The Fool of the House of Spears

I’m not going to mince words here, which I understand is kind of a departure, and . . . oh shit, too late already, huh? Anyway, sorry. I should say instead that I won’t be too clever here because sometimes simplicity is what’s called for, a cold hard truth bomb that needs to be dropped on everybody before the terminal case of the stupids gets too out of hand. Clearly, I’ve already failed in my quest for simplicity and in the process set a new record for the earliest appearance of utter drivel but, hey, fuck it, strange and terrible times, these things happen, blah blah blah . . .

Shit, let’s just start over again, shall we? Okay. Here it goes: this Ndamukong Suh thing is fucking stupid.

There. I suppose I should probably elaborate, especially since all of you are probably nodding your head in agreement, allowing yourselves to believe that I’m referring to only those idiot souls you disagree with, but here’s the thing: in the wake of our man Suh stomping the shit out of a hapless Green Bay Packer, everyone has acted like a goddamn fool, on every side of the issue, from Suh to Sheriff Goodell to you, to me and everyone in between. This is because there are no winners here, only horrible, horrible losers and pea-brained fools and that is why this story sucks, sucks, sucks and will suck forever.

Let’s start with the man himself, Ndamukong Suh. What he did was fucking idiotic. Really, you don’t need to go much further than that. Understand this: I’m not upset about what he actually did. In the grand scheme of things, who cares? I’ve been stepped on before, kicked a few times, once or twice even in anger, and you know what? In the end, each time was kind of funny actually. I mean, who the fuck gets so mad that they actually kick someone? That’s some spastic five year old shit right there. If anything, for the actual offense, Ndamukong Suh deserves to get laughed at, not treated like Hannibal Lecter. I mean, come on, in a game which encourages grown men to bludgeon each other dozens of times every week, and in which 45 year old men end up wandering the street, drooling like decimated zombies because their brains have been turned to pudding thanks to said bludgeonings, a dude getting his arms or legs or whatever stomped on isn’t really a big deal. Shit, I’ve done what Ndamukong Suh did on Thanksgiving and nobody acted like I was some sort of monster. Instead, they just gave me a spanking, took away my Transformers and GI Joes and then sent me to my room to think about what I did. Granted, that was just last week and my landlord felt weird about spanking me but he and I both understood justice needed to be done.

Okay, enough of that. The point is, is that what Ndamukong Suh did was childish and stupid and in response he deserves to be mocked and called an idiot, not treated like the scourge of Western Civilization. If anything, he – and all of us – should just feel embarrassed. He didn’t act like Attila the Hun, he acted like Attila’s four year old nephew after he got his toy wooden horsey taken away.

But none of that really pisses me off or sends me into GOOD HEAVENS THE OUTRAGE territory. No, what pisses me off is that after I got done writing a whole piece about how the Lions should embrace their Bad Boy image and in which I made sure to state how important it was that the Lions did this in a smart controlled way, Ndamukong Suh went and did something profoundly stupid, something that fucked up the whole damn game, sapped the life from his own team and caused his own fans to wither in the face of their own shrieking souls, dying in the face of the memory of a million different Oh Man, The Lions moments, all of which were suddenly dragged kicking and screaming back to the forefront by Ndamukong Suh’s retarded stomp heard round the world.

Indeed. Had Ndamukong Suh waited until the end of the game and then curbstomped a Packer or two, I’d probably be cracking jokes and telling the people of Wisconsin to quit being so soft. But he didn’t. Instead, he did it at a crucial juncture in the game, following a key third down stop, which would have held the Packers to a field goal instead of a touchdown and which would have kept the Lions within striking distance. Instead, the Packers were given a first down inside the five yard line, Suh was throwing a hissy fit on the sideline and soon, the Lions were down by 14. Only a few plays later, Matthew Stafford threw an interception, and one play after that Aaron Rodgers stuck a dagger in our hearts with a long touchdown strike to James Jones. Ballgame. Thanks for coming. Don’t choke on your turkey.

