"Super Bowl At 'The Spa"

I am a little concerned today because sometimes my blog posts contract the vibe of the subject matter I am writing about, and since today's post is about the recent Super Bowl, my blog post might itself be a thunderous clunker.  I am keeping my fingers crossed.  Though it makes it exceedingly difficult to type.

The Fitness Spa where I am spending this week has arranged for those interested to watch the game on a Big Screen, set up in one of the gym facilities specifically for that purpose.  I have to admit that, though I am told this is my 33rd visit to the spa, I have never been inside this gym facility before.

When I arrive, the, maybe, one hundred arranged folding seats are no more than a third occupied.  As the game progressed, more people showed up, but there were never more than thirty-five attendees at the maximum.  (Though many, particularly the females, I noticed, were extremely rabid.)

That kind of turnout exemplifies "Super Bowl at a Fitness Spa."  Can you imagine?  Rather than sitting around watching athletes exert themselves, the majority of spa visitors prefer to exert themselves themselves.  What would it do to our economy if that kind of nonsense caught on nation-wide?  It would likely cause serious damage to the couch business, and virtually decimate the potato business.  

...because there would be a lot fewer "couch potatoes"...he explained, which, when you have to explain 'em...  Sorry.  It's my "Vacation Brain"  Half of it's functioning, the other half's thinking about lying in the hammock when I'm done.  I shall try to apply myself more diligently. You deserve the best for the expenditure of your time.

Okay, so "Super Bowl at a Fitness Spa" means...

No beer.  No nachos.  No pork rinds.  (Which they used to toss out, but now sell as a popular highly non-kosher snack item.)  Instead, what they have prepared for us as "game watching" treats is air-cooked popcorn with no butter, that tastes like what I imagine those excelsior peanuts they fill up transported packages with might taste like, and a healthy-ingrediented pizza, reminiscent of pizza only to people who have never in their lives tasted pizza.

Here's how thoughtful I am.  And spread it around, because it is hardly a popular belief.  Because the viewing crowd is so sparse, imagining the spa's service help as party hosts, I feel badly that they prepared way too much food, so I avail myself of a second slice of pizza.  For their sake.  No.  Really.  You should have seen them.  Their faces looked so sad.

From my perspective, though I am aware it is not everybody's, the parade of lavishly over-produced commercials was sporadically interrupted by an actual football game, which, even if it had been great, and it wasn't, is the way the Super Bowl extravaganza now functions.

Once when we were in Hawaii, we took a helicopter ride over a still-active volcano.  If we looked really closely, we could see these isolated ribbons of molten lava.  But what we were treated to mostly was an extended view of these huge, ponderous prehistoric boulders.  That to me describes the egregious disproportionality of the "Super Bowl Sunday."  If you paid really close attention, you could just about discover a game.  

As for the actual activity on the field - by which I do not mean the half-time show which I walked out on so I cannot comment of the band of "strangers" entertaining the universe - earlier that morning, there was a column in the Sunday New York Times written by Frank Bruni, whose message involved how Peyton Manning represented the older and savvier generation, going to battle against Russell Wilson, Manning's athletically agile but dangerously inexperienced opponent.  Bruni's preferential hope was that wisdom and experience would ultimately emerge triumphant.

Not such luck.  (To the chagrin and eternal agony of the old.) 

Young, strong and speedy obliterated old, experienced, and on the extremely short end of a 43-to-8 trouncing.  The only thing perhaps more disappointing than Super Bowl XLVIII was the quality of the Fitness Spa pizza.  Though, let me immediately add, that was not the fault of the beleaguered spa service staff. 

The end of the game - well the end for me, I left when it was 36-0 - triggered a torturous dilemma.  Uniquely for spa people.  The problem is, it was about six-thirty in the evening, and, truth be told, we had already eaten.  

But they were now serving dinner.

The question is, is it appropriate - and, by the spa value system,  morally and calorically correct - to eat again? 

My decision?

I went to dinner.  Not to eat, mind you, but only to keep my wife (who had skipped the game) company.

Though I did eat a little.

Follow-up from February 4:  There was a birthday cake.  Not carried out by the chef, but by three assistants from the kitchen, who wore hair nets.  The confection itself was a chocolate and banana cake, garnished with - wait for it - kiwi.  On the bottom, there was either an inordinately impenetrable bottom crust, or a round piece cardboard with chocolate on it.  

It did not matter.  

We ate it anyway.