Oh God

We are all Prometheus. Also, you'd be surprised at how hard it is to find a picture where it doesn't look like the bird is blowing him.

I don’t know.  I just don’t know.

I know you want more from me than that but I’m broken.  I dared to dream and have been viciously smacked back down by the universe and now I am naked and bleeding, wandering in the desert with no water under a hell sun, suffering from delusions and conversing with a talking cartoon rabbit who I’m expecting to grow fangs any second from now, jump me and start gnawing at my liver while I try to cry tears that won’t come because even my tear ducts have abandoned me and left me to wither and desiccate in this fan hell where yesterday and tomorrow look an awful lot alike and today the sand just reaches up and chokes me while the devil laughs.

Right.  Welcome back, friends, to . . . to . . . sigh.  Even when things were at their worst we could look to the future, see that things would change, that they would have to change, and in that change we could dare to dream of something, anything, even if we weren’t sure what it was.  But now?  Now, I don’t know what to believe in.  I don’t know what to hope for.  Do I hope that somehow, someway, this team miraculously figures out how to actually play football like grown ass men and not like a bunch of simpering little boys?  I guess but then I might as well hope for my elderly neighbor to somehow morph into Jessica Alba with beer spouts for nipples.

I’m sure there at least isolated pockets that are raggedly and doggedly hanging onto their delusions, insisting that “Well, if only this wouldn’t have happened then . . .” but no.  Just no.  When it’s always something, that’s everything.  That’s football.  There will always be things that go wrong and you can’t make excuses for them, can’t say that somehow they don’t matter because they won’t happen again because even if they don’t, something else will.  I know that sounds suspiciously like some weird Yogi Berra like gibberish but I don’t give a fuck.  You’re lucky I’m even vaguely coherent right now and not just mashing the keyboard wildly and moaning into some computerized voice translation program that would just give up and commit suicide two paragraphs into this thing.

Right about now I imagine Danny Crossman is being escorted out of Ford Field with all his shit in a box while Stan Kwan watches from the box he’s been living in across the street.  Jim Schwartz is probably hearing voices echoing in his office and the ghost of Wayne Fontes is probably whispering breathy come-ons into his ear while he contemplates hiding under his desk and weeping.  Gunther Cunningham is probably thinking “I’m too old for this shit” and the defense is probably wondering how in the hell the Lions can lose a game in which it doesn’t allow a touchdown but surprise, motherfuckers!  This is what happens when you dance with the Failure Demons.

The Lions lost and they lost in a heinous way that ripped open the dreams we had all been clinging too, eviscerated the delusions and exposed this team for everything that it truly is in stark, naked clarity.  Truth was exploded like a supernova, and even the blind can see it now and they are all weeping tears that they can’t see but that they can feel and oh Jesus, it never ends.  It never ends.

I’m not sure if there is one obvious thing that is wrong here and that’s a big part of the problem.  There are a million little things wrong and when that’s the case it’s almost impossible to fix.  A big deal has been made the last few season about Jim Schwartz changing the culture of the Lions and he did.  They are no longer the downtrodden, the talent-deprived, the lesser.  But in the process, a new culture was created, a culture of rampant stupidity that at first seemed like something of a quaint Boys Will Be Boys thing that we thought they would grow out of into something that threatened to become a real problem, popping up at horrible times, costing us games last year, and then into this, this festering turd which has become the center of our team.  Our team’s identity is synonymous with stupidity because it was never checked, never controlled.  Everyone just stood by and watched helplessly while it became the new culture.  It is not the old one but in some ways it is more despicable, a reckless pissing away of talent that most teams would kill for, a wastrel degenerate that will never change no matter how much we love them, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves that one day they will grow out of it.  Because now, we look up and our rambunctious child is a goddamn adult and he just got arrested again for something stupid, like vagrancy or mopery, and he just called, half-drunk and begged us to come bail his ass out of jail again and . . . AAAAAAARRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

This asshole just isn’t going to change.  I just told UpHere that it feels kind of like watching a junkie family member, one who’s been sober – or at least tried to be – for a couple of years, shoot up again.  Instead of being angry, I just feel beaten.  All I can do is sigh, shake my head, disgusted and hope he doesn’t steal some more of my stuff, or in this case, my heart, to finance his fool ways. 

Where do we go from here?  I don’t know.  I just don’t know.  This team is still the team from last year and it can get hot and maybe it will put together a run but that run will blow up and then we will all die and right now it feels like the best – the very best – that we can hope for, both for now and for the foreseeable future, is that this team becomes sorta like the Wayne Fontes era Lions, too stupid to truly live but too goddamn talented to ever be completely counted out.  There is a certain excitement in that I suppose but there is not satisfaction.  No.  No, there is not.

I had a friend tell me that this team has peaked and the thought seemed ridiculous and made me immeasurably sad at the same time because there is a good chance that it is true, at least for this team with these coaches and these players.  They went 9-0 over a stretch beginning in 2010 and lasting into 2011.  Before and after that stretch they have been just another Lions team, and if that 9-0 stretch is all I get then goddammit, that’s just not fair.  That is cruel, in a way that nobody but Lions fans can understand.  To be given such a small taste only to have it ripped away again and replaced with sand and shit in our mouths is just . . . it’s just fuckin’ mean. 

