Hi.
That's as good a place as any to start, I suppose. You might know me, you might not. If you're a long-suffering Lions fan who does know who I am, then it's probably from my previous incarnation at Armchair Linebacker, where I said a bunch of wild and crazy shit that seemed to both move people and speak to their wounded idiot fan hearts. If you don't know me, well . . . the best way I can sum this whole thing up is that while I was at Armchair Linebacker, I basically became the Lions blogger version of Hard Harry from Pump Up the Volume, which is a completely ridiculous movie that nonetheless is much beloved and seems vaguely important. It's about a disaffected teenager played by Christian Slater, who sits at a microphone and says all manner of vile and offensive shit and somehow finds himself the voice of an entire legion of fuck-ups, reprobates and the otherwise put-upon youth of America. Jesus, I sound kind of full of myself here, don't I?
Wait, wait, before you strain something rolling your eyes, let me clear this up. I don't think I'm the voice of some sort of disenfranchised subgroup of Lions fans. I'm barely fit to represent a band of crippled werewolves with brains rotted by syphilis. The similarity comes from this: I say shit other people won't say. I say the shit a lot of people are thinking but just can't quite seem to put in words. Or at least that is my reputation. I am not suffering from delusions of grandeur here, that is actually a thing many, many people have said to me. But like Hard Harry, I am probably too fucked up and too weird and I offend too many people to really stand as a figure of mainstream respect and adoration. Most Lions fans don't have a fucking clue who I am and the majority of those who do probably think I'm a weird fuck-up and they're probably not wrong. I am crass and the metaphorical FCC of public opinion will chase me down and have me locked away just like the real FCC did to Hard Harry at the end of Pump Up the Volume. (Uh . . . spoiler alert.)
But fuck all that, I'm not here to grovel at anyone's feet. I am here to say the shit nobody else will say. I am here to say the shit that needs to be said. I am here to Talk Hard.
I've decided to lead each post with Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows" just like Hard Harry did each of his shows in the movie. Why? Well first of all, I am embarrassingly unoriginal and shockingly corny, and second, and most importantly, because goddammit it fits.
After all, just listen to the lyrics. Is there anything that better sums up the plight of the Lions fan these days than that?
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded.
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died.
Indeed.
Look, before you pop the cap on the ol' drain cleaner smoothie, let me explain. I realize that is impossibly bleak and awful and oh god there is a hyena chewing out my insides but here's the thing: we dared to dream and dream big in the primordial ooze of a new world following the supernova like explosion of the old world we call 0-16 (shiver) and for a while things seemed like they might work out. The air was blue, the grass was green and I was working the happy metaphor crank like a compulsive masturbator. But then the Lions went 4-12 last year, Matthew Stafford suffered a weird season long malaise which casts some doubt on whether or not he's got the mental skillz to match up with his considerable physical skillz, Ndamukong Suh became Hannibal Lecter in the eyes of the rest of the world and was seen starring in those whacky Taiwanese news recreations of famous train wrecks (look, anytime you're keeping company with Tiger Woods' Boner Follies and Charlie Sheen, you know things have gotten entirely too fucked up), Titus Young went crazy and tried to fight everybody from Louis Delmas to the cops to his own sanity, Titus was subsequently thrown off the team and out of polite society, the Lions drafted a 25 year old hipster from Africa who's barely played football in his life to be their new star pass rusher on defense - which is only the most important position in Gunther Cunningham's defensive scheme - Jason Hanson committed seppuku rather than suffer one more year of this madness, people started wearing paper bags on their heads again and a giant Matt Millen head appears in my dreams every couple of days and taunts me for a while before its giant maw opens and Rod Marinelli staggers out naked, wearing only a diaper and starts screaming at me about pad level before I wake up in a cold sweat and realize that things have taken a very, very bad turn.
Everybody knows the good guys lost.
Okay, so now what? That's just the thing. We all know this is doomed because that is humanity's default state. Doomed. The good guys lose, the war gets lost and in the end we are all just violent savages, hateful wretches who should probably get blown out of a volcano into the waiting arms of an angry sun god. But the fragile beauty of humanity lies in its ability to move forward in the face of doom, to always strive for something, anything better than the savagery which will undo us before the end. We are a people forever in search of a utopia that does not exist, a people determined to create a sort of heaven on earth because that's the only way to deal with the madness of reality. Man is not defined by his failure but by his reaction to it. Man is a doomed creature who refuses to acknowledge that he is doomed. Man is bent and beaten but he is not broken. Man smiles a bloody smile and gets on with the business of living.
And so it is with Lions fans. We know the score. We're not dumb. Mildly delusional, sure, but we're not stupid. We get it. The dice are loaded. We're fucked. But the restless and indefatigable nature of our souls keeps us going, keeps us moving forward. Towards what, we have no idea, but that's the tragic beauty of humanity - we always leave room for the beauty of possibility, for the idea that salvation might lie just over that next hill - or in this case, the next game or the next season - no matter how unlikely it may seem. We are a people who have always gazed at the stars at night, wondered what was up there, what was out there, not because we feared it, but because we believed innately in the possibility of the unknown. We gaze into the night because we yearn for that twinkle, for that glimmer of Hope.
We believe in Calvin Johnson. He is our North Star, guiding us, keeping us true and safe. We see possibility sprinkled in the constellations we have named Suh or Ansah, Fairley and Young. We see a comet named Bush, streaking through the sky and we wish upon it, close our eyes and dream of a better world.
Okay, even I can admit this is getting too fucking corny but I am not ashamed to admit that I can be disgustingly sentimental. For all my bluster and foul-mouthed goonery deep down I am just a wide-eyed fool who wants to be happy. I keep my heart open to possibility even if that means it gets broken over and over again.
Everybody knows the boat is leaking, and everybody knows that the captain lied, but I'm gonna stand on the bow of this goddamn ship anyway and I'm going to stare out over the horizon, because Fear is just a word and Possibility is what defines us. Go Lions.
