My son eats his cheeseburgers with mustard and ketchup. No lettuce. No tomato. No onions. Pickles? Fuhgeddaboudit. He would probably consider going without the bun if he could. Cheese. Burger. He's a pretty elemental guy. I know where he gets that. I used to scrape my burgers free of most anything that might otherwise interfere with the carnivorous enterprise.
For some time I found myself in negotiations with my wife about the contents of my chocolate chip cookies. The cookies, I felt, were the delivery system for the chocolate chips. She is very fond of walnuts. I worried for a while that this might somehow sully the whole chocolate chip cookie symbiosis. Eventually I caved, partly because I felt it was the diplomatic thing to do and partly because it turns out that a few chopped walnuts don't really hurt a thing.
Still, it's hard not to feel the chocolate experience being diluted. The solution? Sit on the couch with a bag of chocolate chips and don't bother with all that dough nonsense. This attitude is echoed in the way I tend to eat my chocolate cake: I flip that bad boy on its head and eat down until I have a thin layer of frosting left. The hard work done, dessert can be enjoyed. I should also, by way of confession, allow that I have been known to enjoy taking a spoon to a can of Betty Crocker ready to spread frosting. That's what I really want, after all.
Which brings me to the National Football League. These guys have figured out the sports equivalent of a can of Double Fudge frosting: The NFL Red Zone. You can, if you're so inclined, sit on hour couch and watch six straight hours of nothing but scoring plays. No beer commercials. No timeouts for a measurement. Just flipping around the country looking for those touchdowns, field goals and safeties. Every so often they let an extra point sneak in there, if something interesting happens, but mostly it's just touchdown after touchdown. They make a big deal about how they don't do commercials, but cooler heads will realize that it's really all one big advertisement for the corporation known as the NFL. Does that keep me from sitting on the couch and shoveling all that football action into my head? No walnuts. No pickles. No worries.
As someone who hardly sees the point of eating chocolate without walnuts, I deeply appreciate (but don't fully understand) your efforts to get me to eat more of your personal soul food.
ReplyDeleteI am divided about Red Zone, however. In a way, just enjoying the touchdowns is indeed like just eating the chocolate chips. I'd probably be more inclined to sit and watch if there were more marching band highlights. (The real point, to me, of football...)