I don’t want to say that they’ve peaked, that they can still move forward with this but it’s awfully hard to make that argument right now.  This is a team that has already seemed to regress, to fold in on itself and now the weight of it all, of the past, of the failure, of the expectations, of our own dreams as they fade, fade, fade into a panicked oblivion, is pressing down on us all and it’s kind of hard to breathe down here and oh Jesus, oh God, is this it?  Is this really all we get? 

The stark, naked horror of this is enough to make even the most stalwart among us go mad.  I don’t know what to do with myself as a fan.  I don’t know what to believe in, what to hope for.  There is a part of me right now that just feels . . . gone.  As if all there is left to do is detach, to just watch from some ghostly realm while the Failure Demons eat what’s left of me as a fan.  I just sort of sneered as Matthew Stafford stumbled, looking like a clumsy donkey, and then was sacked to end the game today and the worst part of it all was that it felt so familiar, that sneering sort of disgust and the sickening horror of that is that the familiarity is one that I vowed I would never feel again as a fan and yet here I am, sneering, disgusted and what happened?  Oh Lord, what happened?

Last week, the great Lions wave in my heart crested and broke somewhere in Tennessee, and now all there is left to do is try, somehow, not to drown as the wave collapses back on me.  That is, I fear, all that I have left to look forward to for a while as a fan, just trying to survive, just trying to make sure that my bloated fan corpse won’t show up on some distant beach, beaten beyond recognition, lungs filled with water, unrecognizable, just another forgotten body, something that used to be a person, that used to have feelings and hopes and dreams.

This has become maudlin and vaguely ridiculous but I don’t care.  Fuck you.  I am broken and there are no instructions on how to put myself back together again.  There are just pieces and parts and there are vultures picking at them in this, the desert of the damned and Oh God.  Oh God.

Donkeys, Hope and the Female Orgasm: the 2012 Detroit Lions

 Yes Billy, the world is a goddamn vampire.

It’s been a hard week, a time of panicked gibberish and wild-eyed hyperventilation, and although a part of me wants to talk about the walls of the zoo crumbling and the animals running amok, tearing the throats out of the wicked and the innocent with equal zeal, the truth is that things have actually been surprisingly subdued.  That isn’t to say that there haven’t been the requisite hoots and grunts and shit flinging that you would expect following such a heinous debacle, but the truth is that most Lions fans, I think, just feel kinda depressed right now.

But that week is over, and now we have to get back to the business of being good, hopeful fans.  I have lined up in front of the slapping machine and let it do its nasty work in the hopes that somehow, some way, my brain would be dislodged from its existential fan funk and that I would find new joy and meaning in Mudville, but the truth is, is that I am just sitting here not sure what to write because for the first time in a long time, I have no idea what to think, what to believe, and in the face of all that Hope feels more like a tragedy than a saving grace.  And yet hope I will because, really, what other choice is there?

The truth is that, even when things were at their worst I have always had hope.  The Lions spent most of my life tripping over themselves and pooping their pants and then sobbing because the mean kids wouldn’t stop picking on them and I still never completely gave up on the idea that they could win. (Which, you’ll note is different than “would win.”)  Even when they were down by two touchdowns late in the fourth and were trying one of those furious rallies that would come up just short (Don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about.  They looked an awful lot like the Shaun Hill led desperation tour as it rolled through Tennessee last week, minus the Hail Mary anyway.)  I would concoct outlandish scenarios in my head in which the Lions somehow triumphed and then that triumph would lead to a string of unlikely victories that would end with our dudes delirious and playing with trophies that no one ever thought would belong to them.  Okay, so maybe I never let myself go that far – and with good reason given the last half century of soul murder – but still, within the bounds of a given game, I always secretly felt like the Lions had a chance.  Maybe hoped they had a chance is a better phrase, I don’t know, but what I do know is that a part of me never gave up and kept things going for that day, that improbable day, when it would all be better.

And then that day came – or at least it seemed like it - and it felt good, but now that day, or hell maybe just my delusion that that day ever came in the first place, has ended, its dreams lost along with the last dying gleams of a setting sun, and here I am, unable to believe but still hopeful, in love with a flawed and degenerate team, a team too stupid to live yet too goddamn talented to die and in this purgatory, I ride with them because I don’t know how not to.

This team is not good.  It is talented but being talented and being good are not the same thing.  It does have fatal weaknesses in the secondary but even if it didn’t I would have a hard time believing in them anymore because it has become clear that they have the collective intellect and discipline of a gang of half-retarded three year olds with ADD and no parents.  It was hilariously apt that they lost the game in Tennessee ultimately because they tried to outsmart the other team and then ended up outsmarting themselves.  Seriously, counting on this team to win because of smarts and discipline was akin to trying to get a donkey to recite Hamlet while giving a dinner party for the Queen.  In the end, the donkey just did what he always does – he brayed like the ass he is, kicked a few of the guests in the head, ate some garbage and then shit all over the place while everyone shook their heads in disgust.  You don’t even wanna know what he did to the Queen.  Fuckin’ scandalous.

