What’s this? Gambling With Sanity has returned to its
regularly scheduled time and place (well, as these things go anyways)? Yes. I
have managed to carve out enough time (and sanity) to do it right this week. I
still have the separate Lions vs Rams piece to do, and that might kinda
probably sorta end up being a postgame piece, so I’m not totally in sync. To be
honest, I kind of want to do it that way though because I want to get an honest
experience about how I feel about it all as it’s happening rather than talking
myself into and out of things beforehand, so with that said, everyone good? We’re
all glad to be here, yeah? Okay, well fuck, let’s have some fun.
Washington (+8.5) at Green Bay
These nameless Washingtonians are pretty wretched, a team
without identity, a team without meaning, a team without any fans, and it’s
probably just gonna get worse given that the NFL is poking around this carcass’s
innards looking for further confirmation that everyone involved in its
operation is a Failure Demon in possession of human skin bags. But the NFL can’t
look too closely or else they’ll end up catching their own reflection and I
believe this is how the story of Lot seeing his wife get turned into a pillar
of salt happened in the Bible. Also, that was pretty fucked up by God to turn
that chick into a pillar of fucking salt just for getting curious about how he
was handling the Sodomites. I guess God just didn’t want her to see what goes
on in those prison showers.
But yes, anyway, The NFL risks its own integrity (lol) the
further they look into this as shown by Jon Gruden unintentionally getting wrapped
up in it and getting canceled because he accidentally CC’d everyone in the company
email with shit he thought he was posting to 4chan. The NFL will only go so far
before having to handcuff themselves to a radiator as a team of CTE inflicted
zombies enter the room with baseball bats and pool cues and leather straps and…
look, you don’t wanna even know how this all plays out, so let’s just say that
in the end, the Washington football apparatus may be sacrificed into the
Delaware River to be gawked at by time traveling Revolutionaries as General
Washington tells them not to look in the water or else God is gonna get Salty again
with their wives.
Meanwhile, The Devil Aaron Rodgers is here to do what God
can’t be bothered with yet, as is all laid out in the contract God and The
Devil had worked up between their lawyers about who gets to turn who into Salt
or poked by hot fireplace pokers by Failure Demons in Hell. It’s a convoluted piece
of paperwork even the two constituent parties are unsure about, which is why so
many fucked up things happen to so many seemingly ordinary people, but fuck,
heaven and hell have a quota they each have to meet, so these things can get
bizarre. What we do know, though, is that God probably doesn’t have time for
any of these assholes right now, and so The Devil is just gonna assume responsibility,
as he does like a fucking collection agency assuming debts, and just take these
Washington fuckers into a real hot place for a real bad time.
Pick: Green Bay
Kansas City (-4.5) at Tennessee
This is a very interesting game because Kansas City has
looked so shaky this season, and it’s only a game or two like this that will
send the whole thing spinning in one direction or the other. Especially since
Tennessee itself had looked shaky to start the season but is coming off a huge
Statement kind of win against the Bills, so if they win here, they suddenly
look like the team that everyone else might need to go through in order to
reach Football Nirvana, which is actually an Oasis Trap sprung by Hell known as
the Super Bowl which exists only to get dumb people more in debt to the
creditors discussed above in the Heaven/Hell contract, as they watch endless
unfunny commercials in between waving flags punctuated by the screeching sound
of eagles getting poked in the asshole to fake sounds of them crying for the
love of Liberty.
It’s an entire ordeal which is why they end up having to
spend months cleaning up eagle shit before they can start the whole thing up
again each September. But that all becomes an issue mostly if Tennessee wins
this game because that will be a clear indicator that they might be the ones
holding the keys to that whole fucking Sodom and Gomorrah of the human spirit.
Look, I’m begging you, keep your wives from looking back at this shit and
turning into pillars of salt already.
But if Kansas City wins here it just muddies the whole
picture up, and then it becomes a bloodbath, an orgy of violence and folks
turning into salt before some team staggers exhausted out of the whole fiasco
only to find Tom Brady waiting to send them to hell, or The Devil himself Aaron
Rodgers if he doesn’t feel like outsourcing this shit anymore.