Fuck you, Ndamukong Suh. Fuck you. That may sound overly harsh, but I’ve spent way too goddamn long watching my dudes do shit like this. The Packers weren’t intimidated or even angry about what Suh did. Instead, they just rolled their eyes and laughed at him, laughed at all of us, just like an entire nation did. Again. You want to know why the Lions are “The Lions” and all that horrible, horrible phrase means? Then watch that fucking play again. Feel the sheer, terrible stupidity of it. Kick ass like a man. Don’t throw a fit like a petulant little boy. Look, I’m a fan of Ndamukong Suh, a big fan, but I’m not going to ignore reality just to placate my fandom. That kind of fandom, which rejects all criticism, is fundamentally weak, fragile and afraid. It refuses to acknowledge truth because it can’t handle it. I’m a fan of Ndamukong Suh but in this case, Ndamukong Suh was a goddamn fool and I can say that because my fandom is strong enough to handle it.

And as for everyone else? Recognize the distinction between kicking ass like a man and throwing a fit like a little boy, okay? Suh didn’t behave like a badass who wasn’t going to take any of the Packers shit. He acted like a damn fool. Like I said, he didn’t intimidate the Packers. He didn’t scare them with his big bad self. Instead, he lashed out like a four year old, they laughed at him and then ripped out our hearts. That’s just that cold hard bitch known as Truth rearing her ugly, cruel head one more time.

And that brings me to everyone else. When things like this happen, whenever anything goes wrong, the whole world goes stupid and this is no exception. Right now, you have a host of Lions fans echoing the screaming banshee wails of the rest of the quiver-lipped public, demanding that Ndamukong Suh be drawn and quartered for his outrageous villainy. These people need to calm the fuck down. He stepped on a dude. That’s it. Laugh at him. Any other response is complete overkill, a maelstrom of dumb noise which just gets in the way of the real issue here, which is that the timing of Suh’s offense is what, well, causes the most offense. Again, I don’t really care that he stepped on a dude. So what? What I care about is the fact that he stepped on a dude when he should have known better. What I care about is that he invited all this nonsense with his willful indifference to the concept of responsibility – not to his opponent or the fans or to some grotesque caricature of morality, but to his team and to himself and to an idea that the Lions are a real, live football team and not just a collection of dysfunctional fuckups, which is, sadly, the way everyone sees them right now.

On the other hand, you have the LEAVE HIM ALONE HE DIDN’T DO ANYTHING WRONG crowd, which . . . come on. Ndamukong Suh is not being persecuted here. The dude fucked up. This is undeniable and to try to deny it makes you look desperate and hysterical. It’s a function of psychological martyrdom, of being so beaten over the years that the idea of personal responsibility is unfathomable. To admit that Ndamukong Suh was wrong is to admit a certain vulnerability, a vulnerability which requires emotional strength, strength which as fans we just don’t have. Instead, it’s easier – and necessary for too many of us – to cling to the ghost of an idea, to some terrible illusion, that we are being systematically fucked over and that anything and everything bad that happens to us is somehow the result of some bizarre witch hunt. Has Ndamukong Suh taken an unfair amount of heat since he stepped into the league? Absolutely. Has this affected how officials deal with him? Absolutely. But here’s the thing – he stomped on a dude. What do you want to hear? He stomped on a dude. That’s a pretty black and white thing, not open to much interpretation. Yeah, it’s kind of silly, and to genuinely treat it like it’s something that matters is vaguely stupid and reflective of a certain sort of dumb hysteria which infects the very idea of morality like some terrible rotting disease but that is a completely separate – and ultimately irrelevant – argument than the one which matters, which is this: Ndamukong Suh stomped on a dude on national television with everyone watching and that will always – always – get you thrown in football jail. Everything else is just dumb noise.

Which brings me to those morality policemen disguised as the mass media, who latched onto this story like dogs on a peanut butter covered bone. Screw them. It’s not at all surprising and in its banal predictability it is sort of soul crushing and depressing, but as soon as that stomp happened and Suh ended up on the sideline pitching a fit, you could practically feel the slobber dripping from their lips. They couldn’t wait to blather on and on and on about Adolf Suh or to openly speculate about how many games Ndamukong Hitler should be suspended for, which in turn shaped the soft little minds of millions and millions of idiot fans who then took to twitter with their own incessant nattering and pretty soon the whole world had reached a consensus – Pol Pot Suh had to be suspended for two games. Why two? Who knows? Such is the frustrating vagary of public opinion. I guess we should all just be thankful that they didn’t demand that Sheriff Goodell publically lynch him.

