And . . . Exhale

Well, that was certainly emphatic.

After the last couple of weeks of Hold Me Closer Tiny Dancer and me gibbering on about hangings, ether rags and Col. Kurtz, I felt like I needed to see something . . . specific. It wasn’t just that I needed to see the Lions win, I needed to see them engage in the sort of wholesale slaughter that would make Pol Pot blush. Had they won 17-10, I’d probably still be sitting here fretting and pulling at my hair and writing love poems to the Grim Reaper, but they didn’t win 17-10, they won 45-10 and honestly the game was nowhere near that close.

After a first Broncos drive that had my eyes wandering towards the place under the sink where I keep my Vintage ’68 Drano and my brain wandering towards a life in the forest spent eating bark, fucking deer and building a nest somewhere in the upper reaches of the trees, it was all candy, sunshine and blowjobs (not deer blowjobs, ‘cuz that would be fucked up and painful. Or at least I imagine they would be. What? Why is everybody looking at me like that? That deer thought it was a carrot, I swear! No, that doesn’t explain why my pants were off, but I don’t have to answer to anyone but my own conscience and that deer’s father. That motherfucker was pissed. I’ve never run so fast in all my life, and . . . wait, where am I? What’s going on?) Honestly, the final score of that game could have been 62-3 or better yet, it could have just been depicted with an image of a clown being tortured and then eaten by 16 foot tall aliens, the clown of course being Tim Tebow and the 16 foot tall aliens being the Lions defense.

That is a weird and grotesque image but let’s face it, this was a weird and grotesque game – for the Broncos anyway. For us it was a beautiful gift, the sort of laughter inducing heaven-sent answer to our most desperate fan prayers. We didn’t just want to watch a game like this, we needed to watch a game like this. We needed to see the Lions beat the shit out of Tim Tebow and then relentlessly mock him simply because they could. We needed to see the Lions not just be the better team but make the other team look so embarrassingly helpless that I’m pretty sure that even a gang of retarded Somalis so starved that they look like weird aliens watched this game and said “Goddamn, I’m glad we’re not those guys.” Don’t ask me how those Somalis were watching the game. Let’s just assume that Sally Struthers carries a portable TV around with her and move on, okay?

Obviously, I have descended into inappropriate weirdness but that is just because I am giddy, like I am hopped up on goofballs or something. I feel weird and inappropriate because that’s how loose I feel. I don’t feel the unbearable weight of the oppression of a half-century of failure. I don’t feel Fate closing in on me, its rank, hot breath whispering terrible things in my ear as it prepares to devour my soul. No, for once, I just feel a loose and vaguely stupid sort of freedom and in this freedom my mind is bouncing around from one weird thing to the next, laughing like a retarded blind kid who possesses some strange secret which makes everything in the world melt away other than . . . than . . . happiness is not the right word for it. It’s more like an unburdened ease, a freedom which is hard to describe.

I am getting carried away, but so what? My Lions absolutely eviscerated the Broncos, and any niggling concerns that I might have are like so many willowy reeds blown apart in a nuclear blast. The Lions victory was so total, so absolute, so inarguable, that there really isn’t anything substantive left to say. All I am left with are the gibbering delusions of my own strange brain, set free by the giant flaming sword which was that game swinging down and severing all of the terrible binds tethering me to my own worries and fears as a Lions fan. I mean, after all, this was a road game, something that the Lions couldn’t win for literally years, and the Lions not only won they made the other team look utterly incompetent, like a gang of winos pissing themselves in the midst of a dumpster fire. For fuck’s sake, even Drew Stanton was embarrassed for Tim Tebow.

This was a game that after the first few minutes was refreshingly devoid of pathos, a game which both spoke a larger truth and obliterated even the need for that truth to even be uttered. It said that the Lions really were a damn good football team but the game was so out of hand, that truth so evident, that it no longer even needed to be said. By the end, it was a given, and that’s the heart of this whole damn thing right there.

Indeed, by the time Chris Houston danced his way into the endzone – hell, it feels like it was even eons before that play – the Lions had nothing left to prove to themselves or to the Broncos. It was like watching a troop of United States Marines invade a country defended only by a blind drunk with no legs and a syphilitic goat. Yes, this is probably the only time that Tim Tebow will be compared to a syphilitic goat, but what the hell, you know? I had planned on comparing him to Drew Stanton, but honestly that shit isn’t fair to Drew Stanton. Really, it’s not that fair to the syphilitic goat.