Pick: Tennessee
Atlanta (-1.5) at Miami
Oh how low these Miami Dolphins have fallen. From a team
that was expected to be a contender behind the blossoming tree known as Tua’s
Arm to a team coming off of getting conned into being grifted by the Urban
Meyer Experience in Jacksonville to openly pleading with anyone to take the
stinking rot of Tua off their hands so they will have enough money to desperately
blow on DeShaun Watson as he rapes their wives and daughters in exchange for
getting to throw a football a few yards longer than the other fellas.
It’s a bad scene, made even more pathetic by having to come in
as underdogs now against a Falcons team whose corpse has literally been rotting
out in the open for, like, three years now, and an aging quarterback desperate
to turn back the clock like Ric Flair every time he gets drunk and catches up
on whatever Arn and Tully are doing over there for Dusty’s boy, and surely the
phone is gonna ring any day now inviting him to that Nostalgia Party, right? Right???
No. In reality, Matty Ryan, like Old Slick Ric, is too
feeble, too much of an embarrassing old drunk to take a chance on, and he’ll
just end up crying while his daughter beats him for trying to sell old memorabilia,
maybe an autographed picture of him with Julio Jones taken before Julio stopped
returning his calls, that he promised he would leave to her as part of her inheritance,
before things got really bad and sad, and look, the poor son of a bitch is only
days away from pawning off his old NFC Championship rings that no one gives a
fuck about, before he hangs himself for the maids to find in the type of low
rent motel where that’s not the first time they’ve opened the door to see
something like that waiting for them. No, it’s just a shake of the head and
another deep sigh as they wonder if it’s even worth it to bring the rest of
their family across the border or whether to get someone else to clean up all
this literal shit because, yes, he shit himself when he died, like maybe one of
the offensive linemen whose phone numbers are the only thing saved in his cell
even though they haven’t even answered a text from him in years.
Yeah, the Dolphins are underdogs to *that* guy.
Pick: Atlanta
New York (+7) at New England
Traditionally, this is one of those games where everyone
just laughs at the Jets and waits for the Patriots to mercilessly have them
blackbagged and sent to Gitmo by their fascist friends. But even their fascist
friends are kind of sick of them now, ever since they lost the last election
and Robert Kraft was caught getting tug jobs from disinterested immigrants, not
even from one of the line of pretty blonde whores they used to provide him
during his trips to visit them on the yacht, those heady days when he didn’t
have to make eye contact with any of them, just hi-five Tom as his own blonde
worked on his dick, while Little Bill jacked off in the corner.
No. Tom Brady is gone, and so are most of the fascists, off
to find someone else who is willing to pay a decent chunk of money to hunt the
blonde whores who have gone past their mile marker and who don’t even have
enough soul left to register feelings like fear or terror as they are hunted
like animals and taken to have their skins removed so that whichever fascist
got them in the end can have a new rug made for his guest house, not even the
home he lives in.
No, all that’s left is just tug jobs from massage therapists
who are just happy at least DeShaun Watson isn’t in the waiting room, while
Little Bill still jacks off in the corner. In short, there are no winners here,
the Patriots days as fascist bullies have come and gone and even though they
will probably still beat the forlorn Jets, does any of it even matter? No. No,
it doesn’t.
Pick: New England
Carolina (-3) at NY Giants
Listen, I’ve already gone pretty hard here, pushed ol’
Gambling With Sanity to its limits before people start logging off, disgusted
that they tried to read this gibberish this week, so maybe I will just cruise through
the rest. Or maybe not. We just have to see how it goes.
