8:23 a.m. - 2007-08-01

Smell it in the air? I sure can. It's football baby, specifically, Redskins football. I can smell it on my jerseys that I just pulled from the bottom of the pile and laundered so they wouldn't have any "I'm a piece of clothing who's been languishing at the bottom of the pile" lines on them. I can smell it on the evening news, that I know to turn to at ten to the hour bc that's when the training camp reports come on. I can see it in the eyes of the group 20-something burgundy-and-gold clad guys that we ran into at Old Dominion Brewery in Ashburn who were stopping in for a beer after fan appreciation day. And I can tell that my eyes are registering the same anticipation to them, if they're looking. Loving the same team (even just being passionate about the same sport) is such a deceptively simple construct. It's easy to pass it off as zealous meathead idiocy. But it's not that much of a stretch to see how it really harkens back to a fundamental need for social affiliation. My fellow fans as brethren. Go Skins! A thing that I've been silently remarking on to myself lately is how the way we relate to those whom we're closest to is a constantly metamorphasizing thing. Nothing about the basics of the relationship might have changed, and we may remain essentially the same people. I don't want to get too hackneyed here, but the similarities to a coastline are really quite undeniable. The water doesn't change its fundamental nature, nor does the sand but the shoreline itself is constantly shifting and evolving. And as it changes, it becomes impossible to revert to a previous state. This span of beach will never be the way it was before this last hard winter. Sometimes this happens slowly, over years. Other time it happens over a particularly stormy night. Sometimes we're gratified by the change, and sometimes we mourn where we've come FROM and will never be able to return to - not exactly, at least.