Sunday’s ride was another in unseasonably warm weather (or maybe the cold has been unseasonable? I have no idea if seasonality still has meaning anymore), this time down to the Inner Harbor to meet N. for lunch before our trip to the Wedding Experience, Day 2. There were dresses and cake samples and lots of stares–which one’s the bride? (neither!)–and then it was time to walk back, her to her car, and me to my bike to meet again at the grocery. Walk+car was about equal to biking, but I’ll call myself the winner, because hey, I’m the one writing this. Anyway, a trip to the grocery store on Super Bowl Sunday is an excellent reminder of how many of us are doing the same thing at the same time, even if we’re not doing it together. Now, I know the arguments about the Super Bowl: it’s just a big marketing campaign; football sells an ugly and violent masculinity that’s part of normalizing gendered violence against both women and men; the injury rate is 100%, and it’s largely Black men we’re asking to take the fall; it sells a dangerous nationalism that normalizes war and American exceptionalism; and on and on and on. It is also a day that leaves grocery shelves like this–nearly empty of chips and those canned dips I don’t think are eaten any other day of the year. We got the “jalapeno” “cheese” dip in a can and the second to last bag of tortilla chips–and they were the multigrain ones. You snooze, you lose on this day. Super Bowl Sunday is all of those things, but it is also a time of celebration and fun and required relaxation, and hey, nobody’s going to talk us out of loving the Super Bowl, so let’s learn to think critically about it so we can watch it and not get fooled into thinking twincest is hot, corporations are our families, we all have to buy cars, war is inevitable because America is great, and being a man means being violent and hypersexual and being a woman means being happy to be an object. Because hey, I love a good game of football, and that player’s union could teach us all a thing or two about organized labor. Oh, and as much as I love you, Detroit, I’m sticking with the bike.