I wish I could tell you that Thanksgiving will be a good one. I wish I could tell you that everything will work out for the Lions. But I can’t, and you know this. 2020 has been the year from hell in just about every conceivable way. You know this too. There is a desperate sense that everything will work out okay, but it’s too late for that. The most ridiculous idiot ever to do the whole President thing has been defeated, yet barely, and in a way that only confirmed how seriously fucked up everything will continue to be. There is a new regime set to take over, but it looks an awful lot like the same dude who has always been President before this, and that is precisely the problem that led to the Big Idiot somehow ending up President. Similarly to this, the Lions are set to sweep aside another gaggle of idiots after yet another failed regime, and yet we are all too familiar with what will come next, just the same group of idiots repackaged with new names, with new forms of ridiculousness and the same issues which will lead to the next failed regime.
But whether its Donald Trump or Joe Biden, or Matt Millen or Matt Patricia and Bob Quinn, that still all pales in comparison with the fact that we’re all spending Thanksgiving in frightened isolation from loved ones, wearing masks like mummified shrouds, hoping desperately for a vaccine that may or may not come, too late already to avoid widespread death and devastation. 1.42 million people worldwide won’t have much reason to celebrate today or any other day. That is because they are dead.
Almost 10,000 of those are – or were – Michigan residents. That may not seem like a lot comparatively, but it is still way too fucking many. None of those people will watch the Lions today or eat Thanksgiving turkey. Or ever again.
I’m not trying to be maudlin. There is enough of that going around. But, I mean… goddamn. And even if all of that ended today, it will leave a scar that will never quite heal, not really a scar at all, but an open wound. And, again, even if all of it ended today, we still live in a world where cops kill anyone who looks the least bit different and even some who look the same, mostly because they can, and also because most of them are violent assholes. There are dead children everywhere – children – who also won’t ever have a happy Thanksgiving.
I could continue to beat this thing down, this whole 2020 and its myriad of problems, but the thing is, is that so much of what makes 2020 so terrible is that, for too many, it could simply be any other year and not look that much different. Rampant masking aside.
And the same is true for the Lions and Lions fans, and it feels kind of ridiculous even drawing this analogy or metaphor or whatever you want to call it. Obscene and insensitive, but then again, so much of that is true with simply being a Lions fan.
Bob Quinn and Matt Patricia are at their end – hopefully, my god – and yet none of that comes with a palpable sense of optimism, or any sense really. That is because we have been through this before, so many times before, and it never gets better, it just ends up being more of the same. Even when things are going comparatively well, like the Jim Caldwell years, it still feels wrapped in failure, hence the “Jim Caldwell years” which still felt like a failure even as it was happening, not so much because the Lions were losing as because it still felt fatally flawed. I mean, Caldwell of all dudes has the Lions best winning percentage for a coach in roughly forever, and yet the Lions still couldn’t win a playoff game and, worse, aside from maybe one year, it never really felt like they could.
Then again, outside of one Jim Schwartz madcap year, “hell, at least they made the playoffs” was a fantasy even of itself for the entirety of this stupid century, which let’s not forget, is twenty years deep. There’s little to suggest in the Lions vast history of epic failure, of which those twenty years are just a fragment of a miserable and ridiculous sixty year run of failure, that the next dudes up will offer little but more of the same. It doesn’t matter if the best player in team history, and probably the most talented player in NFL history, is around. The Barry Sanders years remain the best decade in modern Lions football history, and yet, one playoff win was all they could squeeze out and the dude retired early in dissolutioned insanity. It doesn’t matter if the best wide receiver in team history, and arguably the most talented receiver in NFL history, Calvin Johnson, is around. He too ended up retiring early in misery and disdain for his own team, with whom he ended up in a drawn out persona and legal feud after bouncing early. And, of course, it doesn’t matter if they have the best quarterback in team history. They still can’t win jack shit.
All of that is true, and absurd. In the last 30 years of this madness, the Lions have had all three of those dudes, and have still left their fans with hideous scars and open wounds that never heal. To believe that whoever is to follow this most recent epoch of failure is madness, just insane idiotic madness. And yet, what else do Lions fans have to do but hope against hope, convince themselves that maybe somehow it will all be different, that 2021 will be better than 2020 if only because it has to be?
That is the madness of life in this idiot world we somehow woke up in, this mad world with nothing but pain and a vague, ridiculous hope that it will get better, if not soon, then at least one day that we can somehow see in the future. But again, that day will be way too late for way too many people, and for the rest of us – hopefully, the rest of us – it will still come filled with a myriad of issues that are not so much recent problems as foundational issues that lie at the very bedrock of our collective culture. It doesn’t matter if its ReaganBushClintonBushObamaTrumpBiden, or if its MillenMarinelliMornhinwegPatriciaQuinn, for too many people, its all the same. Of course, “same” comes with a degree of difference that lends itself to delusion, especially when it comes to the Lions. But this is also true in a world where Obama and Trump are vastly different people, and yet for many people, people left to prop up society from the ground up while the wealthy exchange Monopoly money, it all ends up feeling the same. Struggle is struggle no matter who the face is at the top of the pyramid.
So it is with dudes like Caldwell and Patricia, vastly different, and offering varying degrees of “hope” and “change”, “winning” and “losing” mostly in terms of differing perception, in which the end result is invariably the same for too many people. Calvin Johnson didn’t retire on the heels of Matt Patricia, remember.
So here we are on yet another Thanksgiving, and usually I spend this Thanksgiving piece talking up Detroit and making sure everyone knows how special it is deep down and why we deserve the Thanksgiving game, because it is ours and we invented it, blah blah blah, and I mean it, and I still mean it, but to talk about that this year feels kind of ridiculous, and so… sorry, but it’s just not happening. That is where we are and it sucks, it really sucks, but welcome to the Thunderdome of Life.
Instead, I’m left with the feeling that it doesn’t even really matter if the Lions win or lose this fucking thing. I’d rather they win just because losing on Thanksgiving always sucks and just makes the Lions more of a national punchline and we’re all sick of that. But, to be honest, I had to check before writing this just to remember who they even played, and there is little inspiring about a game against the woebegone Houston Texans, whose own people are still recovering from a Noah like flood, and who fired their coach early in the season after a schedule from hell did them in.
The Lions could every well beat this team, but so what? Other than the Thanksgiving of it all, and let’s not forget, this is probably the most thankless Thanksgiving ever, or at least since Hitler was running wild, the book has already been written on these dudes, or at least their chapter in an absurdly miserable longer book. And if they lose? So what, really, it is just more of the same, only with the added blow of the whole national punchline thing.
So, I guess, winning is still better than losing, even in this miserable, fucked up year, but not by much, and in a way that only underscores how badly fucked up the whole thing has become for the Lions. And that is nothing new, nor even a compelling story anymore. It just sucks.
2021 is right around the corner, it’s the holidays and with that, I suppose, comes some succor, but really, as we sit in huddled isolation, or meet in fear and distance in cold garages for a quick how do you do, it will all just underscore how fucked up this whole thing has gotten in just about every respect for every human being on the planet. The entire world have become Lions fans. It is everywhere you look, in every day of your life, and you have no choice but to live it and hope, obscenely almost, that it will get better one day. But deep down, you know, probably not.
Lions 23 Texans 20
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