There’s magic in the quirky friends we gather with over and over. (photo by Chris Erskine)

They say books are portable magic, yet so is bourbon, so is a violin.

Football is magic too. We tend to see magic in the quiet moments but it also shows up in the roars as well. In Sunday sermons and Super Bowls. I say this even as I tend to shy away from crowds, trends and anything to do with group-think and popular culture.

Tip: Everything we do and say is pop culture.

As you might guess, my gardens are a jungle of mixed intentions, of one plant overtaking another. You can’t tell the mule’s ear from the petunias, an elbow from a leg. Obviously, it’s an orgy.

Listen, I like when things get a little complicated. I tend to lean in to simple and clean. Yet, I’m drawn to messy, ornery and sly. That’s where the juicy stuff lives.

Back to football for a second.

It’s difficult to get a single person to do anything (try getting your kid to walk the dog). So to get 11 ornery men to execute a football play, do all their fakes, their button hooks, their left-shoulder blocks in rhythm, yet all at once, is almost a group prayer.

Any keen observer of life, hearing football explained to them for the very first time, would insist that it could never work. Knowing humans – their quirks, their tendencies toward laziness and dissent –  you’d never expect that a team could pull off the exquisite timing required for a simple running play, the guard pulling, the tailback darting through the 3-hole at just the right moment. Ping!

Because, meanwhile, on the other side of the ball is Satan, the enemy of good intentions. On defense, 11 other ornery men, dudes more drawn to chaos and misfortune, are trying to disrupt the blocks, the rhythm, the gaps, the prayer.

Now, you see why I like football so much?

It’s good vs. evil, east vs. west, order vs. mayhem.

I mean, where else do you get that besides maybe marriage?

Getting anyone to do anything is an art. That’s why politics is such a mess, and democracy too, which is based on individuality and general distrust of authority.

That’s also why our freeways are a rumble. Most of us are satisfied to zoom along sensibly, 10 miles over the limit, checking the rear-view mirror occasionally for cops. The other 5 to 10 percent of the drivers are there to bring the mayhem.

I ponder all this as we send the kids back to school. At Target the other day, Smartacus was buying his back-to-school supplies for college: four dozen Calloway golf balls.

As Smartacus stood in the check-out line, a tired young father with a basketful of Crayolas, Elmer’s Glue, No. 2 pencils, rulers, lunch boxes, erasers, protractors and all the other flotsam of modern education, looked over at him and started to tear up.

What was this father feeling? Lost youth? Misplaced priorities? Good vs. evil?

We need to have our fun, for sure. And Smartacus suddenly reminded this young father of that.

“But when?” the dad must’ve been thinking. “Have I had all my fun?”

Tip: Fun is where you find it.

So, for the next few months, we will celebrate football, and AYSO soccer and the most magnificent holiday: Halloween, a day when America celebrates both eternal youth and death.

To survive spiritually, we will do things in groups. We will take this new autumn and make it fine.

FYI, for the next four months, you’ll find me at select pubs or under the oak trees at the Rose Bowl, at these so-called tailgates we do. They too, are a form of prayer, of belief that individuals, when faced with incredible challenges, will generally step up.

Hence, Mark will bring his margaritas, Bittner the wings, Charlie the chips, Kim her homemade cookies.

We will gather under cloudless autumn skies to raise a glass, cheer an underdog, backslap a friend we haven’t seen since the last tailgate nine months before.

Because that, too, is where the magic is – not just in the longshot wins, but in the quirky friends we keep gathering with over and over again each September.

Tip: We are all underdogs. And we are all a little complicated.

Ping.

The most-magnificent holiday is coming fast. (photo by Chris Erskine)