And that brings me to the Sheriff himself, that lackwitted coward with his tin star on his chest. It’s no secret that I’m, uh, not a fan of Sheriff Goodell. I think he’s a terrible commissioner, a man who somehow can’t keep people happy in a multi-billion dollar sports league, a dude who almost threatened to derail the most popular sports league – hell, the most popular entity – in America because Jerry Jones was whispering in his ear about how he needed more gold plated toilets in his Sodom and Gomorrah of a stadium. The man is an ineffectual nitwit. But worse than that is his arbitrary and tyrannical style of rule, a freewheeling desperate sort of style which tries to please everybody and ultimately pleases nobody, sucking the dick of public opinion while somehow simultaneously ignoring it. In the end, it’s little more than anarchy. When it comes to the integrity of the league, the good Sheriff doesn’t seem to give a shit. Make Jerry Jones and his ilk happy. That’s it. That’s all he seems to care about. When it comes to everything else, he’s like some degenerate Roman Emperor, leaving the fate of his gladiators in the hands of the fickle public. If they scream loud enough, he’ll change rules on the fly. He’ll fine people for wearing the wrong shoes. He’ll sentence someone else to death for a big hit and then turn around and sell video clips of that same big hit because he knows that people are insane and that they will gibber about player safety one minute and then demand blood the next. Sheriff Goodell is a shitty commissioner because there are no rules. There is no law. There is just dumb noise and it rules everything. And since the dumb noise decreed that Ndamukong Amin deserved a two game suspension, the commissioner gave him a two game suspension. There is no reason behind it, no real justification, just a shrug of the shoulders and a “Hey, why not?” kind of decision making that is both capricious and utterly maddening. And in the end, it could end up fucking the Lions and all of us. Random obliteration. And all that’s left is to either rage against the randomness of the universe itself or to pick meaningless fights which manage to give us something tangible to scream at, lest we face the terrible and ugly truth, that depressing and soul crushing truth, which is that these are indeed strange and terrible times and sometimes these things just happen.

In the end, everyone has been debased by this stupid story. Ndamukong Suh looks like a thug to most and even those who reject that sort of simplistic reductionism see him as something akin to an emotionally unstable fool. This is a shitty, shitty thing. The fans look like fools too, either clinging to some hysterical and random notion of morality in the midst of a world built on violence or defending the equivalent of a four year old’s hissy fit. And the Sheriff and his NFL have once again displayed their ineptitude, their slavish devotion to laziness and a pimp’s greed getting in the way of ever addressing anything with any sort of common sense. And I have been debased by my own grief, both indignant and heartbroken, because one of my favorite players fucked up and fucked up in a way which was inexcusably stupid. Again, it has nothing to do with what he actually did, and everything to do with the horrible, horrible timing of it. I’m sad not because Ndamukong Suh stomped on a dude but because he stomped on a dude at the worst possible time. I’m sad because in doing so he revealed a fundamental, critical and possibly fatal flaw – in a game which is determined mainly by which dudes can best control and effectively channel their emotions, Ndamukong Suh has shown that he is either incapable or unwilling to do so. That’s why I’m sad. That’s why I’m pissed. Because for as talented as he is, what Ndamukong Suh did was what a loser does. What he did was what the Detroit Lions as a franchise have done for more than half a century now. He let himself get baited, like a dumb fish, and then he was hooked and the fisherman who got him was able to walk away laughing with his friends, while Suh flopped around on the hook and then died. That’s the reason I’m mad and that’s the only reason. Everything else is just dumb, meaningless noise.

The bottom line is this: Ndamukong Suh has been lost for two games – well, two and a half games if you count Thanksgiving and, hey, why not? – and it’s his own damn fault. He left his fate in the hands of an insane system and still he and far too many Lions fans are trying to play the martyr card. If the loss to the Packers proved one thing and one thing only, it’s this: the Lions need to grow the fuck up. This doesn’t mean that they need to become model citizens the Sheriff can be proud of. It means that they need to be in control of and responsible for their own emotions. I want them to be the ones who make the other team flip out. I want them to be the ones who mock and taunt and physically ruin the other team and throw them off of their games. On Thanksgiving, the only team that flipped out and the only team thrown off of its game was the Lions. On Thanksgiving, Ndamukong Suh wasn’t a Bad Boy, he was just a Boy. And that’s that.

The Greatest Thing Ever Made

I'm planning on writing something about this whole Ndamukong Suh hullabaloo soon, but for now, there is this:



I am in complete awe. There are just so many amazing things to talk about here, I don't even know where to begin. Feel free to break this shit down in the comments. This is the Zapruder Film for our generation. Or maybe it's closer to the Bible. I don't know.

