It Was A Good Day

I’ve been burned so many times before as a Lions fan that it’s hard for me to allow myself to truly let go and let the rhythm get me, but there was a moment early in the first half when I clapped my hands together so hard that I worried I broke one of them.  From then on, I was swallowed up in the sea of exuberant fan idiocy, and found myself incoherent and goofy, tongue lolling out of my head like a mental patient, waving like a simpleton at anyone who happened by.  As that notable wordsmith and gentleman raconteur Ice Cube once said before becoming a mini-van spokesman, it was a good day.  Indeed.

The Lions didn’t just beat the Bears, they kicked the shit out of them.  And they kicked the shit out of them in a way that the Bears usually do to them.  You know what I’m talking about.  The quarterback throws an interception, somebody fumbles, a safety pretends he’s riding a horsey and pretty soon it’s an every man for himself free for all, with dudes hiding underneath dead bodies and fans throwing themselves from the rafters.  We’ve all seen it, but for a change, we got to see it and taste it from the side of the blood-drunk victors, and goddamn, that’s some delicious blood.

There are people who will grumble and fret like church ladies because the Lions let the Bears score a couple of cheap touchdowns at the end of the game, but fuck all that.  That’s just paranoid fear-mongering, the sort of concern trolling which has become an art form for most Lions fans, myself included.  We are like fucking Michelangelos of braying fear.  This was a straight up ass kicking, and just because the Bears played out the zombie string like professional football players and Jay Cutler didn’t gnaw on the brains of his offensive linemen, it doesn’t take away from what the Lions did.  They won that game.  Emphatically.  Everything once the score reached 37-16 was basically just noise, the sort of thing that happens when teams, a league and a television network have to fulfill their contractual obligations.  If this were Pee-Wee football, they would have gone to a running clock.

The truly scary thing is that Matthew Stafford really didn’t play all that well – he wasn’t terrible, but he wasn’t as sharp as we all know he can be – and the Lions kinda sorta sucked on third down, which was immensely frustrating because most of them were of the easily makeable third and a few variety.  They also turned the ball over themselves three times.  This meant that they left a ton of points on the field.  They still scored 40 points.  They should have scored 50.  Easily.  When that is your only quibble, you’re ensconced safely in a penthouse located on the corner of Candy Street and Blowjob Avenue. 

This was the team we all saw at the beginning of 2011, the team that terrorized everybody, murdered quarterbacks like Mexican drug gangs disposing of used up mules (the people kind, not the poor, innocent animal kind) and seemed like a gang of pirates bent on pillage and dark acts that would horrify the townspeople but make our boys deliriously rich with doubloons and drunk on honey wine and conquest.  In fact, the last time we really saw this team – a team that could run over and around you and kick the shit out of your offensive line and your quarterback – was in the Lions Monday Night Football game against the Bears in 2011.  Sure, they whipped up on the Broncos later that year, but that Monday Night game was the last time it felt like the Lions made a real statement, when they seemed like a team without fear, and a team that could face down a rival and pistol whip them into humility.  While I was watching this game, it struck me that you could almost take an eraser to everything that has happened since, and just say okay, let’s just pick it up where we left off.

Of course, you can’t do that, and like I said, I have been burned so many times by this team and this franchise that I have no body hair left and I am made of nothing but ash and regret.  But, still, the sentiment was there, and that means something.  This is a team of assholes and reprobates, but when they can channel that into sheer physical strength, like prison bull dogs, I don’t really care.  I don’t care if they are assholes as long as they don’t let it fuck with their game.  When they can take it, and harness it just enough to enhance their game, to intimidate and bully an opponent, well…  as we’ve all seen, that’s a tough trick to pull off, but when they can, goddamn, these dudes are nasty badasses. 

Of course, I am mostly talking about Ndamukong Suh and Nick Fairley, who abused the Bears offensive line.  Just abused them.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the Bears linemen have to ask Suh and Fairley permission to stand up when they pee.  Suh can probably sell Jay Cutler to Arab slavers if he wants because he owns him.  This is what has been so frustrating about the Lions over the last year and a half or so of wandering the wilderness.  We know this is what these dudes can do if they just harness their natural brutishness.

