Ten Cures For The Post Super Bowl Blues

So the Super Bowl Show has fallen silent. What's a football fanatic to do?

It's an exercise in futility to become a Mel Kiper obsessed draft nut. Come on, draft-obsessed Junior Kipers! Half of the first rounders flop, a quarter are average and another quarter are good. Maybe.

February is a savage, ugly month. Football-less and filled with freak storms, the endless abyss that is the NBA. A silly, arrow-shooting, old, dual-natured Roman God's Holiday and in most of the USA, cruel cold and quick darkness. 'Tis the month that made Doctor Hunter Thompson take the dark leap.  It's a mean enough month to make Chicago Mobsters massacre folks.

What's a person to do to keep the dire wolf from scratching at the door and ripping in it down in a mad fit of howling, red eyed, werewolf rage?

1) Exercise

Start exercising. Start running. If you dropped a massive bundle on the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Under, start running like Forrest Gump until you hit an ocean then turn around and start running the other way till ye hit another ocean. Repeat.

Start doing push-ups and pulls-ups like Max Cady in Cape Fear. Punch the heavy bag, hit the speed bag, and do breathing exercises like Caine The Grasshopper in Kung Fu.

Every Ying has its Yang, though. Every head has its tails. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So if you do not feel the need to play that stupid old Rocky song in your head or you like that big, bubbling, beer roll bundled about your soft, jiggly waist, go sloppy Sloth!

Sloth is fat, slow, sleepy, and happy. Eat cheese, chips, fatty burgers and fries buried under butter and cheesy bacon. Milkshakes and beer. Heavy, happy, huge pitchers of beer! Then more beer!

Like a hearty Heineken or fifteen or a dozen good old Budweisers. Drink 'em early and drink 'em often. Chili cheese dogs, crispy creme donuts, wings, fried chicken, choclate, and monsterous mounds of ice cream, oh me oh my! Fight, fight against the dying of the light then scream, scream, for more ice cream.

Expand your body, Bubba. Life be brutal then you die. Enjoy every sandwich and each strip of bacon bits, fudge covered, ice cream. Make yourself into a man manatee. Get a fathead of Andy Reid, plaster it on your wall, hog down, and grow some winter mantits.

2) Read

Football is over. Step back into reality, and it's a harsh economic reality, Charlie Brown. Try to grab some John Steinbeck to get some Depression-era ideas because you might need them.

Study how Jack Dempsey used to ride the rails. It's an almost lost art. Try to find memoirs of folks who survived the Depression and make careful notes of the Great Depression era bank robbers like Bonnie And Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd. Bank robbing might be back and be back bigger and bolder then ever. Think of a good nickname for yourself and your gang, one that could inspire folk songs and crime stories in tabloids.

3) Stage a Coup

Not here, of course. Give that one a few years. No, find a small country, preferably some warm small island in the tropics that lacks a Navy and an Air Force.

Aruba looks like an easy target. It's mellow. There is no Aruba Army, just a few usually-drunk Dutch Marines, and when was the last time the Dutch defeated someone even when sober? Of course, there might be a few CIA guys watching Venezuela, but the Spooks might even help you if you give them some good scotch and let them stay and play.

Read some Soldier of Fortune. Rent the Wild Geese, The Man Who Would Be King and The Dogs of War. Watch them over and over.

Buy a shirt that will look good with rows and rows of medals South American dictator style. Grow a Blago hairdo. Have plenty of pictures of yourself painted so they can be placed in schools, post offices, power plants, town squares, and the like. Or better yet, just go to Africa, battle the Bantu to their knees, kill to earn your living and to help out the Congolese.

4) Work on Science Projects

Finish that Space Elevator you started last summer. If you don't, the Japanese will.

Start collecting old swords of Spanish steel, since swords will be big in space fights when your elevator gets out the atmosphere. The ray guns ain't done yet and swords are more fun anyway. That evil Chinese astronaut comes at you out of his evil space shuttle, give 'em the cold steel of Toledo from the safety of your fully-functioning space elevator. And give em an Arggghhh! Ye old Space Pirate, you!

What about that half-finished cloak of invisibility laying your garage? Do you know how much fun you are missing not being able to be invisible? Don't fall for those evil Invisible Man movies, or the Ring of Gyges story or how crazy folks got for that Ring of Power in the Lord of the Rings. Don't fall for these folklore and fairy tales. Being invisible is actually really fun, so finally finish that project.

And get that Gamma Ray Gun done soon too, son.

5) Go on a quest.

