NFL Week One Thoughts: The Tardy, Musical and Doomed

(Continued from last week's delayed Super Bowl retrospective and Drew Brees loathing.)

Of course, the 2010 NFL season would have to open with Drew Brees facing off against Brett Favre, which offered viewers a coinflip of morally repellent shitbags. Rooting for Brees over Favre felt like choosing polio to defeat pellagra.

Just five years ago, I wouldn't have breathed a negative word about Favre as a person — as a quarterback, plenty, namely "GUNSLINGS" — but four years of demanding that teams openly woo him away from retirement, reneging on his own promises and throwing fans in multiple cities under a bus, and I can't think of anything nice to say about him.

I understand that all sports fans to a certain extent are only rooting for laundry, but Favre's decade and a half in Green Bay, plus the citizens' ownership of the team and thus greater example of the democratizing of fandom, felt like there was a legitimate relationship there. Seeing him discard all that adulation and patience without anything but the most cursory of Thank Yous and with open enthusiasm for playing for a direct rival eroded all sympathy for him. He's an incredible narcissist whose only excuse might be that he never developed beyond the emotional maturity of a child. As one friend described him, "Ladies and Gentlemen, the anthropomorphized penis, Brett Favre."

Brief Reviews of Cadaverous Men

I woke up today to an email from a friend and a Facebook message from another, both distressed about the apparent suicide of David Foster Wallace. Much like an afternoon in 1994, when I watched a girl stumble through a hotel hallway in Washington D.C., Alice Cooper treaks of mascara running down her face, bleating "Kurt's dead, Kurt's dead—omigod, Kurt's dead," I wondered why this was such a big deal. (Actually, in that case, the first thing I wondered was, "What is a girl who wears mascara doing listening to Nirvana?") It took my working out my thoughts on Joe Posnanski's blog comment section to realize why: David Foster Wallace was a rock star.

I've always had a strange relationship with DFW, none of it personal, naturally. A close buddy in college practically worshipped Infinite Jest, considered it the greatest novel ever written and, if I remember correctly, had personal rules about when and how often he could re-read it to prevent the spoilage of over-familiarity. I hated it. I still hate it.

I wanted to like it. Since this friend, who was also my writing partner and drinking buddy, loved it, I felt like there was something wrong with me when I didn't. It just seemed inconceivable that he and I could both think torturing characters with geography trivia and having an Italian zombie teach bocce to a boy as a means of increasing his masculinity was hilarious but disagree on a novel so massive and so acclaimed that it had to at least be pretty good.