Finding a Way

The best part about being a Lions fan is that each win feels like a genuine joy.  I mean, we know enough to appreciate each and every win, to savor it, because we are intimately familiar with the alternative (and by that I mean we served as the concubines to a parade of Failure Demons for more than half a century) and whenever the Lions win, however the Lions win, my heart smiles.  The worst part about being a Lions fan is, well . . . read that parenthetical again.

Right.  And that’s the thing.  For as good as each win feels, it’s hard to let my heart soar completely away into the stars because I know I’ll just wake up tomorrow, chained to the bed by one of those Failure Demons and . . . awful, awful. 

This season has been a colossal disappointment.  I don’t think I’m out of line saying that.  In order for the Lions to make the playoffs (and please, let’s not concoct scenarios in which the Lions missing the playoffs this year is somehow an acceptable fate) they would have to probably finish 7-2, which would put them at 10 wins and at least give them a shot at a Wild Card.  Given what I have seen this season, the odds of that happening are somewhere between slim and get the fuck outta here with that nonsense.  Which means that the Lions are almost definitely staying home for the playoffs this season which means that this season will be a failure. 

I know that some people will try to massage that truth, to find some twisted sense of accomplishment in the lesser, but that is an embarrassing attitude and I won’t have any of it.  I didn’t come this far with this team to start telling lies to my own heart just to try to obfuscate a reality that is too tough for me to face.  That would be cowardly.  And furthermore, that attitude is profoundly defeatist.  It accepts mediocrity not out of some fucked up sense of loyalty but out of the fear of The Other, and in this case The Other is Hope, or rather what happens when Hope gets trampled into dust which I guess is just a convoluted way of saying The Fear.  No, missing the playoffs is not good enough and goddammit anyone who says that it is, who says that we should somehow make peace with futility, who says that we should kneel before the Failure Demons and acknowledge their claim to our souls, is part of the problem, part of an attitude, a culture, that has kept us oppressed for way too damn long.

But I am getting carried away.  After all, the Lions beat the Seahawks, Matthew Stafford returned from his walkabout, and to bray about such dreadful, depressing things like an obnoxious jackass is unseemly.  I mean hey, it’s certainly possible that the Lions can get hot, go on an epic Fontesian run and sneak into the playoffs.  Except probably not, and even if they do, that is not the future we were promised, and it’s not the future we deserve.  I do not want to settle for that sort of schizophrenic ugly madness again.  I don’t want to ride a rollercoaster of ridiculousness into a first round playoff obliteration or 6-10 every other season.  I don’t want to have to constantly worry that that goddamn rollercoaster is going to run off its rickety tracks week after week, and I don’t want to have to scrape myself up from the pavement far below after it crashes, drag myself back into one of the carts and signal for the carnie to crank that fucker up and take me right back to the top again.  Sure, there might be some thrills along the way but goddammit people are dead, can’t you hear them screaming?

I’m sorry.  I can’t seem to shake this negative bent and I am sure that it is off-putting and I wouldn’t blame you if you called me a cocksucker or something and spit in my face.  Well, I would take it kind of personally and I might spit back in yours but that’s only because I am a strict Newtonian and believe in the supremacy of physics. 

Anyway, the problem is this: for as good as the Lions winning makes me feel, it is hard to let my heart truly soar because I am a battered woman and just because my man just came home with a diamond necklace doesn’t mean that all is forgotten, you know?  At some point I know he’s going to get violently drunk and then his belt is going to come off and . . . the horror, the horror . . . and then Matthew Stafford will throw an interception or Gosder Cherilus will try to fight a fan or something and these things should not be accepted, not in a civilized society. 

But they will be and we’ll hear all about how nothing needs to change and if we just believe in the talent – if we just love him hard enough – then everything will eventually get better.  But to hell with all that, I have my bruises and goddammit this is bullshit.  This is bullshit.

Okay, okay, okay . . . be happy, the Lions won.  I am.  The door to my heart remains propped open instead of being slammed shut and that’s a good thing.  It is.  Sure, at this point I resemble something akin to a zombie, just lurching forward, not entirely sure why, driven by some inane impulse that I can neither control nor explain, but that’s all I’ve got left as a fan right now and so I guess crazy zombie lurching it is.  Perhaps if I can nourish myself on the brains of the wicked  - you know, your common Vikings, Packers, Bears, etc. – then I can become a real live boy again and then maybe we can talk about Hope and Good Things and New Worlds and all that absurd bullshit I allowed myself to get carried away with last year.

