Every year I look forward to the Super Bowl, and every year it's like eating a TV dinner -- always looks better in the picture.

Nothing, not even Armageddon, could live up to the hoopla. The pregame show begins three weeks before kickoff, when neckless men begin dissecting the games, going backward week by week till they finally get to the beginning...

"Football dates back to the 1800s, when a soccer player decided, on a lark, to pick up the ball and run. Opponents tackled him to the ground, beat him silly, and gave birth to the sport we love today."

As much as I enjoy football -- well, the 12 minutes of actual play time -- maybe we're watching a little too closely...

The Patriots are more likely to score on odd weeks when Aries is in the seventh house. For further analysis, we go to Shirley MacLaine. Shirley?

And we gobble it up, gimme, gimme, gimme. We need the puffery, the sensation, some amazing, worldwide thing. And the footballogists always deliver.

"For breakfast Peyton eats Cheerios, which are made of rolled oats -- the same oats that the opposing coach farmed as a schoolboy in Idaho! A fateful match-up indeed."

Then come the interviews with players who can barely support their heads for elephantiasis of the ego. And though they struggle with basic inflections of the language, we listen with 300 microphones.

"How does it feel to be going to the big game?"

"For me to put it in words, you know, it's like, damn..."

Some of them praise the Lord for aiding their victory, and it's a little-known fact that most murders and train wrecks occur because God was helping others win football games.

I like to flip between pregame shows to hear from a cross section of experts: William Shatner, Eminem, Sideshow Bob. Brittney Spears even ventured an opinion. Turns out that she only knows about tight ends. So it goes.

You want spectacle? The Super Bowl delivers fighter planes and drill teams and fireworks and clowns and that deaf woman doing dance interpretation through the smoke. Spare no expense.


Somewhere in the distance a military unit is being pummeled by enemy fire...

"Where the hell are those fighter planes?"

"Sir, they're buzzing a football game, sir."

Finally, the ambassador of Zimbabwe tosses the official Super Bowl coin (Taco Bell is heads, Pepsi tails), the kicker boots the pigskin, and slowly we remember that football consists mostly of elphantiacal men untangling from three-yard runs. It's so predictable that we pee during the game so that we DON'T MISS COMMERCIALS.

Half of us don't even care who wins. We just want the blue team to score two safeties before the half, or the period, or whatever it is, so that our square wins the lottery. Before you know it, a field goal kicker is called away from his cigarette to decide the game and we are left to face the cold, harsh reality: Football will never fill our void.

It is a parade for which we wave our flags and shout like the cheerleaders who themselves aren't even watching the game! And as the last millionaire somersaults by, we realize that nothing has been accomplished. We're still fighting the same wars and dealing with pollution and giving airtime to Donald Trump.

Maybe if the losing team were to forfeit its salary or be kicked out of the country or give us all a back rub, then we wouldn't feel so dumb holding our beer can smudged in veggie dip.

It reminds me of Tom Robbins's "Skinny Legs and All," where an exotic dancer was to reveal the meaning of life through her "Dance of the Seven Veils"... on Super Bowl Sunday. Some men tried to run back and forth between the football game and the dance; others watched the dance as best they could, sweating from the conflict. And for me to put it in words, you know, it's like, damn.

I live by a dock where cars are dumped off daily. Hourly. Mercilessly. They pass my street like I-Robots, half-wrapped, en route to Processing. It's starting to feel like an elevator full of sumo wrestlers.

"Let me ooouuut!"

Why do we call it rush hour when no one goes anywhere? Like rush hour takes only one hour. Maybe we should have a slow hour -- 3 a.m. to 4 a.m. except weekends.

Last week I merged into traffic so hairy that people were actually backing off the freeway. And while I myself suffer from gridlock claustrophobia, once you're physically on the freeway ... that's pretty much a done deal. Do not pass Go; do not collect $200.

"Freeway." Good place for a "rush hour." The only difference between a freeway and side streets is that the streets have a fast lane -- for bicyclists. I've sat on the 101 so long that we could have used a Las Vegas yo-yo girl...

"Cigarettes? Soda? Candy?"

For those of you in the market, these conga-line cars are the same ones that advertise "freeway miles only." So it goes.

Problem with gridlock is that people are overheating. Road rage is worst in Arizona, which is -- coincidentally, I'm sure -- the hottest place to live outside the surface of the sun. I've never understood why people move to Arizona. They always say the same thing: "My home was so cheap." Yes, but when you walk outside, YOU'RE IN ARIZONA.

I myself don't carry a car gun, but I can see it. Once you've breathed someone's fumes for an hour, you start to wonder why they're out in the first place. Is their reason good enough? During "rush hour," traffic should be limited to women whose water has broken. And me.


