(Another) Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: The Super Bowl Edition

My brother won this contest, you see, the prize of which was a generous all-expense-paid package to Super Bowl XLII in Phoenix, Arizona. He was kind enough to transmute his singular good fortune into a family weekend of a unique sort. So, my parents flew from Philadelphia; my brother flew from South Carolina; I flew from Houston. We convened in Arizona, reunited for a brief time, with an unusual theme.

In addition to the tickets themselves, the prize package included all the other necessities, so we had a nice rental car, a pleasant suite in Scottsdale, etc., etc.
Sacrilege though it may be, the essence of my weekend had everything to do with seeing my family, not necessarily anything to do with the Super Bowl itself. (More on the family stuff in another post.) Would the Giants prevent the Patriots from completing the winningest season in NFL history? Would the Pats prove their superiority over the pretender to their throne? "Who wants it more?" as so much NFL promotional material queried. I didn't know. I didn't even truly care, except insofar as I tried to frame the whole experience as an anthropological study . . . as I already mentioned. I wanted to see my brother, whom I had not seen in several years, and my mom and dad, whom I saw a few months ago, but whom I don't see as often as our affections for each other warrant.

So, to Arizona. Beautiful, beautiful people trolled the chi-chi streets of Scottsdale. The average person on those streets was polished to a glossy finish, so to speak. Conspicuous consumption of designer everything. Tanned, toned, highlighted, painted, contoured, festooned just so. Sunglasses to shoes. A lot of pricey food gets nudged and shifted and repositioned on plates in this town. A lot of celery is nibbled. A lot of people have "eaten before they came." "You cannot win here," I kept observing to myself. "One can never be enough in a place like this."

My jaw clenches when I guess how much truer and louder that quiet observation would have rung had my family attended any of the big pay-to-play-with-the-stars events. Ms. Hilton, Mr. Dogg, et. al. were not going to get money in exchange for their company at an ostentatious party, not from me or mine. Hawk your wares elsewhere, Paris, if your public image your wares be. This lack of high-profile partying will surely disappoint many of my coworkers, who undoubtedly will probe my weekend for glitzy, decadent details of the sort that I suspect that they fantasize that their (relatively) youthful officemate would have during Super Bowl weekend. There isn't enough Purell, latex, Emergen-C, ibuprofen, or antibiotics in the city of Phoenix, though, to help me survive a weekend of the sort they seem to expect, frankly.

So many of the official attractions over at the stadium in Glendale sort of, well, depressed me. The lines and crowds were, as expected, enormous and plodding. They're thick and slow like human molasses. Everything is bright and busy and loud and flashing. Colorful. Frenetic. Plastic, even when materially it is not. But for all the "boldness" and "excitement," the atmosphere felt mostly hollow to me. I felt like a witness to a cult worshipping a god I believe to not be truly there. Honestly, I felt stultified—bored—much of the time when we were engaging in Super Bowl activities as opposed to simply enjoy each others' company as a family. I felt bored even in the midst of the buzzing activity. I sort of pitied the droves of people who seemed to be having the times of their lives. As I felt this pity, I was truly ashamed of myself: this imperiousness is not proper for a self-styled amateur ethnographer, but more importantly, I do not think it kind or fair. If I were more generous of spirit, I would not have felt as I did, perhaps.

But, oh, how I was slowly withering inside during so many moments. Even with all the "excitement," the environment didn't engage me as fully as I like to be engaged in order to staunch the flow of neurotic anxiety I always feel. I get absorbed by stuff that bores many people; they get absorbed, apparently, by what bores me. I'm not so sure now as I once was that this is something other than a mere function of preference. But it can still feel maddening when stuck in a foreign spot.

I confess that, yes, a culturally jingoistic part of me pitied these folks for caring so much about Super Bowl hoopla instead of enthusing over the sorts of things that keep me riled up and entertained. Meandering through crowds, slurping syrupy margaritas and hogwash beer, cheering music so proletarian and awful that listening physically made me blush (including a Tom Petty cover band performing on a stage in the midway outside the stadium), greedily snatching up promotional trinkets, and devouring all the entertainments presented to them like famine refugees at a banquet . . . why was this fun? Hadn't they ever read a book so thought-provoking they could hardly stand not to tell someone about it or stared at a sculpture so beautiful it made them cry or . . . cared about what I care about? Didn't they know how much richer life could be than this? I wanted to lead them all off to see a Tarkovsky film, like some bleedingly self-righteous Pied Piper of Culture. I felt very adolescent for feeling this way, since I knew better.

Maybe I worried that they were enthusiastic because they were instructed to be enthusiastic, not because they reflectively considered the experience worthy of their enthusiasm. This is what fun is supposed to look like. Even so, how many times have I or my ilk raved over Bergman because we're supposed to, or embraced Shakespeare because he's the Bard, or denigrated the likes of Nascar without ever attending an event? We all inherit taste and value, to some degree, whether we humble ourselves to admit it or not.

I feel genuine, unalloyed sadness while in the midst of mass enthusiasm I don't share. Some haughty pity, perhaps, but my own lonesomeness too. The feeling of being a non-believer at a Big Tent Revival. A tugging sense that I am misunderstood in some profound, important way, and that I fail to understand something widespread and fundamental. These thousands and thousands of people around me—and their millions of counterparts who wish they had the chance to be where the thousands are—do not "get me." They do not understand what makes me happy or what instinctively feels worthwhile to me. Moreover, I do not "get them," I do not "get this" or why they find this special and important. The matter does not feel like one of criticism . . . just spiritual distance. I truly long to understand as much as I long to be understood. But it seems like neither obtains as often as I'd like.

A month or two ago, I read Barbara Ehrenreich's Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. As I discussed Super Bowl mania with one of my bosses, an astute observer of human behavior, a smart, perceptive man, I recalled again and again Ehrenreich's descriptions and interpretations of communal celebration and ritualized mass hysteria throughout history and across cultures. We NEED this sort of thing, I guess, and that is why these cultural ecstasies flourish inevitably as one of the most widespread human inventions, regardless of time, place, or culture. The Festival of Bacchus, Carnivale in Rio, a Rolling Stones concert, the Super Bowl. This particular boss encouraged me beforehand, likely sensing that I was not prone to such a practice ordinarily, to try to embrace the experience for what it was, to not just observe but to participate, even just to try out the feeling. I'm not sure whether I truly succeeded or not, but I find his idea wise nonetheless.