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We all know these things to be true: Every tailgate has its staples, like a grill and Tennessee Honey whiskey, no matter who’s there, where you’re tailgating, or how you’re handling things in an alternate dimension where humans have to manually open and shut their mouth with their hands.
1. A tailgate is merely a party until someone breaks out the potato salad. Then it doesn’t make a difference if it’s night or day, a college contest or NFL game, or a vibrating multiverse in which humans evolved to have elephant trunks for fingers and elephants have five human fingers in place of their trunks.
2. Fall tailgating means one thing: You need to perfect that chili recipe! Experiment with new spices this season, and do it whether or not you live in an alternate reality where Al Gore won the election and commissioned the band Staind to rewrite the National Anthem.
3. Everybody knows that no tailgating experience is complete without an awesome playlist. It doesn’t matter if you live in a world where black is white, up is down, or you walked by yourself on the street, thereby opening a paradox that consumed humankind and turned them all mad. Are you ready for some football?!
4. Look the part; there’s no scenario in which team colors can be left out of a tailgate. No, not even in a parallel reality in which Betsy Ross stitched together an amalgam of raw meats into the first American flag, causing the smell of raw meat to infinitely linger over the nation.
5. You’ll definitely want to bring along a variety of foods to grill, whether it’s chicken, beef, or some combination of leaves you’ve found on the island you were all forcibly relocated to after the fall of man in 2839.
6. Everybody knows no tailgate is complete without a pigskin to toss around. Even in a case where the world, knocked on an unfamiliar axis, turns into a surrealist painting, and the pigskin is a 17-sided magenta sun that takes the thrower’s hand and arm with it when it’s tossed through the melting air.
7. No tailgate can exist without the presence of a couple good folding chairs, even if we live in a universe where human knees bend the opposite way, rendering traditional chairs obsolete.
8. Everyone appreciates a smorgasbord of different game day foods at a tailgate. Don’t forget the chips and salsa, since it’s your favorite snack, and in this alternate reality where the entire tailgating crew is an ever-expanding throng of constantly replicating clones of you, you’re going to need a whole lot of it!
