A Beautiful Life and the Beautiful Game

I live a charmed life. I am happily married to a beautiful girl, my high school sweetheart, and together we have a wonderful family. I have many fun and interesting friends. I work at a challenging job that continually engages my attention, and I care deeply about my co-workers whom I also consider friends. I live near the city of Boston, which celebrates culture be it artistic, academic or athletic; in some ways there is no place more humane and progressive than Massachusetts. All-in-all it is a fine life, and I know how lucky I am; I never complain. Except about one small thing.

I am a football fan. A fanatic, in fact. I speak of course about the round football that is kicked back and forth by eleven players on each side as they try to put that little ball in the opposing net; most of my friends here at home, when they talk about football at all, call it soccer. But I am a fanatic; all I do is watch the game and read about the game and think about the game. Even when I am living my lovely life and spending time with my family and friends and enjoying interesting conversations I still find myself thinking about football.

This blog, then, is going to help me with my obsession; it shall be a focus for all of this thinking and reading and watching; it shall be at the least a semi-plausible reason for all this time being spent. But this blog shall be about more than that. It will discuss not just football, but also what it is and what it means to be a football fan in the United States of America, and a consideration of all the positives and negatives that being a fan here entails. I hope eventually that this can be read and enjoyed by football fans everywhere, not just in the U.S., and I do expect that it will eventually shed some light to those interested in exactly where this fanaticism comes from.