Am I out of hand here? Absolutely. Do I care? Not at all. Because all of the building worry, all of the encroaching terror, all of the venomous whispers of The Fear, were sucked into a black hole and banished to another dimension thanks to this game. Will all of that return at some point? Of course it will. Fandom is completely ridiculous by its very nature, bipolar and schizophrenic and two weeks from now I might be yammering like a lunatic about shit bombs and werewolves eating my pants, but none of that matters right now. Right now all that matters is that my Lions crucified the Tebow child and there will be no resurrection. Is that an offensive thing to say? Yeah, but so what? I am offended by Tebow’s pretentions, or perhaps I am offended by the media’s pretensions. I don’t know. All I know is that I feel a certain sort of manic glee that a simple truth was revealed by this game: Tim Tebow is a terrible quarterback. You strip everything else away, and that’s what’s left. He sucks. The end.

And really, that was the beauty of this game. It was a game of simple truths, of absolutes, a game which left my brain nowhere to go but up, up, up. The Lions were a good football team, the Broncos were not. Matthew Stafford was a real quarterback, Tim Tebow was not. The Lions defense was ferocious and cruel and mocking and everything you want a defense to be and the Denver Broncos defense was not. Those are absolutes, simple truths that leave no room for debate, no room for niggling fears and dumb, shameful worries.

Are there little things to bitch about? Yeah, but that’s just because there always are. Actually articulating them right now would be an exercise in bad taste. There is no point because for the moment, they have been made utterly irrelevant, petty, small, stupid things not worth even our time or brainwaves. Bitching about them right now would feel like choosing to drink out of a toilet bowl when you have a giant jug of wine in your hand. It would just be senseless and vaguely obscene.

The Lions are 6-2 and they got that sixth win in a way that is going to make this bye-week feel absolutely beautiful. There is little more that I can say beyond that because the simplicity of this game’s meaning is so self-evident. In fact, I have probably gibbered on for a thousand words more than I needed to. In the end, this is all that matters: the Lions kicked the absolute shit out of the Broncos and the worries of the past couple of weeks now feel like a fading memory. Really, coming into this game that’s all I wanted and, well, that’s what I got. And there you go.

Dancing on the Edge of Madness

I am a passionate dude. This might help to explain the talk of hangings and ether huffing that went on earlier this week. But my passion is also tempered with reason. I like to let my passion take me to the edge of madness and then I like to peer over that edge while my reason desperately hangs on to me and makes sure that I don’t fall over. In some ways, I suppose this makes me an emotional daredevil. I’m willing to explore my own feelings to the point of near madness, trusting that at some point I’ll be rescued by my big beautiful brain.

And so it goes with my sports fandom. Perhaps there is no better medium in which to explore my passionate side than sports. In the end, it is a relatively harmless pursuit, devoid of real consequences, but rich in feeling. It is ritualized warfare, symbolic death and rebirth, and when it comes to my sports fandom I dance on the edge of reason and madness with a weird smile on my face, tiptoeing into thin air and freefalling before my reason reaches down to save me yet again. Fandom is a condition marked by a thousand deaths and a thousand rebirths, which given my fascination with the timeless dance between passion and reason which I just gibbered on about, might explain why being a fan is so irresistible to me. Every week, I go into a game knowing that I might die, but I also know that eventually I will be reborn and then it will be time to dance that dance all over again. I suppose, among other things, this makes me a masochist, but fuck it, I’m a lot of things, and at least this helps to explain how I have managed to remain a fan of the Detroit Lions for so long.

My point – and I promise there is a point hidden somewhere in all this madness – is that on Sunday, and for most of this past week, I experienced one of those tiny deaths, one of those little explosions of feeling, which sent me careening over the edge yet again. But now, I think, I’ve been pulled back by reason, reborn into a world in which the Lions are still 5-2, heading into a game against the shittastic Broncos, a game they should win without too much trouble (if they can’t, get ready for a whole season of tiny deaths and wild madness) and then they have a bye-week before games against the Bears and their offensive line which is made up of broken dreams and sadness and against the Panthers, which means that at worst I think the Lions should go into the Thanksgiving game against the Packers at 7-3. Which means that once again, I find myself delightfully . . . alive.

