The Utter and Heartbreaking Stupidity of Words

A Faulknerian Preview of Texas A&M vs. Ole Miss

By Rush Roberts@DrNorrisCamacho Nov 7, 2018, 11:51am CST

The little gray box beckons from across the room, sleek and innocuous, humming with a metaphysical appeal, near-silent, waiting for the mood to strike. The mood. Utter and consuming despair, the futility manifested upon the bright and sordid Plains, feeding life into a dormant and bumbling beast, authors of our own destruction. Tormenting and unstoppable, the engine of our demise is also the ultimate goal of attainment: expectations, pure and shining upon the highest shelf in our mindspace.

Months of meticulously-groomed hope escaping into the thin autumn sunlight, somewhere in the gap between disgust and that second fit of outrage, squirming helplessly in the confines and traces of fanhood as the entire cumbersome ordeal gradually comes apart and crashes into a giant jumbled array of scattered memories and as long as that little gray box is closed it will all reside therein, safely and quietly shut away from the peacefulness of the room, the cool November sunlight tumbling through the windows but if you open it, maybe just for a second, only to look, you see

COACH TALK ABOUT

oh you. Oh, you and your endless requests for others to speak at your bidding, without a single interesting prompt to aid them, to converse therein upon the vast sea of engaging knowledge you imagine to be bubbling like a swift underground current that you have been clever enough to tap and yet there it lies, tempting and open upon the air until the man plucks at the string and sends the old stale vibes outward again, radius of appeasement

KILLER INSTINCT: LACK THEREOF; EXECUTION: POOR; WOUNDS: SELF-INFLICTED

no delight in this menagerie of cliches, despair dripping from their formulaic corners like garish decorative fonts, calling to the darker recesses of the mind to strike flint upon that enormous and immensely flammable tinder of outrage built deep into the psyche, yes go ahead, feel the anger, stoke it, see the billowing smoke in your thoughts and vent them directly into that little gray box, yes, it makes one feel so much better, it doesn’t harm anyone, go ahead, that’s right, mash the caps lock key and turn it loose: you are not culpable in this mess and cannot rectify it, but perhaps if you’re that one last voice that tips it over the edge it will all have been worth it, but

($PREMIUM$)

you must pay the dark invisible ferryman to partake of this verbose feast, to wallow exorbitantly in the phrases crafted specially for the discerning and paying customer, to hear exactly what you want to hear, without too much desperation in it, but with certainly enough to stoke your righteous anger enough to justify that small monthly fee, very nominal, you surely appreciate this insight since you are so sophisticated, yes you are, and wait a small chime from the magic gray box and what’s this

TEXAS A&M AT OLE MISS 11 .am.

Sweet moldering and desiccated deities of sport, hovering with menace in the black skies of consciousness, why have you done this again? The shocking brightness of the morn, the clamor of the brassy instruments sending shards of outrageous suffering into our addled and throbbing brainpans, the predawn preparations, earlier and earlier they must begin, another Saturday morning littered with unseen pits of despair, nothing at the end of the ordeal but an unwelcome malaise; an exhaustion of the senses and the inevitability of finding anything other than disappointment in the journey: in the team, in the myriad efforts of individuals both paid and unpaid, and ultimately in ourselves because we know better than to believe for one sliver of a second in the vast vacuum of time that anything emanating in Oxford, Mississippi could lead us to any end other than a prolonged and unceremonious demise.