Okay, Let's Do This

It occurred to me a couple of days after the Lions beat the Vikings that I was almost hilariously too negative.  It was awful and I feel vaguely stupid about it but what the hell, this is the world we live in, and as Lions fans we’re all just lucky we don’t eat our own shoes and play with ourselves in front of the TV, laughing like Mongoloids and following the pretty colors like chemtrails that have rendered us too stupid to breathe without outside help.

The thing is, is that there are two ways, really, to watch this shit.  One is to focus on the Battle of Self, which makes me sound like a pretentious jackass, but hey, if the shoe fits.  Anyway, this is where I think I was driven as a fan.  I became so focused and so hyper-obsessed with the Lions problems that it was all I focused on.  Sure, there’s another team on the field and yeah, the Lions are beating the pants off of them and I think Christian Ponder just started crying, but goddammit, they are still dumb assholes and I don’t want them to be dumb assholes and why won’t they stop being dumb assholes?  That was where my head was at, and the first half of hilarious idiocy, in which every goddamn horrible cliché we and everyone else associates with the Lions, happened, it was all too easy to let that run away with my mood, and hide, where my skull was fingered by horrible Failure Demons, who sniffed my brains and cackled amongst themselves.

In all this madness, born of a lifetime of stupid angst and shameful suffering, I forgot that there is another, simpler way to watch the Lions – by, you know, just watching them and cheering when they win and booing when they lose.  In my Ahab like crusade in which I demanded that the Lions be a perfect football team, I forgot that there are lots of other teams and guess what?  Most of them are filled with dumb assholes too.  It is the Dumb Asshole League.  And in this league, the best that you can hope for is that your dumb assholes, loathsome as they may be, beat the shit out of the other dumb assholes and try not to embarrass you too much in the process.

And in that league, the Lions proved themselves the better assholes than the Vikings assholes.  In fact, they tore them brand new assholes and then shoved Christian Ponder inside of one and left him to die.  That was a dominant win, yo.  And no matter how much there are parts of that game that still eat at my football fan soul like some sort of miserable acid, I can’t pretend like that didn’t happen.  The Lions won and they won in a way that made it obvious that they were the better team.  To ask for more than that at this point might just be an exercise in masturbatory angst.

I don’t know, it’s tough.  You all know it.  It’s tough to escape those fucking demons, especially when they spent the better part of last season gnawing on our balls and laughing, the fiends.  Still, I don’t feel entirely good when it comes to the Battle of Self, that eternal struggle to overcome those demons and stop doing stupid shit like fumbling a field goal snap or Suhing your way back into the national conversation for aggravated ogrey.  Those things happened, and when they did, we all sneered with disgust and remembered all the ways this team has mashed our hearts into pulp.  To simply let that go would be unconscionably stupid and irresponsible. 

And so what we’re left with – what I’m left with, anyway – is, I think, a sort of cautious agreement to move forward with Hope in our hearts but with one eye cocked to the side in case this motherfucker decides to turn on us again.  I mean, really, it’s all we can do, right?  Right.

But even in that Battle of Self I talked about earlier, it was clear upon reflection that the Lions had made some gains, most notably in the play of Matthew Stafford, who, as I said after the game, even as I wallowed in my own haze of masturbatory angst and heroin mixed with drain cleaner (okay fine, it was actually angel dust mixed with drain cleaner, I am getting older and am more responsible and mature, after all) looked like he finally received the spiritual smelling salts. This was the old Matthew Stafford, the one who looked like the savior of the franchise not that long ago.  To say that this was an encouraging development and an important victory (albeit a victory that can quickly turn into a defeat again before we know it because that is just the maddening and ever-changeable nature of this beast) is to undersell it hilariously.  This was fucking crucial, and maybe the most crucial thing we needed to have happen to start the season, and it did.

Aside from that, the offensive line actually performed miracles we hadn’t seen since Jesus turned water into wine and sprang Barry Sanders for monster gains almost 2,000 years ago.  Reggie Bush was awesome, but he wasn’t out there just scrambling for his life.  No, he received terrific blocking, and you’ll forgive me for not mentioning it after the game because I had forgotten what it looked like.  Even better than the blocking at the line, though, was the downfield blocking he received on screens, which is one of those little things that is actually a big thing, which is exactly what this team has struggled so infuriatingly with in the Jim Schwartz era.  Look, things aren’t perfect, but to say they’re not obviously better is again just an exercise in wallowing in the masturbatory angst of Fear and its many awful subsidiaries.

