In the 23 years I've had season tickets, today's football game was a truly unique experience. And I don't mean because #5 Ole Miss scored touchdowns on their first five possessions and #9 Georgia only won because they scored on every possession until they knelt on the ball to run out the clock at the end of a 43-35 game. (What happened to defense?!?) No, I mean it was unique because we didn't make it to the stadium to watch it.

We tried. Mom and I left the house on schedule (rare for us) at 11:30 with the intention of making it to Athens two hours before the 3:30 kickoff. After almost 40 minutes of travel, on I-285 just past the exit for I-75, traffic stopped. Despite Google continuing to insist that we'd be out of the traffic jam in just "15 minutes," the next 4 miles took 2 hours. Eventually we learned that the source of the trouble was that somehow a box truck had overturned on a straight road and blocked three of four lanes of traffic not more than a half mile before the next exit, Jonesboro Road.

By the time we were finally past the accident, I calculated that even if everything went perfectly for the rest of the route to Athens, there was no way we could arrive, park, and make out way to our seats in Sanford Stadium until very near the end of the first quarter. So we made the decision to cut our losses and turn the car around and watch the whole game at home on TV instead. Somehow, it took almost 40 minutes to get home.

I was disappointed. Mom was disappointed. We were looking forward to the big game environment, where someone hatched a hairbrained plan to "stripe" the stadium in black, white, and red, requiring me to wear white instead of my typical red to a home game for the first time. That's probably why there was an accident. I didn't wear red and it broke the universe. Sorry, universe. (And if you saw the game on TV, you may have noticed the white end zones, but deciding to put the black stripe on the sunny side of an afternoon game? Are you trying to kill those people? Good on them for refusing the assignment.)

Sure, you can't always get what you want, but if you try, you might get what you need, so we made the best of a bad situation with some soft pretzels, Mexican Coke, and Culver's custard (Mom's idea for cushioning the blow) as we watched the Dawgs scratch out a win from our sofa with poodles and a havanese. That's my kind of unique.

(I took a picture of us in in our "Stripe the Stadium" whites in front of the TV showing Sanford Stadium pregame, but Mom looks better in this one in our back yard, so it's the one you get.)

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Last week, knowing that Mom would be busy tending to her wounded beau, I sent a message to my standing group text with my friends looking for someone to accompany me to tonight's 7PM football game between #2 UGA and #9 Mississippi. They ignored me.

To add insult to injury, my so-called "friends" were unsympathetic the following day when I complained about people who put up and decorate Christmas trees the first week in November. Are they really my friends if they hate live football and think Christmas should be celebrated before Thanksgiving? I say no.

So I did what any sane person would do: I deleted the group text chain from my phone and went to the game by myself.

Sure, it was cold and drizzly, but I still had a great time (and a hand warmer), mostly because the Bulldogs were totally dominant (and because Mom wasn't there to talk me out of bringing a hand warmer to the game). The seniors were celebrated; the veterans were celebrated; the SEC Champion soccer team was celebrated.... After halftime, it was pretty much all celebration inside the 9th largest football stadium in the world. These are good times to be a Bulldogs fan.

There are still two games remaining on the season, but this was the last home game of the year, an unusually early ending to a (mostly lousy) home schedule. Looking back at the four I attended, Kentucky was the most fun, but this was an easy second place. The question is whether I will be back next year.

It is getting very hard to find people to go to the games with me, especially since I have fewer friends than I thought I did. (Christmas tree-hugging bastards!) So spending thousands on a couple of tickets I can't (and don't want to) always use is starting to seem like a bad use of my money.

I'll see how I feel when the bill comes due in February.

In the meantime, do as Miss Manners advises and "finish your turkey before putting up Christmas." Assholes.

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For the second time in two home games, the scoring didn't start until after I went to the concession stand. Ole Miss was up 3 to nothing when I went to buy a Coke and popcorn. By the time I returned to my seat, it was 10-7. I probably would have been back in my seat sooner, but the dude running the concession stand had to use a calculator to add $3.50 to $3.50, and he still gave me the wrong change for a $20. He must have been a Georgia graduate.

It was a strange afternoon. During an absolutely wild second quarter that saw 4 turnovers over the course of 5 consecutive plays, two separate groups of people were thrown out of our section for intoxication. No one ever gets thrown out of our section! That led to this overheard exchange:

Guy 1: "Did you tell on them?"

Guy 2: "Hell, no. I'm just glad they didn't see my shit."

Once Georgia was finally on the way to their eventual 37-10 victory, the crowd collectively exhaled and spent the final two quarters joking about how clueless the radio announcers are about the names of the players and how bad Mike Bobo's offensive play calls are.

Guy 3: "I've been watching Bobo call plays for years, and he sucks at it."

Guy 4: "I remember watching Bobo play, and let me tell you, he sucked at that, too."

I think in the end, a good time was had by all, probably even the people who got kicked out in the first half.

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Another Batman and Football month draws to a close with another Georgia Bulldogs victory. This win was a little odd because it seemed that we were able to draw together and defeat Mississippi 45-17 only because of Knowshon Moreno's dancing to a calypso beat during one of those forever long official time outs. After Knowshon got the stadium crowd worked up, Thomas Brown became Superman, tearing through defenders as he ran downfield at will for the following quarter. Why couldn't we beat an inferior team like Old Miss without a couple of players providing motivation very late in the game? (Dancing with the stars, indeed.) That's UGA for you.

We won't have another home game until November. We've got to play Tennessee and Florida on the road first. I'll decide if I'm going to the Troy State game based on our performance in October.

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