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.