Culpability begins somewhere. Barnett to follow? Not likely. Run for your life, Kenny…(see prior Barnett post.)

How does a person get addicted? I just finished Augusten Burroughs’ memoir Dry, and the great mystery of the book is how someone goes from being a relatively normal human being to drinking two or three bottles of Dewars’ a day every day for years on end. Or, more relevantly to us, how does someone end up on the couch on a Thursday night watching Louisville(the official team of Thursday night) play Colorado State in an ineptly played 6-3 game that made us want to claw our eyeballs out?

In the book, you discover that not being really normal-his mother was diagnosed clinically insane, and he grew up in the house of their psychiatrist and his adopted son, who raped Burroughs mercilessly for much of his adolescence. So being extremely fucked up by life helps. So what’s our excuse for rampant drinking and excessive remembrance of useless college football trivia? Admittedly, most of the college football fans I know don’t have mad mothers, and if there’s any forced sodomy in their past, they certainly don’t share it with others.(Unless you ask nicely after a few drinks, of course.)

I think for some fans-Boston fans pre-2000s especially-the real dedication comes in a certain amount of masochism. Getting dumped might suck, but getting dumped by a really beautiful woman, one who set fire to your house, gave you gonorrhea, and then ran over your pet pig…now there’s something grand and awful about that. Kind of like Jean Claude Van Damme movies: so putrid, so unwatchable, so laughingly bad…that we actually love them, with the logical exception of Double Impact with Dennis Rodman.

I went back and tried to remember the moments that got me hooked. I was surprised to find that the losses were what really stuck out-always more vivid, and always the bait for a deeper level of addiction that came with the next one. Kind of like getting trashed, and going straight to morning beer to take the edge off the hangover. It’s a nasty cycle, and it all started with… (more…)