It was so dominating that they demolished the Bears interior offensive line even though the Bears were holding like desperate men hanging on to the grim tatters of their shredded dreams on every goddamn play.  Suh and Fairly just ran right through them.  It was insane.

The crowd was insane too, marauding and vicious, throwing things onto the field like hooligans, and while the tsk tskers will surely decry this villainy, fuck it, I love this stuff.  But again, it has to be earned, and it’s all part of riding that fine line between intimidating Bad Boyish assholery and the embarrassing hubris of the punk who lives in a land of self-denial.  Just win, baby.

That will always be the struggle for this team and this fanbase, I think, but for today, it felt earned and perfect, and I salute them all with the finest meats, the best beer and the wildest women. 

This was the game I wanted to see, the game I needed to see to make me believe – maybe not in the promise of the future or in the dreams of my heart – but in the potential of the Now.  The Lions are 3-1 right now and they should probably be 4-0.  They have absolutely kicked the shit out of 2 of their 3 divisional opponents already – albeit at home – and who knows?  Who knows what they can do if they get on a roll and feed off of their own momentum?  I think that’s the thing we all need to realize about this team.  They are an emotional team.  They are not cerebral chess players who can turn deftly following adversity and change their tactics.  They are team of emotional brutes, and that means that they are highly susceptible to those intangible things that the Football Outsider types hate to acknowledge as a factor so much.  If they start to lose, then things unravel quickly.  I think that probably speaks to sketchy coaching, but that’s a topic for another day.  But when they win, they can become berserkers.  They become like video game characters that get some sort of bonus that makes them impenetrable to any and all attacks while they just careen through the slaughter, glowing and attacking at ludicrous speed.  It’s just the nature of this beast of a team, and we’ve seen that too.  Remember that 9-0 stretch at the end of 2010/the beginning of 2011?

If this actually were a video game, Suh, Fairley and Reggie Bush would have been literally on fire while the announcers hollered outrageous made-up words as the players turned ten feet tall and threw the goalpost like a pitchfork into a quivering Jay Cutler.  If they allow that momentum to carry them, then who knows what they can do?  That’s enough for me, for now. 

Speaking of Reggie Bush, I’ve been gibbering since week one about how important he is to the offense, and how his presence on the field changes everything from the spacing to the defensive game plan, and, well… allow me to gesture dramatically like a lawyer dropping his hottest piece of evidence on a jury.  Bush was ridiculous in all the best ways, rushing for over 100 yards by halftime – when was the last time *that* happened in a Lions game?  For us, I mean. – and looking a lot like the dude who once conquered Los Angeles like the half-human/half-god spawn of some unholy tryst between Zeus and a gazelle.

There was so much right with this game, so much unqualified beauty.  There are no “Yeah, buts…” here.  There are no lingering doubts.  This was a team that wandered in the desert and somehow came out the other side alive, psychically damaged sure, but still more than capable of slaughtering whatever poor saps they found camping on the shore, coming down from those desert hills like demon warriors from hell.  I am getting carried away here, as is my wont, but in some ways, the last year and a half or so of “Oh God, why is this happening?  No… why?  WHYYYYYYYYY???” made this game even more impressive because it showed that there’s something there, something intact that couldn’t quite be broken, and if that gives this team a quiet confidence to lie just beneath the emotional, beastly surface, then they could be truly dangerous indeed.

I’m just happy right now, happy in a way that I haven’t been as a Lions fan in a while.  Am I going to start gibbering about Super Bowls and Promised Lands?  No, because like I said, I’ve been burned way too many times.  But like the Lions themselves, maybe this will give me some quiet confidence, something I’ve never really had as a Lions fan, and maybe I can smile and stop worrying about the future and what it all means (okay, I won’t because, well, come on…) and accept that today is enough, because today was - and is - a good day.