By now, it should be obvious that these assholes lack that certain something – call it football intelligence, call it discipline, call it – gasp! – good coaching, call it whatever you want – that allows them to do all those little things that are necessary to being a good team.  They just don’t have “it”, whatever it is, and if they haven’t developed it by now, if they haven’t figured it out, well . . . I don’t know what to tell you but that donkey is not going to turn into a goddamn Arabian Race Horse, you know?  He is what he is.

Forget stupid horse metaphors though.  Here is the truth, given to you straight, without any bullshit getting in the way:  I don’t know whether the Lions will beat the Vikings 48-3 or whether they will lose 48-3.  That’s it.  That’s all that matters.  I simply don’t know anymore.  I still believe that the Lions are capable of beating any team in the league, so long as they get some breaks and Matthew Stafford and Calvin Johnson decide to go into God mode.  But I also believe that they can lose to any team in the league.  Hell, we just saw them do exactly that.  They’re unpredictable and while some people will tell you that unpredictable is fun, it is not what I wanted.  It is not what we wanted.  People will tell you to recalibrate your expectations, to just enjoy the ride, but we did that once, in a decade known as the 1990’s when we were basically the Jacksonville Jaguars except with one transcendent player.  Well, here we are again and I don’t want that.  I want more than that.  If you have been reading my stuff for a while then you know that, you understand it. 

There are people saying that this week’s game will tell us a lot about this team.  That’s fine, except the only problem is that last week’s game told me everything I need to know already.  It was the exclamation point on a creeping sense of dread that has been growing somewhere inside of me since sometime last season.  Last year’s team was flawed, deeply flawed, but we overlooked all of that because it was so much fun, because it seemed like the real thing, felt enough like it that we could say okay, this is it.  We were like a woman who’s never had an orgasm trying to convince herself that she just got off.

But we didn’t, and I think somewhere deep down we knew it.  It wasn’t right.  There were too many little things, details that just felt . . . off.  We blamed everything from the refs to the league to Matt Millen’s fetid old stench, the whole time telling ourselves that this was just a young team, a growing team, a team that would get their shit together eventually and when it did, look out.  But then this season started and it’s been more of the same and more of the same and more of the same, only worse, and it has become too obvious, obvious in that way that we just can’t ignore that, sure, we felt something and it was nice and it was kinda different but we still haven’t had that orgasm that all our friends talk about and Jesus, I just hope we’re not frigid.

Okay, this has gotten weird, with talk of donkeys and orgasms, but the truth is, is that I don’t know what to say about this week’s game because I just don’t know what’s going to happen.  Anything could go down.  The Great Willie Young might ride Christian Ponder like a horse out of the stadium, whipping him the whole time while the crowd roars its approval or Ndamukong Suh might get thrown out of the game after taking off his own jersey and choking the ref with it.  I don’t know and neither do you.  This is a team of wildly talented individuals that has no concept of how to play together.  It is an explosive team, a team that will leave you speechless with its transcendent beauty and then a minute later have you shaking your head in disgust because the offensive linemen don’t understand the shit that you get taught the first day of camp.  It is a team capable of doing things that no other team in the league can do and it’s a team that will do shit that even Pee-Wee teams don’t do. 

We were promised classical music while we all drank expensive champagne and had our feet rubbed by supermodels with hands made of pillows and love but what we got was Ted Nugent playing Stranglehold while we drank Natty Light and had our feet stepped on every once in a while by fat men wearing steel toed boots, and hey, I like to get grimy just as much as the next guy but I wanted gourmet food for once not hot dogs, you know?

This is just descending into dumb gibberish and I would apologize but I don’t want to.  I don’t want to say I’m sorry for how I feel, for having my heart broken, for having my dreams ripped away from me.  I’m not finished, I’m not sitting up in the bleachers heckling these dudes and telling everyone they’re stupid to care.  I’m not predicting that they’ll go 2-14 or even 6-10.  I simply don’t know.  I don’t believe anything and in that absence I’m just a dude, sitting in those bleachers, eyes wide, hands clenched beside him and I’m hoping because I have no idea how not to and I will cheer my heart out, scream ‘til I’m hoarse if somehow, someway, this thing turns in the right direction.  But I refuse to lie to myself, refuse to lie to all of you.  I’m not going to put on some fake plastic smile because that is just what I’m supposed to do and make a bunch of grandiose claims that I don’t really believe.  I want this to work, I really do, but I just don’t know anymore.  I don’t think this team is any good right now and I’m not sure if they have it within them to change any of that.  I really don’t.

This is not about schemes or play-calling or any of that shit.  This isn’t about drafting or personnel decisions or anything else that people like to bitch about.  This is about the dudes on that field, their heads and their hearts and this is about the dudes teaching them to play like men, not rambunctious little boys.  I believe in this team’s talent.  I believe in its ability to do great things.  I just don’t believe in anything else. 

You want to know what will happen against the Vikings?  Well, so do I.  All we can do is watch and wait.  And hope.  Because, once again, that’s all we have left.

I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness

Home, home again.

