Oh, now, Martin. Don't be inconceivable.

  

   I've warned you,

   they do not nap

   at half-time!

And there they were, our extra men, struggling with their acceptance of 
a gridiron buffet, with no apparent explanation for those satchels of gosling down they clutched as weather beaters. Before them spread such countless metres of gurgling chafing dishes, with sludgy dips and humid chips, for hours on absolute end, 
and no recourse but social remorse for memory lapse to send: apologies.

I'm not one who thinks, the excuses of our lives are furnished us to be upbraided for their use. On the con-trary. On the annual recurrence of an innocent's groggiest endurance of his lowest obsession, we improvise.

Who'd not sooner down a glowing little cupcake from the cuisine of Marie Curie, than these stagnant slurries of bicarbonate worry, all whippingly Pasteured, that National Public Radio in America ran a solicitation for this past week: comestible slops to go with hops, from our own fantasies?

Recognizing, that in the host hemi-sphere there are entire continents where fleeing out of doors in Feb-ruary comes second to a protracted and even consoling nap in that cat-egory of escapism, we don't leave home without spontaneous cushions. If, that is, we go at all.

The thing about gridirony as we have come to know it, is that the very men-tality which it consumes has consumed, in turn, an instrumentality to keep it at arm's length, more truly composing than ex-posing its denial of so-cial potentialities in all their absysmal ab-sence. That is, could anyone conceive of mounting a decent buffet on such slender social pickings, as a roomful of self-contented ironists? 

  Cross one's heart, and 

  dream of lunch, there's 

  paradox to crunch along 

  the way, compulsory fes-

  tivity, and no one free 

  to play.