The Unbearable

You’ll have to excuse the title of this post. For as creative a dude as I am (or at least I think I am) I’m appallingly bad at coming up with titles for these things. Part of it is, I just don’t care about the goddamn title, but for some reason this one just popped into my head before the game had even ended. It actually started as The Unbearable Shittiness of Being but then The Unbearable all by itself somehow seemed more poignant and apropos. Other contenders included Happiness is a Warm Gun and, perhaps the most eloquent of all, Shit: The Movie. Why am I discussing the titling process for my posts instead of the game? Well, shit, why would I actually want to talk about the game?

Indeed. In the wake of whatever the fuck that was, I lashed out on Twitter for a while and then decided to express my feelings as eloquently as I possibly could in the form of Nicolas Cage staggering through the streets, moaning like a fucking maniac. I suppose I could have written something last night but it was still Thanksgiving and I wasn’t feeling particularly thankful. And now that I’m sitting here and actually writing this, I’m not entirely sure where to begin.

I suppose I could start with my idiotic proclamation that I was feeling good about things and that win or lose I would be cool. In retrospect, this madness was a fool’s invitation to the football gods to strip me naked, lather me in honey and then tie me to a hill filled with mutant red ants with rabies and hatred for hearts. Still, I still hold to what I said, at least in theory, which is always the last bastion of the ruined man. Theoretically, I should have been fine, but reality understands better than I do the depth of my delusions and pathetic need to overcompensate for my terrible, terrible fears and, well . . . here we are. Had the Lions been simply blown out, run off the field from the word go, I think I could have handled it. I actually believe that. I would have sneered and probably acted the fool and then hooted my disdain for the world to hear, but there is a finality in something like that that is easier to accept than the shitstorm we were forced to endure on Thursday. Similarly, had the Lions lost in a close, thrilling game in which they fought the Packers toe to toe, I could have swallowed the enormity of my disappointment and taken modest solace in the fact that we had proved we belonged. Instead, neither thing really happened and in a weird way, the football gods decided to take the worst parts of both scenarios and roll them all into one maelstrom of misery. The Lions showed they could play with the Packers but they also showed they were miles away. They fought toe to toe and still kind of got blown out and rather than coming away feeling like the Lions are close or like they had just been beaten by an obviously superior team, I was left with the same old terrifying and soul crushing feeling which has plagued my fan soul for virtually its entire existence, and that’s that the Lions beat themselves – again – and that despite every fiber of my fan being screaming at me that things are different, the crushing and maddening realization was that on Thursday, in the biggest game of the year, no, no they were not.

And really, that’s all that probably needs to be said. I don’t like it either, and I bristle at that Same Ol’ Lions crap, but the truth is a cold, hard bitch and she is mean and she doesn’t like any of us. That much is abundantly clear. Yes, the Lions are 7-4 and yes they are a much more talented team than they have been in a long time and yes, the future still looks bright, but at the end of the game there was no escaping that cold, cruel bitch and she was whispering in our ears, cackling evilly, telling us that our Lions were still a bunch of goddamn idiots and that, in the end, they would just fuck us and themselves while the rest of the world laughed, then sighed, then laughed again and then went back to gnawing on turkey bones and the withered husks of our shattered dreams.

I am getting a little carried away here and I have careened into a darker, more hopeless realm than I meant to, and I don’t want to give the impression that I have given up or anything like that, it’s just . . . shit, man, you know? I mean, goddamn. I suppose we should have seen this coming. After all, the world is clearly not made for us, but the tragic nature of Hope is that it survives all reason and that it thrives in those corners of the human heart which are inexplicably untouched by the weight of the past and then they grow and they grow and they grow and they invade the mind and they twist around the past and smother it until all that’s left is a sort of giddy, deranged fantasy, a Kingdom of the Heart in which reality is something to be conquered rather than accepted, in which Hope rules all and the nightmares of the past are just some dumb bedtime story that we tell ourselves, empty tales which only serve to make the present feel even brighter, to make Hope seem that much more powerful.

Towards the end of last season, I yammered on repeatedly about the Symmetry of Fate, about how in retrospect everything makes a strange sort of sense and I was right. If nothing else, I was right about that. But my fatal mistake, made in my deluded glee, was in making the assumption that Fate was on our side and that this symmetry existed in order to reward us at the end of the hard, terrible road out of hell. But Fate and its symmetry do not hold to fanciful notions of what should be. Instead, Fate and its symmetry hold to the immutable laws of nature, and there is no law more immutable than this: the Lions will fuck up and they will be fucked and when this orgy of fucking occurs, we will all be left crying bitter tears and remembering just why it is that we hold our fragile hearts behind bullet proof glass most of the time.