I don’t do 180’s.  I just don’t.  I think it’s embarrassing, but the more I write this the more I realize that goddammit, I think I’m actually excited about this team.  I haven’t even mentioned how well DeAndre Levy played, or how well the defense bottled up Adrian Peterson outside of that one Oh Holy Shit Not Again Why Does This Sort Of Thing Happen To Us run of his in the first quarter.

But that’s the thing we need to remember too.  That run did happen.  And so did all of that other ridiculous bullshit that happened in the first half, and I’m past the point of praying for miracles and hoping against hope that somehow all of that stops happening at some point.  It won’t, and that sucks, and that’s what still threatens to drag this whole thing right back down to hell.

I hate it when fans are negative no matter what happens, and I kinda fell into that place, but I hate it when fans are positive no matter what happens too.  It’s dumb, that sort of binary “They’re either going to the Super Bowl or they should be dismantled and sold for parts and turned into toilet paper” outlook that too many people have.  It’s dumb and it will poison you as a fan and everything you will say will just be dumb noise when governed by it.  And so we have to learn, somehow, to take the bad with the good, and accept that there are certain maddening things about this team that aren’t going to change.  But they also have a chance to be *gulp* good, or at least good enough to beat the shit out of teams like the Vikings, which is something they couldn’t manage last season.

This team looked closer to the team I saw at the end of 2010, only with more firepower.  And no, I didn’t make a mistake.  I meant 2010, not 2011.  To me, that’s when this team was playing their best football, during that mini-streak at the end of 2010 that got us so excited.  But here’s the thing, like I said, this is still a team of dumb assholes, and while they can get away with that shit against a team like the Vikings, they won’t be able to against, say, the 49ers.  And that sucks.  That means this team has a ceiling, and while we can always hope for the best, I’m not going to do the whole Dream Big thing, in which I envision a scenario in which this team becomes the Team of My Heart and sets a new standard for the rest of the Dumb Asshole League to follow.  It’s just not going to happen, because there are just too many shitty things that they’re never gonna change.

That doesn’t mean that I haven’t already found myself getting irrationally hopeful.  For fuck’s sake, it was only two days after the game – and only two days after I wrote a piece that was the football writing version of Morrissey singing a song written by Ian Curtis while cutting himself – that I found myself looking at the schedule and getting excited because I saw a plausible road map to 10 or 11 wins, and not even one of those “Well, if this happens…” dream fests, but one of those things where based on how they played in week one, I looked and genuinely they should be able to win 10 or 11 games because they seem better than that many teams on their schedule.  It was ridiculous, and I tweeted about it.  Almost immediately I was met with fans of other teams and well-wishers telling me I was making a huge mistake, but what the hell, what is fandom if not one huge mistake?

I’m going in with this team, which probably sounds hysterically stupid given all that junkie metaphor bullshit I wrote last week, but I don’t give a shit.  It feels good to get excited, and more than that it feels good to get excited without having to manufacture it.  This feels real to me, and really that’s the first time I’ve genuinely felt that in a while – maybe even back to early in 2011 if I’m being honest with myself.  I know – I don’t think, I know – that this team will break my heart because they are still a team of dumb assholes who do dumb asshole things.  I mean, Ndamukong Suh is still out there cutting promos to the cops about what a badass he is and threatening cable guys with pellet guns, and it’s pretty clear that on some critical level, he just doesn’t get it and probably never will.  I think that I’m finally allowing myself to make some sort of peace with that, to let it go and just enjoy the good things that are there while shaking my head at Denial Artists who want to pretend that he is some sort of persecuted warrior poet, and that’s a good thing, no matter how much of a permanent shadow it leaves on my fan heart.  That sounds sort of depressing, and it is, but shit, at least it’s real.

I still don’t know whether the Lions will make the playoffs or whether they’ll melt down again and shit their pants while Jim Schwartz gets fired for slugging a ref or for breaking into the Harbaugh compound with a crossbow.  I don’t know, but fuck it, I’m willing to hope, and that means something.  It really does.  The Lions should beat the Cardinals on Sunday, and should beat them rather convincingly, and that’s something that feels good to say again, and more importantly, to mean.  I mean that, the Lions should beat the Cardinals.  I’m not going to do the usual blogger analysis to explain why because that’s not really what I do here.  I’m just going to throw it out there and feel good about it.  And if you’ve followed me for any length of time, then you know that means something.  It means I believe in something again.  Even if it’s not quite what I wanted so desperately to believe in, and even if it’s not something that will somehow make all of the bullshit I’ve experienced as a fan alright, it’s still something.  It’s still something.  And for now, that’s enough.