Wandering the Halls of Madness

It’s hard to really know what to write after the Lions win over the Redskins.  I have absolutely no idea what to say, and I think that probably is the only thing to say.  It seems a perfect summation for the sort of purgatory I feel like we’re all just kind of lounging in as Lions fans – happy we’re not roasting in that inner circle of hell but resigned to the fact that we aren’t seeing heaven any time before the rapture, and even then, we’ll probably still be on the waiting list, dropping Jesus’ name to St. Peter at the door, trying to casually slip him a twenty while the Packers and Bears and all those shitheads just sort of slide on through, laughing. 

The Lions beat the Redskins and that’s good.  It’s better than losing.  Shrug.  I don’t know what you want to me to say.  Last week, the Lions pretty much played this exact same game against the Cardinals, only they lost.  They are sort of bunched together with teams like the Cardinals and the Redskins in a jumble of dumb assholes who just sort of meander around for 60 minutes and then check to see who fucked up the least before either triumphantly throwing down their headsets like 14 year olds or angrily throwing down their headsets like 14 year olds.  It’s a kind of brutal ennui, and when you find yourself trapped inside of it, I guess the only thing you can do to get through it all is to take relative pleasures.  And by that, I mean you celebrate – quietly, otherwise you look like kind of a dumb asshole – the fact that you were able to overcome and maintain at least for a day.  You’re still a junkie, but at least this week, you didn’t pass out on the bathroom floor while other junkies like Carson Palmer stepped over your body to take a piss.

Yes, the Lions won, but let’s not pretend like they blew the Redskins off the field either.  The defense probably played its worse game of the season, and it’s obvious that without Reggie Bush the offense is depressingly all too similar to last season’s.  Look, that’s not to say that they are bad, it’s just to say that the line between truly good and fatally inconsistent is remarkably slim.  With Reggie Bush, the Lions are a multidimensional offense, capable of hurting you in any number of ways.  Without them, they are Matthew Stafford standing in the pocket trying to throw fifteen yard laser beams to covered receivers.  Sometimes it works because the Lions have Calvin Johnson and when Matthew Stafford is on, his laser beams are diamond cutters that even the dudes at CERN probably freak out about. (Dork science jokes, what up?)

But it doesn’t work consistently, and just watch the Lions in the red zone against the Redskins for evidence of that.  On three separate drives, Stafford just sat back and fired those lasers of his at the endzone, ignoring all the space in between because he and Scott Linehan apparently didn’t have faith that the Lions could do anything with that space.  That is inherently self-limiting, and sure enough, Stafford missed 8 of those 9 passes and the Lions were forced to settle for field goals before he finally threw an impossible pass to Calvin Johnson on the 9^th to score the touchdown that effectively ended the game.

That’s great, but you don’t want to put your trust in impossible passes, you know?  The point is, again, that without Reggie Bush, that’s what the Lions are reduced to, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.  For further evidence, watch the 2011 and the 2012 seasons back to back, and watch as the law of averages plays havoc with our idiot hearts.

I don’t mean to sound overly negative here.  I mean, again, the Lions won, and WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!  But it doesn’t do us any good to pretend, either.  The good news is that Reggie looks like he should be back, and that holding him out this week was just a precaution, a calculated gamble meant to ensure that the Lions would have him for the long haul and not just for one game against a shitty Redskins team.  And, looking at it through that lens, you have to say that the gamble paid off, the Lions pocketed their winnings and moved on, hooray. 

Still, there were moments in that game that made me remember why I can’t devote my whole heart to this team.  There was Nick Fairley taking a ridiculous cheap shot at Chris Chester behind a play, which was roughly 10,000 times dirtier than anything Ndamukong Suh has done recently.  And there was Jim Schwartz’s I’M A MAN headset abuse moment, and no matter what the reason – and yes, I have heard all the buts here, “But he was just excited to close out the win,” “But he was angry because the Lions communications had broken down in the last minute,” “But he was upset that the Lions didn’t beat the Redskins more handily” – he looked like a huge asshole, and let’s face it, this is not Schwartz’s first dance with the Huge Asshole Queen.  This is a team filled with dumb assholes, coached by dumb assholes, and cheered on largely by dumb assholes.  I am continually shaking my head in shame, like a parent who opens the door only to see his son tying off his arm again.  Goddammit.