I’m about to get weird here (well, weirder anyway . . .) so hang on and if you need to take a shower or gouge out your eyes or your brain halfway through, I understand. Okay, ready? Anyway, sports fandom is kind of like sex (here we go . . .) By that I mean that when it’s done right, it’s exhilarating as hell, it leaves you flushed and breathless and, uh . . . sticky? No, I went too far. Anyway, sex at its best can be dirty, nasty and it can feel completely out of control. Sports fandom at its best feels kind of the same way. You’re not entirely sure what’s going on, you just know that your heart’s beating faster and that everything is leading to a crescendo and an explosion of feeling. That’s why the French call an orgasm la petite mort, which means “the little death”, because at its best it is a spiritual release, an embrasure of every feeling in the human spectrum, everything from utter madness to sublime stupid joy. Only a great fool would try to sum up an orgasm, but, well, I am a great fool. Only a bigger fool would compare this to the joys and sorrows of sports fandom, but, well . . . here we are.

Indeed. The truth is, is that sports fandom is a lot like sex even if you strip it of all that horseshit I just wrote. A lot of the time it’s vaguely disappointing and you end up needing to get drunk afterward or you end up mumbling some weird gibberish and getting the fuck out of there before anyone sees you cry. Wait . . . I have said too much.

No, but really, after every little death comes a little rebirth and that’s the part of the joy of both sex and sports fandom. Pain and pleasure are temporary, ephemeral things, and I could get even weirder here but then I’d probably have to start posting as the Marquis de Sade and nobody wants that, do they? I didn’t think so. Anyway, both sex and sports fandom are only truly experienced if you let yourself dance on that edge between reason and madness, between passion and measured calm. Both are the purest expression of the animal duality of man, between the creature of science who believes in maths and the beast whose ancestors danced naked under a full moon and fucked until the sun came up just so the crops would grow.

Look, I doubt anyone is still reading, but fuck it, we’ve come this far and it’s too late to turn back now. Anyway, the ultimate point that I’m trying to make here is that you can’t be afraid to die those little deaths, to fall over the edge, to give into the madness and passion which makes the rebirth and the joy worth it in the end. You have to let yourself go and just . . . feel, and hope that you’ll come out the other side still intact.

I am not afraid to feel. That much should be obvious by now and that’s why I come across like a bipolar lunatic, because my sports fandom allows me to feel even more intensely than I do in other areas of my life. It allows me a construct to do that dance, to tango with the devil even while my eyes are watching God. It’s the stripping away of all those things we cling to in day to day life which keep us tethered to our own naked and dumb fears, our inhibitions and sad robotic routines, our quiet safety dances we do which ensure that we never feel pain or joy, just a comfortably numb fortress from which we cannot be besieged but from which we can also never escape. Sports fandom allows us to shed all of that bullshit and to embrace passion, to dream of the stars even while the fires of hell lick at the soles of our feet. Go big or go home, as Jesus used to say.

Okay, this has gotten way, way out of hand and I suspect it’s time to reel it in. In the end, this is what I wanted to say before I began this tour de force of gibberish: I’m not afraid to freak out after the Lions lose because I know that it’s just another tiny death, an ephemeral moment, and that rebirth is only a Sunday away.

Anyway, if I can extend this bizarre passion thing a bit further, since the Broncos are up this week, I figure that I have to talk about the Tebow child, and since the theme of the day is apparently passion, I guess it’s an appropriate time to say that the problem with Tim Tebow is that he is a man who denies himself his passions to the point that he doesn’t even understand them, and instead drifts through the world like a retarded alien sailor, gawking and gaping at each port of call in the hopes that the humans around him can teach him how to be a real boy.

Let’s get one thing straight: Tim Tebow is a good man. In fact, he’s a ridiculously good man, but he’s a good man in a very plain, very technical kind of way, the sort of good which at its core is almost amoral. That sounds bizarre but hear me out, okay? Tim Tebow seems like the sort of dude whose conceptions of good and evil aren’t based in anything the man feels but in a very antiseptic childish interpretation of good and evil. In short, his morality is not one born of experience, which in my mind is the only kind of morality which is worth a damn, or really, worthy of the word “moral” at all. Hence, to me, Tim Tebow is amoral, because his morality is born of something inhuman, of something clinical and cold which cares only for right and wrong as two sides in a black and white rulebook. Tim Tebow is a man of rules, and true morality at its core is complex and inherently chaotic.

