Brother vs Brother

The Lions get a final visit to Oakland before the moving vans start hauling ass to Las Vegas, along with the shredded heart of my boy Harpo, who is the dude who invited me to first write about football at Armchair Linebacker so you know he is Spirit Warrior #1 for me.  And in the many years of our friendship we have seen our two teams fuck up in about as many ways as a team can fuck up. At least his team is abandoning him for what is essentially a moral Thunderdome of a city, to a place where the whole point of its existence is to fleece goobers and get fine upstanding tow truck drivers to sell their trucks and their families in a desperate chase for that winning hand that never comes except for maybe as a failed hand job as life rips your dick off.

It is a horrible thing to continue to chase the idiot dreams of fandom long past the point when it was fun, and at least my boy Harpo has a way out here. I mean, your team straight up walking out of town on you gives you an opportunity to say okay well fuck all y’all then. This isn’t like the time Vampire Al Davis took the team to Los Angeles and then brought them back again. At least there was still an unbroken link between fan and team vis a vis borders, but this time is different, this is a divorce that is ugly and will only hurt my dude Harpo and people like him, who grew up on the fierce Spirit Warrior Raider way, that started with Kenny Stabler and the gang and then infused new blood like Marcus Allen and Bo Jackson as the glitzy 80s rolled on.

After that, it was all punk moves and waiting for Uncle Al to shuffle off this mortal coil. Sure, there were bright spots, one last run at the Super Bowl behind Rich Gannon of all people. But, the Raider Way has been a dying light for far too long, and now it is just a bloated corpse that its people are ready to dump off on some other shithead city, just bury that fat fucking whale in the desert, baby and tell your kids that there used to be a team here called the Oakland Raiders, and they were badass, but the world is fucked up, and now they are gone and all that’s left are memories and ghosts.

For me, though, the memories are all fucked up too, because I have no living memory of my team being any damn good except for a bright star flash here and there. Even the best parts about being a fan of the Lions are cloaked in a sort of bitterness that it’s almost like the world decided to fuck us over twice more. Barry Sanders was the best goddamn dude to ever play football, and the Lions broke him, made him walk away from football because they crushed his spirit. Calvin Johnson was the most talented athlete I’ve ever seen. He too walked away too early, and now spends his days fighting with the organization that ruined him. He has been brain damaged and fucked over by the team that I am a fan of and for fuck’s sake, this is not how it’s supposed to be.

And this goddamn team doesn’t even have the decency to just fucking leave like a failed father. You fucked up, might as well move two states away, you worthless piece of shit. They just sit here, punishing us, year after year, too dumb to die, too stupid to live, and it never ever gets any better. It is just an endless parade of clowns and charlatans who have no idea what they are doing. Owned by a family that were Nazi supporters, run into the ground again and again and again by their stubborn ineptitude, channeled through jackasses like Matt Millen, who by the way is a former Raider because the world is fucked up and stupid. And now we have witless sociopaths pushing some bullshit Patriot Way to cover for the fact that they are just leeches, fucking parasites that the Patriots were all too ready to get rid of.

It doesn’t really matter what happens this Sunday between our two teams. Harpo and I have seen an endless shitstorm of fucked up garbage from them through the years, and we have always commiserated and laughed together because that’s what friends do. We could swap teams, but what is the point? The Oakland Raiders are probably my favorite team of all time, but that team existed before I was even born. The Lions have never been worth a goddamn thing to me, and if they left town like the Raiders are doing, I would help them pack.

Fuck both of these teams. Fuck them to a place so dark that all we see is black. I don’t like writing this, or saying these words to you. But fuck it, man, we have been fucked over for so long by this goddamn team, by the NFL, by the refs, by the entire goddamn shitty industry, and I don’t have to love these fuckers. I want to love them, and that is the fucking problem. It sucks being abused like this, and every time we say enough is enough and that we are walking away, we still come back because we are weak and stupid and pathetic. At least Harpo’s team has the guts to walk out on him. They don’t even want him chasing them.

So that’s what’s up as we sit here ready to watch another fucked up week of NFL football, cheering for teams that have ruined our hearts and our minds, secretly hoping that the whole fucking thing would just go away and leave us alone. Harpo gets to wash his hands of his team. I don’t. This is because I am a goddamn idiot. I’ve been abused, shit on, fucked up by this worthless team and it’s never going to get any better because THE MANIACS ARE INSIDE THE HOUSE. They’re here and they hate us and they will never let us get any joy from this idiot life. Fuck the Raiders, fuck the Lions, they are two shitty teams leeching off whatever life we have left inside of us. I will see them in hell, and I will see my boy Harpo in Valhalla.

Raiders 16 Lions 12