Philosophy For Idiots

Squint hard and you can at least start to see an outline for some possible future in which Kerryon Johnson destroys teams on the ground while Kenny Golladay goes ¾ St. Calvin through the air, but it’s pretty hard to get juiced up for a coin flip game like this. I mean, the Panthers missed a short field goal, an extra point and then a two-point conversion with open receivers and all day to throw in the pocket, so . . . yeah, I mean, who cares?

It’s better to win than lose, I guess, but it’s sort of like being thousands of dollars in debt and finding a quarter in the street. Buy a gumball and hope that you choke on it after passing out.

“Meaning” is a weird concept, abstract as fuck, and the argument is that things are only as meaningful as we make them so we should just shut the fuck up and enjoy the win and give it “meaning”, but I mean, that’s only true to a point because it essentially just makes everything meaningless and nihilistic and who wants to live in that world? No. “Meaning” is an abstract concept, but only to a point. It still exists within a larger concept, a larger framework, attached to things like “expectation”. We provide meaning to wins and losses based on that larger context, not in some weird vacuum where the games only have meaning within their own confined 60 minutes (Or 4 hours. Thanks, advertising vampires!)

So, I reject the argument that we should all just shut the fuck up and enjoy a 20-19 coinflip because it happened to come up heads this time around. Attaching “meaning” to that on its own singular merits just feels desperate, not born of optimism but by an inability to fucking face reality. I mean, I get it. Being a Lions fan is fucking impossible sometimes, and so we all have to play little games with ourselves to keep from falling into the abyss, but it’s still unhealthy.

The Lions won 20-19. They didn’t really outplay the Panthers, nor were they grossly outplayed by them, so that’s something I guess. But, like I said, it’s 25 cents when you’re $25,000 in debt. Or $250,000. I don’t know how dark your life is, but you’re reading this so I can only imagine it’s pretty goddamn dark. Kerryon Johnson hurt his knee, people are arguing about the wisdom of tanking, the desperate and ruined are manically doing calculations in blood on the walls of their caves trying to gin up absurd playoff possibility scenarios, and the whole thing is just too ridiculous and depressing to deal with.

It is always an ugly place to be, that place where fans start turning on each other, arguing about who’s a better fan and all that shit. It’s just a ludicrous exercise in meaningless gibberish, a way to channel your frustrations and take them out in a way you deem “constructive” because you know, deep down, that you have no power, no control, and that the only alternative is to sit with eyes open Clockwork Orange style and watch the true Horror of Lions football. Because the Horror isn’t found in simple losing, it is found in the utter meaningless of it all, of stray thoughts about whether it matters if the team even wins or loses, of wondering why the fuck you are even watching this shitbag team at all.

And so you dig into the netherworld of Lions fandom, you pick meaningless fights with each other, obsessing about who Gets It and who doesn’t, about who deserves to be a Lions fan and who is a charlatan, about a million other meaningless and stupid little things that obscure the larger picture, which is that we have done this our entire lives and that to too many of us, this is Lions fandom, an endless display of flexing misery and posing optimism, that fills the gap where the actual football team should exist.

I’m guilty of it too. I mean, what the fuck is this post if not a devolution into the nasty backbiting and endless gibberish that has become Lions fandom? I’m guilty of it because THERE IS NOTHING ELSE WORTH TALKING ABOUT.

This is the horror of being a Lions fan. The season is over. It’s been over. We know this. Deep down, even the cave writers with the bloody nubs of their fingers know this. You can either disengage and feel like a “bad” fan, or you find ways of staying engaged that aren’t actually, you know, about these damn games that mean nothing. You talk about the future, you analyze the roster, you complain about the coaches, you bitch about Bob Quinn, you shake your fists at the Fords, you find fans who think differently than you and you tell them that they’re idiots, and it is all just a big sideshow circus meant to distract ourselves from the utter futility of being a Lions fan, of the fucking absurdity of it all.

Why are any of us still watching this goddamn team? Why?

This is all ridiculous given that the Lions, you know, just won, but somehow that makes it the perfect time for me to write about all this because it makes the point for me. It’s one thing to feel like this after yet another loss, but to feel like this after a win? That kind of says it all, doesn’t it?

Why do people care about things? I guess that’s what I’m interested in here. I know just asking that makes me sound like a sociopathic alien and lol yeah, but you know what I’m getting at here, right? What makes us care when the larger context isn’t there? Is it just habit? Or is it something deeper than that? If you admit and understand that being a fan of a sports team is by itself an absurd thing, meaningless at its core, then what is it that makes you care?

Maybe it’s not meaningless. Maybe it’s what I talked about last week, when I said that sports fandom is a cipher, a way to feel monstrous extremes of emotion without true consequence. Maybe that’s why people care. Maybe that’s why none of us can tear ourselves away from this godforsaken team. Maybe that’s even why so many people are addicted to the “community” element, because it gives them a chance to bitch about things that don’t really matter, because it gives them an outlet to vent deeper frustrations, or an outlet to hope, an outlet to get excited about something because even if it all blows up in your face, it doesn’t hurt you. Not really. Not like real life shit.

And yet, that doesn’t feel exactly true either, does it? I mean, if you’re a big enough fan, it still feels real, those emotions, right? But then we’re right back to talking about the nature of “meaning” and this whole thing just becomes a great big circle jerk of gibberish. Then again, maybe that is a perfect description for fandom.

Enough of my faux-philosophical nonsense, though. It’s almost Thanksgiving, which means this will be a short week. I’m probably gonna skip the weekly NFL picks piece and maybe just tack on the picks at the end of my Thanksgiving Lions post, which is always fun and full of Braveheartesque YOU BASTARDS frothing at the mouth in defense of Detroit. And in that post, maybe, lies the heart of this whole weird puzzle, the answers I’ve been circling around this entire ridiculous post. Because when I sit down to write that every year (well, give or take a few years long hiatus) it quickly becomes apparent that yes, I do care, and I care very deeply. Because the truth is that the Lions are not just a team that exist in a vacuum, but a team that belongs to something deeper, to an identity, to the very way that we understand ourselves. And maybe that’s why we all keep watching.