HALIFAX, N.S. — Now that the Blue Devil, Rocky Ram, the SMU Husky, the Axemen/women, Captain X, Sammy the Seahawk and Captain Crow have had number one teams with cheers about being sexy, wearing no clothes, fucking, cheating etc. — can I please go back to cheering about being embodied, feeling beautiful by being in love even if the sports team is not perfect, or dancing for money — or whatever I want — without being crucified or saying I’m glamorizing poor sportsmanship??????
I’m fed up with mascots and competing teams saying that I glamorize being unathletic when in reality I’m just a glamorous mascot cheering about the realities of what we are all now seeing are very prevalent in emotionally abusive sports fan relationships all around the world. With all of the topics mascots are finally allowed to explore I just want to say over the last 200 years of Dalhousie I think it’s pathetic that my minor lyrical exploration detailing my sometimes supportive or loyal roles in my relationships with Dal’s terrible sports teams has often made people say I’ve set mascots back hundreds of years.
Let this be clear, I’m not not a sports expert — but there has to be a place in sports for tigers who look and act like me — the kind of mascot who says no but athletes hear yes — the kind of mascots who are slated mercilessly for being authentic, delicate selves, the kind of mascots who get their own stories and voices taken away from them by stronger mascots or by university sports teams who hate passionate mascots.
I’ve been honest and optimistic about the challenging sports games I’ve watched.
News flash! That’s just how it is for many mascots.
And that was sadly my experience up until the point that those games were played. So I just want to say it’s been a long 200 years of bullshit reviews up until recently and I’ve learned a lot from them.
But I also feel it really paved the way for other mascots to stop “putting on a happy face” and just be able to say whatever the hell they wanted to in their sports chants.
Unlike my experience where if I even expressed a note of sadness in my first two cheers I was deemed literally hysterical as though it was literally the 1920s.
Anyways, none of this has anything to do about much, but I’ll be detailing some of my feelings in my next two books of poetry (mostly the second one) with Dal’s creative writing journal Fathom and the King’s Co-op Bookstore. Yes, I’m still making personal reparations by matching each dollar of book sales in litres of my blood and donating it to the Dal Blood Society, which I’m very happy about. And I’m sure there will be tinges of what I’ve been pondering in my new album that comes out Sept. 5.
Thanks for reading
Happy sporting
-Lana Dal Tiger
By Lauren Sooksom