For the first time since the halcyon days of August 1988, I have arrived at the cusp of September and I do not find myself heading back to school. Perhaps it is because over 80% of my life thus far has been spent marking the year by the arrival and passage of school six weeks, semesters, and quarters, but to arrive at this point in the year without going back to school does feel pretty odd I must say.
Given that I've almost certainly seen the last of a classroom from a student's perspective, I suppose that from here on out I'll mark the beginning of fall as any good Texan would by noticing that football is right around the corner.
One of my favorite parts about my drive from Houston to Nashville was the opportunity to pass through a number of different areas of allegiance in the land where SEC football is King. As I passed over the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge, I could see the towering mass of Tiger Stadium (a.k.a. "Death Valley") rising from the trees that cover the L.S.U. campus. My fingers turned the radio dial to an A.M. station in Baton Rouge discussing the upcoming season and how Les Miles and the boys were going to recover from last year's 8-5 campaign.
As I passed out of the Pelican State into Mississippi, the topic of conversation turned from Tiger football to Rebel football. I picked up a station out of Jackson that was wrapped up in the hype surrounding the '09 Ole Miss program. Would Jevan Snead continue to impress in the SEC? Were the expectations surrounding Houston Nutt's team too high or could the boys in Oxford really live up to all of their advanced billing? The radio hosts and callers didn't come to anything even approaching a consensus, but they all seemed to agree that this was the most excited they've been before a football season since Eli Manning was walking through The Grove on his way to Vaught-Hemingway Stadium.
After jumping on I-20 at Meridian, Mississippi, I quickly passed into Alabama, and once you enter the Yellowhammer State, the talk immediately turned to the Crimson Tide. I found an AM station out of Birmingham that was all Crimson Tide all the time. If you've been past Tuscaloosa on I-20, you know that the city does not appear to be very much from the interstate, in fact you cannot even see the most famous piece of architecture in town, 92,138-seat Bryant-Denny Stadium, and as I passed by the University of Alabama campus, and the hosts discussed the Tide's prospects this year, it was as if they were talking about a figment of their imaginations.
Finally, as I turned north out of Birmingham on I-65, I eventually crossed into Tennessee where absolutely no one was talking about Vanderbilt on any of the stations that I was able to find. Despite the fact that a number of the callers on the stations in Lousiana, Mississippi, and Alabama were berating their favorite teams, the Vanderbilt program would probably long for a little vitriol being thrown its way, because as Oscar Wilde once said, "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."
Current Reading
Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey by David Horowitz
Labels: current reading, David Horowitz, SEC Football, Travel
or this guy:
Honestly, I don't think there's any middle ground.
