Scratch Offs and Opioids

Every Lions fan who watched Golden Tate catch that last touchdown pass said the same thing: “too soon.” When you’ve lost every way imaginable over the years, you’re able to pick that out, sort of like that old saying (probably bullshit, but whatever, go with me here) about how the Inuit have, like, 1,000 different words for “snow.” We have 1,000 different words for “defeat.”

It started out like a good ol’ ref-fuckin’ sort of game and then evolved into a stolen hope kind of game, and in between, it was an “oh shit, the Lions still can’t stop the run” kind of game, but more than anything it was the familiar “the bad guys win” kind of game because, after all, this is Dallas’ America and in it, the Detroits of the world get fucked.

It is encouraging, still, that the Lions were in a position to win the game with only two minutes left, and had someone just recovered that damn Dak Prescott fumble or at least tackled him after he recovered, or if Glover Quin intercepted that pass instead of just deflecting it, we’d all be talking about sunshine and rainbows right now and about how sometimes the good guys still win, but they didn’t and they don’t, and so here we are.

It is meaningful, though, that things have shifted from No Hope Someone Please Hold Patricia Down And Shave Him to What If, and in that shift lies at least a reason to keep moving forward, to gently shave Patricia instead of holding him down and violently sheering him and yeah, this is weird, let’s just move on.

So . . . the Lions lost. You are used to this, but at least it felt like they lost for potentially fixable football reasons (I say “potentially” because only an insane idiot would believe in “certainty” here) instead of woeful Shaking My Fist At God reasons, the sort born of 60 years of crushing failure and the sort of black hole of misery in which everything seems broken and hopeless. It wasn’t that, at least.

What it was, though, was a defense incapable still of stopping the run, of allowing some degenerate Ohio Ewok like Ezekiel Elliott to run wild and provide with absolute certainty that the Cowboys would get that field goal to win at the end of the game. This is not a good defense, which is disheartening because that’s, you know, Matt Patricia’s whole deal, but we knew that going in.

At least it wasn’t a farce. That’s what I keep telling myself. At least I’m not damning Matt Patricia to hell this time and making plans that don’t include football for the rest of the season or the rest of eternity, which is where I found myself at the beginning of the season.

But it is okay to be critical of Patricia – and Bob Quinn – for not being able to stop the run or the Cowboys when it mattered most. They knew when they started this whole thing that the defense wasn’t good enough, and that it needed a lot of help, especially up front. For that, you need talent, you need players who can actually, you know, play. Instead of going out and getting those dudes, though, the Lions solution was to prop up Matt Patricia and basically say “This Guy Fucks!” as if his presence alone would somehow change things, as if his Staggering Genius would account for all the change that was needed so long as the pissant peasant players would do what they were told.

It’s arrogant, and that’s the one thing I still don’t like about Patricia and Quinn. It smacks of that other fat former Patriots assistant, Charlie Weis, sneering that Notre Dame would win because with him they’d have “a decided schematic advantage.” Notre Dame fired him after he cratered the team to 3-9.

I’m not saying that this is how things will turn out here, which is a nice change from how I felt only a couple of weeks ago. I no longer have that certainty of failure, and sometimes that’s all you need to be able to keep going as a fan. At least I am complaining about actual football things instead of talking about how Matt Patricia and Bob Quinn should be buried up to their necks in a fire-ant colony while I piss on them. That’s something, I guess.

That win over the Patriots is going to linger, which is good. It gives Patricia time to breathe, at least, but in that breath, he needs to actually show that he knows what he’s doing as a head coach, that he’s not just some Weisian egomaniac who believes he can win because he used to hang out on the fringes of Tom Brady’s entourage back in the day.

The good thing, though, is that I think there is something to his whole “get tough” routine, and I think that’s shown itself the past couple of weeks. Again, just like last week, the Lions looked tougher than they have in a long time. I kind of hate that because it is such a subjective unquantifiable thing, like if you want to believe they’re tough you’ll tell yourself that and if you don’t, you’ll find all sorts of reasons why they are weak-willed ninnies, but something just feels different about these dudes. They could have folded, could have collapsed, could have fucked around and then made a meaningless mad dash to the finish in order to make it look more respectable or whatever, which is what we’re used to seeing from them, especially the Caldwell era Lions. Instead, they were never out of this win. Even when they fell behind by ten, they pulled their shit together and came back and took a lead with only two minutes left. They never wilted from it. They simply weren’t good enough to sustain it.

I can take that. I can take “not good enough” instead of “fuck this, I’m going home.” At least for now. Eventually, you have to be Good Enough. That’s really the only thing that matters, but if you aren’t, the only way you’re going to eventually get there is to push yourself to be better, to do better, to be “tough” whatever the fuck that means to you, and I’ve at least seen that the last two weeks.

There was something satisfying, at least for a moment, in watching the replay of Golden Tate score that touchdown and seeing a fleet of fake Cowboys in their nice crisp cowboy hats and their pressed proudboi white shirts, jowls hanging, look on helplessly as Detroit took back its pride, even if it was fleeting. It was satisfying to feel like maybe, just maybe, these ugly fuckers don’t always win, that they don’t have to win.