That may sound harsh, especially in the wake of a victory, but I have to say this because this is what makes it hard for me to just lose myself in this team, which is really the one thing every sports fan wants to be able to do.  It’s just a feel thing, you know?  I felt like I was watching the same team that passed out on the bathroom floor every week last season.  It’s just that the Redskins are that junkie who has to shoot up between their toes because their arms are too scabbed up now, and they don’t just routinely pass out on the bathroom floor, they get their mail delivered to the toilet.  The Lions essentially won because they weren’t as fucked up, which is still a victory, yes, and we should feel glad, but come on. 

This is far more negative that I meant it to be, it’s just that, really, what can I say that is positive here besides “Well, they won, that’s good”?  Think of one thing from that game that merits rapturous praise or satisfied relief.  To be fair, “Well, they won, that’s good,” is probably the best thing you can say after any game so I should probably chill out a bit, especially since I said I wanted to take this a game at a time, and just savor the small victories instead of worrying all the time about the big picture, but it’s not as easy as all that.  I can say that shit all I want, but sometimes, the dark, black clouds seem a little bit too close to ignore, and I guess that’s where I’m at right now. 

It’s weird, because I really don’t feel any better or any worse than I did after last week’s game against the Cardinals.  And that’s because I feel like I just watched the same goddamn game.  The result ended up being different, and hey, again, the result is kind of the only thing that seems like it should matter, and that means that I’m probably being ridiculous, but like I just said, when those clouds are following you around, it doesn’t really matter if it’s raining right now or not, because you’re kind of always preparing yourself for the inevitability of rain.  You look outside and see dark clouds, and you don’t think “Phew!  Thank god it’s not raining.”  No, you think “Awww shit, it’s gonna rain,” and then mentally and emotionally react like it already is raining.

It didn’t rain on Sunday, but it sure as hell felt like it might, and sometimes that’s close enough to the same thing.  But hey, like I said, the absence of Reggie Bush seemed like a calculated gamble, like going for a picnic even though those clouds are rolling in and hoping it doesn’t rain.  And it worked, so perhaps I should just feel thankful. 

I don’t know.  I just don’t know, and this mess of a post is evidence of that.  I keep going back and forth here because that’s what I’ve been doing in my head.  I’m happy that they won, but I can’t quite allow myself to feel it.  It’s better than a loss, and I know that intellectually, but emotionally, I’ve been having a hard time reconciling what I see as storm clouds with the lack of rain.  I’m fucked up in the head as a fan, but this is what being a fan of the Lions will do to you.  In the end, I guess the only thing I can say is that it didn’t feel like the Lions won that game so much as the Redskins lost it, which might sound extraordinarily picky to you, the fan who just wants me to shut up and lead a parade down main street with magic monkeys and clowns shooting fireballs out of their mouths, but goddammit, that matters.  That matters.

This is probably a temporary setback in my own junkie battle.  I’ve fallen off the wagon and let the big picture overwhelm me again, the realization that I’ll always be a junkie causing me to reach for the needle because, hey, why not, what’s the point?  If you’re going to lose in the end anyway, you might as well just pass the time comfortably numb.  But that is also loser talk, and I recognize that.  I’m trying to do better, trying to be better, trying to overcome and understand that there is a sun shining somewhere behind all those goddamn clouds, even if I can’t see it, even if I never see it.  I am just sort of rambling here, but I told you right at the outset that I had no idea what to say, or what to write, and, well, you were warned.  I suppose all that’s left is for me to gibber some bullshit about enjoying the picnic and trying to ignore the clouds, and being thankful that the rain didn’t come, and blah, blah, blah, I am drowning in metaphors, somebody save me. 

Look, the Lions won, and I guess that’s all that matters.  Last week they lost.  Their two wins have both been against 0-3 teams, and nobody knows where this is really going.  We’re just junkies drifting in a rowboat in the open sea underneath cloudy skies.  Maybe somebody will find us and bring us back to shore, get us cleaned up, and maybe put us in a recovery center for metaphor addiction, or maybe we’ll just drift out here forever, the skies will open up, the rain will fall, we’ll run out of junk and then devour each other in our own madness before the boat finally disintegrates and we sink to the bottom of a sea that doesn’t care. 

