I Don't Know

“They could win and if they do, people living in denial will ratchet up their shrill airhorn voices and start gibbering like idiots about the Super Bowl and god only knows what else.  And they could lose, and if they do, blah blah blah, it’s all so much noise and I hate it all.”

And so it hath come to pass.  The above pull-quote, from Hey, maybe…, sums it up rather neatly, I think.  The Lions won, and they won in a way that anyone can spin anyway their idiot hearts’ desire.  This is kind of a fucked up place to be in, as a fan.  After all, nobody wants to read the sad gibberings of the man who storms into the party, drunk and angry, hollering about how everything is bullshit and that anyone who’s trying to have fun is a goddamn imbecile.  It’s just ugly and mean and hey, I get it.  I really do.  But here’s the thing, this team is still a junkie team of assholes who do asshole things.  I don’t like it, but our boy is still a goddamn junkie and just because he didn’t shit his pants today or get caught trying to suck-off the bailiff outside of his court appearance for smack money doesn’t mean we can pretend it’s not a problem, you know?

Here’s the thing – for as relieved as I am that things seem to have at least stabilized and that I’m happy that tomorrow I won’t wake up to find him dead in a toilet, that boy of ours is still a junkie and let’s not enable him, okay?

Like I said, this is hard because it’s human instinct to put all that bullshit away and just want to enjoy the game in sort of a vacuum.  I get that, I really do, but we don’t live in a vacuum, we live in a world in which the Lions have been addicted to Failure for 50 goddamn years, and it would be the height of naivety to try to deny that that matters just because they smiled at us today and told us they felt good, especially when early in the game they were practically crawling on the floor, drooling and begging us to call the rehab center again because they just couldn’t take it anymore. 

Right now, the Lions are in a weird place, and so am I as a fan.  They’re really not good enough to really make it.  In the end their junkie diseased souls will ruin them.  I know it, you know it, we all know it.  Deep down, it is the empty abyss of inevitability we’re all too scared to look into as fans.  But they’re not bad enough to hit rock bottom either.  They can keep their shit together just enough that we can’t reasonably sit their ass down and convince them to get clean once and for all.  They’re maintaining and we might as well go fuck ourselves no matter how much we care and wring our impotent hands.

It’s hard.  It’s hard to know what to really root for anymore.  That’s a disgusting admission, but it’s a horrible one every parent or loved one of a junkie can probably understand.  We want the best for them, to succeed and be happy, but we also don’t want them to get away with their junkie bullshit because we know that it will eventually consume them entirely and then we’ll be woken up at three in the morning by Ndamukong Suh trying to steal our stereo system to pawn off.  But, I mean, what’s the alternative?  To root for them to fail, to bottom out so they can finally clean themselves up seems like the responsible thing to do, but goddammit, we can’t just watch someone we love, someone we’ve loved our whole goddamn lives, disintegrate like that.  It’s a sort of spiritual purgatory, a damned if you do, damned if you don’t sort of existential malaise that leaves me watching the game while at the same time trying to drown out the screaming voices of the angels and the devils perched on my shoulders.  Those fuckers are noisy.

I guess, in the end, the only thing you can do is sort of hope for the best and try to hang on.  Believe in miracles and all that.  It’s obvious that the Lions have cleaned themselves up a little bit.  The defense looks like it could be nasty, and Matthew Stafford finally looked like someone gave him the spiritual smelling salts.  And then there’s Reggie Bush.  Goddamn, for all our idiot hopes and dreams about what he could do, about what he could mean to this team, he somehow showed up and blew them away.  When was the last time we could honestly say something like that happened?  That, all by itself, is enough to cause most of us to break out the incense and anal prayer beads (what?) and start gibbering to the Saints (of the non-New Orleans variety) for divine intervention and miracles of the most miraculous miraclosity. 

This is how I see it – the first half of the game showed us enough that we have to admit that this team is still a goddamn junkie.  All of the ugly bullshit we have come to associate with this team not just in the Jim Schwartz era but in the half century of Failure and Fear which we’ve had to collectively endure, happened in that first half.  It was an abomination, the sort of thing that had me looking up intervention counselors as we hurtled towards rock bottom.  But then Reggie, that new friend who everyone seems to like, showed up and kept everyone from making a huge mistake. 

