The Desolation

"This isn't The Fear. It's the Desolation"

Those words were sent to me via e-mail by Scott aka Good Friend of the Blog and Frequent Commenter UpHere, yesterday during the game. They came after he asked me to get Raven Mack to find out the symptoms of an aneurysm. This was the first game of the year. A half hour before, optimism reigned supreme and The Hope was making sweet love to us and promising to buy us a giant diamond ring and to make us the happiest girl in the entire world.

And then Matthew Stafford was driven into the turf by Julius Peppers. It looked bad, and we all held our breath and then he stood up, his throwing arm was hanging limp by his side and, well . . . This isn't The Fear. It's the Desolation.

Why? It's such a simple question. It's one word, but it's laced with so much pathos, loaded with so much meaning and terrible emotion and spiked by decades of brutal and despicable history, that it has become a question of dread and such unbearable weight that the very act of asking it is a testament to failure and to the million little pieces of our shattered hearts and its mournful squeak is the dying echo of Hope.

Why? I don't know. Who does? I speak often of the Failure Demons and Fate and all manner of mystical forces that feel like they are perpetually lined up against us, but now, more than ever, doesn't that all feel true? Doesn't it feel like there has to be something brutal and mean and otherworldly that has devoted itself, for whatever reason, to just toying with Lions fans?

The last several years have been horrible, just one long apocalyptic struggle for survival. Being a fan shouldn't be this hard. It shouldn't require epic tests of faith and horrific manglings and desperate pleas to the heavens for mercy. I mean, at some point, you have to find happiness, don't you? You have to get lucky, to stumble upon something, anything, that can make you smile and say "Wow, this is alright." But we never get lucky, never stumble upon anything other than a banana peel laced with acid and malicious intent.

Once Matthew Stafford was drafted and Jim Schwartz was hired and Martin Mayhew announced to the world that he was competent, it felt like Lions fans all took one, huge deep breath, exhaled and said "Here we go." After so much pain, after so much brutal agony, after so many years of never getting what we want, we steeled ourselves for one last dive into that terrible breach. We allowed ourselves to believe in Hope once again even though Hope had spent years tricking us and abandoning us when we needed him the most.

Even last year, when Stafford got hurt, we took another deep breath and said "That's okay. This is all for the future. All for the future. The future." We repeated that like a mantra: The future, the future, the future. And we gibbered on about Hope and smiled at one another and looked for rainbows in the sky and light way off in the distance and convinced ourselves and each other that it was all leading up to something glorious and amazing and, well, worth it all. We did this with wide, panicked eyes, with desperation bubbling just under the surface and we did this because we had to, because what other choice did we have?

And maybe all that is true, and maybe that future really does exist, and maybe we'll get there, but when Matthew Stafford went down and then got back up missing crucial parts of his shoulder anatomy, all of that evaporated in an instant. All the faith, all the good will, all the talk of the future and all the patience was sucked away and all that was left was The Desolation. All that was left was the feeling that it was all pointless and utterly without meaning or anything good or decent or worth caring about. All that was left was the familiar pain and the familiar idea of rank failure and we knew in that moment that nothing had changed.

I spent the whole post after the game talking about how hard we fought and in that we must take comfort. We must do this because, for now, it's all we have left. The reports on Stafford's injury are hazy, with words like Separated Shoulder and Shoulder Sprain and Oh God Why being thrown about along with numbers like 6-8 weeks and 4 weeks to who fucking knows how many weeks tossed in for good measure.

We have had it with meaningless football. We have had it with the idea that at some point in some nebulous, undefined future that the world will brighten and we will smile and have success. We have had it with the pain, with the agony, with the self destructive knowledge and acceptance of losing. We have had it with just rolling over and saying "Well, this is just the way it is."

At some point, you have to plant your flag in the dirt, even if that dirt looks more like shit, and turn around and say "Fuck it, today I'm going to fight." That's what the Lions did on Sunday and that's what we must hold on to right now.

Of course, all that is much easier when you get a fair shake. It becomes much tougher when a referee decides, just for the hell of it, to interpret a ridiculous, Byzantine rule in the most ridiculous way possible at the most critical time possible in the most cruel and fucked up manner possible. I mean, who does that? Who sees an obvious touchdown and then thinks to himself "Well hmmm, there is a way that I can take that away . . ." I mean, come on.

Could the ref have interpreted the rule the way he did? Yes. But that's because the rule is so ambiguous and so ridiculous that he could have interpreted it any way that he wanted to. He chose to interpret it in the cruel and awful way that we saw. And that leads us back to that deceptively simple and terrible question: Why?

Why indeed. What is it about the Detroit Lions that causes a referee to look at Calvin Johnson catching a miracle touchdown pass to give us long suffering fans our first road win in a billion years after having watched our franchise Quarterback get obliterated and decide "Well, fuck it, I'm going to say that's not a touchdown." What is it?

We could ask ourselves that question until we went completely insane trying to answer it. All that's important is that it happened, and somehow, someway, we have to move on from it, just like we have had to somehow, someway move on from every other infernal and horrible thing that has happened to us as Lions fans.

UpHere sent me that e-mail I mentioned at the beginning of this post during the game. Later, he sent me more e-mails asking if Jim Schwartz was going to get swallowed by a whale. When the Calvin touchdown fiasco occurred he sent me another e-mail that said "And there's your whale." Yes, that's how it feels to be a Lions fan, like the whole thing is just some biblical test of faith. And then, in the end you end up getting swallowed by a whale.

It's a hard thing to have to endure. It's perverse that it was only yesterday morning that we all felt so full of hope and joy and excitement and that today I'm having to write the sentence "It's a hard thing to endure." Yet again.

But here we are and for now, at least, we have some idea where here is. It's familiar, it's cold, it's hard, it's mean and we absolutely hate it. But we are used to such things, terrible as they are and we will survive to see another day. All we can do is stare at the Failure Demon who has captured us in his dungeon once again and then try to punch him in the face. The future is once again just a hazy idea, a half forgotten dream and we have to put it out of our minds. We're here and we have to fight for what's in front of us, for today and for ourselves. We deserve so much better than this, so much more, and I'm sick of waiting around for it. I want to win. Not for tomorrow, not for the future, but for right now, for today. I want to win one game just to win that game. I want to say to hell with that question. Fuck why. I just want to be happy now.

After all that brutality, after all that pain, after we had fallen prey to The Desolation, UpHere sent me one more e-mail that said "Fuck all of them. I'm counting that as a win. We are 1-0 and I don't give a fuck what the NFL says." He said the same thing here in the comment section after my last post. The world had taken the biggest shit on us and in the face of all of that, there was still that spark of defiance. Indeed. Fuck all of them. We are 1-0 and I don't give a fuck what the NFL says.