It wasn't just the briefly bouncing boob and the awful music. Add in the commercials - the farting horse and the dog that bites a fellow's testicular apparatus to get his master a beer. And all this framed by a few hours of costumed steroid-enhanced mutants on speed clobbering each other for glory.

This was showing the people who wonder about what we're doing in their neighborhood just what folks in the Middle East could have if they give in to us - what they could be.

Some future.

There are some people who think football is a metaphor for life. Is the super bowl their great pilgrimage? The Hajj is it? Then we are, in fact, a culture in swift decay.

Alan's take at the end cracked me up in that "theater of the absurd" kind of way. But yeah, I think that's the way it is. Jaws dropping in the Middle East at the sight of such a ridiculous extravaganza. Their version of religious fanatics shocked and awed - "should we cut off her breast or gauge out our own eyes. Whip me with a chain, or I'll do it myself!" The Super Bowl use to make me feel kind of sick - like I'd eaten an entire can of cake frosting. I just couldn't care less about football.

I've missed the bowl the past three years. I made a point to go read my poetry at a coffee shop, so glad to be of an audience who doesn't give a shit about the super bowl, or its commercials. This year I was riding back from Sopchoppy, musing on the sunset behind the silos and flat fields with tractor tracks. Most bucolic. My passenger, a retired chimney sweep and former basketball scholarship at Georgia Tech kind of guy searched the AM waveband in vain for the game, or just the score. The static wasn't much worse than the game, I figured. The sound of switching AM stations at night was like a Theremin in a black and white sci-fi movie from the 50's. I'll sort of miss it when I get XM.