Yeah, I'm not watching. And sure it will be hard to miss the sparkling, tweetybirds over his head repartee of Michael Phelps.
But for me there is something deeper going on.
Rio right now seems to embody all the tensions in the world in one single bikini laded place.
Externally there's the Zika-virus-carrying mosquitoes who seem to have overpacked their baby toxic luggage just for this event.
Then there is raw offshore sewage of Guanabara Bay (which, when they won the bid to host the Olympics back in 2009, it promised to clean up the city's pollution problems in time for the games). Thousands of heavily armed military are policing the dangerous city as a visible reminder that despite the pasted on glee, this is not a small world after all.
Dozens of people on Olympic Village Twitter have already posted images with several hashtags exposing the lackluster conditions of their accommodations. Nasty extraterrestrial sludge is pouring out of faucets.
In a recent Reuters survey, 60% of Brazilians believe the games, which cost an estimated $12.2 billion dollars, "will do more harm than good."
Let's not forget, as reported by the New York Times last month, the favelas and their weaponized gangs, the incumbent governor, who is on sick leave, declared a "health system emergency" as hospitals closed units and money ran out for equipment, supplies and salaries. Months later the state started delaying civil servants salaries and pension checks.
Teachers have gone out on strike. The state owes 21 billion to Brazil's federal government and 10 billion to public banks and international lenders. One more image: homeless people are being forced off sidewalks and police are dragging them to filthy shelters to start "cleaning up" the streets. 80% of the returns will go directly to the wealthy of Barra da Tijuca, which is Rio's South Beach. The rest of will be guzzled up by contractors and landowners.
I don't know about you, but having to deal with the psychopathic Trump Games has simply worn me down.
His new reality show, "The Appresident", stars an illiterate, completely out of touch idiot with a pathologically distorted, Game of Thrones-like sense of entitlement and privilege (his cologne is Hubris by "Me") who is distracting and mesmerizing the equally illiterate, completely out of touch idiots of this country (whose fun house mirrored reflections show little more than bad dentistry, with moss piglet brains, who come fully loaded with a visceral hate for smart women and anyone who is not as white as the inside of their copiously consumed Oreos).
That, my friends, is our Olympics.
Billions of dollars are being spent on our games too. And for what? I've long thought that the person who wins the presidency should not be the one who will do anything to be seated on the throne but rather the one who spends his money the most creatively on our own poor and neglected. Let's see what you really got, butches.
Or just give your goddamn SuperPac money to Jimmy "Habitat" Carter and let's see what he would do with it.
No. Instead we get our brand of Rio which comes every four years too.
The truth is there is no reality on NBC this week. The only really games are the "hunger" ones that are really being played out on the streets of Rio.
For this American viewer, I am sick of all the pretending and posing, the fake endorsements, the irresponsible lying that gives free license to the clueless lemmings of this country to say or shoot whatever they want, when they want.
I'm sick of our games and I'm sick of the games there.
Maybe we should take a page out of what the New York Back To Basics Yankees are finally doing. After all these years of lavishing ten year multi-million deals on young stars -- who when they became old stars are as athletic as Tony Bennett -- are now releasing all their veterans into the atmosphere like the deflated balloons that they are and are declaring themselves in-house farm system farmers who are ready to patiently nurture their hot little minor-aged Baby Ruths.
They are now The New York Youngkees. And no, I'm not saying that the young or the meek should inherit the earth, especially when it comes to our leaders.
All I'm saying is that after decades of decadent and bloated overspending to the point where money has become parade confetti, somebody finally woke up and said: it's time for a change. This system does not work. Let's fix it from the ground up.
Now that is a game I would watch anytime, anywhere.
But this week it will be anything but NBC.