Sometimes you really have no choice but to say, "what time's the game?"

David Sherman

In Andy Garcia’s film, Just the Ticket, he offers advice we’d do well to heed: “Sometimes you just gotta say, ‘Fuck it.’” He and the love of his life, Andie MacDowell, then trashed her dipso employer’s kitchen.

Now’s the time to answer the call. Grab an exacto knife to a map or your brain, slice along the U.S./Canada border or deliver unto yourself a partial lobotomy. Cut the spectre of our sick neighbour to the south right out of your life. Goodbye Manhattan, goodbye the Keys, goodbye the High Peaks. Fuck it.

Not only cut the wretched ties that bind you to the “lie and deny” Twit-in-Chief, but trash the 50 states and everything and everyone associated with it – the domestic storm troopers – hired with a persuasive $50,000 signing bonus and the right to beat and choke all genders equally -- starving the poor and feeding the wealthy faithful and the inevitable claims the Demos cheated. Fuck it.

Yes, this week’s U.S. elections and ballot initiatives went Democrat, maybe a harbinger for mid-terms. Though few are as adept at conniving and cheating as the twice-impeached ostrich in blue and red who presides over the U.S. with his head in a sand trap.

There remain thoughtful souls stuck in the bane of the free and the home of the terrified. They’re imprisoned online, protected by pseudonyms, labelled far-left radicals, communists, illegal immigrants, Muslims, anti-Semites, drug dealers, etc.

Talking truth down in the anything-but-united states can get you shipped to Venezuela or interred with swamp creatures in the Everglades. But some have persevered in online chat rooms, sharing their affection for who’s running the country. Here present and former members of the U.S. armed forces, now known as The War Machine, share their affection for Peter Hegseth. Hegseth runs the War Machines, a position he qualified for by once being a Boy Scout and having his lips firmly ensconced between the president’s prodigious buttocks.

“Hegseth was & is a bonafide shitbag coward.”

“He's a POS. Not even for being mediocre. He's a POS because he talks about merit, yet he merits NOTHING.”

“He's a Yes Man. A Nazi. A drunkard. A sexist. A fascist.”

The latter comment might be from J.D. Vance’s wife, a Hindu, who the Veep has publicly pushed to adopt Christianity, the only spirit, other than his boss, he will take a knee for. A true Christian, the only thing better than a Sunday in church is bombing anonymous Venezuelan boats said to be loaded with drugs. The fact most illegal drugs come into the U.S via Mexico conflicts with American lust for regime change and access to 300 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil. An Elon Musk nightmare.

The U.S. is at war with itself, a milkshake of malevolence and ignorance, greed and cruelty, homelessness and hunger. Our only chance to maintain our own sanity is to kill the news apps, the cable news channels, choose your favourite tracks on YouTube or your linty CDs or sit back and glow in the balm of the late, great World Series, hockey, football, basketball or even soccer. Follow the bouncing ball.

Of course, Canadian news is no meander in the northern woods. We have a healthy share of murder and mayhem, pollution and politicos like Poilievre and Smith, Trump wannabes. They do spread the gospel of immigrants and non-white, non-Christians being space invaders out to devour spleens of good Christian heterosexual white folks.

There is peace in sports, even if you paint your face in team colours and drink enough beer to fell a moose. You can skip the “news” on the widescreen, the phones and tablets that suck up our lives and mine millions of words on exploits of athletes as young as 14.

Except for cheating here and there, a gambling scandal or three, homicidal rage on the ice or under the boards, sports retain a smattering of innocence. Winners and losers are charted without benefit of a filibuster or lying, aircraft carriers or guided missile, conniving former beauty queens turned U.S. cabinet minister or Justice Department hack.

Regardless of who wins or why, bank balances change only for gamblers and those whose income is related to team fortunes.

For 99 per cent of us, winning or losing is of no consequence. Yet, the emotional tie is strong. “Wait until next year” a mantra of eternal hope. At least in sports. In politics, it means hoping he’ll keel over into a water hazard and float away like a punctured balloon.

Sports, unlike the news, as comic Lewis Black once said, won’t give you colitis.

Unfortunately, sports news is overflowing with speculation and conjecture, often centered on how many million the subject(s) of all this crystal ball, click bait might earn, will earn or is earning. It’s fodder for accountants as the new science of analytics is really for number nerds. I don’t know what a Corsi is. But I can still enjoy the game.

Somewhere, too, is admiration of beauty and courage, determination and obsession. We watch kids, barely out of their teens, invest emotions and intellect, joints and limbs while we yell at the TV.

“Why didn’t he play Plante rather than Price?” “How can he not use Lafleur on the power play?”

Talk invented for long, cold nights now a well of endless bytes for endless blogs, pseudo news stories and ads and more ads and more ads.

So, forget the mortgage and the weather and the craziness down south. Forget inhumanity and marvel at what superbly conditioned young men and women can do. Marvel at the exceptionalism. Escape the quotient craziness. When athletes and movie stars appear between whistles to sell you crap and convince you of the glories of gambling, turn off the sound or hit the fridge or washroom.

There is an endless supply of dolts shilling anything which makes one wonder, “Is this how ad agencies see us, consumers with an IQ of a hockey puck?” Or do they think we’ll feel better about ourselves and their products if the pitchmen and women have the intelligence of their Labradoodle.

As a wag said of our home team, “They play with joy.” Happy kids, futures assured by multi-year, multi-million-dollar contracts -- as long as mind and body withstand the abuse. Just happy kids under a microscope.

Probably best to close your eyes to the tsunami of money in sports. Salaries, stadiums, tickets, tax breaks, franchises -- the costs are staggering.

But when the game is on, we can forget for a couple of hours the world is too weird and there’s nothing we can do about it. That’s up to the generations playing video games.

Winning or loses won’t change our lives an iota; no need to chew Zoloft. There’s always another game, another season. It’s so meaninglessness it’s wondrous.

So, fuck it.