1224 Tis the Season

1224 Tis the Season

(Note to readers:  There is no #1223 because two earlier posts have the same number, 1218, and the numbers have been off ever since.)

The National Meditation League should learn its lessons from the National Football League.  A sport that causes brain damage should be abolished.

The NFL just agreed to settle a lawsuit for 700-million dollars plus to help players affected by the years of brain battering they got on the field.  

This tells us some stuff about the “sport.”  First, it’s dangerous and often life shortening.  Second, if the league can peel nearly a billion dollars from its wad of bills and not feel it, it has too much money. Third: people who do this for a living are mostly idiots and require special care BEFORE their brains a scrambled, not after.  Fourth: if you’re a fan, you are supporting death… just not where you can see it happen, at least most of the time.

College football is even worse.  There, the players pretend to go to school and often are given decent scholarships.  That’s kind of like being paid to play, a no-no in the technical and legal sense but the reality is that’s what happens.

Football at any level is a big money business and the players are pawns and machines.  In college they risk serious injury in the hopes of landing a deal with the NFL.  In the NFL, they’re ground up, eaten alive and tossed to the curb when no longer useful… a state that often comes sooner than later.

So as the both the professional and semi professional seasons begin for the autumn of 2013, let’s get out there and watch those outsized guys battle it out like the gladiators of old.  It’s a lady-or-the-tiger arrangement in which there are no ladies and a slow eating tiger behind every door.

As for you, the fan: Get out there.  Bring your own bottle if it’s legal. Otherwise, tank up on overpriced beer at the concession stand.  Down a few cheap but expensive hot dogs and stagger home knowing you’ve made your contribution to the dehumanizing of a bunch of guys who don’t know any better and filled the pockets of team owners, television networks and self perpetuating college athletic departments.

And if you know a player who has yet to have a concussion or a broken this or a torn that, help him become one of the boys by tripping him on the sidewalk.  The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

Now, as for the National Meditation League…

Meditation as a competitive sport is only in the early stages.  But there already is a full schedule of events and a professional association.

It’s hard to describe.  If you take golf, slow it to about half speed (you didn’t think that was possible, did you,) and use much less space, you have part of the idea.

The rest of it is kind of like making a cake in a microwave.  For those who never have seen that, please understand that it requires no actual baking.  It starts as a slab of nondescript material in a microwave-safe paper vessel.  You add water and stir a bit and then microwave it for a set number of minutes.  The cake then develops, much like those old Polaroid pictures that would pop out of the camera and the image appeared slowly as you watched.

If you left it in the oven too long, it exploded rendering the microwave inoperative.  Those situations were not covered by the warranty.

Beginners and amateurs in competitive meditation have not yet mastered this … but among the pros, you can actually watch brain swelling and heads expanding.

At some point, perhaps in the middle of a particularly close match on the pro tour, someone’s head is going to blow up.

So the NML had better learn from the NFL and start putting aside a widows and orphans fund.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2013