Understand that it’s fucking Mordor.

It’s totally evil.

It really is.

Entertain for a moment the idea that the NFL might actually be nothing more than a flashy delivery system for gambling. The games are just accessories created to facilitate the exchange of a mind-bending amount of money. It’s impossible to calculate how much cash– both legally and illegally– is bet on the NFL each year, but it’s hundreds of billions of dollars. It might be a trillion. The NFL, and the owners of each of the the 32 teams that comprise the league, make pornographic amounts of money– so much so that even the pathologically greedy Donald Trump wanted in on the action back in the 80’s.

Working beneath these overlords are the players. About 70% of them are black, and the average length of a career is about 3 1/2 years. It is a brutal, collision-based sport, but beyond the mechanical failure of knees, hips and such, there is CTE, a brain disease that virtually every football player seems to acquire due to the concussive nature of the sport. And because the NFL is evil, they withheld this information from the players even as symptoms set in and raged amongst them.

Essentially, what the NFL does is hire people to engage in combat while America bets on who the winner will be.

It’s the bread and circuses we’re fed.

The game itself is about martial precision rather than athletic improvisation. The players are armoured and anonymous, strategically deployed by the technocrats on the sidelines, and whatever exuberance or individuality they bring to the game is swiftly crushed. When celebrating and dancing after a touchdown became a thing, the league outlawed it. It was considered “disrespectful,” ( but not in the same way that calling a team The Redskins might be “disrespectful”) which put another way means it was considered too black. In effect, they took an African-American product, subordinated it to the tastes of a conservative white audience, and profited obscenely from it.

Colin Kaepernick, a talented black quarterback, ( It was not that long ago that a black quarterback in the NFL was unheard of, the belief being that they didn’t have the “faculties” to perform the job) began the practice of taking a knee during the national anthem as a protest against against racial injustice.

He was subsequently black-balled from the league, even though his talents should have been in high demand. In his absence, others players stepped up to continue the practice, all of which came to a head when Trump started calling for the sons of bitches to be fired. This cynical and amoral manipulation of existing divisions in the nation forced the players and owners to respond.

Siding with those who are against racial injustice and for freedom of expression seems like a pretty obvious choice. I mean, this is a no-brainer, right? History is unfolding in such a way that it’s forcing people to make a choice, whether they want to or not, and many players took the knee. And the photographs–all so familiar, inevitable and urgent– were deeply moving. They gave me chills, and for a moment it was easy to believe that things might finally be changing for the good.

But then again, this movement was taking place largely within the pitiless machine that is the NFL, and so many sought a middle road that they hoped wouldn’t interrupt any revenue streams. The Dallas Cowboys, led by their owner, took a knee before the anthem, and then standing, locked arms as a team during the anthem.

It was a muddle of a message, one that managed to suggest the players had some sort of solidarity with ownership instead of a grievance with institutional racism, but that was the point. It was supposed to mean all things to all people. Ultimately, they co-opted the symbolism of Kaepernick’s protest to support the idea of “protest” without actually joining the protest. It was nothing more than damage control, a gesture as empty of meaning as a Pepsi commercial, and one more thing the NFL can add to it’s wall of shame.

It’s hard for me to imagine a creature more physically dissimilar from a human than a lobster– an entity that inhabits the same planet as the rest of us but lives on the cold, dark floor of oceans. If we could imbue it with a human intelligence, could it possibly conceive of the terrestrial civilization above that actually farms and manages lobster communities and then eats them as delicacies? My guess is that no, the lobster is not thinking this, and so I assume that whatever my instinct is about what lies beyond the field of my imagination, the actuality is going to be so much stranger and greater that there’s absolutely no point in trying to codify it into a religion.

I have a friend who is a Charismatic Christian, and knowing that my wife was out of town one weekend, he invited me over for dinner with his men’s group. I did not know what a men’s group was. I imagined a bunch of guys who liked fantasy football, crossbows and the free market, and with that in mind went over expecting to eat a huge steak.

When I arrived there were about six other men sitting in the living room, as if waiting for me, as if they’d been waiting for me for their entire lives. There was something unusual about these men, an aspect of aggressive contentment that was entirely humourless and disquieting.

One man seemed to make a special project of me. He handed me a piece of paper upon which were what he considered to be numeric proofs of the immaculate nature of the Bible. After looking at it for a minute or two, and commenting on the interesting connections it made, I joked, “If the Bible were perfect, surely it would contain a few photos of Raquel Welch, don’t you think?”

I was being charming.

Men’s Group charming, I thought.

He gave me a long, hard look and then nodded to the other men, who over the course of the next fifteen minutes filtered out to the front porch to have cigars.  Thickly built, the man was probably 20 years older than I was and gave me a look that suggested he’d seen my type before. We talked for a good half hour before he announced, “You know, when I was younger I was a sex addict.”

I nodded respectfully.

“There seem to be very few old sex addicts,” I couldn’t help but add.

“You think you’re funny, don’t you?”

“Not funny Ha-Ha, funny the other way, I guess.”

He snorted, “When I met a woman do you know what I saw?”

“No,” I said.

“Genitals. That’s what I saw. Just genitals.”

He spat out the word “genitals” in the same way a serial killer in a movie starring Morgan Freeman might. “But it was the Lord Jesus Christ who saved me from this sinful bearing!” And then he shouted something and raised his fist into the air.

“Come with me, son, I want you to see something.”

He led me out to the front porch where the rest of the men were, and for the first time in my life I saw people speaking in tongues, or at the very least, pretending to speak in tongues. With their arms up, aspiring for heaven, the men were shouting and crying. As a holy babble poured forth from their mouths, they twisted and spun, undulating, as if no longer owner’s of their own bodies. Ferdinand, the Congolese guy who had been addicted to heroin and cocaine, was so stricken by the Lord that he collapsed and fell into the Weber barbeque. I rushed over to him, and upon revival asked him what he had seen during his hallowed transport but he did not know what to say. His wide, innocent face just looked back at me, “ All was good,” he said, “all was glory.”

“But what happened when you collapsed into the barbeque?” I pressed.

“The Lord spoke his miracle into me.”

I looked at the men on the porch. Although in a state of ecstatic transference, they still managed to hold their cigars and glasses of whiskey. Each one was recovering from some life seizing passion, be it drugs, alcohol or an addiction to sex, and it was clear that they’d replaced one obsession with another. It was fantasy football, only with the Pentecostal Church replacing the NFL.

As I crouched near Ferdinand with what was likely a look of wonder on my face, they asked if they could pray for me, the black sheep. I was a little bit anxious about what this meant, but said yes and inched into their prayer circle clutching my scotch like it was a holy talisman. They all put a hand on me and lifted the other toward the skies, and then they really put their hearts into it. The man who had taken me on as a special project reached out to touch me, and when he did, he shuddered away as if suffering an electrical shock.

But he was strong, and reached out to touch me again. It pained him to do so, I could see it in his face, but he persisted, Satan was not going to beat him. Powerful, unguarded commands from his heart issued forth, and then he proclaimed that he saw a serpent wrapped around me, a serpent coiling tighter and tighter. The other men were shrieking and howling. “You must come to the Lord, the serpent is winding itself into you, I see it,” my exorcist proclaimed in a voice that seemed to come from a TV set. I nodded my head and looked at him, “No,” I said, “you don’t see a serpent. You’re lying. I think the serpent is wrapped around you.” And I looked at him like I was goddamn Clint Eastwood. And then Ferdinand, whom I think has peace-making instincts, distracted everybody by being struck by the Lord again, shouting, “The Lord has seized the Serpent, it departs!” before collapsing once again into the Weber.