I have explained myself and where I am coming from so many times now that I feel as if I have nothing left to say.  The only thing I can do is hope that you understand and respect that and follow me anyway as I zombie strut into the future, bleak and bombed-out as I fear it may be at this point.  I am not going to be a pleasant companion but that is only because I speak the language of Truths and refuse to make love to Delusion.

Today, the Truth is that the Lions won, and perhaps for the first time all season they deserved to win.  That is kind of an incredible statement to make, what, 8 weeks into the season – Jesus! – and yet here I am making it.  It was the best game the Lions played all year and it came against a quality opponent – or qualityish anyway, let’s not pretend the Seahawks are some juggernaut, although they have shut down opposing quarterbacks all season and Snake Stafford sliced them the fuck up so maybe I should be giving them a little more credit and also this digression and this run on sentence are getting out of hand so pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, he is drunk on his own weirdness again – and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t encouraged.  This was the team that I believed in, the team that I hitched my battered fan soul to and dared to try to ride into the sky.  They weren’t perfect but I never demanded perfection.  Matthew Stafford was The Truth, The Snake, The Fighter Pilot, The Franchise, the whatever the fuck else you want to say, for the first time this season, the defense played well enough (perhaps damning with faint praise, but fuck it we cannot afford to be delusional here), particularly the run defense, outside of one UGGGGGHHHHH NOOOOOOOO run in the first half anyway, and the team’s parade of boneheaded fuck-ups was kept to a tolerable minimum.  In short, it was good enough and good enough is, well, good enough for now. 

The trick, though, is to turn Good Enough into Good Enough Every Week and if they can do that, then, well then we’ll see, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves and start blowing each other and passing out candy canes and blowing candy canes just yet, okay?  This season has been reduced to a weekly fight to simply rise up, to struggle to our feet and dare to walk, not towards anything, not even away from anything anymore, but simply to move because stagnation is the enemy of life and I do not just want to lay here and let death and the Failure Demons take me again.  The Future is hazy and for right now it might as well not even exist.  We just have to try to get up, to walk, every week and hope that somehow, someway, we find our way back to the path that leads to the Promised Land.  Today we shuffled forward, moved again, lived in defiance of the world below, and next week we will try to do the same thing.  It is not what we wanted, not what we dared to dream, but it isn’t nothing either and in that simple Truth, I will try to find my way, just like the Lions did today.

Tips on Surviving the Season

How to Make Banana Beer

Contents [hide] 1 Technical Brief 1.1 Raw material preparation 1.2 Processing 1.3 Packaging and storage 1.4 References and further reading 1.5 References and further reading 1.6 Useful addresses 1.7 Categories

Technical Brief

Banana beer is made from bananas, mixed with a cereal flour (often sorghum flour) and fermented to an orange, alcoholic beverage. It is sweet and slightly hazy with a shelf life of several days under correct storage conditions. There are many variations in how the beer is made. For instance, Urwaga banana beer in Kenya is made from bananas and sorghum or millet and Lubisi is made from bananas and sorghum.

Raw material preparation

Ripe bananas (Musa spp.) are selected. In the rainy season unripe bananas can be left to finish ripening laid on a hurdle over the fire where the cooking is done. During the dry season bananas can be ripened by making a pit in the ground, covering the sides of the pit with green banana leaves, packing the bananas in to the pit and then covering them with banana leaves and earth. On one side of the pit a little ditch should be dug for a fire so that warmth and smoke can enter the pit. This takes about six days. The bananas should then be peeled. If the peels cannot be removed by hand then the bananas are not sufficiently ripe.