In fact, if anything, Tim Tebow’s morality seems to be a function of his own denial of the human experience, which means that, yes, Tim Tebow has betrayed his own humanity and very well might therefore be the antichrist.

Hey, I don’t want it to be true, but there you go. No, but seriously, how can a man so averse to the passions which make us truly alive ever be a leader of men? How can he look his compatriots in the eyes, knowing deep in his heart that he is afraid to truly live? How can he ask them to die beside him when he won’t even risk la petite mort?

And that is why Tim Tebow is ultimately a fraud and why he is doomed to fail. Men won’t follow him because there is nothing to follow. He is asking them to follow a rulebook, not a man. Kenny Stabler was a leader. Bobby Layne was a leader. And that was because they weren’t afraid to live, and therefore feel and know and understand. Matthew Stafford is a man of that cloth. At least I think he is. Take away all the physical gifts and that’s the difference between Stafford and Tebow and that’s why I’m glad one is my quarterback and one belongs to the soulless freaks of Colorado. Matthew Stafford is as much my quarterback as Tim Tebow is not, and that is why I am fully confident that the Lions will kick the shit out of the Broncos on Sunday.

But even if Stafford can’t play, the truth is that the Broncos are so shitty that Shaun Hill should have no problem whipping that ass. I would be shocked if the Broncos can manage more than 10-14 points against the Lions defense. Tebow was sacked 6 times by the craptacular Dolphins so there is a very real chance that he will get his wet dream and he will be crucified for the sins of the people of Denver. And that just means that all the Lions quarterback has to do – whether it’s Stafford or Shaun Hill or even the Grit Merchant – is make a few plays, and then go home. You see, the good news is this: whoever the Lions quarterback is can play as shitty as Stafford and the Lions offense have played the last couple of weeks and the Lions will still win this game. After all, the Lions have been using Drew Stanton to simulate Tebow in practice, which makes a lot of sense when you consider that Tebow is basically Stanton with a better PR agent. And I feel pretty damn confident facing a talent-deficient team led by a dude who might as well be Drew Stanton, you know?

I have yet to talk about the Broncos defense, but that’s just because there’s no real reason to worry. I recently read an article about the Broncos defense which said that their secondary is “evolving.” Evolving. That’s a nice way of saying that it sucks. It means that they are just throwing dudes out there, hoping against hope that something will work out. They can toss all the undrafted free agents and retreads they want on the field and call it whatever they want, but the reality is that aside from old man Champ Bailey the only thing their secondary is evolving from is from a shit sandwich to a turd salad. Meanwhile, sack artist Elvis Dumervil is hurt meaning that the Broncos basically have one pass rusher – rookie Von Miller – and if the Lions can key on him and (hopefully) keep him neutralized, the Broncos have exactly no one who is going to hurt the Lions.

Stafford or no, the Lions should win and win fairly comfortably. If they don’t, then it’s death metal for a while around here. That’s just the way that it goes. But I don’t think it will be. I just don’t see the Lions losing this game. We all died a little death last week, but after death comes rebirth and like I said before, that rebirth is only a Sunday away and this Sunday both our Lions and our hearts will be reborn and then we can dance, dance, dance and laugh at the madness which will suddenly seem so very far, far away.

Lions win.

Predicted Final Score: Lions 24 Broncos 10

Making Sense of the Senseless

Well, that happened.

And then after it was over, I handled it like a mature adult, ranting and raving about hangings and ether rags and other assorted bullshit. I even discussed how self-hanging would result in pants-shitting and the assault upon my dignity that would ensue. Others decided to throw pitchforks at Matthew Stafford and someone got all hysterical because they caught Matthew Stafford eating at a restaurant or something. I don’t know, everybody was out of their mind. I’m pretty sure that in their haze someone on MLive actually killed a guy.

But fuck all that, we’re better than that nonsensical gibberish, right? No? Well, okay then.

Indeed. I have come to the conclusion that right now it is okay to literally feel anything and everything. The last thing I want to be right now is Kevin Bacon in Animal House screaming ALL IS WELL at the top of his lungs over and over and over again before the crowd surges over top of him, flattening him into the pavement. I can’t do this because, honestly, I think by myself I have felt and said every possible thing there is to feel or say about this team within the last 24 hours or so.

We’re in a strange moment as Lions fans, a moment where reason and the things our eyes have seen are at war with each other, where numbers and stats appear to be brutal liars but also conspire to make us look foolish and hyperreactive. I just don’t fucking know, man. I just don’t fucking know. And hey, you know what? That’s alright.

