If I could only watch one tv show for the rest of my days, it would be King of the Hill. There are others I’d hate missing, most notably Scrubs, The Simpsons, and Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, but King of the Hill is my favorite, I tell you what.
Mike Judge, creator of the show, seems to feel about Texas the way I feel about Georgia. We both love our home state, it’s our fellow Georgians and Texans that bug us. It seems that small town slack-jawed yokels in Texas aren’t very different from the ones here in Georgia. Hank Hill is a striking copy of many of the uptight white dudes here in smalltown Georgia. He defines himself by his job, worries obsessively about what others may think of him, thinks way too highly of people with titles in front of their name, and is nicer to his dog than his own son. He is tight with a buck unless it goes to add to his already massive collection of tools for his workshop in the garage or other prototypical macho pursuits. He attends endless town hall committee meetings. He only wants to associate with fellow Christians, and his best friends are rubes. I see a little (or sometimes, a lot) of Hank Hill in most of the men I know around my hometown.
Peggy Hill is reflective of many of the know-it-all women around where I live who think that being married and a mother gives them superiority over women who are not. She grossly overestimates her own importance in the universe as a substitue teacher who absolutely butchers the Spanish language. She doesn’t have very many classically feminine traits at all, which I have noticed to be a trend around here. She is every bit as uptight as her husband, and just as focused on what others think.
When I make a mental “pros and cons” list of what it’s like to have Asperger’s syndrome, one of the more glaring pros is knowing that my decisions as to my likes and dislikes are not influenced by those of others. For instance, most of the hicks around here are University of Georgia football fans. If you are not, you are looked at funny, both despised and pitied. It has become an important part of social protocol for the NT’s in my hometown to be UGA football fans. GA Tech fans are tolerated in the way that Democrats are tolerated around here- well, at least they’re not Florida fans or communists. Being a huge sports fan who is also an Asperger, it escapes me who anyone could choose a team based on the people around you. The overwhelming majority of people in the world aren’t that smart. And from what I’ve observed, most of the UGA fans don’t really know much more than the bareboned basics of football. They are much more concerned with the social opporunities being a fan of UGA football provides. UGA fans are legendary for their codependent need to be around as many other drunken rednecks as possible on game days. I had the displeasure to be at one or two of these football viewing parties/wife swapping orgies years ago and maybe ten percent of the people in attendance were actually watching the damn game. If you want to sit around and party with your friends, ok, fine. Just don’t cheapen the meaning of being a fan in the process. I don’t go to your zoning committee meetings and dribble a basketball. My sister, ever seeking general acceptance, has become a UGA fan. I feel certain that if some cataclysmic change were to occur and GA Tech were to become the “in” team, she would be lining her wardrobe with yellow and black shirts. Our father is probably going nuts down in hell while he watches the endless rerun loop of Full House with Hitler and Richard Nixon next to him on the sofa, knowing one of his spawn is a UGA fan. He was a Tech fan. Guess I had to beat my sister at something involving parental approval.
When I watch a Yankees game, it probably is a tense experience for the people in the room with me. I don’t want to be talked to when certain players are batting, and I don’t like to answer any non-baseball related comments or questions unless they are urgent. I’m prone to some spectacularly, prodigiously foul language. I feel great when they win and bummed when they lose. Yeah, I know it’s just a game, but I don’t have much that I really get into.
The season will be starting soon and I’m excited. Cathy and me went down to spring training in Tampa this year, and it got me more keyed up for the regular season than usual. Any hardcore baseball fan should try to make at least one visit to spring training. The players are much more accessible and interactive with the fans, and the tickets are cheaper. I enjoyed trying to figure out who might make the final regular season roster based on the players in camp. My wife got some autographs, and it was one of the great thrills of my life watching as she caught the baseball that the players had signed and tossed back to her… I kept thinking “my wife is playing catch with the New York Yankees!”
One thing that my Asperger bluntness gets me in trouble about is my intolerance for people who don’t at least try to make their kids behave. Most parents where I live seem quite content to turn a blind eye while their child runs around frenetically like a miniature Viking razing a seaside village. Small children are probably the number one reason I will avoid a particular social situation. Second on the list would probably be the prospects of inane and cliche filled yammering of people who think their head will explode if they shut up for five seconds. My wife gets embarrassed sometimes because I will blurt out things like “my God, somebody shut that kid up!”
I think part of the reason I feel so little reservation about making my own comments is because of how many snide comments people have made to me over the years because I wouldn’t conform to Southern small town norms:
“Get a haircut, hippie.”
“Look me in the eye or I’ll know you’re a liar.”
“Why can’t you just be more like everyone else?”
“Don’t you want to fit in?”
“People think you’re weird.”
“I wish I had a normal son, a real boy.”
”Act normal, people will think we’re bad parents if you don’t.”
It goes on like this…
Once I went to Emory University when my wife was considering having a gastric bypass procedure. The University required all potential patients to attend a seminar covering the basic infomation about the process. My wife is a beautiful plus size woman, and I will love her at any size, so I don’t want anyone thinking I pressured her into this. It was her idea and hers alone. So anyway, there we are at this seminar, and there were some people there who didn’t look like they could’ve have made it out of the house without the participation of a forklift operator. One of these folks asked what would happen when he binged after the surgery. It made me furious, knowing this guy had a chance to fix his problem with a surgical procedure, and he was already planning an eating binge. I wish my problems could be fixed with a surgical procedure and a bit of self-restraint.
