Sports. That’s what we cover here. Sports. At least that’s they want us to cover. I keep saying, "But life is a sport." They don’t like that. No sir. Not one bit. (Sports.)

A lot of people think the human species has reached some sort of lazy plateau in which no one really wants to see anything accomplished anymore. American college campuses (the last six words have started with either an a or a c)–society’s proud centers of intellectual thought–are rampant these days with alcoholism and drug addiction. Personally, I’ve never done morphine, but I see the appeal. Why try?

The answer lies in sport. Or maybe it just lies, in which case, the answer isn’t much better than no answer at all. The question remains.

Émile Zola, one hundred years ago, said, "Modern society is racked without end by a nervous irritability. We are sick and tired of progress, industry, and science." She or he didn’t say sports, though. She or he? Now that’s sloppy journalism, Nate. You should know the sex of your sources. Sex? Not really. You’ll have to settle for sports. You’d think schizophrenia would force me to edit my paragraphs a little better, but that’s either wishful thinking or just the morphine talking. Morphine. I’d like to try that sometime.

They tell us that on Christmas Day, 1914, in the trenches of the Great War, the Germans and the English met in no-mans-land, played soccer and rejoiced for an afternoon before going back to killing each other, along with the rats. That is to say, the rats killed them too, not them killing rats, though I’m sure that also happened. How am I so sure? Sports, dear boy.

Dear boy? Yes, I said ‘boy,’ dear. Now, if you’re a girl reading this, I apologize, but if you’re reading the sports page then this probably isn’t the first time you’ve been called a boy. And for good reason. Scientific research overwhelmingly indicates that far more men than women are interested in sports. Not me though. I could care less about sports. Does that make me a woman? "Yes it does," said the Overwhelming Scientific Research ’01.

Well she or he is obviously wrong. She or he? (Never mind.) I have a penis (penis!). Really, I do. I use it to play sports. Indirectly, that is. You know that feeling you get when you win a big football game after groping, tackling and rolling around in the mud with other men? Well, what do you suppose that’s a substitution for? Freud called it sublimation, but then again he also hoped it would be used more toward great works of art and such.

Back to truth. It doesn’t exist. For example, I had a friend once who drank a pint of his own urine each morning before continuing his search for this one place called Dry Land. Now, I just described Kevin Costner’s character in the modern-day classic Waterworld. No friend of mine. But he was in Bull Durham, I think, which makes the statement both semi-truthful and about sports, right? Wrong. "I’m not going to sign off on any of this," said Matt Kolsky ’03, my co-editor.

In conclusion, life, you see, is a sport. Drink it up. Stay off the Gatorade, though. I hear it’s copyrighted.