Post-Avatar Depression? Try Post-NFL Depression!

That's right, depression. According to several articles on the subject (feel free to google "Avatar depression" and read away), some folks, having seen the faux flora and fauna of Pandora, now find plain old Earth boring and gray, or, in the words of one guy that really needs help, "dying."

To which I respond: Welcome to the die-hard NFL fanatic's world, you ThunderSmurf wannabe's. We deal with this every stinkin' year. It's called post-Super Bowl depression, and it looks like six whole months of no genuine football.

How do we survive? We do it like kids crossing a creek, hopping from one perilous stone to another, until we have reached the muddy banks of training camp. Once we have reached training camp, we are free to ignore everything else that's going on until the next February. The stones for an NFL fan look like this: the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament (three glorious weeks of madly checking and re-checking illegal office pools), the start of baseball season (hey, it ain't soccer), the Master's, the NBA Finals (really, no one pays attention until then, not since Michael Jordan stopped mattering), and the baseball Home Run Contest, er, All-Star Game.

Then, there's a pause. An entire week in which nothing at all worth mentioning is happening in sports.

It is much like the pause that God took just before speaking the world into being.

Once we are past the Midsummer Classic, we can start breathing freely again because training camp (!!) is within sight! We pore over the sports pages to see which teams have their draft picks in camp, which veterans are holding out, which players got irrevocably broken before the start of the season, fantasy drafting...football, glorious football is finally back and man didn't that six months just FLY by!

That's how we do it, Avatar-boy...just like the guy that quits smoking and suddenly gains 30 pounds, we REPLACE football with other stuff until we relapse and get our football fix again the following fall.

Of course, you're welcome to join us NFL fans as we hop from stone to stone until the lag between "Avatar" finally leaving your cineplex and entering your supermarket is over. But I have to warn you: it's not pretty.

In the NBA, Greg Oden got in trouble over some nude photos.

Of himself.

I can only hope that they were for science. I can't (won't, won't!) imagine any other purpose.

In hockey, Alexander Ovechkin continues to destroy all things Sidney Crosby, and no one outside of Canada cares.

In baseball, the Cubs signed Xavier Nady. The same Xavier Nady who played all of 9 games last season before trying to retrieve a ball from a wood chipper and having his arm sewn back on or some such catastrophe...okay, yes, I'm exaggerating, but really, who signs a guy that has had Tommy John surgery twice? gaaaaaah...

The World Cup is being held in South Africa, and no one in the U.S. will care. Again.

In golf, Tiger Woods is trying to learn how to live without screwing everything in a skirt, while the PGA is trying to learn how to live without Tiger Woods.

Now that I think of it, the world is a pretty dreary place without the glorified violence of the NFL.

I think I'll go watch "Avatar."

For six months.