As Oklahoma heads balls-deep into football season, fans everywhere are catching the fever, prepping for the big game by stocking up on their teams’ knockoff merch at Wal-Mart, painstakingly painting their faces beloved team colors and coming up with new and interesting ways to comically denigrate via butcher-paper banners an almost-extinct race that once ruled this great land.
Me? I’m watching Possums for The Lost Ogle.
It’s easy to avoid the actual watching of football games in Oklahoma, but it’s damn near impossible to escape the culture. The mania. The obsession. And, of course, the constant rejection from friends and family who can’t relate to you because you got no idea what the heck is going on because you’re sitting in the corner reading Still Life With Woodpecker as Meat is Murder quietly queues up on the Discman.
If your experience was anything like mine, football night usually culminated in dad calling you an “embarrassment” as you sit in the bathtub debating whether or not to cut yourself again or jerk it to photos of P.J. Harvey in the latest issue of Spin.
And that’s probably what makes Possums not a good, but an honest football flick, a true-to-life Oklahoma story about the love and passion of this game, the kind of stories that are relived nightly in small-town bars by the former kings of the gridiron, taking in as many free glory day drinks as possible just to build up the gumption to head home and crawl in bed with the former high school homecoming queen slash current middle-aged shrew.