By Thad McKraken - September 2013
Ahhh Football season. The crisp feel of fall winds and the sound of drunkenness in the afternoon. There is absolutely nothing more distinctly and disturbingly American than football culture. So, you get a bunch of dudes who may or may not drink very often incredibly drunk in the middle of the afternoon. If their team wins, they get increasingly wasted and elated, if they lose they get dangerously sauced and pissed off. Yeah, that’s gonna end well for the kids. Don’t fool yourself. Football, or any sport for that matter wouldn’t exist in their insanely bloated capacity if weed and hallucinogens weren’t outlawed back in the day. People would probably be more into fucking and playing the electro delay sitar. Maybe there’d be porno sitar players. I don’t know. What I do know is that alcohol is legal and because of that, football culture is fucking PERFECT. You work a dumbshit job all day but hell, it’s all worth it because on the weekend you get to throw back drink after drink and yell at people who could kick the living crap out of you. There’s a reason half the ads during football games involve booze. The most hilarious part is where they often imply that downing cheap beer and watching football is going to get you pussy. Riiiiiight.
Did I mention I watch football like a crackhead? Yeah, probably should get that out of the way. Half the shit I write is making fun of me when you get down to it. So why is it that I find myself getting suddenly obsessive about other dudes calculatingly beating the shit out of each other every fall and winter? I guess because of my childhood, but there’s more to it than that. Christ, I only played like one year of organized ball before I realized I hated getting yelled at like a drill sergeant. Oh, and it fucking hurt. Fun when you’re young, but you start getting bigger and damn is it painful. With all the new information coming out about just how dangerous it actually is, this particular addiction should be getting harder and harder to justify to myself, but I’m more hooked than ever. Why? Why Man? What the fuck is wrong with me? I’d say the answer has a lot to do with it being one of the few things I have in common with people. Believe it or not, writing about telepathically summoning discarnate entities through sex magick (which I do on Facebook, friend me) isn’t a super crowded world at this point. I know right? I spend most of my time feeling like I exist in a dimension I don’t remotely jibe with and watching sports grounds me. Hell, I’ve even been known to go running for the remote to throw on Sportscenter at the end of an extended acid trip. Stuff brings me down to earth easy, reconnects me to the boring world of other people.
I like their football at least, but why is it that sporting events make so much goddamn cash? In middle America a college football game can regularly draw a bigger crowd than basically anything. It’s totally insane. A reunited Led Zeppelin opening for Pink Floyd couldn’t continually bring in 100,000 fans every week. Church? Yeah, good luck with that. So, why are we so addicted to this shit? What is it about the allure of finite rules and collective yelling that compels us to give people money? The main reason I bring this all up is because of a study that was conducted at the University of Washington that went viral a year back. We re-blogged an article about it, but I never got to comment on it, so here are a few choice tidbits to refresh your memory from the UW website:
“More than half of all American churchgoers now attend the largest 10 percent of churches.”
Those would be churches with more than 2,000 congregants, think about how fucked that is for a minute, then continue.
“(T)he Holy Spirit goes through the crowd like a football team doing the wave. … Never seen it in any other church.”
And then this priceless quote from the study’s author, professor James Wellman.
“How are you going to dominate the market? You give them a generic form of Christianity that’s upbeat, exciting and uplifting.”
How you can be a Christian and selectively edit out the passage about the money changers in the temple is beyond me (sort of what got Jesus killed right?), but Wellman’s research essentially confirmed what I’d already known for a while. Hell, I’ve joked about it for years. I’ve actually tried to watch evangelical sermons on occasion and I don’t get it at all. They’re not actually saying anything, but they’re saying it all over the top emotive style (sort of like Obama). It’s like how you talk to a dog. It doesn’t matter what you’re saying, you just intone the meaning exaggeratedly. With some of the sermons I’ve watched, I actually try and summarize the whole thing to myself after the fact and I don’t have anything. It’s like sand through my finger. Boring, boring sand. The whole charade’s designed to provide the same sense of profitable collective release that you can get from a football game (also on Sunday mornings), but let’s face it, way more people give a shit about football.
