Throwback Weekend

Let’s see: Alabama putting the wood* to a clearly-overmatched Tennessee team that couldn’t shoot straight…Vanderbilt managing once more to shit the bed** against a clearly inferior foe at a time when a win was critical to their future prospects…Republicans complaining that the media is pushing a meme of inevitability on behalf of a sprightly young Democrat for President…the Redskins whoopin’ that ass in the NFC East and tied for most wins at the halfway mark…SNL bringing the funny week in and week out…and most incredibly, pouring myself into bed at 2 AM after a night of assorted Baptist sin only to answer the bell at 8 AM and commence again – for the second weekend in a row?

When did it become 1992 again?

Rolling sixteen years off one’s personal odometer is very much like the same operation performed on used cars by the Sand Mountain dealers of my youth: sure, it might look newer and fresher, and you might be deceived into thinking it’s a much more capable machine than it is, but come Monday, you’re gonna see the rust on the undercarriage and feel the sludge in the crankcase and say “what the HELL have I done?” However, I have some decided advantages now that I didn’t have then:

* An extra decade-and-a-half of experience with the fruit of the vine/grain/cane. I know things now I didn’t know then, i.e. stick with one type of booze and don’t put too much of that sweet shit in it. Also, drink lots of water before, during and after, and take your ibuprofen.

* A good 50 pounds extra to help soak up all that booze. Yes, the waist size of my jeans has gone up six inches in sixteen years, but the flip side is that I don’t immediately start going loopy at the first whiff of bourbon.

* A girlfriend*** who is not psychotic, doesn’t drink, and can provide me with ongoing updates regarding whether it’s time to tap out or at least knock another 20 dB off my inside voice.

* QUALITY CONTROL. Miller Lite, Early Times, Boone’s – the swills of my youth are long gone. Nowadays, those of us who once pledged ourselves to the C.O.D. Club**** are snobbish enough that we drink only Guinness, or Maker’s Mark, or fine handcrafted cherry ciders, with occasional forays into a pleasantly oaken Napa cab or a fine single-malt that tastes like a beach fire. If you have to be a grownup, you may as well drink like a grownup.

I have successfully evaded hangover the whole way through these last two weekends, of which I am rightly proud, but I can also say in honestly that when the alarm rings, I’ll rise – but I’ll be damned if I’ll shine.

*Right now the only thing between Alabama and a trip to the national championship game is hubris. And as far as I know, Nick Saban doesn’t have time for that shit. Whatever they’re paying him, I don’t want to hear any caterwauling – name me one other coach, ever, that has taken a team from disaster to national title contender in one and a half seasons.

** SAME. OLD. VANDY. That’s right, I said it, it had to be said. There is not one single game the rest of the way (Florida in 2 weeks, then at Kentucky, home to UT, and at Wake Forest) that Vanderbilt will be favored in. Aside from the fortuitous arrangement of games to allow the 5 wins to come at the beginning of the year, and create the illusion of hope, there is nothing to suggest this team is any better than the many others who stalled on 5 in the last decade or so. Bobby may be credited fairly for getting the Dores from two wins a year to a reliable five, but I’m starting to think that it’s going to take a better coach to break through from five to seven, because you can’t build a successful team on the notion that you will never, ever make a mistake in the “itty-bitty things” phases of the game. Success doesn’t mean you never make a mistake, it means you can overcome a mistake. Which the Dores cannot.

*** For long-term committed and ceremonially-bound values of “girlfriend.”

**** If I still claimed any connection with the history of my undergrad institution, this would be the place for a chorus of something that sounds strangely like the middle-eight of “California Drinking Song.” Not for nothing were the club’s posted hours “Midnight to 4 AM.”