X-RAIDED
Also, I try not to gloat. It's bad form, and I'm clumsy when it comes to the Superiority Dance. But.

It was lovely to watch the ever-sucky Bucs smack the facepaint off the Oakland Raiders yesterday, even if all my plans fell through and I wound up watching the thing at home drinking and cooking (which works quite well, actually, as long as you don't burn anything, which there's no danger of at my place because the elements on my stove only get about as warm as a functional electric blanket, so the stew I was cooking took two awfully-slowly-nursed beers to complete) and alternately cheering every little bounce that went the Bucs' way and trying to figure out which genii thought the commercials that made it to the broadcast were worth 2 mil to air.

The game, as always, didn't matter. I hadn't bet enough on the outcome for either side to be able to break my heart, or even the veneer of my anger at my inability to write anything coherent.

It was the typical Super Bowl one-sided over-early capital-exchanging exercise, and I muted through the musical acts except for the Dixie Chicks and No Doubt. The Chicks were fine, an acceptably bluegrassy national anthem which was kind of sweet in its uncharacteristic understatement, and after Shania Twain's Cruella De Ville-from-a-can getup, it was a pleasure to hear Gwen Stefani actually sing off-key. Let's hear it for live performance; every time might be the last time they let that happen with a billion people watching, especially these days.

At the end, I was drunker (after only two beers; my blood has definitely thinned since I moved here) than I usually get alone, but not so far gone that I wasn't able to call up a couple of old friends from Toronto and coherently talk small about matters other than football or writer's block. Which lifted the black cloud I had been carrying around all weekend just this much, which was enough.