I’ve been thinking a lot about something my good pal (and yours) UpHere said in the comments following Apocalypto: the football game.  He compared our situation as fans to that of trailer park trash that wins the lottery and thinks things have changed only to find out that, in the end, we are who we always were and AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH COBRAS

Ahem.  Anyway, he’s right.  I haven’t said this in a while because, hey, things were going good and there was no need to bring up such ugly things but being a Lions fan has always felt an awful lot like being in an abusive relationship.  You get your ass kicked over and over again and yet you can’t leave because things are gonna change and he really loves you and nobody understands our love.  Meanwhile, we creep through life, hiding our bruises and our scars, both ashamed and terrified, not sure what the hell we are doing or where we are going but feeling utterly powerless to do anything about it.

Right, but then those numbers hit, Jim Schwartz showed up with a big ass check and a smile and the Lions hugged us back, told us they loved us and promised us that everything would be okay.  And for a while, they were.  Life isn’t easy, no matter how bright the future looks and so we struggled to trust both ourselves and our newly reformed man.  But the Lions quit drinking, cleaned up their act and started treating us right and month after month things got better.  It wasn’t easy but we learned to trust him at least a little and pretty soon we were moving from the trailer to a deluxe apartment in the sky, or at least a rented house with central air.

But that lottery money kept coming in and we did what idiots do when given a shitload of money and bought ourselves a bunch of cool toys, big ass powerboats that we would rev whenever we flew by the old couples’ place along the river because we’re assholes, fast cars, Ndamukong Suhs, shotguns that shot candy and unicorn wishes and all sorts of awesome shit.  Our man had cleaned up his act and even started taking care of the baby so we could go out with our friends and have a good time every now and then.

Soon, we moved into a brand new condo down by the water and even though we still didn’t totally fit in, and even though the squares kept staring at us because we swore and spit and would get into fights every now and then at the beer tents during carnivals, we had that lotto money and our man was still keeping his shit together and so we just rolled with it.  If other people couldn’t handle who we were then fuck them.

But then our man started coming with us to the bar.  At first he just drank non-alcoholic beer and would drive us home and it seemed like he was going to keep it together forever.  But he wasn’t quite himself and so we told him it was okay if he had a beer every now and then.  So he did and still, everything was cool.  He didn’t drive us home anymore but that was cool.  We were living like kings and queens and tomorrow promised nothing but more dough rolling in and good times, man, good times.

Then he started getting in fights.  Not with us, but with other drunks.  He’d say he was trying to defend our honor and that it wasn’t his fault, that he was being set-up and goaded into these brawls and we believed him because hey, that’s our man and fuck everyone else.  Even when the cops started hauling him in every weekend, we just blamed them, told everyone that they just had it out for him because of past problems that he had and wondered why everyone couldn’t just forgive him like we did.  Of course, we never noticed – or perhaps we did and just chose to look the other way – that he was getting drunk every night now and he even left the baby at the supermarket that one time, just sitting in the cart.

But he never laid a hand on us and things were good.  The condo was beautiful, the lake was warm and filled with beautiful people and goddammit this was just the way life was supposed to be.  This was the American Dream, promised to us all our lives, all our parents’ lives, all our grandparents’ lives, and we were finally getting what we deserved, what they deserved but could never have.  Yes, maybe there was a place in this world for us after all.  So what if our man drinks every now and then?  We’re rich and only getting richer and even though he makes an ass out of himself sometimes people don’t see the way he looks at us at night, when it’s just the two of us.  He’s not perfect and even though we’re secretly a little disappointed that he started drinking too much again and don’t want him to get in any more fights, we love him and everything else is just so much noise.

But then we took that trip down to New Orleans.  He fell in with some degenerates down there and never came back to the hotel room on the last night.  We cried and worried that he might have gotten in trouble with the cops again since they just won’t leave him alone no matter where he goes, which can’t be his fault, uh-uh, no way.  So we grabbed the baby and went looking for him, only to find him doing heroin down by the banks of the Mississippi.  We started crying because this was just too much but he promised that this was just a one-time thing and that when we got home everything would be alright.  We wiped the tears away and said okay, we believed him.  He asked to hold the baby and we weren’t sure but he cried and told us that he needed to feel the love of his family if he was going to pull it together.  So we handed him the baby but he dropped the baby and the baby rolled into the river.  Thankfully we were able to fish the little guy out but he might have brain damage now.

We came back home and he told us over and over again how sorry he was, and even though it was hard we accepted his apology and tried to be a family again.  After all, we loved him and maybe hitting rock bottom like that again was what he needed to clean himself up again.  And he did – or at least it looked like it.  He bought some more shiny toys and even told one of his old friends, a meth dealer named Berry, to get the fuck out of our lives.  We could trust him.  He swore!  And then came the incident at the bar.  He told us that he wasn’t going to drink and we were so proud of him.  He just wanted to come and hang out and give us a ride home.  Awww, isn’t that sweet?  But then he disappeared for a half hour.  We went looking for him and found him coming in a back door.  His hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat and his sleeves were rolled up.  We quickly tried checking for track marks but he hid his arms and said he had to go to the bathroom.  When he came back out his sleeves were rolled down and he looked better.  He smiled at us, kissed us on the forehead and told us that everything would be okay and we believed him.  He drove us home and we made love that night and believed that everything would be okay.

