Thirty years ago, amid the disappointment of Ray Perkins and the uncertainty of going to Bill Curry as head coach and losing twice to Auburn which clearly had the upper hand, the notion of \u201cthirty years from now, Alabama is coming off five national championships in a decade under a coach who is even greater than Bear Bryant\u201d would seem like the stuff of Star Trek time travel, the same My Weekly Reader-As We May Live nonsense that promised us self-driving cars and pocket computers and video phones and a potato baked in five minutes…<\/p>\n
Well don\u2019t I feel like a jackass.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t watch it, obviously. I kept apprised of it, but you don\u2019t actually have to watch Alabama football these days. It is as ruthlessly efficient as a hard-eyed casino blackjack dealer, as joyless as a tidal wave, impossible to root for unless you\u2019re a devoted glory-hound or a long-time loyalist. Alabama is the rake, they are the don\u2019t pass line, they are the house – even if their kickers are the 00 on the roulette wheel. Just as Vanderbilt in 1994 prized my interest away for the first time, the Brigadoon era at Vanderbilt took me away for good. I could easily claim the Crimson Tide, because I suffered through the years after the Bear, through the bricks in the window and the Memphis State homecoming loss, the Jelks-Langham debacles and the Dubose-Franchione-Price-Shula parade of ineptitude (while noting that all of those coaches who made it to a regular season did turn in at least one 10-win performance\u2026which Vanderbilt has never done). But I don\u2019t, not really, because you don\u2019t emotionally invest in the vacuum cleaner.<\/p>\n
I like to think this would have been enough to keep relations up back South. Although maybe not. At least I was given the grace to lose my father a decade before the term \u201cFox Geezer Syndrome\u201d passed into currency. I\u2019m under no delusions about what would come of leaving someone at home to watch cable news all day for over two decades, especially when they already owned a couple dozen guns in Alabama. Although I like to think he would have drawn the line at a Trump or a Moore. At least I don\u2019t have to know for sure.<\/p>\n
Something broke in the last couple of months. I think I may have let go of the college thing and just accepted that, like Kimmy Schmidt said, you\u2019re never going to not have been kidnapped. I\u2019m never going to have not gone to Hilltop High or suffered the consequences and repercussions of that. It ultimately wasn\u2019t necessary, there was a path to get everything that matters to me now without going through Mordor, but it just didn\u2019t work out that way and there\u2019s nothing to be done about it. Yes, there is a gaping hole in my life. It will always be there. Nothing for it but to go around and try not to keep falling in.<\/p>\n
And if I\u2019m honest, maybe part of it was seeing Luke Skywalker up there again at last. Older, paunchier, angry at how things didn\u2019t work out. The kind of people pissing and moaning about how that\u2019s not real and shouldn\u2019t be canon have never been over 40 and had to live with a life that didn\u2019t go the way you were promised. There is a certain enormity in giving up trying to will yourself a better past, to stop trying to squint at the dots until they become a schooner, to stop trying to make the pebbles have been worth counting.<\/p>\n
There are a lot of things in this world that we\u2019ll never make unhappen. The trick is what do we do about it now, knowing that it\u2019s not going to be the same and that matters may be worse and we just have to battle through. I think the fact that I finally saw Ireland last year proved that there could still be new things, new discoveries, that there are still opportunities out there for the person I finally aged into being and may have wanted to be all along. And it gave me a frame of reference by which to gauge: can I live here like I\u2019d want to live in Galway?<\/p>\n
Take the bus. Take the walk. Work remotely. Have a pint. Put away the phone and read. Plan to travel. Go to Tahoe in the winter. Go to Hawaii in the winter. Make a list of the things you enjoy doing instead of a checklist of things that have to get done while you\u2019re on leave. And when the place you live gets to be too obnoxious to live with, refuse to play the game. Sidestep it. Do your own thing instead. Of which more later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thirty years ago, amid the disappointment of Ray Perkins and the uncertainty of going to Bill Curry as head coach and losing twice to Auburn which clearly had the upper hand, the notion of \u201cthirty years from now, Alabama is coming off five national championships in a decade under a coach who is even greater … <\/p>\n