Le Nain Rouge

Phillip Rivers’ Failure Demons picked a pretty goddamn good time to poke their heads out, and in the aftermath of a game that I still don’t know how in the fuck the Lions won, I guess all that’s left to do is to salute those lil’ Failure Demons.

There have been times in the history of the city of Detroit when things got wild, and in these wild times, there have been sightings by people of a little imp man, a literal demon loosed from Hell onto the streets of Detroit. His name is Le Nain Rouge, owing to our fair city’s French roots, and perhaps he took a Napoleonic journey across the Atlantic to set roots beneath the city of Detroit, or maybe he has been here all along and it was left to the French to name him during one of his binges, when he fucked his way through the city, leaving no doubt as to who owns our fair town.

I’m serious. In the 1967 Detroit riots, when the city finally exploded in an all out race war, that little motherfucker Le Nain Rouge was seen flitting through the streets. These are not things that people will tell you are real because people don’t need to know about my man Le Nain Rouge and what he gets up to when the fever hits and the people get mean. But they do see him, and he sees them, and when these seeings happen shit gets wild and real.

So, yes, Detroit has a literal Failure Demon that pops his head out every now and again just to make sure we’re fucking up like he needs us to, but sometimes that little guy can trip up the tourists, the out of towners like Phil Rivers. It’s easy to see my man Le Nain Rouge trip up Rivers and the Chargers assortment of fuck ups and he does this because he loves us, our own little Failure Demon.

It felt like the Chargers scored multiple touchdowns, and they did, it’s just that my man Le Nain Rouge got involved and those yellow flags started flying. Or the ball squirted free on the goal line, or poor Phil Rivers threw it to the wrong dude. All the work of Le Nain Rouge. Watch as he makes every kicker, Lion or Charger fuck up. Watch as he takes the pants off of poor Phil Rivers and makes him sit on a cactus shaped like a dick.

You never know when Le Nain Rouge will get loose, and you never know whose side that little shit is gonna be on, but when you see him out there tripping up fools like Phil Rivers, you know that the time has come again for the city of Detroit to explode.

What will that explosion look like? I suspect it will be the frontline in this fucked up Civil War we’ve got going on here, Phil Rivers looks like a dude who would rock a red MAGA hat, right? What Le Nain Rouge has to say about it is his own business, but what happens in Detroit will be what happens in the whole of these fucked up United States of America. We have cities that don’t have drinking water around here. We have people who have been lied to for generations now, and it’s only a matter of time before it all just breaks apart in an epic explosion of anger and old hates, of race and regret, people barely getting by, surviving, eating garbage and sleeping in their own filth. It’s a horrible situation, but what does this have to do with football, you may ask?

Nothing really, except that football is the last place we have to channel these dark things, these mean thoughts and violent delights. We cheer on our Lions to savage the Chargers because it allows us to feel good about beating the shit out of The Other. The Other is frightening because The Other wants to take from you. The Other doesn’t see you as human. The Other will slit your throat while you sleep and cut your ankles to pieces so you can’t run him down.

And that’s why we still play football. That’s why we cheer when Phillip Rivers fucks up again, when Le Nain Rouge gets loose on these streets and starts dragging Chargers. It doesn’t matter that the Chargers probably should have won that game. It doesn’t matter that they probably feel like they’ve just been skull fucked by Le Nain Rouge, that the refs were out to get them or whatever. We’ve all dealt with these feelings before and they don’t matter.

What matters is that the Detroit Lions are somehow still unbeaten, and what matters is that the Los Angeles Chargers came to our city and met our Failure Demon, our Le Nain Rouge, and they got fucked up by him. We all dance with the devil from time to time and it’s good that sometimes he whispers in our ear and we know that he has our back and that everything will be alright.

We aren’t friends with the devil. We will never be rid of our Failure Demons, but don’t walk into our city and not expect Le Nain Rouge to fuck with you a little. We belong to each other, wrapped in these devilish hells, and we have suffered for it. But for one day, at least, a September day when the Los Angeles Chargers rolled into town, representing the City of Angels, they met our demons, our Le Nain Rouge, and our demon fucked up that angel. Because that’s what you get when you mess with the city of Detroit and our Detroit Lions.