Is it Thursday already? Shit. I suppose I should at least get *something* out for you jackals…
*opens pants*
WAIT NOT THAT
Ahem.
Okay, so this will probably be fairly brief by our standards, maybe just the Thursday game here and then I will get the rest out in the next couple of days. Like a man with prostate issues, it’s all stops and starts, dribbles and drabs. You know how it is. Usually, I remark upon how I did last week, but I don’t feel like checking and will assume I went 16-0 and that you all won millions of dollars, which reminds me that there is a dude who apparently was on an epic gambling run last weekend and would have won hundreds of thousands of dollars… if the Lions could beat the Packers in Lambeau, which…
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
Yes, the universe is cruel and unfair, sheering the guilty and innocent alike like a New Zealand farmhand sheering sheep. You don’t want to know what those Kiwi’s do once the animal is naked and alone.
Wait, what were we talking about?
Oh right, so anyway, this dude needed the Lions to beat the Packers and I can only assume that he reads Gambling With Sanity every week and also has a very big penis, which is common in my readers, even the women, maybe *especially* the women, but big penises are nothing in the face of the Lions ineptitude and ability to ruin lives. Some lose millions of dollars while some lose themselves in madness and despair, screeching and squawking here on this internet thing that is so popular with the kids. The Fear they call it, and yes, it is very real, especially when you are anally clenched in front of your TV begging God and who the fuck knows who else to just let you have this one good thing in your lives but then Aaron Rodgers, the fucking devil himself, starts to emerge from your TV like Vigo emerging from the painting of himself in Ghostbusters 2 and you realize that you have hideously fucked up and that putting yourself in a position to rely on the Lions, either for monetary gain or just for emotional support, is fucking dumb as hell and the Poorest Choice anyone can make. The Failure Demons, like The Fear, are also Very Real.
I suppose I should stop rambling and just get to the fucking game already, but I wanted to chat a bit given that this will be truncated and only a morsel to whet the appetite before we gorge through the weekend and end up vomiting like the Romans of old, and maybe buggering each other in dark corners like Caesar buggering Octavian in the hit TV show Rome, which was a documentary I think. Of course, in that episode, the whole thing turned out to be a misunderstanding as Caesar was just having a horrible seizure which is what happens when you’re a Lions fan, either now or before Christ ever appeared to redeem us for our sins and we worshipped the Old Gods, who are cruel and capricious and who cursed the Lions with this hideous Madness because someone looked askance at Zeus’s wife or maybe it was a blood feud between the Olympian heroes and The Great Willie Young that just got out of hand… I mean, who knows how these things work? I don’t. I’m just the guy that works here, damned for all eternity like the rest of you, vultures pecking at my liver as I weep, chained to a mountain, all for the hubris of wanting to love something, wanting to believe in something, something so simple as an NFL football team. But the gods are soccer fans because they are all Greek or Italian and laugh at us as we continue to push this stupid game of “football” as a viable alternative. Which isn’t to say that the Gods don’t enjoy alternative lifestyles since they are out there fucking and sucking everything that moves like shapeshifters in a Bangkok whorehouse, or even disguised as goats and bears and whoever the fuck knows how many animals Zeus has changed himself into just to get some pussy, but despite the Gods’ polyamorous hijinks they sure as fuck do not appreciate dumbass Americans trying to push our variation of the game of football.
So… yeah. That gambling dude was fucked from the start, as are we all, which is why we have gathered together in the hopes that we can lend each other strength and support when we need it the most, or at least to laugh at a boner joke as we search desperately for anything to distract us from the hideous realities of our lives. Imagine choosing this as your outlet. My God, you are all sick!!!!! But it’s okay because so am I, and again, we are not like the others. Anyway, let’s talk at least a smidgen of football.
Carolina (-8) at Houston
Sam Darnold actually hasn’t looked too bad for the Panthers. I mean, he hasn’t exactly been good, but these are low bars for him to hurdle after being run out of New York like one of those Ponzi scheme grifters who preyed on the Innocence and Nobility of New York’s elite and… my god, I can’t keep this up. They all deserved it, and so do the fans of New York who now have to watch as the Jets debase themselves with yet another rebuild. At least they still have the Giants, which… lol I’m sorry, you fuckers are screwed.
But this isn’t about New York and the pompous assholes who think that it is the center of the world, or the North New Jersey animals who wildly overpronunciate the name of simple noodles and kill each other over garbage routes. This is about a man who escaped that hell and now finds himself in Carolina, trying to woo the locals like Ric Flair, aside from the constant sexual misconduct (is that like a game misconduct in hockey?) and drunken jackassery. But Carolina is always going to be suspicious of a dude from New York City and who before that played in the moral wasteland of Los Angeles, which makes him basically a Bret Easton Ellis character, but not even a high tier one like Patrick Bateman, maybe one of the scoundrels in The Rules of Attraction, which by the way, is a pretty decent book that was marred in the movie version by whatever idiot thought that James Vanderbeek aka Dawson from Dawson’s Creek should play Sean Bateman, Patrick’s younger brother. Anyway… shit, what was I gibbering about? Oh right, Sam Darnold, who is maybe a lesser Ellis character, but in the end who cares because they are all depraved sociopaths and of course that shit is gonna terrify the local yokels in North Carolina.
The Panthers, of course, remain Christian McCaffery’s team even if building a team around a running back is ludicrous in these ridiculous times. But McCaffrey is much more than just a running back. He’s also probably the team’s best receiver, which makes him, obviously, far and away their most important weapon and a security blanket for Darnold should he freak out and start having New York flashbacks or just play like, shit, like Sam Darnold.