Just pathetic that this is what our spiritual beliefs have devolved toward. I’m not saying there’s not a positive benefit to feeling connected to a greater whole in a charged environment. The joy of collective release is part of the reason I go so apeshit for it. Even when I’m just watching at home, there’s a thrill in knowing hundreds of thousands of people all around me are yelling inappropriate insults at the same violent spectacle. Feeling that blood thirsty connection to your fellow earth brothers and sisters (all 3 of them) can be enchanting, but it’s not turning you inwardly, which is where the spirit dwells— in the world of dreams and ecstatic phantasms. I could get freaky here and point out that this desire for collective release probably has obvious sexual implications, hinting at our desires for orgiastic spectacle, but I’m not gonna touch that one?
What I will do is not let the scientific atheism geeks off the hook. Oh, we’re so much better than those crazy megachurch people, are you? Last year Bud Light started running these ads where they play Superstitious by Stevie Wonder and illuminate the utterly odd crap football nerds do to supposedly help their teams onto victory. Every time it runs it brings my mind back to all the supposedly scientifically rational people I’ve known who for some reason resort to what’s essentially weak witchcraft the second a ball game enters the picture. Basic magick involves the idea that you can influence distant events with inner gestures, or weird rituals. So why is it that even though we don’t believe in this concept, we for some reason act as if it’s absolutely true the second we throw on a game. Seriously, sports stars are some of the most notoriously superstitious people around. We believe you can’t influence material reality at a distance with our actions, but we’ll just act as if we can because it’s a really big game and last time I wore this shirt with mismatching socks and we won. I love the part in Bill Maher’s Religulous where he admits that he sometimes resorts to odd internal dialogues with forces that aren’t there and what not. Why is that exactly? It’s because spiritual experience is a basic human need. Telling people to just ignore this aspect of themselves is like preaching abstinence to teenagers. You can keep them purely rational right up until the start of football season. Then spooky action at a distance is obviously legit.
What’s hilarious about all this is that I do the same idiot crap. When I watch sports I sometimes find myself resorting to absolutely batshit obsessive compulsive derangement. I have to listen to this band at this moment so we’ll get the momentum going in our favor, right in the clutch. How retarded am I? I mean, seriously right, like me sitting in the correct position or standing and cheering is going to change the outcome of a game several million people are digging on.
Here’s where it gets even stranger, in one of my legit magick trances, I was basically told that nothing that I do makes any difference whatsoever in these matters, which is particularly funny because it’s one area of inquiry where this doesn’t work, and it’s how everyone uses it. Then I found myself struggling not to do some of these weird things because they told me it was pointless and now I felt stupid. I always did. Then I went through this other thing where I decided, well, since it doesn’t matter, I can do it or not do it, makes no difference. Sometimes I can’t stop myself. Why do sports almost automatically bring this out in us?
How do I know they/me aren’t just fucking with me about it not working? Well, being a psychic and a sports fan, I’ve now had some odd experiences. Without getting into it too deep, let me just say that in the last couple of years I’ve gotten some Occult intel where I’ve thought to myself after the fact, okay, that could have actually made me money. Yeah, some shit that was dead on but it’s not like it happens very often and I don’t have a whole lot of confidence in psychic sports intel, as much as I’d love to. I will say this, I think the 49’ers are going to win the division over the Seahawks this year. Next year it’s ours. Not what I wanted to hear from the ether which gave it some legitimacy, but I’m not betting on it. We’ll see if I’m onto something.
Until then, let’s just contemplate the fact that the evolution of religion just might involve an increased understanding of how to better utilize the collective release experience that people now get from places like mega churches and football games. How can we take this persuasive force and use it as means to uplift and extend our consciousness spaceward rather than yelling at tough guys and sexually intolerant grifters? Does it have to involve booze or sobriety? No, I’m thinking it could involve neither of those things, and maybe a sound generation software that’s controlled by 5th dimensional entities outside of time and taps directly into your neural infrastructure or something. We’ll figure it out one of these days, probably after Sportscenter.
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