Survive

Survive and move on. That is about the best I have to offer you in this grim outhouse existence that is our lives as fans of these Detroit Lions. There is no light at the end of this tunnel except for perhaps a speeding train waiting to send us into the bardo or Dante’s Purgatorio anyway, where we will wait to be shunted off into hell once St. Peter gets to our names on his goddamn (god damning?) list. 3-3-1 is certainly better that 2-4-1 or whatever, but it merely ties us to an eternal future of Ford family fuckups with their Nazi loving ways and Patriot Way Fascists and Millen incompetencies or any of the million other fuckos I could point to in this endless horror show that we call fandom.

But the Lions won, and that is good, I suppose. Matthew Stafford remains the closest thing to an adult in the room for us, and it is good that we can beat even shittier teams like the Giants still, but it is all just a fake parade of idiocy that will delude us into ever deeper waters of despair in this Sisyphean existence. I would like to tell you that it will all be better someday, but you know better and don’t need me blowing sunshine up your ass. We are not like the others and never will be and that means we are doomed to this shitty eternity of Lions fandom and it’s assorted Failure Demons threatening to drag us from this Dante’s Purgatorio to Dante’s Inferno where we will get to enjoy the distinct miseries of all nine levels before eating ass at the feet of the devil, and while I am an ass eating man it would be nice if it didn’t always taste like shit.

Oh when, Lord? That is all we can cry as we continue to suffer these endless torments, but at least sometimes we get to experience the transcendent beauty of someone like Barry Sanders or St. Calvin Johnson, but even those just always end in bitter acrimony and hatred between player and team and fans in this endless uncivil existence, this poisoned marriage we just can’t seem to break free from.

But even poisoned marriages end sometimes, and maybe that is the best that we can hope for, that one day we can just ignore this goddamn football team that has taken so much from us. But probably not, and at best we will always just have these scars to haunt us as we seek for better times and a better life in a better world. Don’t despair, because we are all in this together and what the hell, at least it beats being a fan of some soulless monstrosity like the Patriots or the Packers who are already in hell, worshipping at the devil’s feet, eating his ass like good little slave monkeys.

I don’t know what to tell you to make this all feel better, which seems especially grim and dumb given that, you know, the Lions actually won this meaningless game. But we all know how this story ends, and it doesn’t end in championships and spitting in the face of the fascist Goodell’s of the world. It just ends in misery and regret as we maybe, just maybe, sneak into the playoffs once last time before being humiliated before a national audience again who will laugh at us and call us names and try to take Thanksgiving away from us like they do every year because they are all just monsters here in hell sent to torment us, and all we can do is remember that we are not like them, not like the others, and try to take care of each other.

This is a nasty piece of business being a Lions fan, grim and unrelenting in its assorted miseries stuffed down our throat and up our asses by these endless Failure Demons here in hell. But we don’t have to worship the devil at least and maybe some kind living person will pray for our souls and get us bumped backed up to Purgatorio before maybe just maybe a kind angel drags up to Dante’s Paradiso, but probably not and even if we get there it’s not like we’ll know how to behave, covered in all the shit and these scandalous lies that we tell ourselves to keep from going mad in an ocean of ether and regret as fans of the Detroit Lions.

Maybe someday it will make some sort of sense, but it’s too hard to see now with Fat Matt and that bastard Quinn skulking our hearts with his pathetic baseball bat. And as long as Martha and her Nazi loving family are in charge, none of it will matter. This is just the fate that has been dealt us, and these cards fucking stink, but it’s not like we can just keep folding them because we are already broke and there are nasty sorts who like to break thumbs if we don’t pay up so we just have to keep playing and hope for miracles, I suppose.

It’s hard – so hard – to be fans of this fucked up team, but what else do we have to do? Watch the Red Wings in their dark descent into the dregs of the NHL, hoping against desperate hope that Stevie Y will save the day? Or maybe watch the Pistons as they start off yet another season with a loss? Hey, let’s check out the Tigers who just finished the season dead last in the whole league while Verlander and Scherzer face off in the World Series to remind us that we don’t get to have nice things.

Maybe we can trust in our pure college teams who continue to disappoint us year after year, or perhaps head to foreign soil to root on a Liverpool team that won’t break our hearts, but that is a crazy thing to have to do, to look to foreign places and teams to rescue us from our perpetual miseries here at home.

For most of us, the Lions are the best thing we have going today and that is a fucking ridiculous thing to say, but these are strange and terrible times and everybody dies here. I don’t know what to tell you or how to save you because I can’t even save myself and this is all just a Dante written nightmare from which we can never escape. There is no Beatrice here to guide us to heaven, no Virgil to walk us safely through hell. There is only me and only misery here in the afterlife because we must have sinned hideously in some prior life to be reincarnated eternally as the bottom of an old shoe, or the taint on some fat man who’s balls scrape against the toilet seat and hang in the shit waters of his own making. We are covered in shit and it’s all our own damn faults for not having the guts to just turn away from all this madness.

I’m glad the Lions won today because it is better than losing, but I am also not glad because this team, because all of us, need a goddamn enema, a clean slate, something pure to start over with, free of these last 60 plus years of wild madness and despair, of a Bobby Layne curse that has haunted us and many generations of dumb fans too stupid to get the fuck out of here before it’s all too late.  When Lord, oh when? That is all I have left to cry as I peer out over this ocean of insanity and ether, looking for some light, like Gatsby, forever determined to find his Daisy again and be rescued from a hideous past, a lie from which he can never escape.

But we are not Gatsby. We are barely even Nick Carraway. We are just the lie that Gatsby tells, that he can never forget, can never escape. That is the best I have to offer you even in victory. What defeat holds we are all too grimly familiar with, and you don’t even want to know what literary characters and references I have for you in its grim embrace. So I leave you with this. Let’s just survive and move on, together, bonded together eternally in our struggles, in this shared fate. It will all be better one day. Maybe. But probably not. And at least until we somehow miraculously arrive at that better place, we have each other and baby that’s enough for me.