Everybody Lives

If you are gonna steal one on the road, you might as well do it with all the help you can get, which the Lions did done get got from a host of Eagles injuries to possible referee malfeasance to Fat Matt and Uncle Paulie finding ways to keep the Eagles tight ends handcuffed to I don’t know, juvenile delinquents and crackheads throwing batteries and bags filled with piss, glued together by dried cum onto the heads of their own players causing them to fail in ways no one could really see coming.

Are there any heroes in a game like this? Yes, I guess so, like Jamal Agnew, who returned to being the fast little alien that gets to places the rest of us don’t, or maybe Marvin Jones Jr. who decided to take on the role of number one receiver. It is a good day, celebrate boys, lord knows we don’t get too many of these.

No one knows that better than Calvin Johnson, or St. Calvin as I once dubbed him back in the good old days when I had only been 9 times betrayed instead of the final ten which was pretty fucking dark now that I think about it. But anyway, yeah . . . Calvin Johnson knows what it’s like to celebrate one of these rare victories on the road, and he knows that the best way to celebrate is to get high as fuck immediately after the game so you can protect yourself from the 169 new voices in your head that come courtesy of the many concussions you just suffered as a laborer on the cruel plantation known as Lions football.

Wow, this got dark in a hurry, didn’t it? Yes, but that is what happens when your heroes are haunted, only coming out at night to tell you to go away, that the team that did this to them is evil and that the only way out is at the end of an impossibly long bong rip

But those are all the haunting notes coming from the haunted house that is NFL football, which is a criminal conspiracy designed to ruin the minds of an entire generation one concussion at a time, and it would be impolite to ignore them.

Still, it feels good to win on the road against a team that won the Super Bowl only a couple of years ago even if that team has been hollowed out and you know that you were lucky to escape with your life. That feeling of relief after hours of anxiety is a nice change from the norm, you know? You’re not sure how you did it and that you’re pretty sure it would be stupid to think you could get away with it again, but shit, steal from these fools while they’re sleepin’, why not?

Matthew Stafford gets to lead this team into a 2-0-1 world in which they are not exactly invincible but not pathetically weak either. He gets a chance to take a decade’s worth of promise and regret and turn it into something real, something powerful, something that will make Chris Spielman weep in the booth because he knows what it’s like, just like Calvin Johnson did.

But, that is an awful lot to hope for, and poor Chris ended up having to flee town just to better take care of his dying wife and poor Calvin had to get high just to better take care of his dying life, and in the between times, we all experienced what it was like to go through dying life as a Lion. We know what it does to these dudes, the grind, the interminable shame and Failure, demons just constantly cackling and telling you that you aren’t good enough and that this will only end in tears and sadness.

I watched Calvin Johnson do things on the football field that no mortal man can do. He forced the NFL to rewrite its shitty rulebook time and time again because his effortless grace often clashed with the stark needs of the NFL’s black and white ideas of what a catch even fucking was. He was concussed into oblivion and an almost surely dim future and early death, but he did it all as a Detroit Lion, for idiots like me who can only commiserate by getting high as fuck too.

Matthew Stafford probably wakes up everyday and looks at his wife and wonders what will happen when he is concussed into an early dotage and she is left with her own head injuries and his to deal with as the sun sets on their life. He is paid exorbitantly rich sums of money to be the kind of man who would sacrifice these kinds of things, but in the end there has to be something more to it for him, right?

It felt good to get over on Jim Schwartz. It felt good to listen to the shitty Philly fans boo their own team, cue It’s Always Sunny music, and it felt good to watch the Lions survive yet again. Does this thing have legs? Is there a happy ending somewhere for someone?

Shit, now you’ve got me asking all those crazy questions that led me once to march my own sanity off of a cliff into an ocean of ether, which I floated in until being reborn as Krishna, and I know now that the future and the past is all just an endless loop of love and warmth and the belief that there is something more behind the final door. This one understands.

But in the here and the now we are faced with the painful tragedies of our own doomed loves, and none is more painful than that of the Lions fan, who must suffer to one day understand universal transcendence. But oh lord how long? It is one thing to be a fan of a bad team, it is another to be taken in one year after another by the same brutal con. And now we are seeded with the tempting lure of 2-0-1 and where that might lead us, to which fever dreams we will never want to wake from, and to the possibility that this will somehow, someway have a happy ending.

But probably not. And you know this. And you’re not here to pretend that is anything other than what it is, but what it is, I guess, is good enough for today, or at least until the realization hits that this might matter, that this time it could be different and then everything will be scary and terrifying because that’s what the real stuff is like, baby.

But again, probably not. Most likely this ends with Patrick Mahomes and Aaron Rodgers leading a parade of our corpses through the streets just to be set fire on at the altar of whatever hell gods they made deals with, and we know this, but what is on the next page? Aha ha, now we are asking the real questions, and when we start asking those questions we will fall into a wormhole of our own seductive possibilities, and in this place anything and everything is real, and I sure as fuck hope Matthew Stafford looks good holding that trophy from the commissioner.

But these are all things to be pondered at a later time, a forever time set so far in the future that we’ll probably never get there, just be jerking off and joking with each other until the year 3039 when I’ll declare this season the one that Matthew Stafford finally becomes a real grown man and that this season is the one all the other seasons have been building to, and in that 3039 season, you will look at me and you will smile and you will say I always loved you, Krishna, and you know what, I always loved you too.