At 11:00am on the first Saturday of the college football season, neither of the TVs in my house were tuned to the start of a game. DisneyXD's animated Spiderman series was on one, while the other was being used for playback of a Sesame Street sing-along DVD. In a perfect world, I might have been halfway between Kansas City and St. Louis, on my way to the Fighting Illini season opener. But this world is clearly far from perfect.
Although I didn't have a ticket, I'd entertained the idea of making the trip to St. Louis all the way up until Friday night. My wife even supported the plan. But when I had to head out of the house at 1:30am to purchase pain relievers for my littlest boy, I knew there was no way I'd be making my solo gameday roadtrip.
Most of the day instead centered around keeping our children happy and comfortable; by late morning it was clear that Joey wasn't 100% either. So the 2:40pm kickoff of the Illinois-Missouri game arrived not with me sitting in the Edward Jones Dome, not with me screaming at the television in anticipation of the start of the season, but with me sitting relatively reserved (at least on the outside) with a somewhat-ill child by my side, while my miserably-ill child was with his mother at our doctor's urgent care office. Not at all what I had in mind for gameday.
By the time Lukas returned home with a diagnosis of two ear infections and mouth ulcers consistent with the 'Hand, Foot and Mouth' disease virus, the Illini were already in a 10-0 hole and my blood pressure likely would have blown the cuff off of my arm. Things clearly didn't get much better as I watched every snap of a game that I now feel comfortable saying was the most disappointing football performance I've seen in recent memory. And I watched it primarily in a silent living room.
I'm usually the person who has a comment for every play, the annoyingly educated fan who call outs individual players away from the ball during the action. It doesn't matter if I'm alone or with a group of people or in public. So imagine the trouble I had trying to watch this game in silence, watching my beloved alma mater appear ill-prepared from the start, lose its best player to injury on the opening series and make the same mistakes as last year's disappointing 5-7 team.
You wanna know how it feels? When someone who usually bursts with emotion is forced to keep it bottled up inside? Physically ill, that's how it feels. My head throbbed, and I felt like I was going vomit.
I didn't watch another snap of football the rest of the day, and I don't look forward to watching any in the near future.
The weekend began with so much promise. The forecast of nice weather, the kickoff of college football with the Illini as a six-point favorite and, of course, knowing there's an extra day off before heading back to work. But it quickly crashed and burned. The late night/early morning trip to the pharmacy -- which was actually two stops instead of one since Walgreens didn't have what I needed -- is the only time I've been out of the house since Friday evening. Now here I sit, monitoring sick children, doing laundry and dreaming of a better outcome.
What could be next? Cleaning the fucking garage? Maybe the basement? At this rate I shouldn't be surprised if I'm called into work on a federal holiday.
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