There's nothing wrong with having a dream. There is something wrong when the dream takes over.

There is nothing that is a better indicator of our basic insanity than sports. Because our lives are spent basking in the reflected glory of our athletic heroes, vicarious existence prevents us from having out own lives. There is nothing sadder to me to see someone who has a hard time adding two and two unless there is some aspect of sport attached to it. It's a sign that the relative non-importance of sport vis-à-vis living life has been inflated way beyond rationality.

Case in point. I was recently watching a gymnastics competition between Long Beach State and (I think) Georgia. One of the gymnasts was being lauded for performing in pain with at least two damaged vertebrae. I'm sure that in the National Football League this isn't unusual, but those behemoths make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year minimum. When they reach the point that any further participation could cripple them for life, at least they have some kind of a bank account to keep them from having to live under a highway bridge somewhere in the wilderness and eating whatever they can snare. But what is a gymnast ever going to make professionally? What is she going to have to ease the pain of knowing she spent every physical dime she had without realizing an economic one?

I used to distance run when I was 18 just because I enjoyed it, but I did my running on the hard pavements of city streets. My knees today are in sad shape, and running is a thing of the past. My physical dime account ran down to zero, and all I have to show for it is regular pain and swelling. Even walking can be a problem on occasion - all because I was too soon old and too late smart.

And what of the day you discover that your fantasy world doesn't want you anymore? Remember Mia Hamm? It wasn't all that long ago that she and the women's soccer team were winning Olympic medals, and yet she showed up to training camp one year only to be told that she was too old to play anymore. Now she hangs on to her faded glory by any means necessary, including enticing other young women to follow the path that she took, even though most of them will never achieve the success she had. The dream has taken over.

The Olympics started out as a dream, a dream to provide a means for nations to compete with each other without resorting to military expressions of that primal need to pit one's self and community against another. The major problem I have with the Olympics is that it is set up to laud the home nations of the athletes whether said nation did anything to support that athlete while s/he trained or not.

Take the wonderful long distance runners of Kenya, for instance. With their nation ripe for civil war because of American-style electoral shenanigans, is there anything left in their country to provide support for them and their sport? No! Many of them don't even have shoes! It wasn't that long ago that local LA television news covered a man who collects discarded Air Jordans and the like, and cleans them up for redistribution to the impoverished athletes of nations like Kenya. When their athlete with the charity feet actually wins a competition, the entire nation will wave their flag and shout as if they had something to do with it.