I know that I’ve written about this before, but on Monday nights, I love going to Dempsey’s, an Irish pub on Second Ave in the East Village. When I describe the bar as “unremarkable,” it is not an insult; I don’t need all sorts of bells and whistles at my local bar, just a good and reasonably-priced selection of beers, a bartender who knows when to chat and when to stay away (and when to buy me back a beer), and a TV or two because, hey, I like sports. But that’s really it, aside from I also like that on Mondays, it’s not very crowded, so there’s no one to bother you or anyone nearby talking like a goddamn jerkoff. After all, man is no closer to God than when he is in a pub alone with his thoughts and his beer. Monday night at Dempsey’s is Uncle Jason’s private time.

But because I drink there alone, it begs the question: why the hell do I do with myself the whole time? I get there as soon as I can after work (earliest is usually 6:30pm), and sometimes I stay until 8:30pm. Sometimes I stay until midnight. Most of the time, it’s something in between. I’m not the type to read a paper or a book in a bar (and I’ll be damned if I do any “writing” in one – in that case, I might as well wear a t-shirt that says, “Hi, I’m An Asshole”), and there’s only so much staring at the bottles of liquor that one can do while on that road to inebriation.

And so this is why I appreciate that there are TVs with sports on. And this is also why Mondays work well, because of Monday Night Football, which is on for roughly a 1/3 of the year. Have a beer, watch the pre-game show, have a beer, game starts, have a lot more beers. It’s perfect, and even when you’re feeling most introspective, at least you have an option to entertain yourself with something besides thoughts like, “I know that it has a lot of positives, but I just feel like once you go down that craigslist ‘Casual Encounters -> M4M’ road, there’s no turning back.”

(This is to say nothing of the fact that drinking on a Monday is highly, highly underrated. A big reason why I go on Monday as opposed to another week night is that this is my time to steel myself against the upcoming week, sort of like, “Alright, I know what the week looks like, I know what I gotta do, and I know it’s gonna suck – but first, let me get drunk alone. Then, we tackle the work week.”)

But then January comes around, and there’s no more Monday Night Football. And baseball doesn’t start until April. So for me, there’s a sort of sports void (as I’m not big into pro or college basketball or hockey). And so just this year, having moved back to NYC in December, when January came around, I found myself watching something new on those solo Monday night booze sessions at Dempsey’s: English Premier League soccer.

I have a long and complicated history with the sport of soccer. I did not play it growing up in the hard-scrabble streets of South Philly, save for a brief moment in 1994 when World Cup fever took over and my friends and I kicked around a volleyball and used the two poles of the basketball hoop as a goal for a few weeks before moving back to our more traditional sports (basketball, football, wiffleball, fighting, etc). Though I studied abroad in London for a few months in 2000, I never got into soccer, as I was too busy trying to figure out how to make the $1800 I had saved up last five months while still not only drinking, traveling and having a good time, but also eating, showering, and breathing. In the only fiction writing course I ever took in college, my first story was about how soccer was invented in England by cloistered armless lesbians during the Hundred Years War (I am sure, with my current juice, this will be optioned for a movie within the next year). So I’ve always been familiar with soccer – it’s been on my radar, at least – but at the same time, meh.

Making my relationship with soccer all the more complicated is that I have a handful of very good friends who love soccer (and have loved it for a few years now). Now, you would think that this is a plus for soccer in my eyes, that the very same people with whom I’ve discussed the Eagles’ inability to make the leap and the Phillies rise to powerhouse-ness over the past few years are big EPL fans. But this is not so. This is because these friends who are into EPL (the EPL?) are the same type of people who will go off for hours about their travels through Europe with only the slightest provocation, who will tell you in great detail about the best “unknown” restaurant in Copenhagen or a great hole in the wall pub in Rotterdam or their favorite lunch spot in Brighton. In short, they are Europhile douchebags, and I viewed their love of British football as just another part of their Europhiles d-baggyness. So again, meh.

(And truly, these guys are some of my best friends, so they know that I say this in jest.)

(And there’s this: U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!)

But yet, week after week as I sat there alone at Dempsey’s on those dark, cold winter Monday nights, watching replays of EPL matches from earlier in the day or from that weekend (it’s an Irish pub, after all), something strange happened: I started getting into it. I didn’t know anything about how soccer worked (aside from get the ball into the net), nor did I know what teams were playing, but because I sat there watching a ball being kicked around for two 45 minutes halves, when a goal happened, I’d find myself cheering (and again, I didn’t know the teams; for all I knew, it could have been the local Neo-Nazi team trouncing the team playing on behalf of crippled orphans everywhere, yet if the former scored, I was yelping to myself in the bar). There was just something about the payoff, about watching the ball seemingly mindlessly being kicked around for 30 or 40 minutes, that when a goal was finally scored, I found it immensely rewarding. Not exactly the all-consuming instant rush of falling in love, but enjoyable nonetheless. I knew that the season was already well underway by that point, so while I continued to catch those games at Dempsey’s week after week, learning a bit more each time, I decided that come next season (August), I would give soccer a full-assed effort in order to see if it was for me (Europhile d-bag accusations be damned!).

