The Fucking Lions, Man

Last week, Sam Martin slipped on the opening kickoff and fell on his ass. At the end of this week’s game, he was taken away in an ambulance. This is the Lions’ punter. The fucking punter! This is what people call a metaphor.

Of course, in between the Passion of the Punter were two grotesque losses to division rivals, the entire receiving corps getting hurt, the utter and complete demolition of the Lions season, and any other heinous bullshit you can think of. I could lament every single player on this team at this point. And yes, that includes Matthew Stafford.

Listen . . . 10 years ago, I started writing about the Lions. About four months before that, my dad was diagnosed with cancer. It was a particularly rare form of lymphoma almost impossible to treat with standard treatments like chemo. They tried anyway, and it went away. Then it came back after a year. He then got a stem-cell transplant that obliterated the cancer. Good news, right? Yes. And no.

You see, life is supposed to be about progress, about your hopes and dreams coming true eventually. It’s supposed to be about doing the right things and having it all work out in the end. The alternative is just too fucking dark to even contemplate. It will break a man. My dad didn’t have cancer anymore. The stem cell transplant killed him though. Not right away. He’s still alive, but he’s never recovered. He’s in and out of the hospital constantly and every year brings some new and ridiculous unforeseen side effect that hobbles him further and diminishes his quality of life. It sucks.

My dad is going to die from this, and probably sooner rather than later. This is a hard thing to deal with, a hard thing to accept. It is a slow and horrible death. I have been dealing with it and trying to accept it for ten years now. I can barely remember a time when I wasn’t.

My dad loves cars. More than that, he’s a genius when it comes to cars. He’s an artist. His body work, his restorations, have appeared in magazines. People come from all over to have him work on their classic cars, their show cars. Or rather, they came from all over. A few still come, those that don’t really get it, and my dad has to tell them he just can’t do it anymore.

My dad loves Mustangs, old Mustangs, late 60s style. He’s owned more than one – he’s always sold them because regular people can’t afford that shit for long – but his dream has always been to restore one from scratch, build it by buying custom parts one by one from all over the place and then assembling his dream car. He’s had the old body of a Mustang, completely stripped, in his garage for years. He’s ordered parts, spent a ton of money on everything he would need to do this, and he’s sat there and watched it all just sit because his body, his health, won’t let him do it.

Lately, my dad has been using what energy he has to gather all his parts, his tools, his dreams, so he can sell them. This is because he has accepted that he will never be able to do it. That his dreams are just that – dreams. Accepting that, living with that, is just unfathomably brutal. I don’t know what to say to my dad when he talks to me about it. What can you say? That it’s alright? It’s not alright. That it doesn’t have to be like that? It does have to be like that. Ignoring it doesn’t help anyone. It just leads to more pain, more frustration, more anger.

I imagine you can figure out where I’m going with this. You also probably think “Jesus, Neil, only a monster would use his father’s death march as a metaphor for Lions football.” And you’d be right, but if you understand one thing about this blog, about me, let it be this: this blog has never been about Lions football. It has never even really been about what it feels like to be a fan. It is a blog about loss, about the deals we make with ourselves to be able to handle it. It is a blog about life, in all its ridiculous vagaries. It is a blog about how some of us just aren’t meant to win.

Of course, this is all ridiculous, and that’s part of it too. This blog is about the ridiculous, about the sublime absurdity of it all. It is not a nihilistic blog, no matter what people think, because if nothing else I am always looking for the beauty hidden in the madness, for the Hope in the hopeless.

But the stark, terrible truth is that sometimes it just doesn’t work out. It doesn’t get fixed. People get sick and they don’t get better sometimes.

It’s been ten years and my dad is still sick, still dying, still almost impossibly conscious of it all. How does someone live like that? How do they get through it without becoming a bitter mess? I don’t know. You just do. Or you don’t. No one is gonna blame you either way.

Look, sometimes there are no answers. There is no point to any of it other than what you make of it. This is the madness of dying. This is the madness of living.

It’s been 60 years for the Lions. 60 years for Lions fans. And here we are, in 2018, after Reboot Number 168, the Lions are 3-6 and it feels like they are 3-60. There is no hope, not for this season anyway. It becomes increasingly harder to even feel like there is any hope beyond that. And yet, this is just the start of this particular iteration of the LoLions.

This is all hauntingly familiar. It is the same shit I was writing after the first game this season, and it is the same shit I’ve found myself writing over and over again through the years. In the past, though, it’s always taken me some time to accept that this is the way things are and there is nothing to be done for it. Just give it a chance. That’s what I’ve told myself and what all of you have told yourselves your entire lives with this godforsaken team.

