Cocksucking in the Desert

Well . . . shit, I guess it’s better than losing. Yes, these are the kinds of things that we tell ourselves to make sense of yet another Lions season opening in something less than rapturous glee, but we have been here before and most times below here and I guess it’s better than nothing?

Yeah, I’ve got nothing, except the sort of empty feeling that can only come from watching your team self-destruct in slow motion somewhere in the desert, and you can take comfort that you are 2,000 miles away from the blast site, but you also know that there are a lot of dead people out there, people who thought it would be nice to watch a NFL football game in the pleasant embrace of early September only to find that they wandered into a world of empty buildings and stick men meant to resemble something like humanity before it all gets blown apart in a nuclear hellstorm of Failure Demons and lol same ol’ Lions amirite gibbering. Somewhere, a man runs in slow motion down a sideline to call timeout to the whole insane spectacle and somehow this man is listened to and it’s all stopped but only for a moment, and in that moment, everyone wishes that man would get blown away but he doesn’t and so then that moment passes and in the next moment you have Matthew Stafford running in fury off of the field while everything burns around him and you know that there is no putting this thing together again and that we are all just dead things burning in a mushroom cloud of our own worst fears, and Matthew Stafford is still screaming but there is no one left alive to hear him, only the cries of a few buzzards and maybe the mocking laughter of a god, cruel and indifferent to the sufferings of his people, and this is just life in the desert in the year 2019, which isn’t really life at all but instead a sort of death frozen in time, just a memory waiting to be caught up in some desert hell storm and blown across all the land reminding everyone that to be a fan of the Detroit Lions is to welcome the eye of that storm, to welcome the embrace of that sweet nuclear heat death because it’s easier to just die than to somehow manage to escape and delude yourself that there is anything real left for you in this world to care about. Matthew Stafford is screaming and we are all howling with laughter and regret, ghost voices in a hell of our own making as a tiny bug man steals our souls and whispers names from the Book of Death to us, names that we are all too familiar with and all we can hope for is that someday someone finds us and releases us from this eternal prison so that at least our ghosts can find some semblance of peace, finally able to tear away from this nightmare of a world in which even our victories are stolen from us and where the absence of loss is not joy but a sort of empty feeling, a familiar feeling and please just let the mushroom cloud take us away to a better place, a place where we don’t have to feel these feelings and where we can let Matthew Stafford find whoever the fuck gave final voice to that fucking timeout and beat that someone into a death long coming.

This isn’t Matthew Stafford’s fault, who did everything he could to hold off the inevitable, whose rage at that fucking timeout is the only thing still feels real in the surreal aftermath of whatever the fuck that was. I don’t know whose fault it is. Is it Darrell Bevell’s fault, the man who tried to call that timeout? Is it Matt Patricia’s fault, the only man who could have given final authorization to that timeout? Is it our fault for having the audacity to believe that this fucking team could just get out of its way long enough to escape from the desert with something resembling its dignity still intact? I suspect that it’s everyone’s fault because we should all share the blame for whatever the fuck this was because at a very simple basic level, we are the ones who keep enabling this fucking disaster, this never ending nuclear heat death in the desert, where we all knew the only thing that we could possibly find was the reflection of our own stupid hubris in the eyes of a tiny whirling dervish of a man ready to steal life from us in a place where only dead things could ever hope to survive.

Now here we are, those dead things, surviving somehow, but with life stolen from us, with victory just a cruel rumor and defeat an all too easy feeling, a feeling to get lost in so that we don’t have to pretend that it could ever be anything other than this. At least this is comfortingly familiar. At least here, in this feeling, we don’t have to worry about ourselves getting our hopes up yet again and we don’t have to pretend that we deserve anything better than this winless, lossless purgatory of 0-0-1.

We’re not in hell, but we’re not in heaven either, and now all we can hope for is that the still living pray for us every now and then so that we can one day find peace and rest. I don’t have any answers for you that don’t begin and end with someone tackling Darrell Bevel and cutting his hands off so he can’t call that fucking timeout. Just one more moment and we could have had it all, victory in the land of the dead, but we didn’t have that moment and so here we all are, wandering with the dead, waiting for our final judgment before a god we have never held much faith in other than as a sure harbinger of our own soul obliteration. What man begs at the knee of his own executioner?  Because at a certain point it should become clear that we’re gonna die either way, and that to hope for a savior is stupid and childish. We are all sinners here and we all deserve to die.

Oddly, I don’t really blame any of the players for this. The NFL is a weird, weird place and these things just sort of happen sometime. But they usually happen due to incompetence in things like time management and bend but don’t break coaching conservatism. These are the things that I blame. Matthew Stafford just works here, etc.

Darrell Bevel racing down the sideline again in again in slow motion as we replay it like the fucking Zapruder film will be one of those things that goes into the Lions Hall of Shame, the place where we store all of those hideous things like in that warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Don’t worry, folks, we all got our faces appropriately melted, nothing to see here.

We’ve been through a lot together as Lions fans, and we are the only ones who can understand that after a while these things are all just best taken with a sort of ghoulish humor, an understanding that it is better to just laugh at these things than to get mad at them over and over and over again, which just isn’t good for the soul. I watched all of this happen wrapped up in my hoodie on the couch, a victim of my own scandalous living and I laughed with contempt as the inevitable happened because what the fuck else am I going to do? I have been mad before, I have uttered unspeakable things about men whose only crime was to get sucked into this never ending story of despair and suffering. I have howled and raged at the utter madness of it all, and at least this way I can just let my face get melted and my head roll off of my body instead of trying to hold it all together in a Sisyphean struggle for redemption. There is no redemption to be found here, only the embrace of a nuclear heat death and the hope that we’ll get it better in the next life.

There is lots of blame to go around here, but the vast majority of it has to fall on ourselves for being stupid enough to believe that it could ever be anything other than this. People are right when they say that losing is just like sucking your sister’s cock, which is a thing that people say, right? It is certainly not like kissing her because that is just a moment of awkwardness you don’t ever have to talk about again. Sucking her cock, though, is something that you don’t come back from, and sadly, I don’t think Matt Patricia comes back from sucking his sister’s cock, nor does he deserve to. Keep sucking that cock, Matt, and maybe you’ll work off the calories you’re about to ingest.

Look, this is all terrible imagery, and I’m sorry for it, but not as sorry as I am for allowing myself to believe that it could have ever ended in any other way. We are all cocksuckers here, prisoners of our own cock hungry hubris. Suck ‘em all up, fellas. That is the only way we’ll ever learn any kind of lesson here.

The Lions are 0-0-1 which is better than being 0-1-0 I guess, but then again this is American football and that “1” doesn’t come with a point attached to it. We’re stuck at zero points and in this pointless existence the only thing left to do is to hope and pray that at the end of the year these points will be returned to us, rewards for allowing them to be withheld throughout the year. These zero points come with a promise that they will one day be filled with meaning, but for now there is no meaning and no points so fuck it, I guess.

And that’s the best I have to offer you, kids. Just keep on sucking them cocks and hope that someday they will count for something. Because here, in the desert, there is nothing else to eat and a belly full of cocks is surely better than a belly full of air and sand. I hope that you didn’t think you would find anything other than this. This is where people go to die. It isn’t where they go to get fed and hopefully one day a buzzard will pick our bones clean and at least that buzzard will get fed. Okay, well that is that, and I am out. Keep sucking those cocks and hope that one day a buzzard will know that you sucked those cocks and he will thank you for it.