Don't worry. We'll get to do it all over again next week. Yay!Right about now I feel like Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day. And I don’t mean the part where everything is fascinating and kinda fun and he is getting to know Andie McDowell and fucking around with people and astounding everyone with his Jeopardy prowess. No, I mean the fucked up part in the middle of the movie where he just wants it all to end and is dropping toasters into the bathtub and kidnapping Punxsutawney Phil and driving off the side of a cliff. That’s where I am right now.
I mean, come on. How ridiculous is this bullshit? One more time, the Lions were controlling a game into the fourth quarter only to once again see everything slip away at the end. I suppose I could take the optimistic road here and talk about how this is a sign of progress and we’re oh so close, but that would require waking up and actually having it be tomorrow instead of Groundhog Day yet again. It’s hard to care about the future when you never actually get there.
The Lions are 2-10. They probably should have won at least half of those ten losses. But they didn’t, and so here we are. Once again, we had to watch as the other team pulled it together at the end of the game and once again we had to hear from the announcers and those same opponents about how this wasn’t the same old Lions and about how we should be proud because they fought hard and blah blah blah and shut up, shut up, shut up!
Once again, Mike Pereira appeared on my screen with his lizard tongue and tried to explain why it was good and just and proper that the Lions got fucked over on a horrendous call by the officials and once again his scaly face caused my bile to rise and I swore under my breath and I snarled and waited for him to slither back to whatever rancid hell he crawled out of. Fuck him and fuck this ridiculous bullshit. Ndamukong Suh is apparently only allowed to tackle people via angry thoughts because any time he lays hands on a dude, the refs freak the fuck out and throw a flag. Although if a dude did just fall on his own, they would probably just flag Suh for compelling him to fall via mind control or some such bullshit and then we’d have Mike Pereira back on our TV screens gibbering on about Karnac and about how ESP and mind control are clearly prohibited in Article ZZZ Section K Subsection 666 of the special NFL rulebook that can only be read by lizard men from hell like him because it is written in some sort of backwards ass hell language and would cause a mortal soul’s brain to cave in on itself it if were read aloud. Seriously, is the fucking NFL rulebook actually the Necronomicon? Whenever that asshole Pereira pops up on my screen and starts blathering, maybe he is just cursing Suh and causing our brains to bleed a little bit in order to appease his dark master, Lord Goodell or Satan or whatever the fuck he’s calling himself these days.
But that was just a moment, a heartbeat, in a day that we have lived so many times before. There were all the other familiar moments – the mocking sense of false hope, the inexplicable miracle play from the other team (in this case, the career long billion yard field goal from Robbie Gould), the stalled drives in enemy territory, the tragic collapse of the secondary, the soul crushing final drive that felt like some sort of slow, terrible torture engineered by Nazis or Failure Demons or some mad Chinaman – and when the clock struck zero, we got to watch Rod Marinelli and Mike Martz celebrate in the middle of Ford Field and what the fuck? Just . . . what the fuck? I am at a loss here, you know? I mean, I have joked that Hitler must have been a Lions fan in order to explain the almost hilarious hate boner that Fate has for us, but this is just fucking absurd. Who’s worse than Hitler? How much uglier a reference can I make? Was the Roman soldier who nailed Jesus to the cross a Lions fan? I mean, what’s going on here?
In a sense, it would have been easier to watch the Lions just get blown out in this game. After all, I had made my peace with that. I had said “Okay, fuck this season” and then prepared to spend the next month in the comfortable embrace of macabre humor. But I got sucked in anyway. HEY LOOK, THE LIONS MIGHT WIN A GAME! It didn’t matter that it didn’t really mean anything for the future. I just wanted to watch my team win a meaningless game because, well . . . hell, none of them are really meaningless for us, you know? I have made my peace with the savage reality that this team just isn’t any damn good again, but that doesn’t mean I am a robot. I am a man and I bleed.
I didn’t mind that the Lions lost. I didn’t. Like I said, I have made my peace with that already. It’s just the way that they lost, you know? I can’t even blame this on Ol’ Plucky. He didn’t fuck up. He didn’t really do anything to win us the game, but he didn’t fuck up either. You can’t ask him for much more than that. I can’t just shake my head in disgust because the team didn’t have a chance and so hey, fuck it, you know? I have to live with the knowledge that the Lions were two or three plays away from winning that game, just like they are every fucking week. That is a maddening thing to have to live with because it never changes. Every game is the Jets game.
It’s exciting because we jump out of our trench every week and we charge towards the enemy’s line, dodging bullets and bombs going off all around us and then we reach their trench and we just stand there, dull and stupid and stare down and then someone raises their rifle and shoots us. It’s horrible. We get close enough to believe in . . . in . . . something, but we never finish the charge. We’re just perpetually stuck on the brink of that terrible trench, getting shot to death. We have to relive it over and over and over again. Hell, it’s great that we made it that far but until we actually dive into the enemy’s trench and bayonet some cocksucker in the balls, it doesn’t mean anything. We might as well just die as soon as we peek our idiot heads above our own trench line. Same result. It’s not like you get some sort of bonus credit for not dying immediately. You don’t get to live just because you lasted longer than most people thought. A bullet in the brain is a bullet in the brain, no matter when it comes. It is brutal and it is cruel but it is just the way it is.
There are some obvious positives to take away from this game. Stanton looked okay (Which was more of a product of the play calling, at least in my opinion, than anything he really did, which I will get into later in the week, and I am going to do my best to be fair. I mean, I don’t want to be the guy who just starts twisting things to fit his own preformed opinion, which for me is that Stanton is a butt.), which means that the remaining games shouldn’t feel utterly hopeless. The team didn’t quit. They played hard, particularly along the defensive line. Cliff Avril had a monster, monster game. And Jahvid Best looked like he got some of his burst back. And there are other things to smile about – St. Calvin’s Beast Run towards the endzone, the safe but effective playcalling that emphasized Stanton’s strengths while hiding his weaknesses, etc. – but at the end of the day, it’s another Lions loss and it came in a cruel, mocking way and man, it just sucks that it had to happen like that, you know?
I’ve lasted a long time as a Lions fan, and I will last a lot longer still, but damn, this season has been revelatory for all the wrong reasons. I thought I had seen everything, felt everything, and then dealt with everything as a Lions fan. Win or lose I could take it. But this . . . this is something I’ve never really experienced, the cruel torture that comes with always being on the edge of a tomorrow that never quite comes. This has shaken me up. It makes me feel like Fate is punishing me for believing that I had seen it all. The lesson, I guess, is that no matter how much bullshit you go through, Fate has new and terrible ways of torturing you. You spend years covered in shit and you start to get used to the shit, to the point where you’re like “What’s the big deal? It’s just shit,” and then Fate tosses a bucket of special demon shit all over you and it smells even worse and it burns and Oh Lord, I forgot how much I hate shit! I guess I needed to be reminded.
Look, I don’t even know what I am gibbering on about anymore. I just spent the last half of that last paragraph discussing the difference between being covered in regular people shit and demon shit. Clearly, I am lost in the wilderness here. All I know is that I’m pretty sure that Mike Pereira is actually the devil and that for whatever reason, that son of a bitch has it out for Lions fans, and that every Sunday I wake up and my clock radio is playing Sonny and Cher and Jesus, someone draw me a bath and get me a toaster, and I’ll see you next Sunday.
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