An hour or so into the seminar, I needed to visit the little boy’s room. I had noticed people milling in and out of the room, so I figured that’s what they were doing and it was not rude to leave during the lecture. When I was walking to the restroom, I saw the surgical candidates who had left the room lined up in front of the gift shop, stuffing their bowling ball shaped faces with Kit Kat and Snickers bars. I got even angrier, but reminded myself I was there for my wife, and I kept walking.
The last straw came after the seminar concluded. To get to the lecture hall, we had parked in the lot underneath the facility, then came up a single flight of steps, and walked a short distance down to our destination. I pause here to point out that there were very few steps and they were carpeted and the hallway itself was air conditioned. It was not an aerobic workout to negotiate this path. But after the seminar ended, the overwhelming majority of the patients lined up all the way down the hall to catch a ride on the single tiny elevator the building offered. At this point, it became too much, and since the seminar was over and I had been a silent and supportive partner to that point, I lashed out:
“Look at all these fat MF’s, lined up around the world so they don’t have to actually walk down any steps! These doctors could sew their mouths shut and they’d still always be fat. F’ing lazy and disgusting.”
At this point my wife gave me her trademark tug on my shirt sleeve that lets me know if I don’t shut up and walk with her I will be calling my parents for a ride home. But, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I promise this time she was laughing as she did it.
One thing that seems to mean a great deal to NT’s is the thought they might be on television. Sports broadcasts are filled with morons in the background, waving frantically while jabbering “can you see me?” to their fellow NT’s via cell phone. It seems that there are a whole hell of a lot of people willing to shell out the dough to watch a ball game only to spend most of the night trying to get themselves on tv and talking to their moron friends and family at home. I really wish that teams would inform their usher staff to discourage this type of crap. I hate having to sit next to some spaz who thinks that being a dot on his friend’s tv screen for one and a half seconds lends some sort of validation to his life.
Another pet peeve of mine when it comes to attending live sports is the idiots who have friends attending the game in other parts of the arena or stadium. Inevitably, these geniuses whip out their cell phone, call their friend, and proceed to give instructions about where to look, all the while waving their arms like a person stranded on an island trying to attract the attention of a passing ship. If you want to talk to your friend, just go over and talk to him. If he was that good of a friend, then why aren’t the two of you sitting together? Nearly every sporting event I attend in person causes at least one intense urge to yank the cell phone out of some NT’s hand and smash it underfoot.
So it’s March Madness time, that wonderful time of year when every nerd and bored housewife suddenly becomes a psychotic college hoops fan/expert. I don’t really get much into college hoops, I cheer for Duke on a casual basis but that’s about it. I find the 3-point line in college insultingly close to the net, and the last two minutes of a college basketball game are an unbearable train wreck of strategic intentional fouls. But the NT’s love this tournament. They make their laughable brackets and obsess over the performance of schools whose location is unknown to them. They talk with the false bravado of the overnight expert and regurgitate nonsense they heard spouted from the talking heads on espn (my gripes with espn could fill several thick volumes). In the end, their pseudo-fandom is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Have you ever noticed that about three-fourths of the lead-ins and commercials for espn’s sportscenter involve the phrase “wait til you hear what so and so says about so and so”. What is this, sixth grade playground gossip? Johnny wants to break up with Susie, so he can go out with Sally. Who actually cares about this stuff? Why do sports fans tune in to see what a player said about someone instead of how many points he scored or how many yards he rushed for? In the past dozen years, espn has come to be a shell of it’s former self, more Entertainment Tonight than sportscenter. Let’s see how many celebrities were at this game. Let’s see where Tom Brady takes his vacations. Human interest stories outnumber sports stories several times over. The tragic thing is, espn owns so much of its market that there are few options for us hardcore fans that don’t care what a player’s ex-wife said about his lovemaking abilities.
There are several espn “personalities”, as they prententiously like to call them, that elicit such dislike in me I can taste my own rage. Stuart Scott is my primary adversary, the Joker to my Batman. Listening to him is an exercise in aggravation. It is a jumbled stream of hip-hop references, name-dropping, and codependent efforts to prove to us all how hip he is. He couldn’t impress me if he popped out his glass eye and used it to become marble champion of the world.
At the other end of the annoying espn employee spectrum is Skip Bayliss, the crusty old white dude who doesn’t think any athlete deserves his admiration. He forever made my list of espn shills I don’t like when he claimed that New York Jets all time leading rusher Curtis Martin was not good enough for the Hall of Fame. This is madness, pure and simple. Martin is third all time in rushing yardage in the NFL. Think about some of the great running backs who have toted the ball in the NFL. Curtis Martin was often the only great player on a terrible team, and defenses knew he would be getting the ball a lot. They still couldn’t stop him from moving up the all time rushing list. But Skip sits there unimpressed, saying he only deserves to be in the Hall of the Very Good. He never thinks anyone does anything worthy of King Skip’s admiration. It makes me wonder, if so little about sports impresses him, which did he choose sports journalism (if such a thing exists on espn) as a career?
Next on my list is all so called “sideline reporters” on espn and all other sports broadcasters. Not since the human appendix and the House of Representatives Ethics Comittee has there been anything so epically useless. How many people really get impressed when every single coach who gets interviewed on the sideline before the game says “We just gotta play hard, not turn the ball over, we know they’re a great team and we’re gonna just try and play our game”? Does this really add anything at all to the broadcast? Every coach and player spits out the same tired cliches and yet the networks deem this redundancy a vital part of every game. Erin Andrews, the world’s hottest sideline reporter, is quite a filly but even her I could do without.
Tags: asperger, asperger's, curtis martin, emory university, georgia tech, gordon ramsay, hank hill, i hate espn, i hate stuart scott, king of the hill, kitchen nightmares, march madness, plus size
