Go figure. The first game following my declaration of Chicago Bears fandom they start playing like complete nincompoops. Rookie quarterback Matt Leinart and the Cardinals are shredding the much-ballyhooed Bears defense and Chicago quarterback Rex Grossman seems to be as concerned with giving the ball to Arizona defenders as he is his own teammates (he threw four interceptions and fumbled twice — an embarrassing a performance QB I’ve ever seen, and that says a lot coming from a Iowa Hawkeye fan.)

By halftime the Cardinals had a convincing 20-0 lead that appeared to be one the Bears would not be able to overcome. (Hell, they had something like two first downs in the entire first half!)

I remember thinking to myself “This is typical, the minute I start paying attention to them they begin to epically suck.”

After tuning into part of the second half I see only minor improvement (they kicked a field goal and scored a touchdown on a cheap interception return) so I turned the TV off when a girl from home called and went to my room to chat with her.

At one point about a half hour into the conversation I specifically remember her asking me if I wanted to get back to the watching the game, but since I enjoy talking to this particular women more than I enjoy watching pro football, I told her it was a blowout and that I wasn’t missing much.

I am a fool.

What I wound up missing was arguably one of the best Monday Night Football comebacks in the history of the program, and what was positively the most exciting and dubious Bears comeback on Monday Night Football ever.

For me it was the equivalent of the famous “Heidi Game,” a 1968 Monday Night showdown between the Jets and the Raiders in which NBC decided (with the Raiders down by 13 points and only 65 seconds left) to cut from the live broadcast to the made-for-TV version the classic movie “Heidi.” Except instead of watching an orphan girl prance through the mountains of Switzerland while the Raiders mounted a miraculous 14-point comeback, I was on the phone with the lovely girl I was dating before I moved to Chicago.

The second I hung up with her I waltzed out to the living room and turned on the tube to see what the final damage was, only to notice that the Bears had returned a punt for touchdown with two minutes left that sealed their improbable victory.

“HOLY FUCKING SHIT, THEY WON!” I scream at my roommate, who is, oddly enough, in his room talking to a woman from Omaha as well.

“No way!” He says and rushes out and stands and watches the replay of the go-ahead score on TV, telling the girl from Omaha to “hang on a second” as he puts the phone to his side and stands in bewilderment. (He had joined me on the Bears Bandwagon this week).

“Jesus, maybe we should go back to not caring about them, as they seem to do much better when we’re not paying any attention to them,” I said.

“No shit,” he replied.

So I’m faced with three options with this Bears team: I can either go-ahead with my full-fledged and obvious support (which, based on this week’s results, means they will likely blow the rest of the season and fail to make the playoffs), I can denounce the Bears and stay a Raider fan (a situation that has virtually no benefits) or I can secretly admire the team from afar (which means they’ll continue to dominate at their current rate and win the Super Bowl, though I will not be able to show any emotion or support along the way.)

Never before has a closet looked so glorious.

Dominated

I had absolutely no intent on taking my shirt off, getting handcuffed to a fence and whipped by the team of dominas at Exit Chicago’s bondage night Thursday when I went to the punk rock club to research the event for a magazine I write contribute to in town.

The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind.

But after I asked if I could snap some pictures during one of their “sessions” the girls balked, pointing out that the folks who were being bonded might be less-than-enthused about the pictures of them in this position appearing in a publication.

“Well, fuck it then, I’ve got a couple friends here with me, how about you tie me up there for a couple minutes to do your thing, they’ll take some pictures and we won’t have to worry about it?”

The three of them looked at each other.

“Sure,” Miss Maya, the leader, said, “but you’ve got to take off your shirt and keep your hat on while we do it.”

I was wearing a black newsie.

“Really?” I reply, less enthused about the whole ordeal than I was 20 seconds ago.

“Yeah! If you want us to do this shit to you for free you do what we want you to do,” Maya replied. Dominatrix girls don’t take any shit.

“Fuck it,” I say, and peel off my sweater.

“Oooh, look at him, he’s a big bear,” one of them says as she rubs her hands across my omnipresent body hair.

So they handcuff me to a chain link fence in the middle of the bar and start whipping. Shortly thereafter I could feel them writing something on my back.

At first I was too distracted with self-consciousness to feel any pain. The whipping didn’t hurt so much, but the piercing looks of complete strangers was initually uncomfortable. They were just looking at me as though they were looking at a TV, like this was nothing out of the ordinary (which, for Thursday nights, it wasn’t) so after about 30 seconds I stopped caring. Nobody was laughing. Nobody was pointing. They were just casually observing me being dominated by three busty women in leather corsets.

Then a thirtysomething blonde woman rushed up to me out of nowhere and began asking me all kinds of personal questions. I’m not the most astute on picking up when I’m being picked up on, but I’ll assume this woman was flirting with me — an odd sensation when done while you’re shirtlessly tied to a fence in the middle of a bar.