This is an absurdly depressing post that went off the rails a while ago, a gibberfest that should have left you hitting the back button about the time I started talking about clouds, or maybe even when I made that feeble CERN joke.  Clearly, it just isn’t happening and I’m just sort of wandering the halls of my own diseased mind, hooting at whatever I see like a mental patient, but I guess that’s oddly appropriate because right now, that’s how I feel about the Lions.  They’re just sort of wandering, lost in the halls of their own sordid past, unable to do anything really to escape, hooting and throwing down headsets like mental patients.  And in our respective wanderings, maybe we’ll cross paths, and I’ll look at the Lions and the Lions will look at me, and we’ll know each other, and maybe we’ll laugh or maybe we’ll cry, and this is all just horseshit.  This is all just horseshit.

Fuck it, the Lions beat the Redskins.  HOORAY, LET’S START THE PARADE!

Dead Horse

Let’s just get right to it.  The Redskins are awful, okay?  Just terrible.  They have imploded in ways that have horrified and disgusted their fans.  Once upon a time, that would have included my friend, the esteemed Raven Mack, who I’m sure many of you are familiar with, but he was psychically poisoned by the terrible reign of Dan Snyder: Boy Prince, and had to flee to the Congo to be healed by a witch doctor.  The Lions should win this game.  The Lions had better win this game or else my idiot fan heart will be devoured either by my tears or by hideous laughter, whichever comes first to protect and cleanse me.

But here’s the thing, and this is the sort of thing that makes you just sort of sit out on the porch and smoke a cigarette even though you haven’t smoked in years – the Lions haven’t won in Washington since the Burning Bush administration, when George Sr. screamed at Moses to mobilize his forces in the Egyptian desert.  This makes sense when you consider that, for the most part, recent fuckery aside, the Redskins have been a fairly respectable NFL franchise, while the Lions have been a fairly respectable circus clown franchise.  I mean, it’s not just Washington, the Lions also have that abominable Lambeau field streak, which will only end after the Rapture as foretold in the Book of Revelations, and they once went approximately 252 straight years without winning a game on the road, which we all remember because you don’t forget things like that or like getting bamboo shoots barbed with razor wire and hot sauce plunged into your urethra.

Historically, there is no reason to believe that the Lions should win this game, and so I’m sure that if they do lose there will be people who explain it away as too high a mountain to climb or some such shit, because there is always an excuse and let’s face it, this one is pre-made.  But all of that terrible history is just that – history, and while it may be too much to say that history is a dead thing, which we all know is a hideous lie, as that fucker always comes back like Jason Voorhees and jumps out of the lake to decapitate you just when you finally think it’s all safe, it should not carry as much weight as we give it.  History can be overcome, and it can be beaten, but only if you embrace the now, and while the now isn’t any great shakes for the Lions, the now fucking hates the Redskins.

Their quarterback, their savior, Robert Griffin III, was descended upon by vultures sent by the fates, who tore away his knee ligaments and then pooped all over the souls of every fan brave enough (or idiot enough, depending on your point of view) to believe in the spiritual healing powers of RGIII.  Rather than cleanse the Redskins of their recent woes, RGIII provided damning evidence that the franchise had been taken over by Failure Demons, those vicious parasites.  Most Redskins already suspected that Dan Snyder had secret shadow partners, steeped in evil and misery, but when RGIII went down and a circus erupted involving coaches feuding with doctors and quarterbacks being called cornball brothers on ESPN, perceptive Redskins fans sadly knew that those shadow partners were none other than the dreaded Failure Demons, and that even worse they now had a controlling interest in the once proud franchise.

Like I said, it was bad enough that it helped cause my boy, Raven Mack, to sever the Redskins like a gangrenous limb, if only to save what was left of his own broken soul.  After all, he has seen what that sort of fandom can do to a man during his dealings with me, and I don’t blame him for disappearing into the heart of the Dark Continent to wrestle giant crocodiles and grow Iboga, which he sells to Somalian pirates in exchange for guns and potions he uses to ward off the transmogrifications of the spirits of the white devil men who became trapped in those jungles back in the day and exist now only to haunt and twist the living.

