And boy oh boy, the cry of a loon when you’re out at night with the dogs and you hear the bastard calling across the dark slough – a sound like something lost and lonesome and stark gone crazy in a stark old world where it always knew it didn’t belong – that sound can give you the willies so bad you don’t know if you care to go outside in that stark old world ever again.

Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

The loons have been calling to me from the slough of despair for the past couple of months, and I’ve been hiding out from the stark, crazy old world ever since.

The reason the loons were calling me, of course, was the very mediocre season of the University of Southern California Trojan football team in their initial year in the Big Ten conference. I’ve been a big USC football fan ever since they hired Pete Carroll as their coach and became a college football powerhouse. Shamelessly jumping on the Trojan bandwagon offered an effective antidote to having been dragged behind the Mariners sinking ship for so long.

I watch USC football games on TV with my friend Jeff “Mag” Pritchard. We are extremely powerful, influential, universally feared and respected USC alumni, so you might have thought that between the two of us we’d be able to score a couple of complimentary tickets to an actual game. If you thought that, as we did, you’d be wrong, as we were.

The chief drawback to watching USC games on TV at my house is the lack of adequate open floorspace for us to perform our elaborate and impeccably choreographed post-touchdown victory celebration dances. Also, the dog has been known to dip into our potato chips and nachos while we are in the midst of our touchdown celebration.

I realize that, in the larger scheme of things, college football ranks pretty far down on the list of Really Important Stuff, well behind such truly serious and weighty matters as world peace, hunger, the Kardashians and college basketball. But it still hurts when your team continues to lose important games that it has a shot at winning.

Games of that type, by the way, almost never occur any more for our Seattle Mariners, which would seem to make it pretty stress-free to be a Mariner fan if only the M’s games were entertaining and fun to watch, which they aren’t, at least not lately, and by lately I mean not since the turn of the century.

As it is with your college football team, so it is with your worldview, and like the Trojans, I have been feeling a little down these past weeks over the outcome of the recent election. Actually, the election results have been eating away at my stomach like a pack of over-achieving intestinal worms. I’ve been trying to alleviate the demoralizing effects of the worms with various lotions, creams, ointments, salves and carbonated and distilled beverages, with only moderate success.

In any event, it’s now time for me to buck up, calm down, move on, and drink from the cool and healing waters of the new college basketball season and the continuing effort by my boys at Gonzaga to finally win the national championship they so richly deserve and have been ever-so-close to recently. After all, all good things must end, and somebody has to lose every game. And I’m fine with that, so long as it’s not the Trojans. Or the Zags.

At least with NCAA men’s basketball championship tournament looming on the distant horizon I’ll have something to look forward to in March, and after that it’s a short hop to the start of Major League Baseball and an even shorter hop to April where we’ll all have a full month before the Mariners are mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Tom Tyner of Bainbridge Island writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper.