A sport by which our sins are lessened: forty of our nation’s moralists——hawks huddled neath the sodium-vapors; gentle yet rigorous decriers (now named Nestor, all) keeping warm by the bone-run fires——gather in a pit dug out within our largest stadium. The moralists are apportioned guns and one vote each, the exercise of which—–the votes——nullifying the need to begin the game at all. They, the moralists, must all agree——not leaving the pit which has been well-dug in the center of the otherwise immaculate field——upon a single issue, and then must agree upon a single formulation of said issue in the form of a simple (subject verb object) question. An example given to the moralists before their pre-game arrest and denouement: on the issue of climate change (once a tractable thing, like a diaper): “Is the production of new technology designed to combat climate change inimical to fundamentally combating climate change?” Nothing too difficult to at least frame. If a decision upon an issue and then the framing of the question which lives within that issue cannot be agreed upon by all forty moralists, a large gong is struck by an albino boy in Prada hidden entirely from the sights of the pit by an incensed veil, and the hollow thwong, once registered by the moralists huddled together in small clots beside fires lit by the sparkling marrow purchased by previous games——this isn’t the first; this will not be the last——is meant to require the moralists to raise their pistols and fire them into one another’s faces and heads. The first moralist to die is given to the albino boy for his practices; the second moralist to die is given to the distant umpire who lightly moderates comments on the games’s YouTube pages; the third moralist to die is eaten alive by a thresh of dogs; the fourth moralist to die must forgo any profession in order to play Dungeons & Dragons full-time; the fifth moralist to die both ends the game and signals the local electricians union to shut off the stadium’s lights which in turn, this darkness, signals the bulldozers and backhoes to drive into the stadium and straight to the pit to fill it. Of course it is winter. Days later, the echo of the game is intoned——by the albino gong boy, now nude——via a short and sententious half-time concerto played via wet fingers running over a table dressed with crystal flutes; this teary show inaugurates both the first game of the season and the buried premises by which traditional, ancient, and helmeted sports are allowed to thrive in our clambake economies of rusted auto parts and pilfered corn-bin credits. (Sheet cake is promised upon the panting finale of a deathless game, however unimaginable, and useless.)
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