then again, I find my own belated interested perplexing, but super fan over here is going to be glued to the games come football season, crushing beers, and rooting on the team that was often worked into the homilies of the fall. Thus were Rex Grossman and the Nazarene put on the same playing field, and much of the congregation, in their anticipation of the Sunday’s leisure, once the Sunday’s formalities were through, put them on a similar footing.
