The Fear

Oh God, the Packers. There is no team that fills Lions fans with a combination of fear and loathing like the Packers. That’s right, I said it. Fear. The Fear. It’s not shameful to admit this the same way it’s not shameful for an abuse victim to tell people that they’ve been abused. We have to say these things, if only to ourselves, before we can start to heal.

Brett Favre and his mushroom dick to Sterling Sharpe, Barry Sanders rushing for negative yards in the frozen hellscape of Lambeau, the Hail Mary, the 16 in 0-16, fucking Matt Flynn stealing glory away from us in Green Bay which in retrospect was the beginning on the end for Jim Schwartz, Ndamukong Suh stomping Aaron Rodgers on Thanksgiving which was the beginning of the end for Suh, Aaron Rodgers being Aaron fucking Rodgers so many goddamn times that devil . . . no other team has personified The Fear, brought it to life like Freddy Krueger, a manifestation of our pathos and darkest dreams, like the fucking Packers. Feel free to tell me your own memories in the comments. Let it out, my dudes and lady dudes.

It doesn’t even really matter that the Packers don’t even seem to be that good this season. Yeah, Rodgers hopped out of hell on one leg to torment the Bears, but the only reason anyone even remembers that is because the Bears were whipping that ass in the first place. They tied the Vikings, lost to the Redskins, and beat the Bills, but so what? They look mediocre, and yet we all know that in the end, they’ll still be standing, Aaron Rodgers broken yet slaying like a cyborg and none of this will have mattered.

It doesn’t matter that Aaron Rodgers has lost most of his supporting cast. The Packers just reach down into hell for him and pull out another randomly generated Madden dude who inexplicably turns into a Pro Bowl receiver. This year it’s a dude named Geronimo Allison. A dude named fucking Geronimo. Christ. Now we even have Apache ghost warriors on our asses.

I’m not even sure that I hate the Packers anymore. I mean, I do, but it’s all buried beneath The Fear. They’ve cowed me into groveling respect. This is sick. It’s gross. Not as gross as their vomit colored alternate unis, but still pretty damn gross.

I thought we were through with all this when Dr. Bert Fever retired to make Wranglers commercials in hell. I thought we were done and wouldn’t have to hear about how he was having a good ol’ time out there and he’s just havin’ fun, Troy! But that seems like an eon ago, lifetimes on lifetimes buried by Rodgers, who has somehow been even worse and how long, Lord? How long?

I mean, what comes after Rodgers? He’s already some dead-eyed soulless ghoul, feeding on the souls of the damned, and when he’s not doing that he’s omnipresent in All-State ads and it’s all just too much. Does the literal devil show up after Rodgers leaves? I mean, come on.

I can’t handle the Packers in a rational way. The Fear is just too great. The Lions could be leading 56-10 in the 4^th quarter and I’d be convinced that Rodgers would molt like a fucking snake and reemerge as Cthulhu or some shit and just start eating everyone in the stadium. The Lions could knock him out, Ndamukong Suh could rush the field and stomp his nuts into a jelly and I’d be convinced that he’d just escape his mortal shell and possess whoever the fucking backup is like he did with Matt Flynn that one time and then you’re Denzel Washington killing himself only to watch with your dying breath as Rodgers possesses a fucking cat in order to survive and yes I’m making semi-obscure movie references now because I don’t know what else to do.

The Lions are 1-3 and they’ll probably be 1-4 after this game because of the whole Aaron Rodgers of it all, but that feels like it doesn’t even matter right now. The Lions aren’t winning shit this year and so each game feels like its own individual war, its own Test of the Will, and this is especially true when it’s a Packers game.

The one thing the Lions have going for them is that it’s at Ford Field and not Lambeau, but let’s face it, half of our horrible memories of this goddamn team have taken place here. Favre to Sharpe, The Stomp, The Hail Mary . . . all at home. Besides, playing them at home in early October just means that we have to play them at Lambeau in fucking December because this is how it is every year and there is no rest for the weary and the damned.

Honestly, I just want the Lions to look reasonably good before the spiritual buttfucking occurs. I want to see Kerryon Johnson run it up their asses (two sodomy references in two sentences because that’s how I roll, baby, please don’t psychoanalyze me), I want to see Frank Ragnow push people around, I want to see Good Stafford instead of Walkabout Stafford, I want to see whoever the fuck is playing defense to show that they at least understand the concepts they’re supposed to be executing, and I want Da’Shawn Hand to give me at least a glimmer of hope for the defensive line’s future. I want to see all of that and then I can at least bury my head in a bucket of ether when Rodgers puffs up like the devil escaping a genie bottle sometime in the 4^th quarter.

When the season feels lost, you start to recalibrate your expectations and you start to live for moments, for flashes, for the simple yet all too elusive idea that your team might someday be something different than the same sad sack losers you’re used to dealing with. There is a depressing sense of inevitability about it all, and when all else seems lost, you start to look for reasons that it might be different this time. I am all too familiar with this game as a Lions fan, and as much as I don’t like to play it, what else can I do? Demanding excellence and success this season would be insane, the act of an extreme masochist. To be fair, that’s basically the definition of being a Lions fan, but come on, there are limits even for us.

At some point, you have to set aside winning and losing and just try to survive somewhere in the details, man. That’s where I’m at, and that’s what I was trying to get at in the gibberish of my Cowboys game recap. I can’t sit here and reasonably expect the Lions to whip on the Packers, both because of what’s already gone on this season and because of, well, the whole Packers of it all. And so I try to survive on details, on moments, on reasons to believe in some far off future that I can barely even imagine right now. This is almost unbearably sad, especially because it is so unbearably familiar, but so it goes, friendos. So it goes.

I think the Lions at least have a shot at winning this game, and that’s an improvement over the beginning of the season, and for now that’s enough to keep me going. If the Lions do win, I’ll be happy, but it’s a weird sort of happiness. It’s a happiness that will be about beating the Packers, about beating Aaron Rodgers, and it’s a happiness that will be about potential futures, but it’s a happiness that will exist in a vacuum because I know this team isn’t good enough right now. I know the defense is hopelessly flawed, and I know the Lions aren’t winning shit this season. It’s a sort of melancholy happiness, but that is the oxymoronic life of a Lions fan.

You make secret deals with your own heart, make secret deals with the Failure Demons, with the Devil, and you try to ignore that while he’s dealing with you, he’s also making deals with Aaron Rodgers, who stares at you with those dead serial killer eyes, and you try not to shudder and the devil laughs at you because you’re a Lions fan and you’re already damned and you’re just too stupid to know it and then Aaron Rodgers drags you to a deeper level of hell and straps you in a chair and sits down with you and makes you watch his All-State commercials for eternity and then Brett Favre shows up and starts talking about Wrangler to you and then takes out his tiny penis and you forget why you even wanted to make deals with the devil in the first place and it’s then that you remember that heaven is closed to you and this is the only thing left for you to do and then you try to scream but nothing comes out and they’re laughing at you, Rodgers and Favre, and their commercials are burned into your brain and then you wake up sweating in your bed and you try to forget it but oops, now it’s game time and there they are again on your TV screen, those soulless serial killer eyes staring at you in HD and you’re mad, you’re utterly insane and you’re a Lions fan.

Prediction: Packers 24 Lions 23