Guitar Shots to the Head: My Diet Secrets

An open week has opened the flood gates on the Nation.  It has been a week of back and forth. Members should drink the orange kool aid… on second thought don’t drink the orange kool aid.  It is a familiar two step perpetuated by the minute.  If a non stop barrage of fire Fulmer/ keep Fulmer is not entertaining enough you can always find someone to talk a little mustang package.  If critiquing or defending the defense is not your thing just find your way to a Crompton or Clawson thread.  You can then discuss the finer points of why Ainge (who is no longer here by the way) would have beaten the life out of UCLA.

Needless to say, the mood is tenuous on the Volnation.  In many ways it is justified.  Dropping a football game like UT did is going to open a lot of eyes and stir several questions, but this is the largest community of Vol fans on the web.  With that many eyes glued to the Tennessee program, you are going to have differences of opinion.

In many ways the arguments that are flying around on the board these days reminds me of an experience I had one summer in college.  No, not one of those “I never thought anything like that could happen to me” experiences.In the summer of 1993 I was out of school and needed a place to crash in Lexington until school started again.  For those of you who don’t know, I went to a small Christian school up in Kentucky.  There was a student who had started a large Christian missionary ministry in India who offered to take me in for the summer.  It was a nice pad, and another buddy of mine was living there already, so despite my better judgment, I decided to take him up on his offer.

That summer I was running about 5 miles a day.  I was preparing skirt chasing in the fall.  I was also dieting, so needless to say I was hungry all the time.  I came in from a run one night famished from my restricted diet.  I went to the counter to put some mac & cheese on the stove.  In the process I made a very innocent comment.

“I’m starving”, I innocently blurted out.

Well it only took a few seconds for my missionary friend to reply in his slow southern drawl, “Brother, you are not starving!”

My first thought was to drop kick his pin head into the refrigerator, but I didn’t.  I was completely peeved that he said that to me, yet in his contextual world I wasn’t even hungry.  He had seen the poverty of India on a first hand basis.  He knew that I wasn’t really starving.  So, I gave him a pass.  In the end he turned out to be a moral reprobate and was kicked out of his own ministry by his board, but that is another story entirely.

My point is this.  Some people on this board have witnessed much more feast and famine from a lifetime of watching the Vols play football.  For them the football season is much more about the journey than the bottom line results.  They enjoy the tailgating, the pageantry, and talking about past seasons. These are the people that try to calm the Nation down after an opening loss.  While some of us are hungry for wins, they tell us winning isn’t everything, or try to convince us that we are not as hungry as we think.

For others, including myself, the bottom line is actually why we suit up and play football games.  If the journey doesn’t take them to a championship (at least twice every ten years) the barking will commence. These are the fans that say we are hungry now.  Trying to tell them that there is actually a moral to the story or that football season is simply a journey only exacerbates there fury.

I’m sorry if this is incoherent rambling, I’m just trying to make some sense of everything that is happening around us.

In the end, it comes down to one point.  Right now this Vol football program seems to be on a diet.  The Georgia game last year is really not that caloric.  Some of us are certainly more “hungry” than others.  A hefty menu of Gator, Dawg and Elephant is the only thing that will satiate that empty feeling.

There is one thing that we can all agree on. When we hear Volnation members say that Fulmer works best with his back against the wall, we all hope they are correct.  You see, we don’t live in India, nor do we compete in the Big East or the ACC.  Right now we exist in the most prosperous conference in the country.  Like it or not, a piece of that pie is very important.