Thanksgiving thinking

Today's Thanksgiving and for me it's a quiet one, particularly compared to last year. I haven't spent much time on any of the blogs lately, so I might as well take advantage of the peace and quiet to make a few notes.

This morning I got a phone call from a buddy I haven't talked to in months. He lives in Baytown, and we don't get together much these days. He was my closest friend from grades 7 through 12, so I enjoyed the chance to chat a few minutes. We exchanged thoughts about the dreadful season the Texas A&M football team has experienced, and bet a Coke on the outcome of tonight's game in Austin. For the hell of it, I took Texas minus 35, strictly because I know the horns have the ability to drop that kind of asswhipping on the Aggies and after consecutive upset losses, the motivation as well.

For roughly forty years, I lived for football season. My interest in the sport began in 1967, the first of my two senior years in college. After graduation I became a Dallas Cowboys fan, since I just couldn't seem to get enough football to satisfy my needs by following only the Southwest Conference. Year after year, I rose or fell each weekend with the Aggies and the Cowboys. If both won, I was on top of the world and if both lost, I'd stay depressed for two days. My passion was such that I began following all of college and professional football, so that I could compare my favorite teams to those they were competing against. I bought every football magazine I could get my hands on and expanded my interest to include high school recruiting and the NFL draft.

Here's the thing about football: A man can only maintain a passion for the game if he has a particular rooting interest in at least one team, and rooting interests are by definition contingent on a team's ability to be competitive week in, week out. The descent of the Aggies and Cowboys into extended periods of subpar performance caused me to lose most of my enthusiasm. The season's nearly over and I've yet to watch a single college or pro football game from beginning to end. It seems like there's a void in my life; for most of the fall I filled the space with politics and election news. Now I don't have that either. Even Wasilla Wondermom dropped out of sight - she was always good for a paragraph or two.

At any rate, A&M lost to Baylor and is officially the sorriest team in the Big 12 South. The new coaching staff hasn't done anything to inspire confidence the situation will improve. I need a new team to root for, which would probably be Southern Cal if their games were regularly televised in Texas.

I haven't been to the movies in a year. The last time I was in a theater was the day after Thanksgiving in 2007, when I saw the excellent No Country For Old Men.

I'm thinking about taking Mrs. bee to see the new movie Australia with Nicole Kidman. It looks like the kind of picture she'd enjoy, with elements to hold my interest as well. These days, I usually watch movies on DVD or cable television. Last night in fact, I watched a movie that deserves a guarded recommendation. It's Reservation Road, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Ruffalo. This is a movie that didn't create a splash when it was released last year, and seems to have been dismissed by most of the reviewers. I probably wouldn't succeed as a movie critic because I thought it was very good, if not excellent. The plot concerns the death of a child in a hit-and-run accident and how that affects members of two families. This is a sober, serious film, hence the restricted recommendation. Reservation Road earns an eight on a scale of one to ten.

Added 10:38 pm, Thanksgiving night

Final score: Texas 49 Aggies 9. I had a hunch that taking the teasips and laying the 35 points was a safe call, given the way TAMU has been stinking up the joint all year. Cellar dwellers. TAMU's football program started to skid out of control in 1999 and has basically been sliding deeper into a hole for a decade. Will it ever end ? Fuck if I know.