The next week we found him passed out on the couch and when we woke him we could smell liquor on his breath.  He sobbed, apologized and told us that he had had a hard day, and that he wasn’t perfect.  We just had to accept that sometimes he was gonna slip and we said okay, both because we loved him and because hey, that sounded reasonable.  After all, he was only human.  Of course, we had friends that told us we were nuts, that reminded us of all the times he had let us down in the past, but that just made us angry and we told them to back off, to mind their own business because everyone deserves a second chance, especially the ones we love and besides, he hadn’t hit us in years.  They reminded us of the baby but we said that was all just a big mistake and to stay out of our lives if they couldn’t be supportive.

And then we went to his family reunion down in Tennessee.  It was a fun drive down and we laughed and played music, sang along and talked about all our plans for the future.  But as soon as we pulled into his grandparent’s farm, he looked at us, tears in his eyes and told us that we were getting kicked out of the condo.  We were shocked and we asked him why and he told us that there had been some bullshit mix-up at the bank and that he would take care of everything when we got home.  It hit us hard and we asked him why he didn’t tell us before but he just looked away and mumbled something about not wanting to let us down. 

He seemed distant at the reunion, sorta sad and broken down, in a way that seemed terrifyingly familiar, but we couldn’t quite put our finger on it.  But then we saw him hanging around with his cousin Stan, who we forbid him from seeing after we won the lottery because he was a no good dirtbag who had once burned down our trailer.  They kept looking at us and there was something weird in his eyes.  We lost sight of him for a while after that and we tried to have a good time but his family was getting rowdy and it almost seemed like they resented us.  His grandma cornered us in the kitchen, breath stinking of whiskey and lectured us about pretending to be something we weren’t, told us not to go thinkin’ we were better than we were and then she took the baby and disappeared. 

A couple of hours later, he came back, high as a kite, drunk, with that mean look in his eye that we thought he’d left behind forever.  We started crying and told him not to do this, that he didn’t have to be like Stan anymore, and he told us to shut up, that we ruined his life and stole all his lotto money, money that he could have used to help Stan start that custom detailing business, and then slapped us, hard, across the mouth.  We couldn’t believe it and it didn’t seem like he could either.  He apologized and told us it wouldn’t happen again but goddammit, we‘ve heard that shit before.

The ride home was hellish.  Neither one of us spoke much and he wouldn’t look us in the eye.  He was all sweaty again and we knew that he had returned to his old ways.  The baby wouldn’t stop crying and he got angry and threatened to leave it at a rest stop and even said he wished the brat had just drowned in the river, said that it would have saved us a lot of time and money, money that he didn’t have.  We asked him about the lotto money and he just got angry, said there was no more goddamn lotto money and then slapped us again. 

We got home, only to find an eviction notice on the condo’s front door.  He just shook his head, looked at us once, gave us the saddest smile we’ve ever seen and said “What did you expect?”  What indeed? 

And now all that’s left is to head back to the trailer park, to hope that one day he quits drinking again and that hopefully, in the meantime, he won’t smack us around too much.  I guess we could leave but where would we go?  This is our life, he is our man and we love him.  And hey, maybe all those toys we bought will keep us happy for a while.  You just don't understand.  We love him.

Truth and an Inch

Anyone who wants to relive that game between the Lions and the Titans is a fucking masochist, an inhuman monster who probably eats puppies for breakfast and sodomizes kittens in the backseat of a rusted out old foreign shitbox because he hates Detroit before finally punching a baby in the face and then laughing about it.  It’s awful and I hate it and I don’t want to have to relive it.  This is because despite all evidence to the contrary I am a human man with feelings and sometime yesterday afternoon those feelings overwhelmed me, broke my heart into a million pieces and left me a gibbering wreck of a sports fan.  Oh Lord, why???  How long???  How long must we endure???

Right.  If you’re looking to me to make sense of this all, to say some magic words that will make it all better, or at least make it not seem so apocalyptically bad, then you have been smoking some hellacious faerie dust and I demand you give me some, because here’s the reality: that game suuuuuucked and it sucked in a way that caused lofty and childish dreams to die in a huge goddamn dumpster fire.  It sucked in a way that transcended one simple loss.  And most of all, it sucked in a way that felt all too familiar, all too sickeningly obvious.  That game was hell, and the worst part about it was that when we opened our eyes and looked at our surroundings, we realized that we had been there many, many times before. 

So which is the delusion?  Was everything else, the belief in tomorrow, the beautiful progress . . . was it all just some seductive mirage hiding out in the middle of the desert of the damned?  Or was yesterday the mirage, a terrible fever dream that consumed us in a moment of weakness? 

I suspect that is the question every Lions fan is desperately trying to answer today, but I’ve got to tell you, the answer isn’t quite so simple.  It’s not very nice and it won’t make you happy.  The answer is that progress is hard, and the even darker answer is that sometimes progress falters, things break down and all you can is try to pick your beaten corpse off the hard, cracked ground one more time and try, try to find something, anything, to believe in before you shuffle forward once again.