Wait, where was I?  Oh yeah, the Redskins.  Anyway, all of that happened before this season even started.  Once the ball was actually kicked off, the Failure Demons went completely nuts and started openly wandering the field during play, gnawing on whatever was left over of RGIII’s soul, attaching spiritual chains to Alfred Morris and seeping out of Mike Shanahan’s anus shaped mouth like wispy smoke leaking out of a genie lamp.  It hasn’t been good in Washington, which we all knew in a larger, general sense, but as if to mirror real life, whatever the hell that is, the Redskins have abandoned “not good” and entered into an era of dumpster fires and hobos beating off on city buses driven by cackling skeletons, while snake handlers and charlatans sit in the halls of power and do the bidding of their dark masters.  People make fun of Detroit and its football team, but GODDAMN, have you checked out DC lately?

RGIII suddenly moves more slowly than a stoned ground sloth, and has taken to publicly feuding with his top receiver, Pierre Garcon, which in French means Peter Boy.  Actually Pierre is a derivation of the Greek petros, which means “rock” or “stone”, so in reality RGIII is arguing with a Stoned Boy, which makes all the sense in the world.  The open bitchery began when Stoned Boy publicly questioned RGIII’s speed, which is of course a good, sensible thing to do to your quarterback coming off of knee surgery.  Naturally, RGIII handled it like a true leader and had a frank, private conversation behind closed doors with Monsieur Boy, in which… oh wait, you mean he didn’t?  No, instead RGIII took to the press and challenged T.T. Boy to a race.  And all the while the Failure Demons cackled and Dre Bly and Joey Harrington reminisced fondly about selling each other out in times of crisis.

The whole thing has become a hideous circus, with Griffin hee-hawing constantly to the press about how maybe he needs to run more even though his knees are now made of old cheese and ghosts, while everyone else openly speculates that he’s already done and that Shanahan should smother him with a pillow or at least do the sensible thing and go behind his back to Darth Snyder and ask permission to change quarterbacks, which is always a good sign that your coach has control of the situation.  Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Kirk Cousins, who looks like a dude who should be terrorizing new arrivals at the police academy, stands ready for RGIII to fall, so he can pick off whatever’s left like a vulture and “rescue” the Redskins from the unrescuable.

I have spent this entire piece talking about the Redskins and for good reason – if the Lions can’t beat a team like that, a team that psychically damaged, a team being publicly feasted on by the Failure Vultures – then it’s probably time to call it a day, and by call it a day I mean start hanging dudes in effigy and wearing paper bags on our heads like our forefathers did.

The flipside to all that hideous nonsense, though, is that the Lions should win.  They should definitely win.  For once, the psychic energies favor them, and sometimes all you need to do is look at a team in the midst of true hell to understand that your team is actually doing okay.

The Lions lost last week and that sucked.  You know how I feel in general about this team, but my new stance is to just take everything as it happens, one game at a time, like an addict in recovery, and see what happens.  Last week was confirmation to me that things aren’t going to get better, but maybe they can stay just okay enough that the Lions can sneak their way past the gates of hell and get in a couple of nights partying before the demon authorities show up and drag them back in chains, and if that happens at just the right time, then who knows? 

There is a hierarchy in hell, and right now the Lions are just sort of chilling in one of the outer circles, tormented by their past and by the general hopelessness of the future, but not really openly suffering in the present.  The Redskins, meanwhile, are being slow-roasted near the center, hanging with Hitler and the gang, and screaming for a mercy that just isn’t going to come.  This is the new way we have to look at things as Lions fans, our new reality, depressing though it may be.  But really, it’s only depressing if you really think about it, if you let the inevitability of the doom really settle in.  If you just get drunk and scream at the TV every week and pretend that something good could happen, then you can at least tolerate it.  It’s better than what Redskins fans are going through right now.

And so, that’s all that’s left to do on Sunday – revel in the fact that the Redskins are now Failure’s whipping boy, and while Failure promises to get around to us before too long, for now all we can do is hold the Redskins down while they get the belt.  It’s kind of shameful, and in a just universe we’d all just band together and overthrow the Failure Regime, but people are addicted and the Failure regime knows that and will continue to play with us like puppets using their subsidiary, the NFL aka the Dumb Asshole League.  We are a collective of junkie slaves, and we’re just happy when we don’t get the whip. 

