JOSEPH N. BELL -- The Bell Curve

This is the best holiday of all.

It is noon on New Year’s Day. I have just watched South Carolina bomb

Ohio State in some bowl or other, and I will now watch Michigan and

Auburn until the Rose Bowl comes on. And after that, I will watch Oregon

State and Notre Dame. I will have a beer soon and probably another during

the Rose Bowl. I will have cheese and crackers and maybe a bowl of chili.

My head will be filled with mush and footballs and peace because I don’t

really care who wins. My wife more or less accepts such behavior as a

male aberration and will leave me alone on this strange planet.

The decorative lights have been taken down. The Christmas tree is

stuffed into a trash can. The ornaments are piled in the garage, where I

will one day get around to packing them away. There will be no more

shopping, excessive eating and drinking, unreal expectations, or emotions

in overdrive.

And no more holiday guilt. Guilt over waiting too long to shop. Not

investing myself deeply enough, emotionally, not financially, when I did.

Dealing too much in things and too little in feelings. Not writing

Christmas messages to people I love and don’t want to lose touch with.

Wishing much too early on that it could be all over. And trying, not

very successfully, to put down anger and despair that bad things happened

to good people at such a time.

And so I watch my football games and wallow in a day of guiltless

self-indulgence, using timeouts and commercials to write this pablum.

I thought briefly of taking advantage of the usual New Year’s baloney.

You know, the “Five Most Effective Politicians” of the past year. Or the

“10 Worst Columnists.” Or, perhaps, writing New Year’s resolutions for

people I don’t like.

But I quickly hit a dead end because all five of the first group would

have to be the majority members of the U.S. Supreme Court, who put a

president in office. Professional ethics prevented me from criticizing

any of my colleagues. And the targets for New Year’s resolutions were too

easy.

Like suntan oil for Dana Rohrabacher, so he won’t get burned by global

warming. Or extra protection for Chris Cox from the Chinese spies he

exposed who surround us. Or earplugs for Larry Agran and the Irvine City

Council, who constantly hear imaginary aircraft overhead. Or a world

atlas for George “Dubya” Bush. Things like that.

So I turn back to football, where Oregon State is destroying Notre

Dame, which I find deeply satisfying. I can’t explain this feeling except

to point out that it has nothing to do with anti-Catholicism. I feel the

same satisfaction when misfortune hits USC football, the New York Yankees

and the right wing of the Republican Party, very few of whom -- I suspect

-- are Catholic.

Maybe sometime in March or April, I’ll step back and look at this

feeling of mild dread about the period between Thanksgiving and the new

year, which seems to grow every year. The feeling that it is increasingly

more stress than fun, more frenzied than peaceful, more mindless than

thoughtful. And, perhaps, put it in better perspective than I have right

now.

It’s too easy to blame all this on commercialism, which certainly is

culpable (each year, I fully expect to see Christmas decorations going up

right after Halloween). But it’s more than that. We are willing fellow

conspirators. We buy into this frenzy at the same time we deplore it. And

so those of us who are fortunate come, finally, to New Year’s Day and 12

consecutive hours of football to carry us back to the post-holiday real

world.

I feel mildly sorry for those exhausted holiday survivors who don’t

have this transition available to them. Such as my wife, for example. I

ran this column by her because we have an agreement that whenever I

mention her in print, I show her the copy (a concession I admittedly

don’t offer to others with a lesser effect on my daily life). She said

she feels obligated on this day of football immersion to do something

useful to compensate for my mindless withdrawal from any discernible

human values. So she is baby-sitting her two nieces, for which I

certainly take a good deal of credit.

She would probably agree with the late columnist Erma Bombeck, who

once wrote that “if a man watches three football games in a row, he

should be declared legally dead.”

This, of course, is excessive and only comes out of envy from the

person making such a statement that she doesn’t have a resource such as

football to provide psychological stability.

What my wife doesn’t yet know is that there are two more Very

Important games on the two evenings after New Year’s Day. Fortunately,

half of each one will take place before she gets home from work, and --

if necessary -- I’ll tape the other half. But I’m also working on some

other possible scenarios that will occupy her during that time.

I find it warming to realize that I have more than 10 months ahead of

me during which I won’t have to think about the year-end holidays. This

encompasses the entire baseball season. But that’s another story to save

for another day. Meanwhile, happy new year.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.