But then there was the end of the game, the Cowboys lining up to kick what was essentially a gimme field goal, and over and over and over, we got to see Jerry Jones and his pinch-faced ugly bullshit, surrounded by his pinch-faced family, smug in the certainty of their triumph, in the inevitability of their America marching on at the expense of everyone else. Fuck ‘em.

It’s depressing, to know that in the end, those dudes keep winning. It’s depressing to see it happen every day in real life, in ways that matter, and it’s depressing that their ugly hijacking of our entire culture is so complete that it even happens metaphorically, symbolically, in these stupid games of ours. The Cowboys and Jerry Jones winning feels so wretched because in real life, these are the dudes that keep winning despite our angry horror. We feel impotent and broken by it. It makes me sick.

And so, yeah, this sucks. This sucks in a way that is worse than just “normal” losing feels. I really, really wanted the Lions to win this game not just because I’m a Lions fan and want my football team to do well, but because I just wanted something, anything, that could make me feel for only a heartbeat, one meaningless, stupid heartbeat, that I got to be happy, that we got to be happy, while the fuckers lost.

The Lions are 1-3, but I’m not sure if it even matters that much. This season is almost definitely going to be a lost season, and so what we’re left with are moments, in ambushing the Patriots, in taking our best shot at the Cowboy creeps of the world, anything that can help us believe that we’re at least going somewhere, that if we can just get some goddamn players on defense after this season that it might all be okay.

I don’t know. Part of me feels like this is all just rationalization, a survival technique given that the Lions went 9-7 last season and logic would dictate that the next step would actually be, you know, winning, instead of rebuilding from scratch, but logic and the Lions is an absurd combination only counted upon by the terminally insane.

Being a Lions fan is a day to day prospect. If you start trying to grasp the future, if you start looking too far forward and demanding things of the universe, you will break yourself. It’s hard to be poor and to let yourself believe that you’ll be rich one day. It’s hard to love a city that’s endlessly rebuilding, a team always falling on its ass while the Dallas’ and the fake Cowboys of the world get everything they want. It’s fucking hard, and if you don’t slow down and just try to do the best you can, to try to hope that at least today will be a good day, better than yesterday, you’re going to lose your shit. That’s the America we live in, that’s the NFL, and it sucks, but it’s your job to try to find a way to live in the world, to survive, and so you do what you gotta do.

I’m rambling now, but I hope I’m making some sense at least. It’s hard to be a Lions fan, just fucking brutal sometimes, but today, for me anyway, isn’t one of those days, as weird as that sounds, especially given that I just said that I hated losing to these fuckers so much. Today, I’m happy I’m a Lions fan because it’s sure as shit better than being a rotten-souled Cowboys fan. I’m happy that my team isn’t shitting itself today. I’m happy that I at least have reason to Hope that they win the next game, even if I can’t let myself truly Believe it. These are the deals we have to make with our own hearts to survive in this world. Is it rationalization? You bet your ass it is. But when you’re poor, you either find bullshit reasons to believe in tomorrow, whether it’s a shitty scratch-off lotto ticket or a bottle of pills or whatever the fuck gets you by. When you’re a fan of the Detroit Lions, you do the same thing.

Look, this is all more negative than I mean it to sound. The point is that at least I have some reasons to hope, that my pockets aren’t completely empty because the Lions at least feel like a scratch-off ticket or a stray Oxy or whatever. I can be a fan of the Lions today and feel like it might mean something tomorrow, or at least not feel like shit about it for a day.

This all seems weird, I’m sure, given that the Lions lost today, but what can I tell you? I’m a weird dude with weird feelings. I don’t feel bad about being a Lions fan today because while today wasn’t necessarily a good day, and that scratch-off gave me jack shit, I at least feel like I’m in the game. I at least have enough money in my pocket to afford a scratch-off, and while that might seem incredibly pathetic to you, to someone like me, that actually means a lot. To have something, even something that small and that sad, means so much compared to having literally nothing.

That’s all I’m trying to say. Even writing this feels sad, but this is the reality of a Lions fan. That’s how bad it gets sometimes. That’s how bad it got earlier in this season. But right now, I feel like the Lions have at least a dollar or two in their pocket and while that sure as shit won’t buy happiness, it might at least buy Hope. And even if it’s False Hope (it almost certainly is) it’s still a kind of Hope and that’s better than nothing. People will scoff at that and tell you that isn’t true, that False Hope is even worse than nothing, but those people have never had nothing and can fuck off. You live in this world and you find whatever you can to get by, if only for one stupid moment.

I’ve done some impressive gibberish rambling here and to be honest, I don’t blame you if you quit reading about the time I started going on about scratch-offs and opioids. Then again, maybe you understand what I’m trying to get at here. Maybe you don’t. Fuck it.

The Lions are not a good team, but they are not an awful team, and in some weird way, they feel like a better team right now, in the last two weeks, than they felt all of last season, or in just about any of Jim Caldwell’s years. There is no frantic meaningless to it all, no coin flips and bullshit like that. The 49ers game felt like that, and that’s why I hated it even though it was superficially a “close” game. It wasn’t. This one was, and that’s different. The result sucked, but fuck it, I can at least see the outline of something and for today anyway, I’ll take it. At least I can still get up tomorrow.