State Chumps
written by: Ken Tomaro
At fourteen years old, I was a barely formed blob of flesh bubbling with anger. A white dwarf star ready to burst into a supernova, and religion was to blame. It happened one Sunday when the priest of Saint Gabriel’s Catholic Church brought up the entire Connersville Spartans basketball team to stand next to the altar for a prayer. They were heading to the state finals that year, and the whole town was excited, except for me.
I was angry at the world and unaware of just how aware I was of those things in the world around me. Things like religion and just how much BS it all was. I felt like I was the only one in our small town to question why or how basketball and Christianity came together. Why this town thought it was God’s responsibility to ensure us a state championship. Why these people thought this was what Christianity was.
I was still too young to truly understand what religion and Christianity meant, but something told me that a collective prayer from the paint wasn’t it. I wanted to shake that priest by his righteous golden cassock and show him the true fear of God, or at least, the true fear of newly-teen angst. I wanted to scream at every member of the basketball team and ask them who they thought they were. It was my understanding that God was supposed to love all people, help all people. I wanted them, these good Christians in their righteous, cornfed town, to explain to me why God chose to help them win a state basketball championship while my mother was two hundred fifty miles away and under six feet of freshly dug soil.
- State Chumps - September 7, 2026
- Monotonous - June 1, 2026
- Gushing Wet Kisses - February 15, 2026