How else do you explain the simple cruelty of allowing us to watch our team fight toe to toe – no, to stomp on the toes – of the vaunted Packers, to watch them march down the field over and over and over again only to come away with nothing? Nothing! How else do you explain that we were allowed to creep as far as we possibly could to the edge of Hope and Salvation only to have that edge crumble away while we fell into the familiar oblivion of the Abyss? The Symmetry of Fate may seem cruel, but it really isn’t. It is merely indifferent. The cruelty comes in our own capacity for self-delusion. That is our fatal flaw and that is the tragedy of our kind. Our biggest mistake was in not recognizing that the Symmetry of Fate simply exists in order to point the way to the inevitable, to set the stage for the clarity of inevitability. The Symmetry of Fate does not exist for our benefit or for our ruin but rather so that we cannot miss simple and unavoidable truths, and again, the simple unavoidable truth is that the Lions lost to the Packers because, well, they are the Lions.

You all know what I mean when I say that, and that is a terrible truth to have to face, and yet, here we are. The Lions lost because they were dumb, because they behaved like a gang of idiot fuck-ups, foolish urchins with no understanding of that hidden world that exists between talent and victory. The Packers won because they are a team that understands these things. The Lions lost because they do not. It is that simple, and the simplicity of this truth only serves to underscore just how massive it truly is. The Lions didn’t only lose, by the end of that game it felt like they were a million miles away from where they need to be, because in the end, talent just gets you an invite to the dance. But if you can’t do the dance when you get there, well . . . what’s the point? And right now, the Lions not only can’t do the dance, they don’t even seem to understand the basic steps involved in that dance. And what’s even worse than that, is that they seem to be in complete denial that this is the case. Instead, they want to claim that they can dance with anyone and then the music starts and they start spazzing out like Elaine did in the one Seinfeld episode and then they poop themselves.

I was holding it together all the way through the first half. And I think the Lions were too. They at least recognized the beat and their talent was enough to keep them from making fools out of themselves, but they still were lost when it came to the intricate steps, when it came to the simple execution that separates the real dancers from those poor fools left standing around sipping punch and occasionally bobbing their heads like fools at inappropriate times.

Look, I’m not sure how I got started on this dance metaphor. I don’t particularly like it but that’s fine because as a Lions fan I don’t particularly like anything right now. Everything that there is to like – all that talent, the swagger, the excitement that comes with wild-eyed youth – feels meaningless in the face of that one simple truth – that when it comes to the things that truly matter, to the things that make a good football team actually good, the Lions simply don’t have a fucking clue.

At the half, the Lions were only down 7-0. The defense was playing out of its head and had the Lions offense just been able to do those things that matter, those things that make all the difference in the world, they would have gone into the half with a nice lead and with everyone in America raving about them. Instead, they were down 7-0 and the only thing people could talk about was their mistakes, and then there was Nickelback, some corporate rock monstrosity that would embarrass even other corporate rock monstrosities, the sort of band a group of insurance salesmen hire to play their company picnic, standing in the middle of our field, warbling some bland, meaningless bullshit and what should have felt like a triumphant day felt more like the waiting room to hell.

And then the second half started and the Packers moved the ball. It was inevitable and we all knew it, and it just made those mistakes from the first half feel all the more painful, all the more relevant, all the more symbolic of some terrible turning, of the slow and tortured revealing of the Symmetry of that bastard Fate. But then the Lions held on 3^rd and goal and it seemed, if only for a moment, that the Lions were going to fight Fate, that they were going to stand and go to war with their own identity, their own being, simply because we had collectively had enough and the time for change was now. And then Ndamukong Suh stomped on a dude like a petulant child and then that resistance, that fight we have been fighting for so goddamn long now, collapsed and the world burned. Reality, with its horrid and cruel and cold face, rushed through and what was once true is still true and that’s that.