It’s been pointed out – by me and a million other people – that the Lions are 5-2, which is a far better fate than we have known in a long, long time, and so everyone should probably just chill with the Apocalypse Now talk. And yet . . . man, none of us can help the way that we feel, you know? It’s strange. If you told me that the Lions would be 5-2 at this point, I probably would have looked a lot like Slim Pickens whooping and hollering, celebrating like a madman while he rode that rocket straight to hell in Dr. Strangelove. But the funny thing about expectations is that they are constantly changing. Once you meet one goal, you find that it’s not your goal anymore and your eyes drift to the next horizon. It’s human nature and anyone who doesn’t acknowledge that either doesn’t understand it or is willfully trying to manage their own terrified hearts and minds, suppressing expectation as a means of controlling The Fear.

And that’s fine too. We all do that, to some extent. The specific problem I have with the whole “Hey, they’re still 5-2 even though they should probably be 3-4 so relax, baby cakes” argument is precisely that: the Lions are 5-2 even though they should probably be 3-4. That’s the whole point. If you told me the Lions would look like a 3-4 team at this point, I would have bitched and wondered at the cruelty of the football gods. I expected them to be a good team this season. (I mean, maybe the fault lies with my own unrealistic expectations, but at some point isn’t it okay to expect that the team you love and have followed all your life to actually be, you know, good?) And I don’t mean that in the sense that I expected them to be 7-0 or 6-1 or 5-2 or any other record. Throw out the records for a second. What I mean is that I expected them to look good, regardless if they lost some tough games. Yeah, the thing about that is this: they haven’t.

Not really anyway. I Remember in week one watching and thinking to myself “Hey, what’s up with Stafford?” And I’ll admit, that’s kind of ridiculous but the dude was missing some throws that I’ve seen him make with relative ease. And that hasn’t gone away as the season has progressed. In fact, it’s gotten worse. That is an incredibly weird thing to say about a dude with a 16-4 TD to INT ratio and almost 2,000 yards passing already but this is why things are so confusing right now. My brain is telling me that those are phenomenal numbers. Meanwhile, my eyes the last two weeks have been telling me that my dude looks like Joey Harrington out there, which . . . I know, I know, I just did the Lions equivalent of comparing somebody to a Nazi in an argument, but shit, I’m not going to bury my head in the sand here either and lie and tell you that he’s playing well, because he isn’t.

And that’s the fundamental point here: he – and that offense we know can be explosive because we’ve fucking seen it happen – hasn’t been playing well. Take everything else away – all the numbers, the record, everything – and that’s just the brutal truth, cold and merciless. And while that may have been fine last season or the season before that, or really any season over the last decade of chaos and despair, this season needs to be different. Expectations are higher. The belief that this team is actually capable of something more is what’s driving all the ranting and raving going on right now. People are sad – people are booing and bitching – because goddammit, we let ourselves love this team and now we are terrified that they are going to break our hearts.

Maybe that’s our own damn fault, for daring to believe, for daring to put ourselves out there, but at some point fault becomes irrelevant and the way it is is just the way it is, you know? If you’re honest with yourself and not dissembling the wants and needs of your own heart and mind you can’t help it when you fall in love and, well, people fell in love with both Stafford and the Lions. And that’s why this feels so unbearably cruel and ugly. Even if our brains are looking at the numbers – at the facts – and saying “Hey, this is still pretty damn good and everything’s still good,” our hearts are feeling the same things we’ve felt for too damn long. Our hearts are seeing Matthew Stafford, head hung low, looking like he just had his candy taken away from him, they’re seeing him fuck up a screen pass or overthrow a receiver and then unbuckle his chin strap and stagger off the field like a petulant child, and they’re being shocked by the Post Traumatic Stress of the terrible, terrible past, jolted into reliving memories of Joey Blue Skies and then our hearts cry and sometimes these cries even leave our mouths and . . . well, there’s simply nothing you can do about that because that is just the sad condition of man.

Is all this hyperreactive and kind of ridiculous? Certainly. But it is what it is and there’s not much you can do or say to change it. We’re a wounded people. We’ve all known that all along. We’re an exceptionally fragile people and this is what happens to fragile, wounded people in times of strife. Anybody surprised by this either is woefully naïve or has so completely deluded themselves that there is no point in trying to even explain any of this. Is it sad and shameful and embarrassing that we’re all falling apart and booing the shit out of Stafford and the team even though they’re 5-2? Absolutely. Is it at all surprising? Not in the least.