Processing

The first step is the preparation of the banana juice. The extraction of a high yield of banana juice without excessive browning or contamination by spoilage micro-organisms and proper filtration to produce a clear product is of great importance. Grass can be used to squeeze the banana so that only a clear juice is obtained. The residue will remain in the grass.
One volume of water should be added to every three volumes of banana juice. This makes the total soluble solids low enough for the yeast to act. Cereals are ground and roasted and added to improve the colour and flavour of the final product. The mixture is placed in a container, which is covered in polythene to ferment for 18 to 24 hours. The raw materials are not sterilised by boiling and therefore provide an excellent substrate for microbial growth. It is essential that proper hygienic procedures are followed and that all equipment is thoroughly sterilised to prevent contaminating bacteria from competing with the yeast and producing acid instead of alcohol. This can be done by cleaning with boiling water or with chlorine solution. Care is necessary to wash the equipment free of residual chlorine, as this would interfere with the actions of the yeast. Strict personal hygiene is also essential. For many traditional fermented products, the microorganisms responsible for the fermentation are unknown to scientists. However, there has been research to identify the micro-organisms involved in banana beer production. The main micro-organism is Saccharomyces cerevisiae which is the same organism that is involved in the production of grape wine. However, many other microorganisms were identified. These varied according to the region of production. After fermentation the product is filtered through cotton cloth.
Flow diagram

Raw materials	Ripe bananas
Peel	Peel by hand
Remove residue	Use grass to knead or squeeze out the juice. The residue will remain in the grass.
Mix with clean water	The water: banana juice ratio should be 1:3
Mix with cereal flour	Mix with ground and roasted cereals to local taste. For sorghum the ratio should be 1:12
Ferment	In plastic container. Leave to ferment for 18 to 24 hours.
Filter	Through cotton cloth
Pack	In one-litre plastic bottles with cork stoppers or equivalent
Store

Packaging and storage

Packaging is usually only required to keep the product for its relatively short shelf life. Clean glass or plastic bottles should be used. The product should be kept in a cool place away from direct sunlight.

References and further reading

Grape Wine, Practical Action Technical Brief
Banana Chips, Practical Action Technical Brief
Traditional Foods: Processing for Profit, Edited by Pete Fellows, ITDG Publications 1997
Useful organisations and contacts
C.T.A
P.O. Box 380
6700 AJ Wageningen
The Netherlands
Telephone: +31 (0) 317 467100
Fax: +31 317 460 067

Website: http://www.agricta.org/
Useful internet sites
Horticulture and Landscape Architecture, Perdue University
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/morton/banana.html 










Oh, and the Lions might beat the Seahawks.  Or they might not.  Either way, let's all just get drunk. 

Horses Did Neigh, and Dying Men Did Groan, and Ghosts Did Shriek and Squeal About the Streets

Fuck this.

When it's always something, that's everything.

The end.

Here We Go Again

I don't know what in the fuck this is.  All I know is I GISed (that's Google Image Searched, not a weird spelling of "jizzed" you perverts) "Lion fighting a bear", and this is just what popped up.  When I saw it, I almost made it the new blog logo.

I hate the Bears.

Really, I could just write that and then “fuck them” and leave it at that but I have never been a man of few words, as you well know and so what the hell, let’s talk, shall we?

Anyway, yeah, I hate the Bears.  I have hated them ever since I was a little kid and started paying attention to this stupid sport.  I hated their asshole head coach, Mike Ditka, I hated Neal Anderson and his heretically spelled first name (I am slightly too young to remember Walter Payton’s effeminate ass, although if he were playing today I’d probably be making poorly conceived AIDS jokes and offending everybody so perhaps that is for the best.), I hated their defense, I hated their fans, their stadium, and even their colors.  Okay, that’s not true, I kinda liked their colors but everything else about them was offensive to me?  Why?  I don’t know, I was a little boy.  Probably because I was born into the sad life of a Lions fan and they were the kings of shit mountain back in those days and the natural rebel in me has always hated authority and those in power. 

And I have hated them ever since.  I have hated how every time we take the depressing trip to Soldier Field that something terrible and unforgivable seems to happen.  I hated that they hired Rod Marinelli and gave him new life rather than letting him sink to the bowels of the ocean where he would then be swallowed up by the earth and sucked down into hell where he would be cornholed for all eternity by those weird freaky demons from Hellraiser, which is what he deserved after leading us down the Trail of Unnumbered Tears.  And then I learned to hate them more after they were the recipients of a mighty gift from Sheriff Goodell and his minion, the Minister of Propaganda, the lizard-tongued Pereira.  I hated them as they celebrated a game which was rightfully ours, a game which was supposed to be the springboard into a brave new world, one in which Matthew Stafford and Jim Schwartz would lead us to glory but instead served as yet another black day in the hearts of our collective consciousness, with Stafford lying broken on the field and St. Calvin staring incredulously to the heavens, asking why his father had forsaken him.  Hate, hate, hate.