I love the Lions Bad Boy image. I wrote a whole piece about it. But what Ndamukong Suh did was just dumb, and worse than that it cemented his image for the rest of his career. He’s the dirty player who stomped on a Packer on national TV on Thanksgiving and that’s just the way it is. Like it or not, fair or not, that’s the way that everyone will see him. Like all the rest of us, like his team, he’s been waging a war against the inevitable, fighting against Fate, against his very nature, warring with reality in an effort to overcome, to be better than what others think, to win on his own terms, not beholden to anything but himself and his teammates and his coaches. And then in the most critical moment of all, he failed and he failed egregiously and he failed in a way that renders everything that came before, all the hard work and every inch that he and his team and we as fans have had to fight to get over the last couple of years, utterly meaningless.

I like Ndamukong Suh. He is of my tribe. But he fucked up and he fucked up at the worst possible time. That’s not an opinion. That’s just truth and as I said, Truth is a cold, hard bitch. I probably have a whole piece in me about what went down with Suh and I suspect I’ll write that at some point next week. For now, though, I kinda just want to spend the weekend not thinking about the Lions at all, which is a depressing sentiment to be sure, but a necessary and undeniable one. I suspect – no, I know – that I’ll regroup and that I’ll suck it up and plaster a manic smile on my face and start to believe in Hope once again. After all, I have already spent some time earlier today looking at what the Lions need to do to ensure a playoff berth so it’s not like I’ve abandoned all hope. But for now, I just want to acknowledge the devastation of reality, and face the simple and immutable truth which I have been fighting like a madman for the better part of the last two years, which is that right now, the Detroit Lions are, indeed, the Detroit Lions and everything that everyone believes that that means. And that sucks, man. That sucks.

Me After The Game

Thanksgiving, Fools, Possibility and Foolish Possibility

Oh, noble king, where art thou?

Jesus, it feels like the game against the Panthers just ended and here I am already writing about the Thanksgiving game. Naturally, my head still hasn’t completely cleared from Sunday, but what the hell, you’re used to having to sift through the rubble of my broken mind and so this shouldn’t pose too much of a problem. It would be more troubling if I wrote this clearheaded, sober minded with a zealous devotion to the Lords of Clarity, and . . . shit, I’m already rambling like a lunatic and this thing just got started. It might not go well. I’m just warning you.

Yeah . . . well, anyway, in years past I have taken this opportunity to stick up for Detroit (both as a city itself and as an idea, which is where the true power of Detroit lies, but don’t get me started on that shit or we’ll be here all day) and to viciously abuse all those dumb savages who lazily make fun of the Lions and talk shit and whine about us having the Thanksgiving early game every year, but fuck those people because this season the Lions have made their gibberish irrelevant with their play on the field and I don’t have to waste all of my time explaining that the Lions fucking invented football on Thanksgiving and that everyone should be giving thanks that Robocop doesn’t show up at their door to shoot them in their vile faces for their vicious slander and mean foolishness.

No, I don’t have to do all that this year, which is probably for the best because I’m in a good mood and I don’t need to be dragged into an ugly war which would probably culminate in me calling Chris Berman or someone a worthless cocksucker and gibbering about torturing Rick Reilly by shoving mashed potatoes in his anus until he wept and begged for mercy. Terrible, terrible . . . and no one needs that during this season of thanks, family, friendship and togetherness. Hell no. That shit would be unseemly.

Instead, we should focus on that which brings us together as a people, namely a disdain for those heathen sons of bitches from Green Bay. I have always disliked the Packers – naturally – and I take great joy whenever they are not doing well. The problem, of course, is that this season they are doing somewhere between well and HOLY SHIT I THINK AARON RODGERS JUST TURNED INTO A BEING OF PURE LIGHT AND ASCENDED INTO THE HEAVENS AND NOW HE’S THE NEW SUN GOD which is a problem because the Lions have to play the Packers and Aaron Rodgers twice and I don’t care how much better you’ve gotten, trying to defeat Sun Gods is a fool’s enterprise, one that will likely leave said fool gibbering and pooping himself as he’s being incinerated.

But fuck all that. Taking on a Sun God may be a fool’s game, but sometimes it is the fool who saves the rest of the world, because sometimes it is only the fool who doesn’t understand that he shouldn’t war with the gods and therefore it is the fool who is the only one who dares step to the unsteppable. (Yes, autocorrect, you vicious fucker, I typed unsteppable, not unstoppable. I know what I’m doing, you asshole.) And that’s the amusingly absurd little secret that lies at the heart of this tale – only a great fool would think that he could stop the Green Bay Packers on their march to glory and that means that only a great fool is actually capable of stopping the Packers. Therefore, in order to beat the Packers, a team has to play like they just don’t give a fuck. They have to run hard, hit harder, live until they die and then spit up blood and laugh in the face of Death when he comes to claim their souls.

