Can I blame my obsession with football on love for the sport? Perhaps it’s the love of procrastinating and the ample opportunities the utterly obscene amount of football news websites allow for. Maybe it’s some primal instinct within me that needs to blindly support a tribe, or two in my case. One Scottish, one English. I’m Scottish so it’s allowed, there’s no other reason anyone would support anything Scottish football related. Whatever it is I do spend an awful lot of time with my head in some kind of football related world. It could be that this is inspired by my team losing the derby today against our fiercest and most loathed knuckledragging right wing unionist rivals. Bastards. I think I’ve mentioned in the past that I despise Rangers with a passion and feel angry hatred towards them. This is part irrational and it’s a remarkable thing to experience and recognise within me when I like to think myself so rational and calm ordinarily. Note the like to think there. Anyway we lost and I’m not happy about it. My other team aren’t doing much better. Now may be the moment to do something extreme.
There have been days in the past where I’ve not allowed myself any technology until noon, or none all day at all. In those days I go without, I find by early evening I’ve done so much and been so productive that genuinely I’ve run out of things to do. How technology takes up so much of our day is quite worrying. But it’s not the phone or the laptop because I can make a call or do some work, it’s the things that we allow ourselves to be distracted on with these things. Facebook doesn’t really take up too much of my time but I can easily sit for two hours immersed in all things football; the latest news, gossip and whatever other click-bait I come across.
The idea may have been inspired by me being annoyed at losing but I thought about giving up football for a year. Absolutely no news, gossip or even games. That would be extreme but what I was curious about was what I would do to fill the time that everything football takes up. That excited me. But it’s also perhaps a bit too extreme, and unnecessarily so. Let’s say I only watched the games and nothing else. That would be less than four hours of the week taken up which really is very little. Imagine not knowing anything that has happened leading up to it, whether a player is injured or even whether the coach has been sacked. So perhaps the hour leading up to kick off and the half hour after as the result is digested. Get the team news and find out what’s going on prior to kick off like people did before twenty-four hour everything. Even then that’s a maximum seven hours a week. I am in no doubt that there will have been times that I spent that much time doing football stuff in one day alone.
The thing is that football itself isn’t bad or a waste of time, it does serve a purpose. Everything around it these days seems to be the thing that causes the problems. It has become a soap opera. Who needs Eastenders when you’ve got public rows between players and managers or whatever nonsense the media create and inflame. I don’t know if I’m ready to do it though but I want to. As much as anything I want to do it to see if both I can and what will happen, as in what will the outcome be in regards all that extra time I find myself with. If I can do this blog everyday for over eleven months I’m sure I can challenge myself to a new game of discipline. Which is what it all comes down to. This writing is about finding the discipline to do something while that would be about finding the discipline to deny something, or more positively, to do something else. It’s actually quite an exciting prospect. I’ll need a new challenge once this finishes in about four weeks after all.
Observations and Misunderstandings 