I don’t believe in this team right now.  Call me a heretic, call me a faithless monster, I don’t care.  The Lions were fucking terrible yesterday.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is just trying to rationalize his own desperate need to believe, like a man being held hostage with a gun to his head reading a note to his loved ones over the phone, assuring them that everything is alright and that he actually disappeared to go on vacation in Hawaii.

The difficult thing – the seductive thing – about all of this, is that there are ways to finesse truth so that rationalization is possible.  The Lions offense racked up a lot of yardage, Matthew Stafford’s numbers looked good, Mikel LeShoure showed up – finally – and energized the run game.  The defense didn’t give up quite as many points as it seemed thanks to all the special teams trickery and weird shit that went down, and la di da, it was just one of those things you guys, no need to worry.

Only, no, there is every reason to worry.  The Lions offense racked up a lot of yardage but a big chunk of that came in the last minute of regulation plus overtime when Shaun Hill had to pass for nearly 200 yards just to keep the Lions from dying in the abyss.  That sort of manic flailing came on the heels of a performance from Stafford that way okay.  It wasn’t great.  He didn’t look all that sharp and he just looked . . . off.  Still.  I know that is kind of a copout but I was born as a man with eyes to see and those eyes saw what they saw.  Hey guys, the offense scored 41 points and put up over 500 yards!  And yet, that offense couldn’t score a single touchdown in the first half, trailed going into the 4^th quarter against a Tennessee defense that had been abused in its first two games of the year and then racked up 14 points in the last desperate minute against a defense that just wanted to get the fuck out of there.  The offense is not the problem here – not really anyway – and I think it will be fine, but let’s not pretend that they went out there and kicked ass all over the place either, okay?  The truth, as it always does, lies somewhere in that terrifying middle, and we have to find it if we are going to survive without going completely fucking nuts as a fanbase. (Too late?)  What we need to do is admit that there is something off about the offense – which a whole different post and frankly I don’t feel like breaking into that shit like goddamn Professor Neil right now – but that, in the end, it should still be okay.  After all, we have seen all this before from the offense.  It will be alright.  I hope.

What I have a real problem with is people acting like the defense was somehow good, pointing out that the Lions gave up two special teams touchdowns and one ridiculous one on offense that saw Brandon Pettigrew become afflicted with an inexplicable dose of the Shares.  They’ll say that the defense only gave up 23 points (in 5 quarters!) and that hey, that’s pretty good.  Only, no, it’s not.  It’s mildly adequate, and that’s before you even break that shit down.  It was much, much worse than adequate. The Titans were forced to punt the ball once.  ONE GODDAMN TIME.  That’s not good, y’all.  Meanwhile, Jack Locker did pretty much whatever he wanted, and frankly the Lions defense was lucky it didn’t give up five or six touchdowns all by itself.  There was never a point in that game where I felt like the Lions defense was controlling the action, never a moment when I felt like they were shutting the Titans down.  At all.  By the end of the game, I had absolutely no faith in the Lions defense to shut down the Titans.  None.  That’s terrible enough all on its own.  What makes it go from HEY THIS IS MAKING ME FEEL KIND OF QUEASY to OH GOD THE BEES NOT THE BEEEEEEEEES is that, again, the Lions were playing the Titans.  Go back and read my preview post.  Go do it.  Right now.  And then tell me how in the hell I am supposed to rationalize any of this?  This defense was fucking terrible and what’s worse, I don’t really have any faith in it going forward.

Are there mitigating factors?  Sure.  Louis Delmas is still out and John Wendling probably would struggle in the Lingerie Bowl, but that big bad strength of the defense, the mighty defensive line that we hear so much about it, did absolutely nothing.  Again.  How many times do we need to see them come up with the Big Empty before we realize that there is something seriously, seriously wrong there?  It’s not that they’re not talented.  They are.  We’ve seen them do it before, it’s just that too often they just . . . don’t.  They’re too easily neutralized, and again, this is all stuff that should be talked about in a separate post.  There is just too much shit happening right now, too much that needs to be discussed, to contain it all in one place, or even on one blog.  The whole goddamn Lions internet world will beat this shit to death for the rest of the season, bludgeoning it into the dust and then pounding the shit out of the dust for a while until it loses its goddamn mind and then start doing that weird crying/laughing thing, hyperventilating and then spending all winter and spring locked in a padded cell, talking about butterflies while a team of doctors tries to figure out how to release it back into society without it wandering in traffic or eating its own fingers and toes.  The only thing I can say right now, dudes and lady dudes, as that this shit sucks and I don’t like it.  No, not one bit.

There are issues on offense and on defense, problems to be dissected and argued about until I hate everyone including myself, but here’s the simple truth, and it’s one that transcends all statistics, all arguments and every absurd breakdown and rationalization of this game: the Lions are a stupid football team.  They are heinously dumb and that is not going to change anytime soon.