People were going to break apart and scatter at the first sign of adversity. They just were. This was always going to happen. The question now becomes, how do we move on with this? Like I said, nothing about the way anyone feels right now is wrong. I firmly believe that. Everyone has to deal with this shit the best they can. But there will come a time where we need to splash some water on our faces and pull ourselves together. I mean, for fuck’s sake, no one wants to die with shit in their pants, you know?

I suppose there are a few different ways of looking at it. First, you have the aforementioned ALL IS WELL brigade, who will hold onto their bitter delusions until nothing is left and the world has left them alone and bereft. I’ve experienced this as a Michigan fan over the last few years. I suspect many of you have as well, and the rest are at least familiar enough with what went on to understand what I’m talking about here. There is a dishonesty to this. It’s a noble dishonesty, born of hope and dreams, but a dishonesty none the less and in the end it’s just going to make it hurt worse when the truth becomes evident and terrible.

Next, you have the WE’RE DOOMED SAME OL’ SHIT hysterics, who will claim that everything is lost and there is no hope going forward and that we are all fools for continuing to care about this team. They will laugh and mock and piss all over anyone who dares to still see the light at the end of the world. Fuck these people. They are cowards, hiding their hearts from the world and from themselves, kissing the ring of the lord of apathy, choosing oblivion over either joy or pain, risking nothing, meaningless ghosts, wraiths spinning through the universe, their spirits fading into meaninglessness and therefore nothingness. Whoa, that got kind of heavy, but fuck it, these are heavy times.

And then there is the honest bravery that I’m trying to embrace, the kind that admits that it just doesn’t know what in the fuck is going on anymore, the kind that dares to believe in Hope but isn’t afraid to look into the Abyss and ask some tough, tough questions. I’m not happy right now. I think the team looks like shit. But right now is not forever, and the key is in recognizing that. Everything in its proper place. Perspective. That is the key word – the key concept – that we all must embrace if we are going to survive this as fans.

Of course, perspective is the one thing Lions fans don’t have. I’ve talked about this before. Perspective was what we had stripped completely from us by 0-16. We don’t know how to react when things go well and we don’t know how to react when things go badly. Instead we rant and rave and wave our hands in the air like lunatics and then we stab each other in the face and set fire to our own worlds and run naked and bleeding through the streets. We are idiot children, made stupid by the horrors of the past and hey, that is what it is.

But that doesn’t mean that we can’t try to hang on to at least the idea of perspective, some tattered memory in our minds of what that concept actually means, of how it feels. And that’s what we have to try to do going forward. We have to remember that what happened last is not destined to happen forever. When the Lions win it doesn’t mean that they are going to go 168-0 and win 23 straight Super Bowls. But when they lose, it doesn’t mean that we are headed back down the Highway to Hell either, you know?

So, with that in mind . . . how do we make sense of what’s going on right now? How do we put these things in perspective? How do we sort through the shiny record and those gleaming stats and find the truth? How do we reconcile the cold rationality of our brains with the fiery emotion and truths of our hearts? I don’t have the answers for you. Not right now. I suspect that these questions lie at the very heart of this season, of our own tortured fandom and we won’t know until we know, and even then we’ll probably just realize that we want to know other stuff instead.

That is incredibly vague and Yogi Berraish in its stupidity but I don’t care. It’s true. Or at least I think it is. And it’s that – my own tentative ideas of what’s true and not true – that are all I have left to go off of right now. It’s all any of us have. And the truth, to me right now anyway, is that the Lions are a 5-2 team that should be 3-4. Do I feel lucky? Yes. But I also feel unlucky. And therein lies the strange dichotomy of this season, of this predicament, of this weird, fucked up place we find ourselves in as fans. My team is both a 5-2 team and a 3-4 team. My quarterback is both Brett Favre and Joey Harrington. I am both happy and sad, optimistic and terrified. And, for now, that’s the only thing I know is true. We’ll see. And that’s all that’s left to say, I think. We’ll see.

So . . .

Hey, those slivers of light look kind of like . . . horns.

I hate everything ever.

The end.

Balancing on the Edge of Hope

The duality between Human Hope and the Demon Fear which lives inside of every Lions fan.