Listen, that is a hideously offensive metaphor, but in a lot of ways this is a hideously offensive game.  There are no real winners here, only a sad sort of jockeying to not be at the bottom of the pile.  And right now, the Lions aren’t while the Redskins are.  It’s that simple, and in the Land of Misery, the only things we have to cherish are the simple and the petty.  Most days we wish we weren’t us, but for one day, we get to be glad that we aren’t them.  And for one week, at least, that’s enough.  And that’s how we survive.

Live and Let Die

There are still lots of dark clouds hanging overhead, and the sad reality is that sooner or later, Reggie is probably going to fall off the wagon too.  After all, there’s really no such thing as a former junkie, is there? - from I Don't Know

It’s pretty clear that the Lions are a different team with Reggie Bush in the lineup.  That’s my main takeaway from today’s game, other than ARRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH FUCK.  With him, they can sort of overcome their junkie nature and do just enough to make us overlook all that dumb asshole bullshit and just concentrate on shiny, happy things like puppies made of gold and wins over the Vikings.  Without him . . . well, without him, the Lions are basically the same goddamn team they’ve been for a while now and there’s no use going down that dark road into the nether regions of the soul.  It’s a thin line between love and fuck this, yo.

I was kind of torn after the game, because on the one hand there were still signs that the Lions had come out of their existential malaise, and so I didn’t want to do the whole SAME OL’ LIONS HEE-HAW HEE-HAW jackassery that is so tempting to engage in, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was almost entirely due to Reggie’s presence.  He just gives them one more playmaker, one more presence, and that’s enough.  Really, it’s a testament to that thin line that separates everyone in the Dumb Asshole League.

Right, about the Dumb Assholes, nothing overly ridiculous happened, and by that I mean Ndamukong Suh didn’t cannibalize anybody and Jim Schwartz didn’t wander onto the field in his underwear and start blowing whiskey fireballs at the refs or anything, but there’s no way I can honestly sit here and say that it was a clean game.  It was a cumulative Dumb Asshole effort.  The Lions lost largely because they fucked up at the worst times, which isn’t that much different than any team that loses in the Dumb Asshole League, I guess, but it’s something that we’re nauseatingly familiar with as Lions fans.  I guess this means maybe we’re looking for it, but really, does it matter?  They still happened and the Lions still lost.  Bill Bentley’s “fuck it, I’ll just shove him” pass interference near the end of the game was the difference between the Cardinals scoring the go ahead touchdown to go up by 4 and having to attempt a 50+ yard field goal to go up one.  It made a difference.

Before that, you had the cavalcade of drops which have come to define the Lions receiving corps, a thousand penalties, both deserved and undeserved, and horrific field goal play.  It all made a difference.  Change just one of those things and the Lions win the game.  But they didn’t, and, well, here we are.

Of course, there was also the assorted incidental bullshit that is always just there, so much so that it is basically white noise by this point and I barely even notice – the ridiculous conservatism at the end of the first half with a minute left to go and three timeouts, the throwing short of the sticks on third (and one rage inducing fourth) down, which we used to call the Joey Harrington special around these parts, and just the general all-around boobery that happens when you employ dudes like Brandon Pettigrew. 

In the end, it came down to poor special teams, terrible penalties – again, both deserved and undeserved (Ride or die, Willie, ride or die) – dropped passes and blah, blah blah.  Look, I could write the above about dozens of games over the last few years and it would fit.  Hell, for all you know I’m just copying and pasting what I wrote after a different game.  And that’s the point – this is all too familiar, and no matter whether you’re riding the Hope Train or jamming with the Failure Demons on “The Song Remains the Same”, you can’t really do much but shrug your shoulders and say “Oh well, on to the next one.” 