And of course, with the World Cup approaching, the timing couldn’t have been better. Soon, America would be awash in soccer love, and it would be a perfect primer for someone getting to know the game. But at the same time, I wanted to approach cautiously. I am from Philly, where sports fandom is not a hobby, but rather a full-time occupation, on par with family and God (and to a much lesser extent, actual full-time occupation). As such, poseurs are not tolerated. So I would root for the USA, of course, but I would do so modesty, freely admitting that I didn’t know much about the team or even the sport, but, again: U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

World Cup soccer taught me two things:

1) Geez, these games are short. The average baseball game is 3.5 hours. The last two minutes of the half in a football game can take 15-20 minutes in real-time. A 90 minute soccer match, including half time, is less than two hours, and there are no commercial during action. Sure, I guess I knew this before from Dempsey’s, but I was drunk and alone and, you know, you sort of lose track of time when you’re drunk and alone (and it’s freezing outside). So actually realizing the brevity of the games for the first time was a plus.

2) Man, people are really, really into this. As corny as it sounds, it’s kinda cool to think about how in that semifinal match, likely 95% of the population of Uruguay – a country I couldn’t pick out on a map – was watching that game and cheering on their team; I had a picture in my mind of a dozen farmers sitting on burros in the one run-down shack with a television within 30 miles while corrupt politicians gathered in the lavish presidential palace (this is how I picture most of Latin America, because, well, I’ve never been there and I’m racist) all rooting for their guys. Again, corny (and racist), but kinda cool.

(Uruguay’s in Latin America, right?)

And so finally, fast forward to last week, the start of the English Premier League season. Over the summer, I had done some research and spoken to friends as part of the team-choosing process, each step along the way repeating that I reserved the right to transfer allegiances once I learned more about the sport. You might ask how this doesn’t fly into the face of everything that I just said about “Oh, I’m from Philly and we’re awesome and we love sports and we’ll fuck you up and a lot of us are fat but still awesome.” That is a good question. I can only answer that I want to do this correctly, but I also want to have a vested interest from the start, a vested interest that I intend to cultivate during the course of the season. However, should I fall organically in love with a different team, then, well, so be it. As part of the process, I also consulted the Sports Guy’s excellent article on how he chose his EPL team. Among his six criteria, there were three that especially struck me: don’t jump on a bandwagon, pick a city that you might actually vacation to, pick a team that’s successful enough to not be relegated/get maximum exposure on TV here in the US.

So my pick: Arsenal.

Arsenal meets all of the criteria above. They have a cool nickname (“the Gunners”). They are the favorite team of two of my Europhile d-bag friends (so I can more easily discuss them). They are not Manchester United. Their stadium is in North London, and I lived in North London, just over a mile away from their stadium. Therefore, based on what I know right now, it makes sense that Arsenal is my adopted EPL team. Time for bloody soccer, baby.

I have to admit, week one was tough. Trying to dive head first into a sport about which you know little about is difficult, even though I had seen maybe a dozen games before. I watched the game at home, having a beer (at 10am!), and was certainly into that. But following the action, trying to figure out the players’ names (god, I sound like a woman) and generally getting a feel for the action was more difficult than I thought. It didn’t help that the game was a rather bland 1-1 tie with Liverpool. We were getting into “meh” territory.

However, undeterred, I approached this week with vigor. All told, I’ll have watched four matches: Arsenal – Blackpool, Wigan Athletic – Chelsea, Fulham – Man United, and Man City – Liverpool. The first two were exciting (for me), as Arsenal and Chelsea both won by scores of 6-0, and The Man City – Liverpool match I’ll watch tonight, either on DVR or at Dempsey’s. But it was the Fulham – Man U match that sealed the deal, a stunning 2-2 draw that in the last ten minutes of action featured a Fulham defender accidentally scoring on his own goal, then a Man U penalty kicked that was blocked, then that same Fulham defender scoring the equalizer on a header. Maybe it was the hangover that I was washing away with multiple pints of Guinness on that Sunday morning, but I was enthralled, hooked.

And with that, I have to say, I think I’m into this whole EPL thing. A love affair that began slowly on those lonely winter nights in Dempsey’s, started and stuttered with national pride over the summer, and now is being cultivated over early morning beers in my apartment (though I hope to go out for some games next weekend), and here we are, in the early stages of what could potentially be a sensational, long-term relationship. A veteran of such wars, I know not to get my hopes (too) high. But early indications are good.

(Now if I could just figure out this whole transfer market stuff…)