Look, I’m not even entirely sure where I’m going with this. I suspect that I am kind of just making fun of both the Packers unbeatable image and the Lions image as swashbuckling jackoffs with nothing between their ears other than bloodlust and a blinking neon light that just says KILL in big capital letters. If that’s the way that people want to frame this, then that’s fine because, like I said, it’s the swashbuckling fool who ultimately kills a god. Achilles was killed by a shitty arrow shot to the heel, after all. He wasn’t killed by Hector’s brave and noble stand.

Again, I’m not quite sure what I’m blathering about. This is what happens when you realize that you need to write something even though you really haven’t had time to think about the game yet. I suppose I am saying that I am fine with the existing storyline because it is utterly meaningless and in the end, gods and fools are just men who throw footballs and try to tackle one another and in the simplicity of that truth, anything is possible.

Can the Lions beat the Packers? Absolutely. Will they? Eh, probably not. But you know what? None of that matters. Predictions, hopes, dreams, fears . . . all just meaningless noise set adrift in a universe that doesn’t give a fuck about any of it. When that ball is kicked off on Thursday the only thing that will matter is that there are two teams assembled across from one another and they alone will control their various fates. It doesn’t matter what I think and it doesn’t matter what you feel. What we want is irrelevant and the past is just a collection of semi-useful facts and the future is just a vague idea.

If you can’t tell, I am basically just free-writing this fucking thing, barely even pausing to read what it is that I just wrote before I fly on to the next stray and stupid thought and I would apologize but sometimes this is the only way to find the heart of some forgotten truth. It’s possible – hell, probable – that this will all just be meaningless drivel when I finally finish writing it but there’s also a possibility that it will end up meaning everything. The only way to tell is if I keep writing, if I keep just word-punching my way through to the end. And so it is with the Lions on Thursday. They don’t know whether their efforts will just be a dumb, meaningless cosmic joke, utterly irrelevant in the face of some giant steamroller from Green Bay destined to win everything there is to win, or whether they will somehow be rewarded and one lucky, wild joyful glorious punch will land and they will somehow end up dancing with wild, reckless joy while Aaron Rodgers and his crew stagger off the field, heads bowed in defeat. The only way to know for sure is to just keep punching, man. Just keep punching and see what happens.

After all, it could happen. I mean, why not? People forget that this Lions team completely stonewalled the Packers 7-3 towards the end of last season. Yeah, Aaron Rodgers missed half of that game but that’s because the Lions beat the shit out of him and concussed him. It doesn’t really matter that he didn’t play the second half because in the first half the Lions wouldn’t let him do a damn thing. I mean, the stark, ridiculous facts are these – the Lions beat the Packers just as the Packers were gearing up for their Super Bowl run and they did it with Drew Stanton – Drew fucking Stanton! – as their quarterback. Like I said, sometimes it takes a damn fool.

Prior to that, the Lions were a Charles Woodson non-call on obvious pass interference away from driving down the field and taking the Packers out in Green Bay behind another quarterback named Shaun Hill. The point is, is that for all of the Packers supposed greatness the last couple of seasons, the Lions sure as hell seemed to have figured them out. And yeah, you can say that the Packers took things to a whole new level this season, but hey, last time I looked, the Lions weren’t rolling into this game with either Shaun Hill or Drew Stanton at quarterback, you know? Instead, they have Matthew Stafford, Matty Fire and Ice, leading the way and for as better as the Packers seem to be this season, the Lions are even that much better than they were when they upset the Packers last year. I’m not saying this means that the Lions are definitely going to beat the Packers. That would be dumb. All I’m saying is, hey, why not? Anyone saying that the Lions definitely can’t beat the Packers is even dumber.

