We went to a best good friend’s house to watch the Super Bowl, but we were the first ones there. The game was set to go, the first of the day’s new, supposedly impressive commercials ready to rock, but it wasn’t quite time yet, regardless of what the folks in Miami had to say.  People were running a little late.  It happens.

A bunch of couples, that’s what we would be, ready to have a good time watching the Super Bowl on a nice TV within a solid set-up in a comfortable Chicago apartment. Forget the bar scene. We were ready to bathe in the fine commercial glow of the one event watched by a solid one-third of the US population, and with everything homemade or bought in bulk: Buffalo Chicken, Crab, and Taco dips; a kettle full of chili; and lots and lots of beer. We were ready to blow this party out, in a way that no six-person party had ever been blown out before.

We watched the coin flip on the gigantic HD television, this TV huge, amazing, Super Bowl XLIV about to get underway. All we needed to complete this party…

…was everyone else invited.

And so we threw the hammer down on the Digital Video Recorder:

PAUSE.

We started having beers, having conversations, a graphic ready to unfold just as soon as we hit PLAY. We set up a squares pool befitting a smallish party, listened to music, bided our time, that frozen graphic taunting us, the Super Bowl happening on the other side of it, we having decided to step out of reality, to freeze time and wait on friends.

Dips were out, and beers ice cold.

Phone calls happened, the people on their way literally on their way, driving around looking for parking, much the way I did half an hour before, waiting on a spot to open up, the rest of us watching the DVR timer stretch within an inch of its life, on the verge of giving up the ghost, cycling forward, and revealing to our assemblage, through no faults of its own, everything we’d missed so far.

Once everyone arrived, once, finally, we could start the game that started twenty-five minutes prior, we were able to skip ahead, through pre-kickoff baloney, through crummy commercials that could easily be disregarded, through anything unworthy of our attention as we soldiered through four hours’ worth of footage and coverage, so much of which, we found, the American public honestly and quite easily can do without. When we discovered the friend whose house we were at had to work until well into the second half, we started recording the very game we were watching, three hours worth of supposedly live television to which we were not yet caught up and would not be for the entirety of the game. The opportunities available to the average American nowadays will blow your mind to smithereens.

But early on, with full knowledge of everything unfolding and our paused television waiting to reveal its treasures, a graphic frozen on a huge, startlingly clear screen and the DVR timer ticking away, on the other end of that frozen graphic the god damn Super Bowl, our television sitting there in limbo, waiting for its time to come…

It was as tolerable as fucking miserable gets.