The thing is, is that Reggie himself is a former junkie.  He’s spent too many years lying, cheating and stealing for anyone to truly trust him, and he’s notorious for getting involved with broken whores.  He’s had a rough time, but like a lot of junkies, he got himself clean and then moved to a new environment.  Naturally, because he’s empathetic to the plight of other junkies, and because he’s been a model citizen for a while now – he even managed to keep himself clean in the heathen slums of Miami – he’s taken a liking to our boy, the Lions, and has announced that he’s going to do his best to keep everyone out of trouble.  Today, he stood on the front lawn with a shotgun and fired a round into the back tires of the Failure Dealers as they sped away from the scene.  He then chased them down on foot with a baseball bat and clubbed them in the head as a warning to the other dealers in town.  And we watched from the porch and we celebrated and thanked God for sending us this miracle.

Of course, our boy still looks shaky and that fucker Schwartz won’t stop hanging around even though we know he’s been cooking Failure in his basement, and Mayhew keeps calling from the rehab facility gibbering about money and missing draft picks and hinting that he might sell everyone out to the feds to keep his ass safe.  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?

He has the best of intentions, and right now he’s a godsend, but how strong can one man be?  How can a man who’s wrestled with his own terrible demons stay strong in the Sodom and Gomorrah he now calls home?  It’s not a pleasant thought, but reality often times isn’t.  Still, we can’t just pretend that everything is cool now and that we’ll all have candy and sunshine parties before winning the lotto known as the Super Bowl, especially since we know that fucking thing is rigged by the state anyway. 

Meanwhile, while we’re celebrating because Reggie has come into our lives, we’re refusing to acknowledge another sad truth: things are looking bright for our boy just because the neighbor boy, Christian Ponder, is so unbelievably fucked up that anyone would probably look good by comparison.  We’re proud of our boy and will talk him up to everyone in the neighborhood, but we know those rich bastards who live up on the hill have kids in law school and medical school and if we try to brag about our boy, they’ll just laugh at us, and then Junior will get discouraged and start shooting up all the time again instead of just every once in a while to maintain like he does now.

We’re coming off a crash, off of a season in which things almost bottomed out again.  It was a shock and an absolute blow to the psyche.  Remember what I said earlier about it being foolish to look at games like these in a vacuum?  Well, it works the other way too.  We’re probably all too touchy because we give too much weight to the past, to that miserable half century of failure.  It’s a tough balancing act to pull off, staying realistic because of that past while also not letting it utterly consume us.  I wish I knew the answers, wish I knew what to feel, what to hope for, what to believe in, but I don’t.  And neither do you.  We’re all just sort of stumbling along, terrified about what tomorrow may bring while trying to cling to whatever native optimism we have left, whatever “Hey, maybes…” that still live honestly in our hearts and haven’t been perverted into sort of a cruel mockery of that same native optimism.

The Lions won today, and that’s good.  It’s good because it has to be good.  I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I’m elated or that my heart is full of Hope and Joy because that’s all bullshit.  I’m encouraged, but only in the sense that I think the Lions aren’t as bad as I feared they could be.  I’m encouraged in the sense that at least today I won’t open up their bedroom door and find them lying dead with a needle in their arm.  But it’s hard for that to really mean anything when I know that they’re still junkies, when I know that they’re still back there sticking that needle in between their toes when Reggie’s not around.  I know they’re still hanging out with that degenerate Schwartz and I know that there are days when I’m going to round the corner and find them strung-out, vomiting in the house plants and crying.  It’s hard for me to believe that any of it matters because the disease, this… Lions Disease, is so fundamentally unbeatable.  It’s like AIDS.  No matter what you throw at it, no matter how much money you spend on designer drugs to keep it from blowing up, it’s still always there and one day it will kill you. 

This metaphor has become sadly mixed and incoherent, but that’s okay because that matches my idiot fan heart.  I don’t know.  Anything.  I don’t even know whether I’m happy or weirdly bummed out because deep down I just wanted it to end, to bottom out so that we could finally have some goddamn finality.  I don’t know.  I really don’t.  This is not what you wanted to read, and I know that I’m going to get people telling me that I’m being a bad fan and to relax and just enjoy the win but fuck that and fuck them. 

“They could win and if they do, people living in denial will ratchet up their shrill airhorn voices and start gibbering like idiots about the Super Bowl and god only knows what else.  And they could lose, and if they do, blah blah blah, it’s all so much noise and I hate it all.”

Indeed.