Cerblogus

On my worst days–and maybe yours too (or your best)–I am little more than a pair of eyes staring into and manipulating the screen of the moment. This is a significant part of my job, which is a good one, which is not back breaking or knee bruising or (to my knowledge) cancer causing. Besides eye strain and carpel tunnel, there’s very little in my job that brings me physical pain.

If there is an occupational hazard, however, it is that, as a full time screen watcher and mainpulator, I tend to take in the world around me in a very second hand way. Day after day, like a well paid coach potato (imagine a Yukon Gold, with a silvering goatee), I watch and watch and watch. On the weekends, when sports deign to grace my cableless TV, I watch even more. Basketball is my sport of choice, but right now, football takes precedence because the season is winding down and I, like millions of other gridiron fans, am curious about who will be this year’s Super Bowl champion. In my seven hours of football watching this Sunday, I will witness all kinds of exciting and memorable plays. And, of course, I will see tackles–a shove out of bounds, a trip up, a pile on, a late hit that makes its victim slow to rise, maybe even a helmet to helmet which causes a good long commercial break. I’ll try not to think of the late Andre Waters, the hard hitting defensive back for the Philadelphia Eagles of the late 80s and early 90s who committed suicide a few months ago. A fierce hitter, he too was a victim in the end. It seems that all of his bone jarring and brain jarring hits, however much havoc they wreaked on his opponents, did considerable damage to himself. According to one doctor, at the time of Waters’s death, he had the brain of an 85 year old man–an eighty five year old man with Alzheimers.  Age and senility–it happens to the best of us.  But Waters was only forty four years old!  When I watch the games this weekend, I’ll try (and maybe you will too?) not to think about how many years of brain life each player is losing simply by playing the game. On the one hand, I’m sure that this will not be too difficult to do. After all, I am used to taking in the world at a distance–taking things in, in other words, through the mediating a screen. I’ll see an arm hanging limp. I’ll see dazed eyes or the pinched face of excruciating pain. I’ll see (and you will too) some damn good TV.

On the other hand, I’m sure that the hits, as mediated as they are, will manage to make me uneasy. I’ll have to try very hard not to think about my own concussions–kid’s stuff in comparison, but brain truama nonethless. I’ll wonder how much damage my own brain has sustained scrambling around the basketball court in order to win a measly pickup game. I’ll wonder if my own brain is now fifty five or sixty, inching up perhaps upon retirement age, which will give me (and you, depending on the number and severity of the hits your own brain has absorbed in the games you love to play) just one more reason to sit down and to stare, and the next day struggle to remember.