Caring: A Fan's Journey

Caring: A Fan’s Journey

There's always a line of freaks somewhere waiting for some kind of freakshow. Sometimes the line is filled with wizard hats and wands. Sometimes it's filled with teenaged girls in vampire makeup. Sometimes there are a bunch of lightsabers and Stormtroopers. Sometimes the people in the line are way too excited to see the new Ford Mustang. Sometimes there is nothing to see but fat middle aged men wearing nothing but sports-themed body paint. But they're not freaks. They're fans.

And they're too loud, and they're obnoxious and whatever it is that they care about is actually stupid and childish and meaningless. But that doesn't mean you can fault them for caring.

I was a fan, a football fan, and a big one for that matter - as much as it pains me to admit. I yelled and cheered. I wore color coordinated outfits to show my sport. I (typically) stomped around like a sugar-starved two year old whenever things went wrong for me...I mean my team...I mean the team that I arbitrarily chose to root for, but had no actual connection to.

I look back on my teenaged years, when my fandom was strongest, like an ashamed alcoholic recounts a particularly exciting month in Vegas. The sports themed bed sheets, the picture of a quarterback which hangs in my bedroom in the spot normally reserved for Jesus, those are my embarrassing tattoos, my secret stories of desperate addiction. Because I convinced myself that caring about something so ultimately trivial was both a waste of my time and a black smudge on my character.

I have that kind of compulsive, addictive personality that seems to bounce between extremes anyway. My impulse, when hearing a song that I enjoy for the first time, is to find it online. I listen to it roughly 100 times until I have its lyrics memorized, then I listen to it roughly 100 more times until I can sing along, pitch perfect.

These are the ingredients for the type of person who rereads the Harry Potter novels time and time again. Or the type of person who can act out funny scenes from Seinfeld by memory. Or (in my case) the type of person who spends more time reading, listening and talking about football than he does anything else besides sleep. This is what makes a fan. (Full disclosure: I also am a big fan of both Seinfeld and Harry Potter, so those other things apply to me as well.)

But I gave it up. Part of me was tired of the emotional investment required of the Fan. Part of me was tired of being hurt by my team's losses. The largest part of me was tired of feeling stupid for being so affected by something so disconnected from me, something which could neither directly affected me, nor could I (despite all my lucky outfits and sacred couches) directly affect. So I stopped caring about football and started following politics intensely.

I lasted less than a year. I went just about 10 months without watching a game, wearing a replica jersey or listening to some pompous sports radio host pontificate about the playoff failings of Peyton Manning. Because the playoffs started and that aforementioned team with which I forged an arbitrary and meaningless but very personally important bond was in them. So I dug my lucky socks out of a long-forgotten drawer and walked back into my personal opium den. And I feel pretty good about it.

I can imagine that my situation is head scratching for many, those passionless, cynical and toilsome. Beliebers, Twihards, Deadheads, cosplayers, LARPers, historical reenactors and all the rest of them are so confusing, because why? That's literally the only question. Why care so much about something that matters so little? Why fight and argue and spend money on what is nothing more than a leisure activity? Why not get a job or raise a family or make friends or travel around the world?

Good question. Of course the nihilist within me can only turn it back on the interrogator. Why care about anything, be it money or careers or teen pop idols or Super Bowl championships? Is it more important to care about the right thing (whatever the flying fuck that is) than to care about something?

Why not care about the things you care about and leave it at that?