People aren’t worried. Not yet, anyway. I suppose, though, in my own little egocentric kingdom of madness, when I say people, I mean me. And so I guess that’s my idiot way of saying that I’m still feeling pretty confident even after the Lions gave away the game against the 49ers on Sunday. But it’s a conditional sort of confidence too, you know? I mean, we have been through so much for so long (I don’t even know if I could dredge up an appropriate metaphor to accurately hammer home just how much and just how long.) that it’s almost impossible not to have at least a small part of my brain gibbering like a whiskey soaked lunatic, trying to burrow its way to the front of my consciousness with a litany of fears and concerns born not just from last week’s performance but from this whole crazy train of a season.

And it’s that part of my brain that needs to see the Lions come out and smash the Falcons. If the Lions lose to the Falcons, the rational side of me will get pissed but will then squeeze a stress ball or bite the head off of a squirrel or something, calm down and realize that the Lions are still 5-2. But that terrified little maniac who’s constantly working away at my brain with a pickaxe made of Fear and Panic will start furiously swinging away and he won’t calm down. He’ll start envisioning a collapse and will remember the pain – oh the pain – that’s been there for an entire lifetime of fandom. That tiny part of my brain, that irrational crazy man part, will try to shoot lasers out of my eyeballs, lasers that project giant movies of soldiers getting bayonetted and dying in blood soaked trenches or homeless dudes getting run over by trains or . . . look, what I’m saying is that there is a part of me that will always be so terrified of the Lions that it causes me to go to some really dark, fucked up places. I don’t like it either but if the Lions lose to the Falcons, I’m probably going to be envisioning shit last seen in a Faces of Death video.

But fuck all that. That is The Fear talking and I don’t actually feel that way. Not really. I just wanted to access it for a minute in order to give you all a peak at that terrible place that so far this season has lain dormant behind a steel curtain of Hope and Precious Optimism. It’s there. It’s always there. I would be lying to you if I said that it didn’t, and I will not have any of you call me a filthy liar.

The Lions don’t need this win so much as my own fragile confidence needs this win. If they lose, they’re still in good shape overall. But I won’t be because I’m not sure if I’ll be able to keep that little degenerate with a pickaxe at bay. And as fun as Apocalypse Now Neil can be, it also hurts my poor, sweet soul and I just don’t need that shit, you know?

But this is all vaguely unbecoming and I am starting to wallow in the What Ifs, which is an incredibly dangerous thing for a fan to do, a slippery slope that doesn’t end until you’re careening into a hell of your own making, so I’m going to slap myself in the face a few times and force myself back into reality, into the here and now where the Lions are still 5-1 and the world is so goddamn bright that my shades have to wear shades.

Okay. The good news is that I think this game sets up reasonably well for the Lions. They are at home, they should be hungry and ready to party like rock stars again after suffering through last week’s terrible hangover and they’re facing a Falcons team that so far this season has been a colossal disappointment. I think the Lions should win. The questions is, of course, as it always is, will they? Well, let’s find out, shall we?

The biggest concern for most Lions fans right now seems to be Matthew Stafford and the offense, which is kind of a weird thing to say given that his numbers are pretty fucking ridiculous – 1,729 passing yards, 15 TD vs. only 4 INT – but the reality, almost shocking given the sheer Boss Man nature of those numbers, is that Stafford has looked sort of, well . . . off for much of the season. Again, the numbers tell me that I am either full of shit or completely delusional and maybe a bit of both but the thing is, is that my eyes tell me that he and this offense still haven’t really put it all together. There have been obvious glimpses of it, stretches where he and the O have looked unstoppable, but it has been far too inconsistent and when that inconsistency stretches out for almost the length of an entire game, like it did against the 49ers, things don’t go so well. I think we’re all waiting for Stafford to have that game where he truly does look like that T-Rex flying a fighter jet that we want him to be. We know it’s there and that’s why we’re still complacent even given how shockingly good those numbers are. Terrifyingly, we know he’s capable of better, of more, and we’re anxiously waiting for him to get there, to snap out of this . . . funk is too strong a word, but for the Lions to truly take off he needs to be that T-Rex flying a fighter jet and not just some lesser dinosaur (I don’t know, like an Allosaurus or something) flying a fighter jet. That distinction is tiny and utterly ridiculous and I recognize this but it’s also crucial to the Lions success.

