For the first time ever (I think) the University of Tennessee is hosting a football game on Sunday instead of Saturday this weekend. It’s the season starter.

There’s a parking lot on Henley Street that was filled with orange draped RVs on Friday, three days before the game. I wondered what was going on inside them. How far had they driven on Friday? What is it that makes people paint their RVs orange and white and spend the entire weekend in a parking lot awaiting the big showdown on Sunday night?

That level of devotion is beyond mere fandom. It’s at a high-fevered and adrenaline soaked level of fandom that can only be called an alternative lifestyle. It’s at the level where furniture and lampshade purchases may be made with the Vols in mind. Indeed, entire rooms in one’s house may be tributes to the lifestyle. Dens bedecked in orange banners and white bean bag chairs are surely lurking inside otherwise normally decorated homes throughout East Tennessee.

For me, the Tennessee Volunteers’ season starter means that traffic will be too bad Sunday evening to bother leaving the house. Perhaps it’ll mean that there will be some quiet anthropologically based thinking about the absurdity of the phenomenon, and of course the yearly disgust at the over use of orange.

It’s fall again, and as a Knoxvillian, the Big Orange crowds showing up on a weekly basis is akin to the leaves falling. It’s in my mind like an impersonal force of nature, inevitable as the spring rains and the summer heat. It’s a vain pursuit to complain. I would like to see a local weatherman predict how severe this week’s crowd will be, but only for the inherent humor that would come from it. The following home games will be held on Saturdays. I look forward to stepping out on my front lawn and looking out toward the Stadium with its giant lights blocking out the night stars and thinking “Ah, autumn at last.”