Quests are as old as Jason and his Argonauts, but no one goes on fun quests anymore. Not one of those silly Boomer, find-yourself, pseudo-psycho-Doctor-Phil babble things, but an old fashion Pirate quest.

What were Jason and Odysseus but our first pirates? Sure, the Cyclops might have really been a bartender Odysseus stiffed and the goddess, nymphs, and witches all whore house madames, married women, and bar bitches, but he still had fun. So quest out. my man!

If ye can find Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan's tombs, you will be rich and famous. No one has ever been able to locate them. Find them and you will be rich and famous forever! Old Al the Great might be under water, so bring the snorkel gear. As for cranky Khan, well his successor had everyone that buried him killed, then killed those fellows when they rode home, then killed the fellows who killed those fellows in an ambush, then killed those fellows who killed those fellows at a celebration banquet. All that just to keep the Khan's planting place secret. And you thought Bill Parcells was a tough boss?

6) Brood

Mike Royko used to say winter was a great time to brood and write long nasty letters to people you dislike and to people you like, but who need their shortcomings to be shown to them.

Combine some heavy drinking with your brooding and you can have a helluva a time. A beard, preferably the long flowing Civil War General type, goes well with the drinking and brooding. Go with the General Longstreet look.

http://www.sonofthesouth.net/leefoundation/Confederate_Generals/General_James_Longstreet_.jpg

Combine your brooding with your reading. Break out the old Greeks and go about like Diogenes. Bearded, brooding, besotted, unbathed, and barking like a bad dog at baffled people. Doesn't that sound like fun? Soon you might even have your own television talk show!

7) Hibernate

And get paid by NASA 5,000 dollars a month to sleep.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/05/nasa-offers-500.html

A Sleepernaut, that's you. An American hero. And you might even get a neat NASA jacket, you damn slug. And the lovely ladies love NASA jackets. Just beware the female astronuts bearing duct tape, diapers, and small-caliber hand guns.

We need to hibernate to travel to deep space. Can't you sloth out for a few months for America, you slob?

Sure some demented Doc Moreau NASA scientist somewhere is morphing man, machine, and bear DNA into ManBearnauts for deep-space hibernation travel, but until he gets there - the creepy beast is likely stuck trying to make a fully functioning Angie Joliebot - good old humans are going to have do the deep-space dance someday.

And they need your lazy ass to sleep for science. Be a patriot and do some deep-space sleep. Maybe if you're nice, the friendly NASA Moreau Doctor Man will morph you into an island lounge lizard and send you on your merry, scaly way.

8) Worry

Lay in your yard and study the stars. Forget football. You're doomed.

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Skies-These-Ways-World/dp/0670019976/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220913560&sr=8-8/badastronomy

9) Encourage others

When the drunken, demented, ex-Special Forces postman slurs to you at the bar that if anyone started cutting the thumbs off these bankers and hedge-fund managers, they would become a Robin Hood, or at least a Charles Bronson Death Wish like hero just sagely nod and say aye!

"Aye! They would sing songs about that type of man for many generations. Write books and movies about his deeds. Maybe put him on Larry King, The View, Good Morning America, Sixty Minutes and Anderson Cooper all in one day. His memoirs would fetch millions!"

When he asks if you know what losing thumbs can do to a man, just nod and let him explain that the thumbs are the only thing separating us from the chimpanzees, these lovely working, wiggling thumbs of ours, and losing both thumbs is a downer.

And we'd know the cheating bastards by their lack of thumbs! Brilliant! Buy him a Ale! Give him an Aye! Give him a Hell Yeah!

10) Challenge someone to a duel.

Dueling is definitely out in America, but why? Dueling made folks more civil. Sure we lost Alexander Hamilton, and that duel depressed some banking folks and Federalists, but all in all dueling did wonders for folks manners. And Al shouldn't of slurred Burr anyway.

We have enough guns, so why don't we bring back swords or jousting? Imagine the ratings if Booby Bowden and Joe Paterno settled this all-time win thing once and for with razor sharp rapiers at the fifty? Or if Terrell Owens and Donovan McNabb jousted during the Super Bowl halftime show?

Or if Buddy Ryan and Mike Ditka finally settled the score with Bowie knives and a bandanna's end in each of their mouths while growling over a single fresh grave in the Soldier Field end zone?

Just some suggestions! Good luck finding your own way through a football less February.

Or you just could go the quiet Gerry Rafferty route.

He’s got this dream about buyin’ some land
He’s gonna give up the booze and the one night stands
And then he’ll settle down, in some quiet little town
And forget about everything.

Mehopes Gerry finally made it to Baker Street he's been missing since April.

Cheers!

Go luck with February!