I suppose the whole thing hinges on the Holy Shoulder of Matty Fire and Ice (You’re goddamn right I’ll shamefully steal from my own commenters when it comes to nicknames and the like. Our relationship is symbiotic and strange and sometimes I’m the shark and sometimes I’m the Pilot Fish. This is just the way it goes and this is also why I love you all.) We need more of the Fire and less of the Ice if we’re truly going to do this thing. I think the defense actually matches up well against Rodgers and his bazillion receivers – well as much as such a thing is possible, anyway – especially since the Lions defensive line, when they’re on, are capable of catching and skinning alive a cheetah. They can – and I think they will – get enough pressure on Rodgers to disrupt the Packers passing game. (This is the part that everyone should cut and paste and use to relentlessly mock me when Rodgers throws for 400 yards and 5 touchdowns and Eric Wright is dragged away weeping and insane. Don’t worry about thanking me, I’m always happy to give people the rope with which to hang me. Hang away, haters.) If they manage to pull this off, then the game really will hinge on just how much Fire ol’ Fire and Ice brings to the magic show.

The good news is I think the Packers defense can be had, particularly over the middle of the field. If Stafford can get in a groove with Brandon Pettigrew and Tony Scheffler, then the Lions have a realistic shot of pulling this fucker out. I know, I know, people are afraid of the Packers defense. That’s because they are an opportunistic, big play defense. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have weaknesses because they do and as long as Matthew Stafford doesn’t gift wrap any footballs for the holiday season as an offering to Charles Woodson and as long as Jeff Backus doesn’t poop himself, the Lions can do this, man. They can fucking do this.

Shit, look at me, talking myself into this damn thing. In doing so, I’m probably only setting myself up for disaster, but the truth is, is that I’m in a good place right now as a fan. Talking myself into this is just in my nature. I have to do it. But if it doesn’t play out the way I want it to, I’m not going to freak out or anything either. There is a weird lack of pressure heading into this game. At least from my perspective, which admittedly is utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but hey, this damn blog is all about our warped and stupid perspectives and so I have to talk about it, you know? I feel good and I’ll feel good pretty much no matter what happens against the Packers. I have a weird easy, peaceful feeling which enveloped me at some point in the Panthers game. I’m not entirely sure why that is but my expectations feel like they are more closely aligned with reality than at any other point this season. Shit, I talked about a lot of this in the postgame piece following the Panthers game and so I won’t belabor the point here but I think it still bears mentioning, you know.

In fact, I’m gonna let my dude UpHere sum it up in an e-mail that he sent me the other day:

“Looking forward to game more than usual as a reasonably stress free episode. Not expecting to win, so if they play them tight, or win, I'll be ducky. Get hammered 70-13, I'll be "see, that's what a real Super Bowl team looks like, so quit patting yourselves on the back and get serious". All good either way.”

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, obviously I won’t be happy if the Lions get squashed like bugs in this one, but I think I’ve reached a place in my mind where I realize that this is not the end of the road and that there is still a ways to go on our journey towards the Promised Land. That means that there will be stumbles and ridiculous pratfalls that will leave us both weeping and laughing but I’ve also realized – and I think this is the most important thing here – that this is okay. We can stumble and it doesn’t mean the end of the world. We can fall and it doesn’t mean that we will fall forever. The Panthers game finally slammed that home to me. I’m not sure why it did, but . . . well, it did. It’s possible, of course, that I am just protecting myself from the pain of a likely defeat but I don’t think so. I am far too pathologically honest with myself to be deluded like that. At least I think so. Of course, if I was deluding myself I wouldn’t know it anyway because that is the nature of delusion thus making this whole part of the discussion worthless, but what the hell, you know how I can get.

Anyway, never mind all that dumb bullshit. It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that for the first time in a long time, I am going into this Thanksgiving Day game with a smile on my face, excited about both the future and the now. I’m not fighting petty little slap-battles about the appropriateness of the Lions having this game every year. I’m just looking forward to watching my Lions take the field against the Packers and on that field, anything and everything feels possible, and that’s a good thing, I think. That’s a good thing.

Predicted Final Score: Packers 27, Lions 24 (Yeah, yeah, call me a coward and a pessimist, but you see, the thing is, if reality matched my predictions up to this point, the Lions would be 10-0 so hopefully you’ll forgive this one foray into the land of the reasonable.)

Also . . . a quick note. I just got turned onto a new Lions blog called Honolulu Bromothymol and from just perusing the site and reading a couple of posts, it’s clear to me that Payne is a dude after my own heart. He writes with the same sort of ease and freedom which I try to write with here. His perspective is unique because, well, it is uniquely his own and if you don’t mind, please check it out. I don’t do this a lot but, well, the dude sent me an e-mail, he asked me for my thoughts and for whatever help I could give him and, hey, sometimes all you’ve got to do is ask. After all, I am just a dude.