You Are A Lions Fan

On the first play of the game – shit, before the first play – Sam Martin kicked off, slipped and fell on his ass, and 60 years were condensed into one dumb moment as our skin melted off and Failure Demons pecked at our livers, cackling in between bites and vomiting sessions like ancient Romans eager to go back for more. Almost four quarters later, Matthew Stafford tried to feebly pitch the ball which hit the engorged gut of a Failure Demon, became lost to time and space and sanity, and was then picked up and run back by a Viking for a touchdown. In between, Stafford was sacked ten times, mutilated, and left for dead along with our souls as that goddamn Viking horn sounded again and again and again and . . .

I mean . . . what can you even say? What is left to say? Stafford looked lost without Golden Tate, the offensive line collapsed – again – and everything feels so far away that mere distance isn’t adequate to describe it. This is not a straight line to success, it is just an eternal maze where all the exits are blocked by Failure Demons and the howling ghosts of our dead.

It’s like those few weeks where the Lions actually looked good, like a new team, never existed. It feels like fucking Flowers for Algernon, or for you uncultured swine, like that Simpsons episode where Homer got the crayon removed from his brain and became a genius for a few days before realizing how fucked the world is and making them put the crayon back.

Ten sacks. TEN SACKS.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

TEN SAAAAAAACKS.

TEN S A C K S

10

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;

Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,

In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Long ago and eternal.

My brain is breaking. My brain has broken. Kerryon Johnson went from looking like DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, all swagger and youthful hubris, to looking like DiCaprio in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, retarded, doomed to die smothered by the eternal mass of his monstrously obese mother’s corpse. Lions Disease is that eternal corpse and it is a cruel way to die.

This is all hopelessly bleak, of course, and very much In The Moment, which is something that fans of all kind, and maybe Lions fans in particular, don’t deal well with, but fuck, man. FUCK.

All the old questions are back, both in terms of this season by itself, and the old, old questions that we’re all so hideously and intimately familiar with, and I’m sick of asking them. I’m sick of trying to come up with the same dumb answers and having the same dumb arguments and then sitting down on Sunday and it’s just the same ridiculous shit for 60 fucking years. I’m sick of steeling myself, of gearing up for another long march towards some ambiguous Promised Land that nobody’s actually seen, like apocalypse survivors who’ve heard rumors of some fantabulous safe haven where everyone eats three meals a day and laughs and fucks at night. You know it’s bullshit and probably doesn’t even exist, but you make yourself believe because the alternative, the utter nothingness and oblivion of it all, is just so depressingly horrific to even contemplate. I’m sick of it all.

Trust the Process. These words taste like acid after games like this. They feel mocking, cruel. “The Lions just aren’t ready,” Chris Spielman said as the Vikings scored a touchdown, and you felt like he could have said that at any moment since the Eisenhower administration. And there he was, as the game was ending, and Matthew Stafford led the world’s most pitiable and pitiful field goal drive, telling us all to trust Matt Patricia and Bob Quinn and those 60 years unhinged their jaw like some monstrous anaconda and swallowed those words and every one of us.

It’s been a shitty couple of weeks for the Lions. It’s been a shitty couple of centuries. What’s the difference? It all feels the same, and it all feels like forever.

This is the part where I’m supposed to rally you and tell you that it isn’t forever, but why would I do that? The shrill emptiness of such words just feels so hollow, not the words of an optimist but those of a great fool, almost cruel and mocking in their perversity. This is forever, and that’s what it means to be a Lions fan. You want more from me? Fuck you. You need more? You’re weak. This is life in the desert. This is life after the apocalypse. There is no safe haven, no Paradise City where the grass is green and the girls are pretty. You’re just an urchin living under the street. This is life as a Lions fan. You’re gonna live here and you’re gonna die here. You’re not some secret genius. You’re just some dumb motherfucker with a crayon in his brain.

You Are A Lions Fan.