While awaiting legislation, we could phase in car horns that reflect varying degrees of emotion. The first horn will be polite, as in, "Hellooo? Excuse me." The second will be more condescending like a foghorn. "Jaaack-hole." Then, when someone really gets in our grill, we pull the chord and release the flatulent cargo vessel "HOOOOONK."

Or maybe we'll go with car-tones to match our cell phone ringtones. I've always wanted a horn on the back of my car to play this riff from C&C Music Factory: "Chill, baby, baby, baby, chill, baby, wait."

The point is that that something must be done to relieve gridlock tedium before we all go Arizonan. People everywhere are coming home and collapsing by their spouses...

"You wouldn't believe all the bickering and finger-pointing and manipulation."

"Rough day at the office, huh?"

"I was talking about the commute."

Remember "Eight Is Enough"? Maybe that program sent the wrong message. Maybe it should have been called "Eight Is Way Too Friggen Many." If those children had eight children and those children had eight children ... there'd be freeway miles only.

Of course, we could all go back to horses. I can see a day when millions of heavily armed Hummer Ponies line our freeways, bucking and neighing and randomly relieving themselves (and you thought exhaust fumes were bad today).

For my part, I'm staying home until science perfects the telepod and we all materialize instantly at our destinations. Like Brundelflies. In the meantime, you can find me at home whistling along with my latest car-tone: "Sittin' on the dock of the bay watching the caaaars roll away..."

Men aren't cut out for hair removal. A guy can eat nails, drive a Harley, bench 700 pounds, and still snivel at the sight of tweezers (or as I like to call them, Devil's Chopsticks). It is baffling that women endure this pain -- repeatedly -- for any cause, including their own salvation.

In the waxing chamber, everything was fresh and folded and surgically white. I took off my jeans and assumed the position, which was like being at the chiropractor only with leg stirrups and on second thought nothing like the chiropractor at all.

A voice interrupted: "You muss be see lucky man."

Enter Blanca, an earthy Bolivian whom you liked immediately even though she was about to unsex you. Blanca's voice, straight from Evita, soothed like a lullaby, but you sensed that she could just as well soothe you with a half-nelson.

For some reason, it only now occurred to me that Blanca would see me naked. I felt like we should get to know each other, have a drink or something, but she went right to work like a mother changing a diaper. She had seen every size, shape, and color, and mine did not bear mention. So it goes.

Blanca pulled out her weapons of destruction -- liquid wax, cloth strips, a box of Kleenex (for my tears). Evidently, the "Brazilian" part has nothing to do with live samba dancers.

"Brazilian es when everysing goes, even where the sun no shine. The French es when you leave a leetle strip..." She diagrammed.

I asked if we could start with a cooler, more conservative country ... say, Poland.

Blanca laughed as she dipped a rag in hot -- extremely hot -- wax. She molded the goo onto my wattle, then rrrrrriped! I arched back like a slinky and screamed so loud that nothing came out. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked.

"Es okay. Es beautiful. See." Blanca presented a strip of fur.

I looked to her with runny-red eyes the way you do a flight attendant in turbulence: Her smile was all I had.

"See, es almoss over." Rrrrrip!

With every pass, the wax got hotter. I asked Blanca if the heat would max out at some medically safe temperature.

"Hot wax es better," she said. "It grabs see hair from undernease."

Her thoroughness was killing me.

It's a little-known fact that the person who coined the phrase "mind over matter" died of a Brazilian bikini wax. I've endured broken bones, carpentry stabbings, a bee sting that made my lip look like Meg Ryan's -- none of it prepared me.

Finally, mercifully, it ended. Blanca had clear-cut Georgia, Alabama, and parts of Florida. Blanca told me to air out my privates, be naked if possible. Good thing I work at home; that could have been awkward for everyone.

"Sank you for trust me," she said. "Will you do eet again?"

"Perhaps if down the line I encounter some issues with my memory."

***

A week later, I'm still not myself. The draft in my basement never goes away. I feel less manly -- Samson without his pubic hair. I've stopped showering at the gym, and it may be years before I can eat Brazilian nuts.

My hair is returning slowly, in patches, like Earth after nuclear winter. Blanca said that if I wax often enough, the hair will stop growing altogether, but then what would we do for fun? My compulsion to scratch is severe -- greater, in fact, than my need to be accepted by others in the restaurant.

Some say that waxing improves sex, but I'm good enough at sex to tell the difference. Blanca treats musclemen, swimmers, and guys who roam the beach showing off their circumcision, but still, most of her clients are women. They are the only ones tough enough to return.

I have since decided that my private parts will remain private, but I'll always gush for this woman who knows me better than do most of my exes. Even now, as I scratch and pinch, her sweet Evita accent echoes in my mind: "Es almoss over, es almoss over..." Rrrrrip!