So yes, I really, really want the Lions to win this game.  Not because it fits into some grand vision of the future or because it matters in the early (way too fucking early) playoff picture, but because fuck the Bears.  Really, is there a more noble reason?

Indeed.  Passions of the heart know nothing of records or playoff seeds or any bigger picture other than themselves.  Beating the Bears is a beautiful thing for its own reasons and should not be tainted by anything else.  This is not about a future that may or may not actually exist but about sating some wild lust that hides in our fan hearts and cackles with glee whenever Jay Cutler gets concussed and Bears fans descend into their own land of sadness.  This is about sticking the knife in their ugly hearts and twisting, twisting, twisting until we are bloody up to our wrists and for some reason we are erect and . . . too far?  Fine.

Before the season started there was a lot of heated talk about who was going to be better, the Lions or the Bears and so far . . . well, let’s not discuss such things, okay?  The larger point is that for the last couple of years these two teams have been warring with one another for the same spot.  Only one can hold it, only one can claim that spot and everything that goes with it.  It is a spot that defines both the winner and the loser.  The winner gets to be a playoff team, a team on the rise, a team that belongs to the future and every wild dream that lives within it.  The loser is nothing.

It really couldn’t be simpler than that.  This is a game that is about identity.  It was last year, it was before this season started and right now, no matter how much the Lions have struggled this year, it still is.  I know, I know, that kind of goes against my whole “This game matters for its own reasons and not for anything else” mumbo jumbo I shat out of my word hole earlier but what the hell, I can’t help myself, you know?  Because here’s the thing – if the Lions do win this game, on Monday Night, on the road, in a place where they never seem to win and where the reigning football gods obviously hate them, then suddenly, after all the noise, all the heartache, all the OH GOD WHAT IS HAPPENING PLEASE SOMEBODY FETCH MY ETHER RAG caterwauling of the first third of the season, the Lions will be 3-3, and they will be right in the middle of the NFC North race again.  And even though my soul is critically damaged and lies wounded, bleeding and dying on a battlefield of my dreams, it still crawls towards something – call it a wish, call it an oasis, call it a fool’s hope, call it anything you want, but it still crawls towards it because goddammit, dying is just so 2008.

The question, of course, is can the Lions actually pull this off?  Well, as I’ve said a number of times already, I think this is a team that can win every game it plays and it can lose every game it plays.  I think I have made my peace with that – for now anyway and so I will do what I did last week, shrug, and say the hell if I know.  The Bears are 4-1, but they’re not a particularly impressive 4-1.  Their offensive line is still a piece of shit, resembling something that the French would have built to keep the Germans out in the 1930s.  None of the teams they have beaten are actually any good, although to be fair they did just beat the shit out of the Jaguars, 41-3 so . . . I don’t know?

Yeah, that is lame as hell, but I really don’t know.  All of their wins have been by double digits but all of them have been against shit teams.  The Packers terrorized them though and I think if the Lions can get pressure, which they did last week and which they memorably did last season when they ganged up on Jay Cutler and abused him like [insert whatever horrible and tasteless simile lies in your deranged hearts], then I think we have a good shot here. 

So . . . the question then becomes can the Lions actually get that pressure?  If you would have asked me that a week ago, I would have shaken my magic eight-ball (and by that I mean I would have done a bunch of cocaine in the bathroom and then tried to wrestle an actual bear) and told you “Outlook not so fuckin’ good.”  But then they went into Philadelphia and murder death killed Michael Vick so hey sure, why not?  The key might actually be Louis Delmas.  I think it’s clear now, both from what went down at the end of last season, and what’s happened so far this season, that his presence in the lineup changes the defense from the inside out.  When he’s in there, the defense looks completely different.  It’s crazy.  The line gets consistent pressure – the sort which was the heart of our collective dream world of the soul – and I’m not entirely sure why.  I would say that it’s because he shores things up well enough on the back-end coverage to force the QB to hold the ball a half-second longer but honestly, Michael Vick was getting the ball out of his hand at ludicrous speed, it’s just that the line was breaking through like, well, like the Germans slamdancing their way through Belgium on the way to Gay Paree.  (Yes, I know it’s “Gay Paris” but for stylistic reasons I chose Paree instead of Paris.  I am not an illiterate fool.)  The increased pressure seemed to me to be the line simply playing worldbeaters again and not the effect of some otherworldly pass coverage.  So . . . what in the hell would Delmas have to do with that?  Fuck if I know.  Voodoo magic?  That’s what I’m going with.  Louis Delmas’ voodoo magic is the reason.

