Texas
Suggested by: the Internet
Traveled: September 16-24

I’m not sure how or why my heart was racing almost the entire time I read Friday Night Lights. I care very little about football, and even less about Texas in the late 1980’s (or so I thought). But it was truly hard not to feel tight knots forming in my stomach and energy gathering in my neck and shoulders as I rooted for a team of high school boys who, through football, had been elevated to gods.

Frankly, the whole story and context of Friday Night Lights is pretty messed up. Year after year, an entire town thrusts the entire weight of their hopes and dreams onto the shoulders of some 17-year-old kids, building them up for a season that by all accounts will be the peak of their lives – future and past included. Besides the enormous pressure, the mania of Permian football conflicts with basic quality schooling for the team, sets up an enormous mental and emotional reality of invincibility, and even dictates how and why racial integration is accepted. Um, really? What’s so great about football?

But that’s the whole nut of this story, and one that Bissinger cracks open honestly. It’s not about football, and it is. It’s about a history of economic dependence on the whims of a global oil industry. It’s about the highest highs and the lowest devastating lows in a community. It’s about years of an entire part of town being told they have no worth, until athletic ability becomes valuable. It’s about living in the middle of desert. It’s about pride in where you come from. It’s about finding a way out. It’s about legacy and vicarious living. It’s about parents that haven’t quite grown up themselves.

It was strange to feel myself getting caught up in the team, with the power of sensible perspective so easily accessed from my own experience. But despite myself, despite all the reasons not to, I got caught up, and was cheering for some Mojo magic just as loud as anyone by the last chapter. I’m not necessarily proud of it, but I enjoyed the ride nonetheless.