Pass the Chips

It’s been almost a week and I think I have finally recovered from the Super Bowl.

Not the game.  It was a good game, but I didn’t really have a dog in that fight so I wasn't all that stressed out about it.  I don’t especially like or dislike either of the teams that were playing and all I was hoping for was a decent contest.  And it turned into one, eventually, and the 35-minute blackout that shifted the momentum from one side to the other and nearly changed the outcome of the game was interesting in itself.

Has anybody verified the whereabouts of Karl Rove during that blackout?

Just asking.

No, I don’t need to recover from the game.  I need to recover from the food.

I refuse to eat a nutritious dinner on Super Bowl Sunday.  It’s just wrong.  Unless you are actually playing in the game itself, Super Bowl Sunday exists for the sole purpose of discovering precisely how much junk you can consume before being legally declared a dump site.  It is meant as a celebration of salt, fat and sugar, a noble paean to the art of stacking paper plates so full of things that have no nutritional value whatsoever - things that actually suck vitamins out of your body, things that make a small red bar labeled "Health Points" appear over your left shoulder and dwindle visibly with every bite - that you could use those plates as barbells.  There should be chips, popcorn, buffalo wings, sweets, and one of every kind of dip.  There should be a vegetable tray that nobody touches, just to remind everyone that this day, of all days, is not supposed to be good for you.

Once a year you should be able to ignore the demands of good health and just eat.

The problem, of course, is that I am reaching the age where the demands of good health no longer are content to ignore me.

Gone are the days when I could eat like that every day.  Gone are the days when I could eat like that with impunity even once in a while.  These days, I feel it when I eat like that.

It doesn’t stop me, not completely, but it does make me ration those days out a bit.  I am no longer young, as my recent doctor's appointment confirmed, and everything becomes a balancing act.

So I spent my Super Bowl happily munching on things that could be considered food only by virtue of the fact that I was eating them.  And it was glorious.

But all the week since then?

Nutrition.