We Are All Idiots, But Who Cares?

Yeah, that's a lion. Also, I can't be sure, but I swear that Lion just blinked at me.

The bye week came at both the best and the worst possible time for the Lions. The team is so absurdly beat up that without the week off it wouldn't have been surprising if the Grim Reaper was spotted hanging out on the sideline or if Kevin Smith or someone was mauled by a wild ape during the game. You might say something like that is unlikely, but I would just say that you are naive. So, yeah, it was nice that everyone got to rest and chill with their families or their whores or their monkeys or whatever, but it kind of sucked to have to wait to see them play again, because it just meant that it was another long week spent with the memory of what went down in Green Bay swimming through the brains of fans, players, coaches, team doctors, team pets, and everyone who witnessed that atrocity. After a game like that, you kind of just want the next one to get here as soon as possible so that you can replace the screaming pain of that awful memory with something a little more tolerable.

In my mind right now, the Lions are fucking terrible. In large part, this is thanks to that hideous performance they put on in Green Bay. They are a bad team anyway, but they look even worse to me right now because the last time I saw them they were being whipped up on like . . . okay, there is no joke I could make here that wouldn't be wildly offensive to someone and so I'll just let your own fucked up imagination run wild. Have a blast. Anyway, it's hard to feel good about your team when the images that float through your head are Daunte Culpepper's wretched old body giving out on him without even being hit or Daunte or Ol' Plucky tossing an interception or getting sacked or flailing around on fire while the Green Bay defense so compassionately stomps the shit out of them in order to put the fire out. Such humanitarians.

Violent mood swings are common in the sports world. You win one week and it's candy and blowjobs for everyone. All your fans freak out and rush to be the first to drive the bandwagon. The next week, you lose and it's drain cleaner and kicks in the balls for everyone. All your fans freak out and murder the person driving the bandwagon and then set fire to it. It's terrible and it's ridiculous but it is just the way it is. Especially in football. Football is unique for a couple of reasons. First of all, there is only one game a week, and so win or lose, that feeling sticks a hell of a lot longer than it does in a sport where you get to play again the next day. Second of all, there are hardly any games at all. So every win or every loss feels like a ten game winning streak or losing streak would to a baseball fan. Everything is magnified, everything means so much more, and that's part of what makes football so fun and awesome and insane and great and crazy and nauseating and every other adjective you can think of. And it's what makes its fans such a collection of gibbering baboons, screaming in some kind of feral heat about every little thing.

It happens to the best and to the worst of us. It makes us laugh and it makes us cry, it makes us smile, and it makes us ball up our fists and throw little shit fits like we are children or retards, or retarded children I suppose. It makes dudes like me start writing weird bullshit about monkeys and Napoleon and time traveling wide receivers. The more you pay attention to this shit, the more it drives you mad. When I was a kid, I would just show up in front of the TV and watch the game on Sunday. And then when it was over, I wouldn't really think that much more about it until the time came for the next game. Now, it just never ends. Now, it's who's hurt and who played well and who played like shit and what roster moves are they making and hey there's a dude on some forum saying something I don't agree with, let's bitch about that and a billion other stupid things that keep us all ramped up and stupid with idiot fire in our hearts until the next game comes along and then it all starts up again and OH LORD it never ends, it never ends. This can be really fun when you are the fan of a team that wins all the time. When you are a fan of the Detroit Lions, it is something unique and strange and entirely fucked up that is almost impossible to explain to someone who isn't going through the same thing. There is a lot of hand wringing and wallowing in stupid misery and it starts to feel like some sort of masochistic death march, obscene and terrible, but there is always the sense - at least in my own strange mind - that there is a point to it all, that at some point, the misery will be paid off and we will know great happiness and long lasting joy. It is a fool's hope and I have written about it many times here. In a way, it is like we are all a bunch of degenerate gamblers who just keep losing and losing and instead of cutting our losses and slinking away to cry into the night, we just do the only thing we know how to do and keep slapping down money until we are all sweaty and deranged, stupid and desperate, hoping against hope that this time we will win big and that we will recoup all of those terrible losses. We're constantly trying to play our way out of the hole and most of us are in so deep that we have no other choice.

I love football, and I love the Detroit Lions. Most of you just laughed but fuck it, it is what it is. I also love to write. It's a frightening combination and it leads to a lot of weird bullshit and madness on my part. Perhaps I am idiot for caring about this thing to begin with, and I am almost certainly an idiot for rambling on about it several times a week for other idiots . . . uh, I mean, gentlemen and lady gentlemen and enthusiasts, to read. I don't care though. This is fun to me. That is warped and it makes no damn sense but sports and sports fandom are by themselves nonsensical things that have no rationale. They are the last bastion of the perpetually hopeful and the dangerously stupid. We are all idiot children, screaming dumb gibberish into an ill wind that just blows back in our faces, but what the hell, by tomorrow I will be writing more weird bullshit about the Lions and I will be cheering for them on Sunday because I am a fan and an idiot and there is simply no way I couldn't.

Anyway, these are the things that happen to a man when you give him an extra week to marinate in the sewer of failure. I am covered with shit and I am babbling like a lunatic. Thankfully the Lions have a game this weekend, and thankfully that will give me something concrete to gibber on about. Hopefully, the week off has done the team some good. Hopefully, they all had adamantium grafted onto their bones and have been pumped full of liquid hate and have been fitted with personalized transmitters that emit a frequency that makes opposing players shit their pants or do the stanky legg or preferably both. I mean, the researchers and engineers at Ford have to be doing something, right?

We aren't even halfway through the season and already it has gotten weird. It will only get stranger and we'll probably see a few games like the one against the Packers, terrible things that leave us drowning in a pool of our vomit or screaming obscenities at random inanimate objects, scaring small animals and ourselves along the way. But there will also be games when all of that dumb bullshit falls by the side of the road and we pump our fists and smile and cheer like retards along with complete strangers about a game where a bunch of asshole millionaires try to beat the shit out of other asshole millionaires and old men scream at guys in striped shirts. It will be wonderful. There is a long way to go. Vaya con dios.