Thank God for bye weeks.

I am plum tuckered out.

After a dandy season start of going 1-3, my San Diego Chargers beat the Denver Broncos 41-3 and the following week beat the Oakland Raiders by a score of 28-14.  They are now tied for first place and their next game is not until October 28th against Houston.

Now there may be some of you who wonder why I would be so exhausted when I never actually played a down.  To you I say: you must not be fans.

The atheists of the Team-Fan religion believe the congregation of fans have their collective brains made out of coleslaw and they are, for the most part, correct.

When a fan chooses a team, the relationship is like no other. 
Most of the time, you do not have a choice. 
You only have one home town and if your town has a professional team, that is who you get. 
I cannot begin to explain the bitterness I felt during the 1970’s because I had not been born in Cincinnati.  The Big Red Machine made my corndog Padres look pathetic. 
It was embarrassing.

When your team wins, you feel superior to all of those who support the losing team. 
Your breath is better, your intelligence surpasses the other team’s combined IQ and your DNA is superlative in its DNA-ness when your team scores more points than the other team. 
It’s really that simple.

However, when your team loses; darkness and woe spreads o’er the land. 
Food tastes bland. 
You struggle to speak in complete sentences. 
You forget to bathe and your socks don’t match. 
You’re really not sure if you will ever recapture the will to live. 
You strain to hear the loons.

Again, you non-fans will ponder why the faithful have such extreme mood swings based on something that is totally out of their own personal control. 
And that’s where you are wrong.

Real fans know if they root hard enough, cheer loud enough and concentrate severe enough, their team will benefit.  We believe the team will somehow absorb our devotion, sometimes from miles away, and will reward us by winning the game.

When my Chargers went 14-2 last season, some might think it was luck, the winds of chance or LaDainian Tomlinson having the season of his life. 
But the real reason is far more fantastic. 
It was because, week after week, when I plopped down to watch the game, I was wearing my lucky shirt.

Note to the San Diego Chargers organization: I accept your gratitude.  You are most welcome.

When this season started, idiot that I am, I wore the same lucky shirt.  It worked for the first game against Chicago but just barely.  I began to have Doubts.

A fan with Doubts is not a happy fan.

Sure enough, the very next week, the Chargers lost even though I was wearing my lucky shirt.  Desperate times call for desperate measures so when Week 3 came around, I wore a different shirt.

It did not work.

Half of my closet is filled with Chargers or Padres shirts and the other half has shirts with dead rock stars on them so I had a lot of choices when it came to finding a new lucky shirt.  But the Week 4 shirt failed as well.

Now what?

I dug into my t-shirt supply and came out with a very old Chargers shirt that is too big for me and is really not all that attractive but I did not feel I had any other choice. 
My team needed me. 
I wore it, rooted within an inch of my life and lo and behold; the Chargers won.

Was it a fluke?  I didn’t know, so this past Sunday when the opponent was the Oakland Raiders, in addition to the lucky shirt, I ate the lucky muffin during the fourth quarter. 
I was taking no chances.

Any true Chargers fan loathes the Raiders with every fiber of their being.  Sometimes the magnitude of their hatred is so massive; they must borrow fibers from other beings just so they can feel more outrage.

It goes back to the beginning of the AFL when the Raiders were owned by Al Davis and the Chargers by Gene Klein.  These two were bitter enemies to the end. 
Chargers fans also believe the Raiders and their spiked-out, pierced-through, bodily- painted Raider Nation have mothers that were hamsters and fathers who reeked of elderberries. 
They use their excessive ear hair for comb-overs, never trim their toenails and have the savoir-faire of onion dip. 

And we still haven’t forgiven them for the infamous Holy Roller play and never will.

If you think I am exaggerating the feud, just know when the Raiders and Chargers played last Sunday, the San Diego police reported that the Raider fans were “relatively well behaved.”  There were only 53 arrests.

Therefore, I will use this bye week to rest, restore and recuperate. 
I will wash the new lucky shirt. 
I will buy more lucky muffins and may even make some lucky popcorn. 
I will cheer so loud, the neighbors will able to hear me through closed windows.

Just know if my Chargers do lose; it won’t be my fault.