Oh, What a Tangled Web We Favre

I think that despite our differences, all of us—even the chowda head, Crisp loving, puppy haters—can agree that these are troubled times. The market’s down, the global temperature’s up. It’s a lot. It gets you thinking. What’s really important? What should we be focusing our energy on? When you boil life down to its essence, what really and truly matters? I don’t know much about life’s mysteries, but I’ll tell you this, I can say with pretty much total confidence that Brett Favre is not involved in the answer to any of these questions.

It’s true, Brett Favre, and I’m sorry to have to be the one to say it, but nothing you do matters.

I’m starting to get the fact that you’re kind of an idiot and that it’s something you probably can’t help. I also get that it’s not your fault that the press is obsessed with every idiotic thing you do and is apparently not interested in whether or not I want to hear about it. But seriously, Brett Favre, it’s tiresome and annoying. So just stop. Obviously you accidentally signed up to get the same PR rep as Celine Dion and that person made you believe that we care. But—and I don’t know what I have to say to convince you—I, for one, really don’t.

It would be one thing if it was just the unretiring. True, unretiring from professional sports is inherently dumb unless you are Rocky, some other fake person in a movie, or you wait a long time and have a comeback that no one thought was possible so that it seems sort of like a movie. But maybe, just maybe, Brett Favre, I would have been willing to let the unretiring slide with an eye roll had it not been for that big dramatic speech you gave in March when you cried actual tears about how upset you were about the fact that you were RETIRING. Even if we decide to say that unretiring is allowed, I’m pretty sure it’s not anymore once you’ve cried actual tears about it at a press conference. And as if that isn’t enough, you have the nerve to be upset and confused because after retiring, crying about it, and letting people organize a ceremony to retire your jersey, the Packers aren’t planning your comeback tour in Vegas now that you’ve changed your mind? Sorry, Brett Favre, but you’re NOT Celine Dion. People have moved on with their lives. Did you think that they were just going to retire your team from the NFL along with you? Did you not understand what retirement was and how it worked?

OK, Brett Favre. I get it. You’ve been a professional athlete so long that you've forgotten how reality functions. I'm going to give you a refresher. Let’s pretend for a second that this was real life and not professional sports. If you had retired, your coworkers would have bought you a cake, sung “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” and then the very next day someone else would have come and taken your job. If a few months later you realized you blew it and wanted your job back, there would have been shame, groveling and ultimately rejection on the grounds that the position had been filled. That, Brett Favre, is retirement. Despite the enormous gap between how things function in real life and how they function in pro sports, retiring is pretty much the same in both places. No one asked you to do it. We just believed you when you did.

And truth be told, I know that, unlike our good friend Covelli, you bear no responsibility for this, but your last name is annoying. It’s not pronounced the way it’s spelled, which is dumb and confusing and something I was maybe willing to overlook when you were likable. However, now that that you have disrupted my life with your idiocy, I kind of feel like I am within my rights to be angry with you about it. And you know what? I’m willing to go out on a limb here and say that your last name IS partly your responsibility. Sure, when you were young and they told you how to pronounce it, you didn’t think anything of it because you didn’t know how to read yet. But I’m pretty sure that if I had been in your shoes, I would have eventually noticed the enormous elephant in the room that was the disparity between the spelling and pronunciation of my name and addressed the issue with my family. Didn’t it ever seem wrong and embarrassing to you that, instead, you willfully implicated an entire nation in your stupidity by making us call you Brett Farv?

So you know what, Brett Favre? Retire, don’t retire, go to Disneyland, play for the Vikings, pronounce your name the wrong way. I don’t care. Truly. But can you maybe go to Camp David to have some kind of emergency summit about it with someone who isn’t an idiot, figure it out, and until then, STOP TALKING ABOUT IT?