Category: Insane Ramblings

I first began to notice I was different from the other boys around puberty. I didn’t seem to have the same interests they did. They would huddle up and exchange knowing glances and whisper shared secrets, but I just didn’t understand the attraction. I felt out of place. Alone.

It is only football. I have never understood the obsession with sport. The tedium of bone crushing hits interspersed with seemingly endless banal commentary about how the team that wants it more will win. Well, the team that wants it more and is willing to pay for the absolute freak of nature players required to compete at the highest levels. Wanting it will not make a difference if you weigh 140 pounds and a 250 pound linebacker decides to personally introduce your face to the astro-turf. Want it all you like as you recover from your concussion and the multiple broken bones you sustained when that human growth hormone fueled caricature of a human being hit you like a locomotive composed of flesh and hate. They made a movie about that difference. It was called Rudy. Rudy got to play about three plays for all his longing to be in the big game. Want has nothing to do with it. Drugs and money and training are what make the difference.

I understand the basic structure of the game. Four downs. Ten yards. You have to scrimmage enough yardage in your allotted space to advance to the next series of downs, else kick the oblong thing they call a “ball” as close as possible to your own goal line. Conceptually it makes sense. The execution is where things go sideways. Grown men wearing headsets and barking at other grown men in overstuffed uniforms what to do, all to push that strange looking brown… thing toward a tuning fork jutting from the earth like some skinny metal-head throwing the horns.

What all of this has to do with watered down beer and sixteen bladed razors is something I will never understand. There is nothing left to turn into an advertisement. I suppose the next logical step is to let the quarterback tattoo his forehead with the Nike logo. Perhaps at halftime we could have the Budweiser cheerleaders battle the Miller Light squad to the death at the fifty yard line. Let the fans vote on who gets the swords.

I could regale you with stories of my Tiefling star pact warlock named Sebastion Blaque. How I wondered whether it would be wiser to invest the gold I had earned adventuring into a new set of armor to bump my AC, or instead spend it on an enchanted rod to boost my attack accuracy and strength. Of course, I had a feat available to spend that could also use on either giving him an additional language, which could prove invaluable in deciphering the ancient tome he had uncovered, or instead to utilize it for something more martial.

If you found all of that incomprehensible and tedious to read, welcome to my understanding of sports.

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There is a terrible darkness that gnaws at the souls of men. A vast and inescapable void that looms, ever present, and hungers. My own studies into the forbidden had led me down the path to madness. The toll of grappling with things which should not be seen, and cannot be unseen. I had worried my nails to ruins, and found myself plagued by a cough. My laugh a nervous titter. The Miskatonic University was more asylum than a place of learning. The lost and wicked roamed the halls, either unaware of uncaring what they had sacrificed in their quest for knowledge best left hidden. A sanitarium of the damned.

I slept fitfully, straining against my covers and sweating profusely as horrors haunted my dreams. Dead things in sunken cities that would rise once more to bring ruin to our world. A terrible mass of undulating tentacles that would alight upon the forest and give birth to twisted nightmare beasts. A king in yellow, seated on an ancient throne in the frozen plateau of Leng.

One night, he came. The Viking. His eyes blazed beneath his helm. He pointed his axe at me and spoke. I cannot say for certain what he said, for I do not speak Norse. The path was clear to me, however. Ragnar himself had come to me in a vision. He swept his arm to reveal a trail. An escape. I could not save myself from what I had learned, but I could run from it.

Run I did. Into the night. Through the night. In the mornings. Afternoons. It did not matter the time. Only in flight could I find peace. Only in fruitless attempts to flee could I find some measure of tranquility. I found others, and joined with them. Ragnar himself had brought me to this place, and while it is not salvation, it is the best I can hope for. When the Deep Ones come, boiling forth from the oceans in advance of the dread Cthulhu, I cannot escape, but I can run. When the spawn of Shub-Niggurath ooze forth from the woods, I can run. When Ragnorak comes and Ragnar himself takes the field of battle against the giants, I can run.

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