OK, I spent all of last week's post lubing you up with what I consider normal foreplay--apology, minimizing my own needs out of embarrassment, talking too much about price--so it would be cruel and inconsiderate to deny you any further. The best I can do is a description of the act, but that feels appropriate for our level of intimacy and, well, it works for me. You're into what you're into.
What I got into was USA vs Paraguay for the team's first 2026 World Cup game. The locale was "Los Angeles Stadium," stripped of its corporate-sponsored name, which I normally would approve of as an anti-capitalist pinko, but I know it's just because FIFA don't get a cut of the sponsorship loot. Like any social media user with more than three followers, the mantra is the same: no free clout.
It should be noted that, like a lot of these stadiums, it's not in the city it's named for at all. Before we got to the stadium at all, we had to negotiate parking, which I found for $90 in the small lot of an old 1930s-ish theater converted into a church along Manchester Blvd. in Inglewood, where the stadium actually is. I know: $90 for parking?! Yes, but that was just because my partner and I were willing to walk the 0.7 miles to the stadium to avoid a) the inescapable triple-digit prices for locations nearer the event site, with the highest I saw over $600 and b) the ingress and egress traffic in the immediate vicinity of the other suckers who got duped into paying face-value-or-more prices for admission that should by rights have come with two bedrooms and one-point-five bathrooms.
Hoofing it in and out might sound like kind of a bummer, but we got to see a little bit of Inglewood, which is leafier and quieter than its media coverage during my 1980s childhood would have suggested. It's unsual as a Southern Californian to spend any time on foot in a community not your own (or even your own. So many hills! And you don't want to risk running into any neighbors), so that part carried novelty of its own, not to mention a chance to build up the atmosphere on the way in and decompress on the walk out. Plus it's a real dad-coded treat to walk out of a stadium right past lines and lines and lines of unmoving cars and then drive out unimpeded from the little off-site parking lot that feels like it's just for you. That's almost worth $90 of anybody's money. It's only worth $10 of my money when I do it at Angels baseball games, but these days I'm not sure there are enough attendees to qualify as "traffic."
Getting to the stadium, which I've been to for other football (soccer) and football (American throwball type) events, like everything else touched by FIFA, it was the worst version of it the could be managed. It was surrounded by a 15-foot-high fence, forcing all 70,000-plus in through I think three or four narrow entrances. We arrived on site around 90 minutes before kickoff to a line along the fence that seemed to be a mile long.
It was at this point that I began to despair. I could hear roars from the stadium I couldn't yet access and began to die from FOMO. In retrospect, all I was missing was a naff "pre-game ceremony" touched with that FIFA magic combination of corny, extravagant and unnecessary, but I began to complain to my partner that there was NO WAY we were going to make it through the ENDLESS line in time to get in by kickoff.
It was at this point I should have realized that I was emotionally NOT OK. Being faced with an exceptionally long queue outside a well-attended event, even a pointless queue badly run by disinterested staff, is not an appropriate trigger for genuine human despair, especially if you're there at 4:30 for a 6 pm start. The line snaked through fine, we passed through security and got into the stadium to our last-row (literally last row, top deck) seats in plenty of time for kickoff and I started to notice I was actively, visibly shaking. When my ass finally hit the seat, I lost the ability to resist occasionally softly crying as I realized a thing I hadn't really dared posit I'd be able to do since the idea was planted way back in 1994.
This is where I shout out and celebrate my partner for her patience as I spun out, composure-free, for a good 40 minutes during the security-line pseudo-crisis. She made a much better showing of it when we finally went to Acadia National Park in Maine back in October, a lifelong goal of hers. She climbed up mountains and walked trails and smiled alot, bosh, job done, no fuss. But it's to be expected. Men are so emotional.
I won't go through the blow-by-blow of a phenomenal, cathartic, comprehensive performance and victory by the normally profligate and masochistic US Men's National Team. I was there for the experience of being there, so a sweeping victory and mostly stress-free dominance of their opponents were all cherries on an unexpectedly rich, many-layered cake.
Once I calmed down, I was more or less present enough to appreciate the thing as it was happening all around me. Sometimes you just need a prosaic incident to ground yourself, like someone spilling beer on you or considering whether you want to spend $9 on a bottle of water. For me it was the first time I refused to participate in the "U-S-A! U-S-A!" chant. Nothing will bring you back to yourself like second-hand embarrassment and a gentle contempt for your neighbors. That part didn't cost $2600, so that at least I can recommend without reservation.
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