The Afterlife Can Wait

There are moments, amidst the shit that makes up 90% of our life, when the sky opens up, when animals talk to us, when life is in Technicolor. Sunday was one of those days. My brother and I took my Dad to see the Raiders play the Denver Donkeys at Invesco (still Mile High to those of us who are old enough to think that that kind of name for a stadium is as beautiful a thing as a 20 year old virgin) Field. The beer was cold; we were wearing Raider gear and were prepared for a drubbing at the hands of what, I thought, should have been a better team--God intervened. I'm not big on the concept of God, though there was a period of my life when the idea helped me sleep, but it's hard to describe what happened last Sunday without thinking of the divine. Perhaps we just slipped into that alternate universe that my doppelganger enjoys, where everything goes my way and chicks dig me. That the Raiders destroyed the Donkeys is an understatement. It was 28 to O after the first quarter. I didn't know whether to laugh, cry or strip my clothes off and run through the stadium shouting, "You fuckers have always sucked. You have never beaten us this bad. My brother, father and I deserve this moment." And, we do. We do deserve the occasional reprieve from the life that sucks the life out of us. As Blanche DuBois said, "sometimes, there's God, so suddenly". While it may be more than a little gay to quote Tennessee Williams to describe what happened at a football game, it just works. Somewhere, between the beers and the brats and the cigarettes and the chick fight we saw on the way out of the game, My brother, father and I felt that God had smiled, for one brief and everlasting moment, on our lives. Fuck the Broncos.