Your End of the Line Quizo Update

We now join our regularly-scheduled Quizo update, already in progress.

- is freaking ridiculous,” I say. I told my father over and over again that I don’t like going to Caesar’s, that bad bad things happen at Caesars, but now I find myself not only at Caesar’s, but in a walkway suspended several stories ABOVE Caesar’s, blindingly turning my head to and fro trying to find my father so I can a) give him his stupid Koffee Kake, and b) get the fuck out of Caesar’s.

When’s he going to start talking about it?

“I’m on the walkway,” my father says.

“Dad, there’s like five walkways,” I say. “Telling me you’re on ‘the walkway’ is about as helpful as the traffic report on NPR.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind,” I say. The problem now is that not only am I at Caesars where bad bad things happen, which is enough to start giving me a panic attack in and of itself. I am also trapped in a glass walkway hanging over Pacific Avenue, which brings with it fears of heights, enclosed spaces, crowds, plexiglass, strangers, unsafe construction, gravity, and having cars driving under your feet. By now all of my neuroses are fighting each other for supremacy. I start to think it will be like Highlander. They will compete for The Prize, and there can be only one. I’m rooting for fear of unsafe construction.

He has to mention it eventually.

As I can feel what is most definitely a panic attack coming on I realize that given how often I go to Atlantic City a well-developed fear of unsafe construction will actually end up being quite

Come on, he can’t ignore it forever.

debilitating…

I’m sorry, can I help you?

We were just wondering when you were going to say something about the game.

Game? What game?

You know. Yesterday.

Game yesterday? Oh! You mean the MLS Cup Final. Oh. That was a great game. Really fantastic. I mean, I know I’ve knocked the MLS in the past but that was actually quite something. It wasn’t the Liverpool-West Ham FA Cup final or anything, but it was definitely the most entertaining MLS game I’ve ever seen. You gotta give up the love for Hey-Dude. Fantastic game. Loved it.

No, er, we don’t even know what sport that is you’re talking about there. We mean the Eagles game.

The what?

The Eagles game.

I’m sorry, I don’t know what that is.

Yesterday? The Eagles played the Ravens?

Ee-gulls? Is that some kind of sports team? I really don’t know what you’re referring to here.

The Eagles!

Was it on at the same time as 24 last night? Because that was pretty good too. Not great, I mean, not like season 5 great, but it was better than the end of last year.

The Philadelphia Eagles! Our football team! They got embarrassed by the Ravens yesterday! You had to watch at least part of it!

I’m really sorry, but I honestly don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about. Football? We don’t have a football team yet. It doesn’t start until 2010. I’m already signed up for season tickets.

AMERICAN football!

Sorry, I got nothing. “Eagles?” Never heard of them. Unless you mean the band that they mention in The Big Lebowski. “Man, I really hate the fucking Eagles!” Heh. Classic.

Ed Reed had the longest inter -

YES! FINE! ARE YOU FUCKING HAPPY? I admit it. I watched it. At least, I watched it until the end of Kevin Kolb’s second series. By then the MLS final was about to start and I couldn’t stand to watch anymore. It was like the end of a Lifetime movie, sitting by my young wife’s hospital bed as she died of Congolese Cattle Influenza or some other disease that Could Happen To Your Family, doing my best not to cry as she bravely tries and fails to cling to her last breath. Because the days of enjoying football are over. Oh, they’re over.

We have entered a new era, people, and let me be the first to say to all the Eagles fans/racist fucks in this city: congratulations. You got what you wanted. Welcome to life after Donovan McNabb. It is a dire, fetid swamp full of poisonous lichen and vengeful mediocrity. The sign over the gates of hell reads “abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” If there were a gate to this place it would read “be careful what you wish for,” though I suppose at the end of the day the underlying sentiments are largely the same.

Come on, now, that’s very negative.

Eagles fans are about to learn that the difference between not winning everything and not winning anything is like the difference between having robot-assisted micro-laser brain surgery and having a drunken veterinary assistant perform your appendectomy with a tuning fork. The next few years of Eagles football will be the latter. This isn’t so bad, though, since with the tuning fork around you’ll be able to keep your screams of agony from watching the Eagles on perfect pitch.

Okay, that’s some awfully unpleasant imagery, don’t you think?

The future, people, is bleak.

You’re very pessimistic, you know that?

Well, all right, not all of the future. There is one good thing to look forward to.

Oh, thank God! What is this impending ray of sunshine?

It’s next year. The first Sunday in February, 2010. Super Bowl Sunday.

I’ll be sitting there in front of the TV in my Chicago Bears #5 jersey. With my feet propped up in a recliner I’ll be popping some (non-alcoholic) champagne, smoking an expensive cigar, calling every single person who ever said they wanted Kevin Kolb or Jeff Garcia or AJ Feeley or whoever to start for the Eagles. I’ll be calling every one of them and laughing my ass off.

You are such a horrible person.

And then the next year, I’ll be doing it again.

single gunshot

THUMP

Remember – the price of getting what you want is having what you once wanted.

JLK