The Whole World Is Obscene

Wearied indifference should not be the feeling in Week 2 of a brand new regime, but here we are. I was all set to talk about how narratives are bullshit, blah blah blah, but you never want to reach the point where you’re arguing with some imagined commentariat, because that way lies madness and despair, and let’s face it, we’ve all had about enough of that.

And so wearied indifference it is. I mean, how else are we supposed to approach this? 60 years or 1 week . . . at a certain point, it all just bleeds together and becomes the same, sad tragic horror story.

I guess there is intrigue about Matthew Stafford. It will be interesting on at least some level to see whether he has taken a permanent walkabout of the soul, or whether he’s gonna pull his own ass out of the fire because, brother, ain’t no one else gonna help him. Than again, Stafford is used to that. But then then again, maybe this is what finally breaks him. Maybe this is the moment where he looks at Barry Sanders, where he starts thinking about Calvin Johnson, and he fucking gets it, he understands the true nature of Lions Disease, and that is incurable and always fatal.

It will also be interesting, in a macabre sense anyway, to see if the team frags Patricia. Week 1 was that bad, the simmering resentment that obvious. There have been a lot of reports that the team hates him, and that is where I was gonna start gibbering about narratives and what not, but fuck it, you can’t blame them if they do.

It seems clear, I think, by now, that Patricia is trying some old-school bullshit Change The Culture thing, which is admirable on a certain level, but delusional on every other. First of all, that shit only works if you’re taking over a 4-12 team that is ready to listen to anyone, not a 9-7 team that just needed a little shove to get to the playoffs. Second, Patricia is not the dude to do that. He has no credibility to work with. People will believe in you when things are hard if, you know, you have anything in your background which tells them they should believe. Being a passenger on the Tom Brady Express is nothing. The players see that, you and I see that. Patricia can’t see that himself, and that’s fine. I wouldn’t expect him to. But that inability to Know Himself, and not in a jackin’ it way, is his fatal flaw.

So . . . yeah, there’s a very real chance that Patricia never makes it onto the field after halftime. A camera crew will head to the locker room and find his fat, naked ass tied to a locker, his underwear stuffed in his mouth, his body bruised and battered by a mass assault with bars of soap rolled into socks. If the team was smart, they’d use phonebooks. They don’t leave a mark. But who has an actual phonebook these days? And besides, this team isn’t smart.

Yes, it’s come to this. The biggest intrigue now involves arguing about the best method to assault Matt Patricia. Maybe they find that pencil of his shoved up his ass. I don’t know. This is for the players to decide. It’s part of their unionized rights.

The 49ers are basically just casual participants in this obscene horror show. They’re just hiding behind a tree, watching the massacre, and then they’ll come out once Jason or Freddy or whoever is gone and then they’ll desecrate the corpses. Horrible, horrible.

I mean, come on, it’s hard to actually try to analyze this game because in order to do so, you need to be able exist in a world that is sane and that has common terms and rules that govern everyone fairly. This is not such a world. Lions fans understand this on a level fans of other teams can barely comprehend. And right now, especially, there are no rules. Nothing matters, everything is permitted.

What good would rational analysis do in the face of absurd irrationality? I could talk about Jimmy Garoppolo and his struggles against the Vikings and False Messiahs and all that horseshit, but what does any of that matter when at some point in the game a Lions player’s pants will fall down to his ankles, causing him to trip and fall and give up a long touchdown run? What does any of it matter when at some point in the game a referee will decree that the Lions get a 15-yard personal foul because Matt Patricia’s body hair is offensive? What does any of it matter when Darius Slay is abducted by a UFO in the middle of a goddamn play?

It doesn’t, and that’s the world we find ourselves living in already in the Year of Our Lord 2018, or 1 Week A.P. (After Patricia). The 49ers will beat the Lions because the kids from Little Giants would beat the Lions right now. This thing is a corpse and it’s gonna stink for a long, long time and no one is going to just do the decent thing and bury the fucking body. The whole world is obscene.

Look, I wish I had more to say, but what else is there to say? The whole world is obscene.

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