She was gushing, asking me what I did for a living, where I was from, if I did this kind of thing frequently.

She was quite attractive and I remember briefly thinking to myself “Shit, if it means I’ll get aggressively hit-on by attractive women perhaps I should do this more often.”

Just as I was about to ask if she wanted to have a drink with me once I put my shirt back on and got down from this fence a man came up from behind, grabbed her arm and insisted she come back downstairs with he and his buddies.

“No!” She replied. “Look at him, he’s so cute! He’s adorable. And he’s from Iowa!” She hollered (I’d told her I was from Iowa — turns out she actually lives in Des Moines and was in town for the weekend.)

“Hey, let me introduce you to my husband,” she says to me as the man continues to tug at her.

Just then I feel a sharp burning sensation on my left arm and notice one of the girls has begun to pour hot candle wax on my shoulders and arms, something that’s never been done to me before.

“Mother fuck!” I scream in agony.

“Whatthefuckareyoudoingthatshithurts!” I reply, though now laughing at the absurdity of it all.

I hear the girls laugh devilishly behind me. I look forward again and notice the thirtysomething blonde has disappeared.

So they continue to pour wax on my back, and it burns but I get used to it after about drop No. 4.

Then they started tickling me, which is something I absolutely cannot handle. I began to giggle and prance like a little boy, attempting to bend my side so they couldn’t reach my tender armpits. Tickling is one of the most extreme forms of torture I’ve ever known. If I were ever put in a situation where my only two choices were to be shot in the head or tickled for an hour straight, I’d take the bullet every time. I simply cannot handle it.

I again hear the girls giggling, as they know they’ve found my weak spot.

In order to take my mind off the tickling sensation I chomped on my right bicep (the teeth marks lasted for two days). Sensing my extreme discomfort the girls kept at it more aggressively until they realized I couldn’t take it anymore. I looked over to my right and made direct, almost flirtatious eye contact with Miss Ammunition (she gave me her card afterwards) and she smiled. It was a smile that conveyed a “You think you’re some kind of Tough Guy journalist, but once we get you tied up, we can break anybody down” sentiment. It was the only part of the entire episode I found to be erotic in the least bit.

I still don’t understand how people get off sexually with this sort of behavior, but it was free and they didn’t leave any scars (though the next morning my bed was laced with candle wax crumbs and I had the words “Property of Miss Maya Mistress” written in black ink across my back.

I'm a pretty smart guy, but I don't think I'll ever undersand why women are attracted to certain men

She was in outbound sales during the day, and once I told her I was from Omaha as well, she wanted nothing to do with me.

The inch gap of skin between her tight blue jeans and skin-hugging top teased the boys into giving her an extra buck per round. It allowed their imaginations to get away with themselves and dream that perhaps, if they played their cards right, acted cool enough and threw cash at her, they’d be allowed to view the territory that lie beneath it at a later date. Despite her semi-bored demeanor she knew what she was doing the whole time, and I appreciated her cunning.

Twenty minutes ago I overheard her tell the old man two seats down from me that she was from Omaha, Nebraska and I figured if there was ever a doorstep, this was as good as any.

“So, are you from here?” I ask as she picks up the ashtray and wipes the bar in front me.

“No, I’m from Nebraska,” she says.

“Where at in Nebraska?” I ask coyly, as I’m about 95 percent sure I know the answer to the question.

“Omaha,” she says.

“Ha, so am I!”

“Really? Where did you go to high school?” She asks with restrained excitement.

I put my finger over my lips and smile.

“Shhh, I’m actually from Council Bluffs,” I whisper, “don’t tell anybody.”

Note: For some reason I always say this to people I meet in Chicago who are from Omaha when they ask me that question, and I don’t really know why. But I suppose I do know why: Cause Omaha people are usually condescending to Council Bluffs people, and I say that to beat them to the punch and let them know that I know C.B’s a shithole and they don’t need to crack a joke about it. But honestly I don’t give a damn what any of them think about me being born and raised in Council Bluffs, as I’m actually quite proud of where I came from and the people I grew up with.

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anybody,” she whispers back, and I get the vibe she’s pretty disinterested in the whole conversation as she looks over my shoulder when she says this.

We ask each other the standard questions: What high school did you go to? Oh, do you know so-and-so? Where did you work back there? When did you move here? What do you do here? — Until we realize, despite the fact we grew up less than 10 miles from each other and are only separated by one year we don’t have a fucking thing in common.

At which point she moves on to viciously flirt the group of guys sitting to the right of me (whom are all in backwards ball caps, sports fleece and arguing that the people who really got fucked over in the Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle crashing his private plane into a Manhattan high-rise and dying tragedy are the people that own units above from where the plane collided, “cause the smoke ruined all their shit,” as one stated.)