The most seductive ingredient in the rationalization salad is that tantalizing little sprig that says that “Hey man, most of those were freak plays, weird shit that is unlikely to happen again.  At least not that way.”  And hey, that’s fine.  You’re right.  That exact sequence of plays is unlikely to ever happen again.  The Lions won’t be beat in that exact way again.  But here’s the problem: we say that same shit every time they lose.  It doesn’t really matter exactly what happened so much as it does why.  Those plays all happened because the Lions are a stupid team, prone to dumb mistakes.  They are a team that is easily taken advantage of.  Trick plays work against this team because it does not put itself in a position mentally to handle them.  There seems to be this rallying cry that HEY THE LIONS PLAYED PRETTY WELL FOR 90% OF THE GAME AND ONLY SCREWED UP FOR 10% SO IT’S NOT THAT BAD.  That is a tragically misguided statement, and for two reasons – one, that 10% is what makes the difference in virtually every single game, especially in the NFL where the talent levels are so equalized, and two, that 10% was not some fluke.  That 10% is unfortunately hardwired into the Lions DNA.  It just is – how many times do we need to see ridiculous shit like this happen to argue any differently ? - and anyone arguing that it’s not, that it is all just some great big fluke, hasn’t been paying attention for the last couple of years.

But wait, this was a team that went 10-6 last year so what in the hell are you talking about Neil?  Yeah, this was a team that went 10-6, and in that season a big chunk of the games felt exactly like yesterday’s game felt, only the Lions managed to pull them out in the end.  Don’t tell me I’m wrong either.  You know I’m right.  And you know I’m right when I say that the next day we’d all force one of those ridiculous manic grins on our face, like the ones in the Black Hole Sun video, and proclaim that everything was alright.  And we did because none of us wanted to be the turd in the punch bowl.  None of us wanted to be the ones who complained when things were going “well.”  Because “well” has always been a relative term for us, and as long as we were actually coming out the other side, still alive and with a W next to our name, it would be almost outrageous to complain given everything that we have gone through.

I understand all that.  I do.  I understood it even while it was happening.  I never really talked about it because, shit, none of us were ready to deal with that shit and it would have felt ugly and mean to do it in the midst of our rebirth, our resurrection.  People didn’t just want to believe last year, they needed to believe, and I include myself in that.  Go back and look at everything I have written so far this season and you can see that truth living inside of it.

What happened against the Titans was not an isolated bout with lunacy.  The signs have been there all along for anyone with eyes to see.  The problem was that nobody wanted to see that shit.  We all just wanted to take the train to Happy Town and then get blowjobs from the mayor while he showered us with candy and laughter.

There is so much to talk about, so much to process, that I am almost overwhelmed.  I want to talk about 100 different things, all terrible.  Actually, check that, I don’t want to talk about any of it.  I feel like I need to talk about it.  There’s that ugly word again: need.  It’s what has driven us ever since the final gun went off on that terrible Trail of Tears known as 0-16.  And it has driven us in different ways.  Many of us hoped and dreamed and made love to all things positive because we needed to, because the only way out of the dark places in our hearts was forward, forward, always forward.  Others, meanwhile, refused to believe in anything and they blindly criticized and made SAME OLD LIONS jokes and shook their heads in disgust and said Mayhew was the same as Millen and every ugly, awful and stupid thing you could think about because they needed to, because to believe in hope, if for only a moment, was to open up their hearts to the horrifying reality of everything that had gone on for half a century.  It’s simply easier for some people to accept misery and death than to dream of something different.  Dreams are dangerous and some weak, fragile people can only survive by denying their very existence.

The truth is, the terrible, terrible truth, is that we were all wrong, every single one of us.  Blindly believing, moving forward because we’re too scared to face what lies behind, is merely the first step in a tragedy.  It ignores everything other than that desperate need to keep pressing on, and in that manic, almost feral impulse to move, Truth gets obliterated and with it so does Reason and without Truth or Reason we are just witless fools, wandering towards a light in the distance, and in that wandering all meaning is lost, the light is fetishized and worshipped and all disbelievers are ritually sacrificed on the altar of its greed.  We become idiot zealots and there is nothing good about that.

But at least all the rationalizing going on today comes from a place of hope, misguided though it may be, and while that hope doesn’t feel pure, and feels more like an overreaction to its bastard brother Fear, what is even worse today, what feels ugly and mean and cruel and stupid and hamfisted, is all the disbelievers chortling with sadistic glee, using what happened yesterday to validate every single dumb thing they have said about the Lions over the past few years.  These are the assholes who are running around today saying “See, I told you Mayhew wasn’t any good” and all that shit.  To those people I say this: fuck you.  You lost your right to a voice the moment you refused to even make the journey.  You lost your right to speak of such things the moment you turned away from your own dreams and embraced the darkness because it was all you knew.  You cowards.  You imbecilic weaklings.  I have no time for your shit and I never will.  Just shut the fuck up and make love in the darkness to your own cowardice, your own insufferable weakness.  Fear is your god and I have no time for that shit.

Now that we’ve gotten all that out of the way, let’s talk some more about the game.  Rather, I want to talk about how manic that goddamn game made me feel.  Again, read my preview post.  I was so confident coming into this game.  Even within that piece I realized that I was taking a terrible chance, almost taunting the football gods with my hubris, and yet I believed.  Why?  Because the Titans were that bad. 

Even after the game started to swing in, uh, let’s call it an uncomfortable direction, I still believed in the ultimate truth of that post.  I still believed that the Lions would win and win in a way that would make it obvious that they were the better team.  I was already unhappy – I won’t sugarcoat that – and I knew I would spend today bitching about some things, but my overall belief structure remained unchanged.  Mostly, anyway.

