Welcome back, old friend

After a horrendously long, dull drought, football is back, and I couldn't be happier. I don't have any interest whatsoever in baseball, which makes for a long few months between the NBA Finals and the start of football season.

I celebrated football's return by watching an absolutely stupid amount of it the last two weekends, culminating with yesterday's ten-hour couch-bound marathon of sloth and potato chips. Yard work went unfinished, video games unplayed, dogs unwalked as my beloved Broncos spent the whole morning trying to give me an aneurysm before pulling the game out at the end.

Unfortunately, watching that much football probably took ten points off my IQ, leaving Chevy's godforsaken "This is Our Country" song alternating with "Viva Viagra" on my mental soundtrack this morning. I finally lost it during the run-up to the Sunday night game, when NBC fellated Tiki Barber on-air for 15 minutes as I fled screaming. Did we need a "look back at Tiki's tumultuous final year in the NFL"? Let's see... he put up good numbers for a mediocre team that was eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. He took public shots at his coach while turning the second half of the season into the Tiki Retirement Circus, during which the media slathered love all over him despite the fact that he made the Pro Bowl just three times and was mainly known for having an identical twin and for not fumbling as much as he had earlier in his career. Clearly, this was a history-defining year in the life of a Great American Sports Hero that needed further analysis and discussion. Yes, I realize that, by watching these shows and obsessively reading ESPN.com, I'm supporting this kind of idiocy. Damn it all.

The other big event of the weekend was my best friend's bachelor party. As the co-best man, it was up to me to organize, so we had a lovely day at a big public park, playing volleyball, grilling meat and flirting with two cute sunbathers who set up shop right next to our game and stayed for four hours. We finished the night not at a seedy strip club, but at a karaoke bar seated next to a bachelorette party. Which ended up being about the same experience, as the bachelorette party spent most of the night giving each other lapdances and letting random guys (not from our group) feel them up.

The whole scene made me happy to be married. If I'd been single, I'd have spent a lot of the night trying to get someone to notice me, trying to work up the courage to talk to them, trying not to sound like an idiot when I ran out of things to say after 15 seconds, trying to get them to look past my aforementioned big misshapen head, etc. But since I'm married, I didn't give a damn if the cute girl in the funky hat talked to me or gave me the cold shoulder. Which made it much easier to talk to the cute girl in the funky hat. Who turned out to be very cool, and left me with that glow of validation happily married guys get when they feel like they might have had a chance with the cute girl in the funky hat if they had been single. Which is all I can ask for.