Sports Radio: A Social and Mid-Life Crisis Averted
A few years ago I began listening to sports radio in the car which was a bit surprising given the fact that I’m not much of a sports fan. Unfortunately the only other options were even worse.
Up until my mid-forties I typically listened to music while I was driving but, at some point, I slipped over the divide that separates young men from a much stodgier demographic. The music didn’t suddenly become too loud. To this day I adore anything with a severe amount of distortion or the raw sound of an album recorded in a burned out basement or shooting gallery but something was missing.
As much as I hate to admit it my change in listening habits had something to with how I connected to the music. It’s pretty easy to listen to angsty little bands scream about revolution or how hard it is to get laid when you’re in your twenties but somewhere around your thirties it all just begins to get a little absurd, even sad. I’m a white, middle aged, middle classed and married man. Aside from replacing the plumbing in our third bathroom or finding a decent HVAC company what in the hell do I have to be angsty about?
In an effort to embrace the stodgier me I turned to conservative talk radio and I discovered that I have quite a lot to be ansgsty about. I never knew how hard it was to be a white middle class American citizen these days. Hordes of illegal immigrants are just chomping away at the bit for all of those janitorial and fruit picking jobs that we’ve come to covet but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Did you know that there are members of our society who want every citizen in our country to have health insurance? Some of them even want it to be affordable for people who only work forty hours a week. It sounds preposterous but it’s “The Truth” which differs from “the truth” and is a concept you might hear about on other, less reliable, news networks that are probably funded by communists.
I’d intended to give talk radio more of a chance but, after a few months of becoming increasingly angry and misinformed, I decided that it was time to move on. I’m sure that there are a number of thoughtful conservative viewpoints out there but they aren’t being expressed by radio pundits in my neck of the woods
I turned to NPR which, given my political leanings, seemed like a good fit. It was not. The music bugged me for starters but not enough to keep me from listening. I like old timey banjo players from Eritrea as much as the next person and I can even tolerate the forty minute digeridoo solo that inevitably takes place two or three times a week. The deal breaker was the content.
I wish with all of my being that I cared about the political goings on in Namibia but I don’t. If I were a more interesting person I’m sure I’d be captivated by the new coprolite that answers the age old question about what kind of vole the archaeopteryx used to eat but I’m not.
After a few weeks of listening to the dull monotone typical of NPR commentators on the other end of the car speaker it occurred to me that some pretty awful things were happening in the world and that, even worse, I’m in no place to solve them. Not a day went by when some sort of catastrophe wasn’t in the making. Ice sheets the size of Rhode Island were falling into the ocean. Half of the planet’s forests have already disappeared and most of the arable land will be unusable by 2200. Granted, I’ll be dead by then but it’s still a pretty big downer although, now that I think about it, not as much of a downer as it will be for my progeny.
It was all a bit overwhelming and so sports radio seemed like the next best option. The problem is that I’ve never really cared all that much for sports. Hockey moves too fast and I don’t really understand it either. I’ve never been able to reconcile a sport that’s so overtly violent but enjoyed by so many people from Canada which I’d always considered to be a pretty peaceful country
I’d rather shave a cat than watch a football game and basketball is all right as long as the only other thing to watch on TV are infomercials about hemorrhoid cream or curing back pain. Baseball, however, is right up my alley. The game has a good pace for a man like me with limited mental faculties and I’ve thoroughly come to embrace the sport.
I’d always thought that being a fan of a sports team, any sports team was counterintuitive. After all it’s mostly a matter of demographics. If you’re born in New York you’re, more than likely, going to be a Yankees or a Mets fan. If you’re born in Baltimore then…well you’re probably in for a lifetime of disappointment. Aside from a few stalwarts, players get traded out pretty regularly and sometimes entire teams get a hair up their ass and decide to swap cities. The old me thought that being a fan was a pretty arbitrary sort of thing but the new me gets it or, at least, is willing to overlook these problems.
Instead of worrying about the acidification of the world’s oceans I now obsess about less weighty issues like which players are up for free agency and why there are so many strike outs this year. It’s really the best of both worlds, at least it will be up until around 2200 or so when the planet becomes uninhabitable and we’ll have bigger things to worry about.
About the Author
derekbremer Prior to his life as a stay at home father Derek spent more than a decade performing public relations and marketing functions for financial consulting firms and found the job to be precisely as exciting as it sounds. When not tending to his wife or daughter Derek enjoys subjecting the public to his unique take on fatherhood, travel and animal husbandry. He has been published in Scary Mommy, Sammiches and Psych Meds, The Good Men Project, HowToBeADad, Red Tricycle, RAZED, HPP and the Anthology "It's Really Ten Months Special Delivery: A Collection of Stories from Girth to Birth.