To think this way before Year One is even done with is something worse by an order of magnitude it is almost impossible to describe. It is dark and full of terrors. To fight against something like that, to get angry at it, is futile and self-destructive. All that is left to do is accept it.

My dad has “died” more times than I can count. By that, I mean I have sat by and forced myself to try to accept that this was IT when he’s been in the hospital, his vitals failing. He’s always pulled through – well, for a given definition of “pulled through” anyway – but it doesn’t change that I have grieved my father more times than anyone should ever have to. The deepest, darkest secret is that sometimes, I wish it would just end. For me. For him. For all of us. This is a horrible thing to think, a horrible thing to feel, and yet, it’s natural, I think. If you’ve been through something like this, you probably get it. Or maybe you don’t. I don’t know.

But the endless cycle of despair, of acceptance followed by the most ragged of hopes – each time, the hope grows more ragged than the last – is its own sort of pain, its own sort of emotional crisis that becomes separate from the thing itself. It’s not just my father’s illness, or his death, or any of that. It is the horror of having to live through it, of having to constantly live somewhere on the edge of hope and despair, of acceptance and denial, of having to wait for it to either miraculously get better or to end the way we all know it will.

Writing about the Lions has always been fascinating to me because it’s an easy way to explore these sorts of things in a controlled way. It’s also because I’ve been a fan of the Lions my entire life. The whole thing has always been absurd. Life is absurd.

It gets tough, though, to know what’s left to say about it all, the same way I don’t know what to say to my dad anymore. It’s okay? It’s not okay. It will get better? It won’t get better. It’s been 60 years. It is impossible for anyone, Lions fans included, to contextualize that, to put the whole fucking thing in front of us and stare it down in all its monstrous misery. It is too much for any of us to deal with, to accept, to live with.

There’s not much that anyone can say about it. There are no words that are gonna make it better, or make it different. And yet, feelings are non-negotiable, aren’t they? You can’t just tell yourself not to care anymore. You can’t emotionally divorce yourself from it even knowing the inevitable. This is the essence of life itself. You know where it’s heading. You know that the end is darkness, and yet what else is there? You just get on with it.

Being a fan of the Detroit Lions is the most absurd goddamn thing. It is foolish and unjustifiable. These things we care about, man.

Of course, loving a father is a bit different. I mean, I hope you get this unless you’re a complete psychopath. But loss and grief and acceptance are things not bound by degree. You feel them when it matters and you feel them when it about something trivial and dumb. This is why it’s so absurd, both fandom and life itself. You feel them more intensely for things that “matter”, sure, but the basic emotions themselves are there whether it’s something great or something small. This is because “caring” is non-negotiable.

This is kind of a hideous mess of a post, but I like it that way. It is a hideous mess because that’s who I am, because that’s what being a fan of this goddamn team means. I’m always trying to constantly make sense of it because I’m always constantly trying to make sense of any of it. I want to understand this because it helps me understand my dad’s situation and it helps me understand a million other things in between the two extremes. Being a sports fan is really just a cipher. It is an easy – relatively speaking – and controlled way of feeling monstrous extremes of emotion. It is pain and it is utter ecstasy without true consequence. No wonder it is so addicting.

And that’s why I’m still here, I guess. That’s why I’ll always still be here. As weird and quixotic as it may sound, I can write about the Lions because I can’t write about anything else. Not really. I mean, I can, and I can do it well, but it comes at such a savage cost to myself because I don’t know how not to feel deep and raw. The Lions don’t matter. Not really, anyway. And yet, they do because they are necessary for a fool like me. And the Lions matter because . . . well, because life is stupid and doesn’t make any goddamn sense.

I have repeated myself multiple times in this post. I have wandered and gone off on tangents. I have said stuff I will almost certainly regret, stuff that I won’t even believe as soon as I finish writing it. But that is part of the deal, dudes and lady dudes. That is why I do this. It is an exploration and sometimes I will wander into shitty places and get bitten by a snake or whatever.

The Detroit Lions provoke feelings inside of me, feelings that need to be explored and worked out. They make me think of real life shit, of my dad, or like brawling as a youth, of crying after I get in a fight because of the adrenaline dump, about what it means to hope, what it means to accept loss, what it means to live even when you already know that you have been defeated. This is why I do this. This is why I write about the Lions. This is why I care about the Lions. This is the beauty and the stupidity of sports and sports fandom all wrapped up in one big fucked up package.

The fucking Lions, man. The fucking Lions.  Fucking life, man. Fucking life. What else can you say?