Why I’ll be There Next Year
Yesterday, I watched the sports team with which I’ve had my longest allegiance, the Green Bay Packers, lose to the trending New York Giants. A team which had six fumbles lost all year lost three in one game; which had won or tied the turnover battle all season lost the ratio four to one; which had very few drops, errant throws, coaching mistakes all year, made six drops, threw away third down conversions, and never noticed a special teams unit standing still on every kick leading up to a trapping failure of an on-side attempt.
I watched the game with two important people: my partner who, despite a household of Lions fans, has been wearing her Packer’s hoodie with pride next to me all season, and my good friend, whose knowledge of sport and staunch allegiances makes her once-untested Packers fandom a welcome addition to the fold. I tried my best to keep quiet throughout the game, to avoid making my usual defeatist commentaries that set me up for the potential failures. But I sensed immediately—from Aaron’s errant throw over Greg when the latter released off his route—that we were in trouble. When had we ever really settled for three points all year because of missed execution? And then the onside kick, and then the missed tackle on a half back running out the clock, and then the Hail Mary, and then the faints and the flickers and the all is lost. I all but wrote of the team’s chances when Charles’s arm only faintly connected with a football launched forty yards down field in tactical desperation because, well, until that point (and for what I was sure would be the rest of the game), I had not seen the team I had grown to stupidly fall in love with as the season progressed. The team I saw yesterday wasn’t the team I loved. There was something different about this group of players, the looks on their faces, the matte of the gold in their helmets. They had lost something of their professional burden and gained something of their humanity. This team was populated, without a doubt, with men who had lost the edge to play the game—and I do not blame them at all for losing that: the wins came too easy, the rest came in excess, the tragedy came so suddenly, and the game got away all too quickly.
As the post game began, my fellow watchers were feeling helpless, empty, devastated, frustrated, angry, cheated, disappointed, the way a fan’s fan feels, and I wanted to comfort them and let them know that these moments make the fan, and that these moments are what make the victories so fulfilling and blah blah blah, but didn’t believe the filmic tropes as much as I can write them out in earnest. I walked away from the loss misguided and searching for justification. I, in all my high and mighty, cited the numerous times in which this team had let me down. Three straight play-off losses to Aiken’s Cowboys; Terrell Owens’s catch; Michael Vick sub-zero running; Brett’s interception and the field goal that finally, mercifully, went through; Aaron’s did-that-just-happen moment in the desert: all cited so that I could somehow feel better about this loss, so that the context would knock this loss down the ladder of disappointments I’ve got hanging in my garage of memories (whoa did that metaphor take over).
Truth is, this loss is the hardest I’ve faced with this team. I can’t cheapen it. This loss and this team is my Icarus of losses and teams. From a distance, I cheered Tyree’s catch years ago, revelling in 18-1. This team rose to a comparable height and failed on a far greater level. They didn’t just hit the ground: they found a fissure to fall through and they kept going. What living this loss solidifies for me is this: the intensity of feeling that comes with a loss in no way compares with that of victory. I’ve seen my Packers win two Super Bowls, under two quarterbacks I deified in their moments, yet I cannot recount for you an appropriate or expected feelings in those moments when the games were won. I didn’t cheer, I didn’t raise my arms, I didn’t do much more than let a smile creep through in appreciation. My fourteen year-old self somehow knew it best: he was level-headed about the whole thing. He watched Brett and Reggie and he didn’t know what to do with so monumental victory, so he didn’t do anything. He just sat there, living some kind of uncanny parallel experience in another world in which he was ahead of his maturity and understood that mistaking that moment as a joyful moment is, indeed, a mistake—because the best you can hope for is for them not to lose. The most I allowed myself after last year’s victory was, well, relief, but I couldn’t celebrate the championship. I couldn’t take pleasure in my efforts to follow the team all year, to watch all the games, to read all the stories, to buy all the swag, to dedicate myself daily to my fandom. In the end, I was just relieved that, for one year at least, they had not disappointed me. They had, for one year at least, spared me the usual feeling of helplessness, emptiness, devastation, frustration, anger, the feeling of being cheated.
There is (I have no doubt now) several degrees of masochism which comes with any dedication you make to a professional sports team: you take your mediocre job and your small living space and your family problems and you put them into the hands of celebrity athletes and near billion-dollar corporations, and you tell them to make you feel better for brief moments throughout the year and the season. But I only vividly remember the disappointments, and never take a full sense of pride or ownership in the triumphs. More and more, I’m having trouble reconciling this dynamic, this imbalance within myself. More and more, I hate myself for coming back to my teams, my players, my games. If I can’t celebrate the victories, what am I gaining from this relationship? And yet I can’t turn away. I can’t. I can’t not (‘scuse the Double Neg) get excited at the ironic turn of getting what came in the mail today: I can’t not get excited about seeing my first letter arrive in my mailbox from the Packers ticket office documenting my slow climb up its season’s tickets waiting list. My fandom is my burden, and I guess I’m OK with that, but that’s likely because I just plain refuse to fully reconcile its intricacies. I just hope, and think, and (have to) believe that I’m not the only one who sits sombrely even after a win and wonders why it doesn’t feel better, and what keeps drawing him back?
