As I write this post, I’m compulsively eating one of the best candies in the world: Smarties. What makes these little things so darn good? Is it the color? The shape? The tartness? The packaging that makes you feel like you’re opening a present? Or do they taste even better because they were given to me by my 4-year-old niece, Piper, out of her personal, prized Halloween stash?
“Here, Tee Tee. I want you to hab dese.”
That must be it.
Anyway, I’ve been reading the pop culture essays of Chuck Klosterman from his book, “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs.” So this guy is funny, obsessive … and provocative. Here’s a sample, skewering the youth soccer culture:
“The truth is that most children don’t love soccer; they simply hate the alternative more. For 60 percent of the adolescents in any fourth-grade classroom, sports are a humiliation waiting to happen. These are the kids who play baseball and strike out four times a game. These are the kids who are afraid to get fouled in basketball, because it only means they’re now required to shoot two free throws, which equates to two air balls. Basketball games actually STOP to recognize their failure. And football is nothing more than an ironical death sentence; somehow, outcasts find themselves in a situation where the people normally penalized for teasing them are suddenly urged to annihilate them.
“This is why soccer seems like such a respite from all that mortification; it’s the one aerobic activity where nothingness is expected. Even at the highest levels, every soccer match seems to end 1-0 or 2-1. A normal 11 year old can play an entire season without placing toe to sphere and nobody would even notice, assuming he or she does a proper job of running about and avoiding major collisions.”
So that was just the introduction, the warm-up, if you will. In my next post, I’ll excerpt from his essay on … Christians and the “Left Behind” phenomenon.