He's Happier. Am I?

TBG had an epiphany last night.  He was happy.

The reason for his happiness is my annoyance disturbance boring displeasure quite different from that which would put a smile on my face.  He's finding joy in football.

He explained that he spent 4+ years listening to, hearing about, anguishing over The Former Disgraced President.  He was obsessed, not missing a talking head or a breaking announcement of whatever new nonsense was spewing forth from the White House.  It was in his head, filling his head, rattling his brains, and making him miserable.  

He spent hours fulminating.  He wondered how to fix things.  He wondered how things got this bad.  His mind was stuck in the muck, no matter how much he tried to rise above it.  To be honest, that wasn't very hard.  He felt that he needed to have his entire self ready to react to the latest outrage.  He was focused, which was a good thing.  The object of his focus was noxious scum, which was a bad thing.

Now that the Presidency is no longer dominating the headlines, no longer drawing him down into the depths, he said last night that he's replaced one obsession with another - football.

He analyzes the plays.  He does a deep dive into the players and the teams and the strategies and the management and the talking heads' takes on everything from sartorial splendor

nypost.com

to why did they do that right then.

His brain is taken up with reimagining scenarios, with memories of games gone by, with thoughts and opinions he expresses out loud, to the ether, because his devoted wife sat beside him through Trump but will not invest the same amount of psychic energy in America's Blood Sport.

He recognizes the problems - Aaron Rodgers and the vaccination hocus pocus, spousal abuse, murder, drunken driving to name the first few that come to mind.  He doesn't discount them.  But thinking about football makes him smile.  He's happy in his head.

If we can't spend time making new memories with our grandkids, I suppose this is an adequate substitution.