It's All Good Baby

On Sundays, I like to watch the games on the NFL Redzone thing, where they just dart back and forth between games. That way, I don’t ever have to watch any of the insipid commercials which rot the brain and the soul. I flip between this and the Lions game every week and anyway, this week I’ve been following the 49ers and Saints shoot it out in the Superdome, and it’s late in the 4^th quarter as I write this and both quarterbacks are dealing and meanwhile I flip back to the Lions who just threw an interception to close out another rancid day and our quarterback right now is a dude literally name Blah and that about sums things up.

While all this is going on, we’ve also got Chris Spielman, football hero of my youth, yammering on about patience like a fifth rate Axl Rose and I am reminded that before he was a football hero of my youth he was an odious Ohio St. Buckeye and thus my eternal enemy. It is a good thing that I was a little too young to hate Spielman because I like loving him as a football hero of my youth as the Lions linebacker who was the backbone of the best of those Lions teams of my said youth. Anyway, he keeps preaching patience for these buffoons and every time he does that Lions hero thing starts to slip and I start to see that Buckeye red and it is too fucking terrible to deal with and this is what happens to you when you believe in flawed heroes and choose to follow a shitty football team that beats the shit out of you year after year.

What else is there to talk about? Oh yeah, we can stop blathering on about leading in every game this season. That’s done now. The Lions are 3-9-1 now and never were in this game, which sucks because it means Kirk Cousins got to win which I just wrote about this morning, you know, how much I hate him and all, and now here I am, only a few hours later, forced to watch him lead his team to victory while mine stumbles in miserable defeat yet again. Terrible. Just terrible.

The Saints have now retaken the lead on the 49ers, 46-45 with like 45 seconds left and this game is enthralling in all the ways the Lions aren’t this year or any fucking year and it’s all too much to deal with. During the Lions game, Spielman was talking about the ’93 team which was a pretty good team, but he of course was forced to mention that it ended in the first round of the playoffs when Bret Favre hit Sterling Sharpe for a touchdown in a game that I remember watching at home as a 14 year old Neil, back when I still had hope in this shitty team and in myself.

Today I am 40 and I have no hope in this shitty team, and I manage to get by as a writer and doer of despicable deeds and other assorted chicanery which has left me as a known villain, which is fine because I am that dude in black who likes to walk the streets in the witching hour and make poor choices, but I know that at some point I have to clean up and find Jesus or this whole thing is going to take a nasty turn. I am a loveable rogue, it’s true, but it’s only a matter of time before I end up frozen in carbonite.

Still, of all my poor choices, none is poorer than continuing to be a fan of these goddamn Detroit Lions, who have left me embittered yet again on a cold December day, a day like all the others, which sucks because I love not being one of the others, but my football team is just like all the other wretched and shitty things in life, too depressing to truly love, too parasitic to ever get rid of. That is life as a fan of the Detroit Lions, much as it is life as a loveable rogue.

But at least there is freedom in being a loveable rogue, the kind most of you don’t ever get to experience. There is no freedom in being attached to this miserable football team, who will leave me naked and missing a kidney in a low rent motel room after hooking up with a Poor Choice with a pretty face and a nice ass. But even that Poor Choice is better than the Lions, who don’t have a pretty face, only a fat sweaty bearded one, and who don’t have a nice ass, only the husky boy ass of a man who probably raped a girl back in the day, just oozed into her room late at night and crawled on top of her like the worst Jabba. This goddamn team has got me down in a way that my Poorest of Choices can’t even compete with.

The only thing left to do is make some more Poor Choices and numb myself to this misery that is Lions fandom, maybe rustle up some work, which is coming fast and furious at me of late, which is good because it means more money for me, and maybe look to my network of fellow villains for some extra lucre in these strange and terrible times where we all have to do what we can to get by.

I am not a bad guy. I am a good guy. It’s just that I am a rogue and a villain in a fucked up world with its backwards ass priorities. I wish I had a football team that matched my own Spirit Warrior tendencies, one like those 70s Oakland Raiders teams I have so fondly written about before, but I don’t. Instead, I have a perennially shitty football team that is trying to remake it itself in some sociopathic corporate Patriot Way image and it is too much to bear sometimes, just too fucking much.

And yet, I’m still here, and I’m still writing about these goddamn Detroit Lions, with their quarterback named Blah and with heroes who are either tragic, like Barry Sanders and St. Calvin Johnson, or who wear Buckeye red when you peel away the façade, and it’s no good, man, it’s just no good. But I still enjoy writing about them because as I have mentioned before, they are a cipher, a way to dig into the darker parts of my own psyche, a way to deal with it all, a way to come to some sort of catharsis and be okay with myself, because I love myself, I’m pretty goddamn great, and even my dark parts just serve to spark the fire that is me, and I am always a man on fire and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Still, it would be nice if I didn’t have to be a fan of a football team that is 3-9-1 and run by a sociopath and a rapist, but we don’t always get what we want and fuck it, the theater of pain which we endure as Lions fans breeds its own special sort of toughness, a way to laugh in the broken places, a way to defy the boring “good” people of the world. It’s all fucked up and so am I, but that’s okay because I am strong in the fucked places and I love to fuck so it’s all good. It’s all good, baby.