What the Heck is a Laestrygonian Anyways?
“Hot mockturtle vapour and steam of newbaked jampuffs rolypoly poured out from Harrison’s. The heavy noonreek tickled the top of Mr. Bloom’s gullet. Want to make good pastry, butter, best flour, Demerara sugar, or they’d taste it with the hot tea. Or is it from her? A barefoot arab stood over the grating, breathing in the fumes. Deaden the gnaw of hunger that way. Pleasure or pain is it?” (U 129.232-38)
No doubt this small excerpt from James Joyce’s Ulysses will be the most interesting bit of writing you will ever see in this blog dedicated to my culinary adventures in a city, well, that I think should be a little more well known for its eateries. In my three years here in London, Ontario, I have found that some of the most notable experiences I’ve had in this city have focused around food. Some might say that this is because the only thing to do in LondonONT is eat. . . Some might be right.
In his wanderings around noontime Dublin, Leopold Bloom searches his own city for a place to fill his stomach, passing the strange site of an outsider much like himself taking in the unparalleled aroma of bread, freshly baked. And yet, Bloom’s always quizzical mind asks the question to which I intend to find my own answer. Is food, the smell of it, the taste of it, the feel of it, the sight of it, the sound of it a source of pleasure or pain?
Doubtless I have come up with a few opinions about food in my, now, twenty-seven and five sixths years of eating, but the most stable opinion about food, the one that always keeps me returning to a favourite restaurant or (more often) a favourite recipe is this: food and its preparation is an art, and it is the greatest and most fleeting kind of art we have.
There is no more satisfying creative process in the world than the preparation of a meal for oneself and another. A plate of food lovingly tasked over, spoiled as if it were a child with hours of preparation, its component parts carefully selected, meticulously prepared, and eventually shared with another is more than a Cezanne painting, a Coens film, an Amis novel: more than these artists and their art forms, food can reach into all your senses. And I do mean all. Food overloads your Aristotelian senses; a good meal–an important meal–is heard by ears that strain toward the kitchen, seen by eyes that revel when an oppressive lid is pulled away, smelled by a dip of a head low, felt by discerning fingers, tasted by an equally discerning tongue. Food exercises our audition and our vision, our olafaction and our tactition, and, yes, our gustation. I’ve never listened to a Cezanne, smelled a Coens film, or tasted an Amis novel; well, at least I don’t make it a habit of eating paper. There’s just too much other good stuff to sink my teeth into.
To understand how my suggestion that food is art connects to Bloom’s conundrum of the pleasures and the pains of food, I offer another personal precept about art: art should be something you love and something you hate almost simultaneously. The artists whom I respect most are those that simultaneously make me love them and loathe them; I love them for their contribution. I loathe them for their genius. Of course, the hatred half of this bilateral is driven purely by jealousy, and, you know, I’m absolutely fine with that. That means that as a creator, I know how far away I am from where I need to be, and for me, the most rewarding way to try and produce a sort of artistic affect is food. Sure, I play guitar, and I sing, and I act, and I sketch, and I write, and I spread myself too thin to be too good at any one thing (on purpose I’m convinced) because I can never see myself so good at any one thing as to be the envy of a person who simultaneously can’t stop listening to me, watching me, surveying me, or reading me, while hating me all the while.
But I can make a mean salsa, I get rave reviews about my lamb burgers, and my warm German potato salad, if I may be permitted, ain’t bad either. My guacamole, however, was proven inferior by a friend just last night who so perfectly married a comfortably ripe mango with the softness of avocados to create something that, yes, I could shake my head at, while still stuffing my face with more. If there is any one creative medium, any one artistic venue that carries the potential to change a person’s mood, to affect them with reinvented emotions and reactions, that I want to share in with the people I love, the people I respect, the people I could not do without, it will forever be food.
In The Odyssey, Odysseus travels to Telepylus. His fleet enters a bottleneck, while his ship stays behind. He sends two men onto the island to search for inhabitants and they meet the daughter of Antiphates, king of a race of giants, known as Laestrygonians, who cannibalize men’s flesh. Odysseus escapes while his two scouts are left at the mercy of the giants whose only debate is whether to eat the men when they are first caught or to save them for later.
A Laestrygonian, most importantly to me, is a person who will eat anything. I hope to one day be one of these fearless giants. Now, I know the risks. One unruly scarf too many and I become one of those obscene Lestrygogs from Bloom’s Dublin, a patron of one of the various eateries in my city from which a hero might need to turn away from in disgust. I hope that I will prove here in this shared space that I am not a gluttonous Dubliner who inhales, unthinkingly, bits of cannibalized meat, but instead that I am a surveyor of food, all sorts of food, the food he makes, and the food that is made for him.
How will I undertake this task? Hmm… I think I’ll start by ordering the ”[p]enny dinner. Knife and fork chained to the table” (U 129.238-39). Careful now.
References: Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler, et. al. New York: Vintage, 1986.
