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.