The good news, I think, is that the Falcons are the perfect opponent for young Matthew to evolve from that Allosaurus into a T-Rex. (Goddamn, this is getting nerdy and weird. Hey, can you tell I liked dinosaurs when I was a kid? For real, I told my parents when I was 4 that I wanted to be a paleontologist. Neither one knew what the fuck I was talking about, which I guess, given the amount of nonsensical gibberish I spew today, was prescient.) Their pass defense is only ranked 27^th in the league, they’re dead last in terms of getting off the field on 3^rd down and, well . . . hey that looks pretty good to me right about now, you know? They don’t really have anyone capable of stopping Calvin Johnson which means that even though the Lions running back depth chart looks like this right now: 1. Maurice Morris, 2. Roary, 3. Prayer, they should be fine on offense.

Perhaps I am underselling the loss of Jahvid Best (and every other Lions running back who has been hunted Final Destination style following the tragic departure of the Martyr Sanders) but I don’t think it will be that catastrophic. I mean, the Lions haven’t been able to run the ball anyway – outside of those explosive few plays against the Bears – and the offense is built around the pass. At worst, I think it just takes away a weapon rather than a foundational piece of the offense if that makes any sense. They’ll miss Best, but just because he’s someone who can break one at any time, not because he’s someone they rely upon to consistently move the ball.

Meanwhile, the Falcons have started to get their shit together on offense after Benny Hill Yakety Saxing it around for the first few weeks of the season. In those first few weeks, Matt Ryan was ragdolled all over the field. Seriously, it was like the Falcons offensive line was trying to make a snuff film or something. Since then, though, the Falcons have only given up 2 sacks in their last 3 games, but that’s not so much because their protection has improved as it is that they changed the entire framework of the offense – never a good thing during the regular season – abandoning 5 and 7 step drops in favor of quick passes and designed quarterback roll outs. Then again, they haven’t had to deal with the rabid werewolves the Lions call a defensive line either during those 3 games. And to make matters worse, their starting left tackle, Sam Baker, might not play and the dude they’re throwing up against Ndamukong Suh, Garrett Reynolds, is a rookie. So . . . yeah, Matt Ryan might very well die for the sins of all of Atlanta against the Lions.

It doesn’t help the Falcons that Julio Jones is still banged up or that the Lions defense is likely to be hungry and pissed off after the 49ers game. Of course, the Falcons do have Michael Turner and teams have figured out that the one flaw of this Lions defense is that they can be had in the running game from time to time. And, hey, I still have terrible post-traumatic flashbacks to that game when Turner ran for 220 yards on the Lions in the Year of Unnumbered Tears but that was a different time and last week kind of showed that even if Turner does tear them apart on the ground, it shouldn’t mean that much as long as the Lions can stop Matt Ryan when it comes time for him to make a play. Let’s not forget that even with all the breakdowns against the 49ers, had Matthew Stafford and the offense gotten their shit together none of that would have really mattered. In the end, I figure there’s a good chance that Turner goes for over 100 yards but I also think there’s a distinct possibility that opposing teams will now overplay their hand and try to run, run, run down the Lions throat, which on a down to down basis just isn’t going to work. The Lions can be had for a few big plays in the running game every week, but if your gameplan is to run it down their throat every first down you’re going to be staring down a lot of 2^nd and 11’s which plays right into what the Lions want to do. Because then you have to pass and then you’re going to die.

Like the Lions (hopefully anyway) I’m going into this game against the Falcons believing that the Lions will win, but respecting the possibility that they could lose. That balance, which I talked about in my last post, has hopefully been restored in the wake of the loss to the 49ers. I’m not afraid, but that little fiend with his pickaxe is back there, digging away and so I suppose I am holding my breath a little with this one. If everything works out the way that I think it should, I’ll exhale and then drink myself into a happy stupor. If all of my fears are realized, then I’ll swallow that breath and, well, drink myself into a miserable stupor. In the end, I just hope that when people find me, I’ll be drooling with a dumb smile on my face instead of drooling out of a mouth twisted by agony and despair, the drool mixed with my bitter tears. Okay, this is getting out of hand again. I’ve begun gibbering about Happy Drool vs. Sad Drool which means that I should probably put this shit to bed before things get really weird.

And with that, I’ll just finish by telling you that right now that little degenerate with the pickaxe is still safely hidden away and I think that everything will play out the way that it is supposed to, and that – and how bizarre is it that this is what normal means now – means one thing: Lions win.

Predicted Final Score: Lions 27, Falcons 17