By halftime, I was bitching on Twitter, and the stage was set for a “Well, we won but it shouldn’t have been that hard” type of thing that I figured would be met with people telling me to shut up and just be happy that we won, but I was okay with that.  You see, I’ve been slowly coming to terms with Truth, with Reality, for all the reasons I have talked about, because I think it’s the better way and frankly, I was kind of ashamed of a couple of things I wrote last season because they weren’t honest, because they didn’t pay fealty to Truth, which is what I have always tried to do here.  Instead they pandered to my fellow fans, told people – including myself – what they wanted to hear, what they needed to hear in their own manic journey away from the darkness and towards the light, and in doing do I abandoned reason and began to worship light, forgetting that Truth is found in the blending of Light and Dark.  Truth is found in dusk, in twilight, in the places where both the light shines and the shadows creep.  Truth is, quite simply, Truth, and it pays no fealty to anything other than itself.

So I was ready to start facing Truth down even though I knew it would lose me some readers.  Hell, I had already started to do that earlier this season.  But still, I never believed that the Lions would actually lose this game.  But then they did, and they lost it in a way that was so quintessentially LIONS (and you know exactly what I mean by that) that it was impossible to do anything but face down the stark, naked horrible Truth, which is that, on a fundamental level, that level that belies talent and explosiveness and everything else, that this is simply not a very good football team. 

There.  There you have it.  Is it a team that can make the playoffs?  Sure.  It can catch the right breaks, just like it did last season, and it can overwhelm teams with the sheer force of its talent occasionally, and hey, why not?  But deep in my heart I have known for a while that this was not a good football team.  You can see it in my ravings leading up to and following the game against the 49ers.  But it took something like this for me to reach down into that deepest part of my heart for me to face it, to accept it as a thing that is true. 

It was fitting that the Lions ultimately lost this game by one inch because that feels like where they are as a team, as a franchise.  They are one inch away.  They feel so close, and yet in the end, none of that matters because when that clock reads zero that one inch might as well be one mile.  And it was especially fitting that the Lions lost because of a fucked up snap, because of a mental error, because someone, somewhere, didn’t understand what was going on.  That one play summed up the Lions better than anything I could write about them.  It was an echo of the past and a stark signal post in this vast desert telling us that we had not reached where we wanted to go yet.  Good teams don’t lose like that.  At least not regularly.  They are once in a season flukes, weird things that just have to be set aside and not overexamined.  But these things happen regularly to the Lions, these little mistakes, these mental fuckups, and we all have to face the terrible and maddening Truth, which is that, right now anyway, this is a part of who the Lions are and until that changes, they simply cannot be the football team we need them to be, the team we wish them to be, the team we tell ourselves and all our friends that they are. 

They are Ndamukong Suh, with all the promise and the talent in the world, but not the results to back it up, capable of domination but also capable of being mentally whipped on the football field.  They are maddeningly inconsistent, a team without a rudder, without any sense of stability.  They just roar forward and see what happens.  Sometimes they cause havoc and sometimes they get taken out of the play by a simple wham block.  Sometimes they are a force and sometimes they are just . . . missing.

Everyone is going to talk about the end of that game, that wild, ridiculous, exciting end and hey, I was right there with you.  I laughed like a mental patient.  But I don’t want that.  I don’t want wild and ridiculous and exciting.  I just want a good football team, and right now the Lions are not that team.  Can they be?  Maybe.  I don’t know.  I can’t lie to you and tell you everything will be alright because I honestly don’t know.  Matthew Stafford is hurt or maybe he’s fine and who the fuck knows?  The Lions might wake up and start wrecking fools or they might keep listlessly falling all over themselves.  A light might turn on and the Lions might stop putting themselves in these ridiculous positions but hey, probably not.  I don’t know.

There comes a point when everyone needs to realize that these things are not okay, that they are not just fluky little things that won’t happen again.  Saying “Well, you know the Lions will come back and win in the end anyway” is not okay.  In fact, it’s fucking bullshit.  It’s ridiculous that that has to be what we rely upon, that that has to be what we believe in to get by as fans.  Did the Lions come back?  They sure did.  And they lost anyway.  And you wanna know why?  Because when you put yourself in that position early in the game you can’t afford to make any mistakes at the end.  Good teams don’t do that shit.  At least not over and over and over again.  I know I am kinda repeating myself but I want this to be hammered into your head.

I am not willing to accept this, to rationalize this, to say “Well, good enough.”  Because no, no it’s not.  This is not the team we wanted them to be, the team we told ourselves that they were.  This is a team that is still finding its way and if it’s not careful, this could end up being their way and then we’ll have to start all over again because once you reach a certain point, it’s impossible to change who you are, at least not without changing what you are and that means terrible things like coaching changes, player changes and everything else we’ve had to suffer through for the last half century plus of pain.  There is still time for this to break the right way but anyone who tells you they are certain that it will is lying, both to you and to themselves right now.  The only thing I’m certain of, the only thing I know that is True, is that yesterday’s game sucked and I hated it and I kinda hated the team that played it.  And that’s no fun but there you go.  Truth.