And that’s because there’s no real point in getting angry, in dragging out the brass knuckles and going to town on the Lions or on the culture of this goddamned football team, the coaches or anybody else.  Because this is just what we’re stuck with.  We know it.  It’s not going to change, and even in my optimistic salvo just before the game, in which I renounced Satan and started flirting with the angels again, I basically said that we are forever flawed and doomed and that our hearts would get broken because this is just who this team is, and eventually we’d find ourselves locked in a prison cell of our own despair, behind walls made of broken dreams and idiot hope no matter how often we furiously tried to dig our way out with a spoon.  And this game is just another brick in that goddamn wall.  I don’t like it, but there it is.

This is not about the war between Hope and Fear, this is just about accepting who and what this team is – it’s a team of junkie assholes, and even when they’re trying to maintain, sometimes they’re gonna break our hearts.  I have no grand delusions about this team.  I want them to win and do well because they’re my team and I’ve made peace with the fact that there are simply things I’m going to have to live with.  Basically, I’m the parent that wanted their kid to go the med school and make the whole family proud, but now I’m just thankful that he hasn’t OD’d and I gave him a big hug and told him I’m proud of him because he got that job at 7-11. 

That is depressing as hell, but only if you let it be.  If you just accept it for what it is and try to move on, I think you’ll find that you really appreciate the moments of genuine joy that still pop up.  I was cheering like a fiend for the Lions in this game.  I wasn’t sneering or saying “See!  See!  Look, they’re a bunch of no good fuckers!” every time they did something wrong, which is where my head and my heart had been for a while.  Watching the Lions had ceased to be fun for me.  Even though they lost this game, I wanted them to win, to do well, more than I had in a while.  It was weird.  But the important thing, I think, is that I finally rooted for them to do well on their terms, not mine, which might not make any sense, but fuck it, the Lions just lost in obnoxious fashion – again – so I’m allowed to not make sense.  It’s in the handbook.

This was fun for me to watch because I finally let my grand dreams of the future go.  I finally stopped worrying about what it all meant in the big picture and just rooted for them to win a goddamn game because they were my team.  Of course, then they lost and I had a brief moment where I stormed around and made sounds like a donkey getting reamed by an elephant, but what the hell, at least it was an honest reaction rooted in the immediacy of the moment and not tied up in the “This is what I want to see because THE FUTURE OF THE ENTIRE FRANCHISE HANGS IN THE BALANCE” kind of gibbering I had begun to do, which I think was born out of my own grandiose mythologizing I have done here, in which I have gibbered about Fate so much that you’d think I was Kyle Reese proselytizing to Sarah Connor.

Look, the Lions are a mediocre team filled with mediocre players and a few superstars.  Sometimes, those players – both the lousy ones and the stars – act like Dumb Assholes, but that doesn’t really make us special.  It just makes us the Arizona Cardinals.  And sometimes, you beat teams like the Cardinals or like the Vikings because you have just one more weapon.  And sometimes you lose because that weapon falls off the wagon and stands around on the sideline looking sad because that’s just the sort of thing that happens in the Dumb Asshole League.  There are no grand lessons to be learned from this game, no desperate horse rides in the middle of the night to warn the townspeople like some degenerate Paul Revere to be made.  There is just a dull shrug and a twinge in the heart, a sort of quiet, sad longing about what might have been that gets ground up and mashed by the weight of reality and the notion that, in the end, none of it really matters other than as a curio, a diversion to keep us dogpaddling so we don’t recognize that we’ve already drowned.

The Lions are not the worst team in the Dumb Asshole League.  And they’re not the best.  They are a coin flip of a team, a team that sometimes beats the Arizona Cardinals and sometimes loses to them.  They are a team that I will root for to win because I like hoping for the best, even if that best gets lost somewhere in the clouds of uncertainty once you start playing real teams and start having real goals.  They are a team that I root for because I am a fan and this is what we do. 

Reggie Bush ran and he made me happy, he smiled and kept us from getting fired from the 7-11, and then he got hurt and that made me sad, and the manager came in and found us shooting up in the bathroom and chased us out of the store with a broom and we passed out in the bushes before our mom came and picked us up, smiled sadly, sighed and laid us in our bed, kissed us goodnight, told us she loved us and then went and laid on the couch and watched Castle until she fell asleep.