Lost In The Void

The Lions lost. Again. There are no lessons to be learned here, no moral victories, nothing to feel good about, just an endless stream of bullshit which culminated in a sort of cosmic rage that is impossible to let go of. Watching the game, I kinda felt like Sarah Connor during the Armageddon scene in Terminator 2. You know, the one where she's just hanging onto the fence and screaming in agony while her skin gets burned off by an atomic blast and then her skeleton keeps clanging away on that damn fence before the blast finally, mercifully, blows her to dust. That's how that shit felt.

I have used that comparison before and it pains me to have to use it again, but, well, here we are. I don't know why exactly, but something inside of me snapped while watching this game. I just became mad as hell, tired of the epic failure and my senses began to leave me one by one until pretty soon it was just a mess of Smilin' Favre Heads and interceptions and Shaun Hill trying to fight Jared Allen and black pain. At one point, a dog began to gibber at me and I became frightened and wondered what strange circle of hell I had wandered into. It dawned on me that it may have just been a promo for Family Guy but by then I was incapable of determining what was real and what was just a grotesque cartoon laughing at me, mocking my pain and threatening to devour my spirit.

Oh, God! Do not mine sacrifices pleaseth thee? Why dost thou continue to kicketh me in the asseth? Such senseless brutality, cruel and without mercy. Somewhere there is a heaven but here there is only hell and a longing for grim death.

I'm sorry. I just spent the last ten minutes slapping myself and dunking my head in the toilet. It's just hard, you know? It's hard to allow yourself to be tricked by that motherfucker Hope once again. Moose Johnston kept gibbering about how this Lions team looks different and how they're on their way and all I could think about was Joey Harrington and a million failed fourth quarter comeback attempts and then there was just a feral primitivism and I considered setting fire to the television and cooking the bones of Hope over its open flame.

Shaun Hill is not the future. I get that. I understand it. I do. And I get that the future is delayed - yet again - while Matthew Stafford rehabs his shoulder by balling truckloads of coeds and doing shots of 151 and Everclear out of the love canal of some coked up Georgia stripper. (Fine, this is just what I'd be doing. I'm sure Matthew is a good boy.) But, GOD DAMNIT I am sick of the losing, sick of watching the team fumble around like a retarded child who can't figure out how to keep his pants on. It's awful, just awful and we should all be disgusted and horrified, if for no other reason than the whole sordid affair caused me to bitch in all caps. That's just undignified and it makes me hate myself a little bit.

It's terrible because Jahvid Best's toe was eaten by an angry gopher and Calvin Johnson spent the first three and half quarters of the game debating existentialism with the Grim Reaper and because the defense watched Brett Favre dink and dunk his way to (our) oblivion. It was terrible because we had two turnovers taken away by penalties and it was awful because Stefan Logan fumbled a punt and Dominic Raiola was called for holding where there was no holding and it was terrible because somewhere in all that mess, my last tenuous grasp on Hope slipped away and all that was left was The Void and in The Void no one can hear you scream because you are already dead.

There is a sickening familiarity to all of this and I suppose I have no one to blame but myself for daring to dream. And perhaps this is all reactionary and hey, we knew this was going to happen. We knew that we were going to start slowly this season and we knew that without Matthew Stafford that things would not exactly be blowjobs and rainbows, but this is how I feel and I hate it. I am sick of telling myself to wait for a future that never comes and I am sick of eating a machete to the face every Sunday and a spiked baseball bat up the ass. I am sick of smiling afterward and saying "Well, at least this time the spikes were filed down." I'm sick of it. And this week the spikes weren't even filed down. They were sharpened and now I have a bloody ass and a machete sticking out of my face and Hope has become a cartoonish parody of itself.

I will pick myself up and I will believe once again in Hope, both because I really do believe that something different is over the horizon and because I have no other choice. Hope is all we have left. The future is just an idea, a hazy dream, but its promise beats the hell out of the present, where Terminators march over crushed skulls and the flesh sears and I kneel before a burning television set and beg a talking dog to spare me. There will be plenty of time for niceties, plenty of time to make sweet love to Hope, but right now I am just pissed off and sad and maybe tomorrow will be better and maybe I'll smile and count our blessings as Lions fans, but right now that is an idea that just seems like a cruel joke and I am sick of cruel jokes. This game made a beast of me and I have made a shameful spectacle of myself, but more than ever, these are strange and terrible times and I am afraid that these things do indeed happen.