Offensively, we just have to hope that Matthew Stafford rediscovers his inner Snake, slits the throat of the Aboriginal spirit which is keeping him imprisoned in his walkabout, ceremonially burns his power bracelet or whatever weird shit we’re telling ourselves in a desperate attempt to convince our own enfeebled minds that everything is gonna be alright.  If that fighter pilot smile shows up then we’ll know we’re in business.  And if that happens AND the Delmas Voodoo Murder Gang hits the field then the Lions are gonna be pretty goddamn tough to beat.

This is a game I am allowing myself to get invested in on two levels – one, the Eagles game allowed me to crack open the door to my wounded heart one more time and a win here would cause me to kick it open and start babbling about Hope and Faith again like a fuckin’ televangelist on angel dust, and two, I just really, really want to beat these fuckin’ guys, okay?

There is every chance that on Tuesday morning I will be snorting laundry detergent and giving myself a Drano enema while listening to old country music and slow dancing with a depressed St. Bernard in my living room before my neighbors call the cops and they come and have me put down both for my own sake and society’s, but maybe, just maybe Monday Night will be like a certain Monday Night last year, and maybe, just maybe, this whole thing has been cooked up by the football gods to remind me of that hoary old phrase I wore the fuck out of the last year and a half or so – the ol’ Symmetry of Fate.  I don’t know.  I am just babbling now, allowing myself to get caught up in the manic frenzy of that deluded part of my soul that refuses to give in.  Oh Lord, I don’t know how It happened but I am feeling the music and my soul is starting to shimmy and shake and it’s rising off of the field of the dead and dying and now it’s dancing towards a light and maybe that light is just the light of heaven and I am already dead but I don’t care because maybe it’s actually the light of my dreams and here we go again.  Here we go again.

Lions . . . win?  Sure, why not?

One Game At A Time

 Fuck you, Rocky, you are the avatar of a doomed people.

I know, I know, the whole one game at a time thing is clichéd as hell and if there’s anything we hate here at ACLB it’s hoary old clichés, those miserable old whores.  But really, what else can you say about this team at this point?  I have spent the first month or so of the season playing a goddamn funeral dirge and screaming “bring out your dead!” so often that even I am completely sick of me and even before the game started I decided enough was enough and I wasn’t just going to spend all my time stroking my lyre (not a euphemism I swear) and moaning plaintiff odes to melancholy and death for the gods to hear.  Fuck all that.  It is unbecoming.

The thing is, is that I don’t consider myself an optimist nor a pessimist.  Instead, I like to think of myself as an honest man, someone who is capable of being optimistic when the times, strange and terrible as they are, call for it, and pessimistic when those strange and terrible times become extra strange and terrible and start eating our souls with teeth made from infected AIDS needles.  It’s hard to be honest with yourself, honest about any situation, without your own idiot hopes and dreams messing with the narrative one way or another.  In fact, it’s inhuman, but goddammit, nobody ever accused me of being a normal human and so, well, here we are.

And where we are is the football equivalent of a support group, a room full of deranged addicts chanting one day at a time, one day at a time.  Indeed.  In my preview piece, after gibbering like Morrissey on heroin for over 2,000 words, I did the only thing I could think of and I literally begged for a win.  And hey, guess what?  I got one.  We got one.

It is just one, but what the hell, we cannot afford to be complacent as a tribe.  We must take what we can get and thank the gods for their mercy.  I am not a man who can afford to dream big as a fan right now, and in the absence of any grand vision of heaven, I am left with two options – one, to bitch and moan, an option which I have up until now embraced like a goddamn whiny junkie, or two, to just settle down, not expect anything one way or the other and to just take this shit as it comes.  I have mourned for a month now, wept over the grave of my dreams and beat my wife (just kidding, I don’t have a wife – I actually beat my neighbor’s wife.  He lets me because he’s a pervert who gets off on such things.  What’s weird is that he’s 85 years old and dying and she is at least in her mid-70’s and won’t stop crying about her broken hips and . . . no Neil, don’t do that, people will think you are strange . . .) but now the time has come where even my most indulgent and understanding friends will think me obnoxious if I don’t move on and so I’m opening door number two, behind which anything and everything is possible, both good and bad and what the hell, let’s just see what happens.