McCaffrey is always gonna be a pain in the ass to gameplan against, but again, it is easier now more than ever for NFL coordinators to account for just one dude rather than having to worry about a field full of maybe less talented but still capable slot receiver ninjas, spilling out in front of hapless pass defenders like those tiny little Predators that plagued Slash of Guns N Roses fame when he got too high and hallucinated them on a vacation in Hawaii, but who among us, amirite? But yes, it is hard for a team to rely on one dude as heavily as the Panthers do on McCaffrey for production and even harder when they have to turn to Sam Darnold of all idiots when they need a Plan B.
With all that said (lol yeah, all of… that, whatever the fuck I’ve been gibbering about) the Panthers are still in a much better position than the Houston Texans, who remain without their scoundrel of a quarterback, DeShaun Watson, who is busy dealing with lawyers and whatever massage therapist he is raping for the day. I mean, the dude can’t even be a monogamous rapist, he is out there trying to sexually assault Tina just the night after he popped out of the bushes at Lisa dressed as a clown for some reason.
No, he is in a world of self-inflicted misery, deservedly ruined for his wanton depravity. In his stead, the Texans have been forced to turn to Tyrod Taylor, who is perhaps a homeless man’s version of Watson minus the, well, all the raping, and given that JJ Watt has abandoned Houston (especially dark given all the community work he did following the hurricane floods of yore) the Texans have no identity aside from a team that is constantly on the edge of crisis which is no fucking fun as a fan or as anyone involved with the team, which means the players are probably already emotionally checked out and just waiting to be called as witnesses in Watson’s trial.
Add it all up and you have what should be a fairly comfortable Panthers victory. But nothing is ever “comfortable” in the NFL, and pretending that this stupid game is a salve for the many miseries inflicted on the populace in the past few Hell Plagued years is meaningless. The only thing that matters to most of the fans of these two teams is trying to buy groceries this week or trying to find their dogs and cats after yet another flood has dragged everyone away like Watson dragging a massage therapist into his unmarked van.
It is a horrible world out there, just fucking horrible, and this is what it means to live in the future, in that world that everyone has been nervously warning each other about, and now it is real and we are living in it and in that world everything is a day to day thing, from happy respites to trying to figure out how to literally survive whatever plague crawled up from the taint of the melting permafrost, and fucking football is meaningless and forgettable.
And yet, that is exactly why sports exist, to provide an outlet for whatever rage or anxiety has crept into your daily existence. To stand in front of a TV and scream at a millionaire is easier than sitting in your car with a gun in your mouth after screaming at the millionaire who pillaged your retirement fund or who just gave your job to a robot in Sri Lanka.
That is why people almost need sports. It is no trivial thing, serving as an anchor in the typhoon that is rocking the endless ocean and trying to drown you before you can make it back to shore. It is both a ridiculously stupid thing and also maybe the last thing keeping some people from bounding through the streets like werewolves and hyenas, looking to feed on each other’s carnage as civilization hangs on the yawn of the caprice of the gods or nature, standing before that roiling sea whipped up by the typhoon, watching the tidal wave rise and rise and rise before it breaks and destroys us all.
If you can get three or maybe four hours of relief from that, and if you can use that time to scream at Sam Darnold for being a fucking airhead or at whatever hapless chode is being tossed onto the field for Houston after Tyrod Taylor is broken in two, then you should cling to it like a life raft and promise that if you get rescued you’ll never take the pleasures of ordinary life, of the simple mundanity that we had grown comfortable with and used to, for granted again.
That is what is at stake as these two dumb NFL teams play tonight, and whatever the score is and whoever wins, at least it is better than being whipped from horseback by out of control border guards trapped in an acid trip version of a Cormac McCarthy novel or from being stuffed into cages like animals, children crying and asking for mothers who have been taken behind the bushes and introduced to DeShaun Watson. The world is a horrible and depraved place, and these games we play, with each other, with ourselves, are one of the only things keeping people from erupting and eating each other in the streets, and maybe they already have and it’s too late for anything to matter or to soak up some of that primal rage that is fueling people with no job, no hope and no place in the world other than as withered husks waiting to be reaped by capricious gods and the cruel indifference of nature. Or maybe some kid gets to cheer as his favorite player scores a touchdown and he doesn’t have to put on a Darth Vader mask just to talk to his teacher because he is enraptured by a stupid sport and the feeling you get when everything goes right and you can pretend, if only for the delicate whim of a moment or two, that you’ve won something… or perhaps more importantly, haven’t just lost yet another thing as you stare into the abyss of the future and wonder how the fuck we all got here.
Sam Darnold and Tyrod Taylor and whatever hapless buffoons trot out onto the field tonight are just like all of us, lost in the tidal wave of these cruel times, but for a few hours at least they are kept safe by the structures and by the games that people create to give vent to other deeper issues or to keep the fans in the stadiums from running loose like coked up werewolves in the streets, mauling and abusing each other for the simple crime of being alive in these strange and terrible times.
I don’t give a fuck who wins or loses this game, but there are lots of people out there who do, who have invested themselves in the otherwise meaningless outcome, and who just want something to distract themselves from the world as it burns and there are no firemen to put it out because they all died on 9/11 or from Covid, and just close the door to the fire for a few hours and watch a stupid game because when you open that door after, you know that yet another street or two has been consumed by the never-ending fire and tomorrow, you may be next.
Pick: Carolina
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