I enter the second week of the football season feeling a bit like the
Coyote who has looked around and noticed that while the barrel didn't fall his head, a falling piano is
right behind. He hears the Doppler
effect, he feels the sunlight blocked out be the rapidly descending
object, and he manages to respond with only a feeble parasol that he
raises, mournfully, above his head.
I'm not sure what a
piano is doing in the middle of the desert. It's probably an anvil that
I'm thinking of, but for Jets fans, the improbably bad is always
possible, even likely. If a Jets fan wants to believe that the very best
is bound to happen - like the likelihood of repeating the offensive
mastery they should for three quarters against Buffalo in their opener on Sunday - then he ought to also remember that a priceless Steinway may
indeed be somehow teetering on the arid precipice just above his head.
You know, just to
be on the safe side. If he manages to elude that, I'm sure there's the
anvil waiting for him somewhere. An anvil's a lot heavier, and it comes
in the colors
of the AFC's usual suspects, the predictable, clinical uninspiring
Patriots and the dull, pounding Steelers - gray and black, respectively.
Whereas
apparently, the Jets are a clown car.
Much has been made of it, and
Jets fans have voiced various levels of offense to this. I happen to
love the fact that I root for a clown car. The whole concept of a clown
car is completely opposite to the River Rouge plant of identical Model
T's produced out of Foxboro, which seeks to render everything its
bandwagon jumping fans see into total similarity. Through the bleak eyes
of Bill Belichick, football remains a slickly imagined, grimly produced
corporate product. I know I was complaining the same of our Romney
campaign donor-owner, Woody Johnson just weeks ago; as Emerson
metaphorically asks, "Do I contradict myself?" You damn right I do.
At least
now I have the clown car as a humanizing metaphor. I root for the clown
car. Get that clown car in here. I like to think that, like something
out of the Gumball Rally, the clown car manages to elude Roscoe and the
police. By the sheer luck of its unwieldy design, it manages to make the
maneuvers needed to get off the highway, onto a stretch of local road,
through somebody's backyard, and back onto the highway again, all the while
offering a bunch of carnival sounds and musical notes through its horn
that make kids think that the ice cream man is drunkenly pouring through
the neighborhood. It's not ice cream, kids. It's a bunch of clowns.
Send in the clowns. Ah, don't bother. They're here.
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