This was a weird game, a fun game, a miserable game, a beastly game and a frustrating game all rolled up into one.  The Lions played like a pack of crazed dogs on defense, the Sheriff’s posse spent the whole game throwing flags at them and arresting them for crimes against humanity, Matthew Stafford spent most of the game lost in a morphine induced coma before someone drove an adrenaline needle into his heart and he channeled his inner Snake, and everything both good and bad about this Lions team presented itself at one point or another, causing a singularity which threatened to consume my soul at least half a dozen times before I escaped on the other side in some new universe that would have seemed strange if it wasn’t the same one I woke up in half a dozen times last year.  And in the end, my heart just sort of floats through space in a rocket ship made of tinfoil and wishes and the oxygen is getting low but what the hell, it is still alive, I am still alive and so are my Detroit Lions.  For this week anyway.

And I guess that’s all that matters.  Winning covers up a lot of shit, as we know so well from last season’s schizophrenic fool’s march to paradise, and had the Lions lost this game in Overtime, I’d probably be here reciting scripture, you know the really weird, dark shit from Revelations with snakes and rivers of blood and all that wild shit which makes me think John the Revelator was probably an acid freak and was caught in the middle of a bad trip when his deadline came up and his editors bitched him out and made him write whatever weird shit he could wrap his addled mind around.  But the Lions won and so all the annoying shit just feels sort of like a stale fart lingering in the other room and other people can deal with that foul nonsense because I’ve left that room and now I’m in a happy place where everyone is smiling and happy – at least until next week when that guy next to me will shit his pants or something and we’ll all be forced to flee for further sanctuary.

I’m sorry, this has gotten vaguely weird but then again so is this Lions season.  There is no prevailing narrative, nothing to cling to, to expound upon in some greater search for truth.  There is only today and today the Lions won and so, hey, I’m happy.  Sure, why not?

I spent big chunks of the first half wondering if Matthew Stafford was being abused by Gun or whoever in the showers during the week, or if he was sweating out a paternity suit or something, but for the most part I was just happy – happier than I have been at any other point during this season – because the Lions were not only hitting Michael Vick on every single damn play – I’m not even exaggerating, it was astounding to watch, they even tackled him on a handoff – they were fucking crippling him.  It was a beautiful thing, like something out of a football movie where some shitball team plays a group of prisoners or something and those prisoners show up and just start shanking people and murdering the quarterback while everyone watching cringes and the guards all stand on the sidelines with shotguns.  (Note: I originally typed “shitguns” instead of “shotguns” which made me giggle like a little girl and also in all honesty is a way cooler and funnier visual.)  If I were a decent human being I would say that I actually feared for Michael Vick’s health but I am not and so fuck him.  That shit was like manna for my starving soul.

The second half, well . . . for big chunks of the second half I just stared vacantly off into space and questioned things like man’s inhumanity to man and the nature of god in a post-theistic society, and also whether or not I could be arrested for walking into the video store and pissing on every Rocky movie ever made before slapping the clerk and then openly sobbing, but then Snake Stafford showed up – I’m guessing someone ran down to the sideline and told him either it wasn’t his fault that Gun had “issues” or that the results of the paternity test came back negative – and the Lions did what they do every other goddamn game and somehow forced the game to overtime.  I did almost reach through the screen like a fucking poltergeist and eat whoever the fuck was managing the clock for the Lions during the last minute of regulation and may have threatened to punch not just one baby but all the world’s babies when they were forced to settle for a field goal from the one fucking yard line, but that paints me in a bad light and so let’s say that those things never happened and move on.  Deal?  Deal.

And then in overtime, the Lions defensive line ate Michael Vick’s soul, pooped it out and then rubbed it in the face of all those degenerate Philly assholes and then the Lions kicked the game winning field goal while those animals all booed and probably beat their wives and children and then themselves, the entire stadium dissolving into one giant cesspool of self-loathing while Jim Schwartz and I both pumped our fists in unison.  And with that, happy days are here again!  At least for the next week.  But what the hell, my name is Neil and I am an addict and I understand I must take these things one game at a time.  It is all any of us can do and for now, that is good enough.  It has to be.