And that’s kind of how things stand with the Panthers, who
have a wonky McCaffrey child acting up, which Big Ed swore he had “fixed”
during the latest software modification, and are relying on the trashed heart
and soul of Sam Darnold to save them before they become just another stop on
his way to USC Qaurterback Hell where he will be beaten alongside Mark Sanchez,
Matt Leinart and Todd Marinovich, by the same coeds they were “gifted” to
ritually sacrifice before they got to start for USC for the first time. It’s a
dark scene (when is it not around here?) and the only thing the Panthers have
going for them is that the Giants are equally staring at their own eternal
damnation, and given that they have already sold parts of their souls for Bill
Parcells and Lawrence Taylor among other monsters, that is a damnation which is
particularly dark and terrible, and that is without even mentioning that they
used to play their own home games with a dead organized crime figure buried in one
of the endzones.
Again, this is a game with no winners, only someone who will
get a temporary reprieve, like an addict getting his last shot of methadone
before he his turned loose on the streets to be haunted and hunted by Failure Demons
who cackle like jackals and he hears them even when he is asleep, especially
when he is asleep, where there is nothing left but him and his own subconscious
mind which already knows the one thing that he knows but is not quite ready to
accept: that he is already dead.
Pick: Giants?
Cincinnati (+6.5) at Baltimore
Both of these teams have been pretty good, so this shouldn’t
be too dark, at least not in comparison with the other Tales From the Crypt which
we’re left with this week. No, this is a game with real people with real Hopes
and Dreams, and perhaps a little clarification about how the rest of the season
in the AFC North is gonna shake out.
Really, the game gets even more interesting when you
consider that The Last Rapist in Pittsburgh (well, probably not, but you know)
is looking like he is getting stuck in the tar pits like those beasts in La
Brea, who don’t know yet that they have taken their last steps and are already
dead, killed by their own indifference by a world which is endlessly patient
because it understands that, in the end, everybody dies, either cut down by
hubris or time, none of it mattering while the vultures soar overhead.
And while that old fucking dinosaur struggles to take even
one more step, the young beasts and predators are in the world moving at a
velocity which seems impossibly quick to him but that’s only because his
perspective has changed and he sees how quick and how meaningless it all really
is, and those beasts and predators will find themselves stuck like him in the
end, but not today, as they are too busy chasing life and the illusions it
holds which keep us from going insane, mad with rage, because deep down we all
know how meaningless it all is.
In that moment, time elongating or becoming impossibly brief
based on nothing other than perspective, Joe Burrow and Lamar Jackson are
playing for the glory and honor of The Now, dinosaurs trapped in hot tar, Baker
Mayfield being cut down by his own Failure Demons and the whims of trickster
gods, and one of their teams is probably gonna end up ruling the AFC North,
which is the toughest division in football, and at least for this year will make
their own Failure Demons sniping at them like jackals just waiting for one to
take a wrong step, be turned into nothing more than a distant echo of their own
mortality, and they will be Kings of Today, wrapped in all the foolish finery
we bundle ourselves in like protective cloaks because outside of it all, there
is only misery and despair.
Yeah, one of these dudes will get to win and savor the
moment as they become the newest darlings of a league and a culture which
invariably eats its own. But not today, for today they are cuddled by their own
perspective, which is all reality is anyway.
Pick: Baltimore
Philadelphia (+2.5) at Las Vegas
Goddamn, the hits just keep on coming, don’t they? Yes, it
is another depressing battle, fought in the grim wasteland of this American
Existence, which we have forced and pulled and maimed and twisted into being
Just Another Thing that is owned by us, frolicking in a desert synonymous with
death because that is how we like to do things, how we make the macabre even
just another vantage point, a perspective, to play with as we laugh in the Face
of Death and literally gamble away the things in life which keep us insulated
as we run, staying one half step in front of the screaming maw of inevitability
and fate, the two things which nip at our heels every day, and every day we do
our best to pretend that they aren’t there and that we can win this rigged
game.
But we can’t, and it all ends up the same, and our bones are
just ashes and dust, in a world that doesn’t give a shit about any of it, and
one day you’re winning Super Bowls and returning triumphant to the cradle of
your own glory, and the next you have no quarterback and you are losing games
against teams equally as broken and ruined, and you end up typing out hastily
written resignation letters and eying the drain cleaner as goons sort through
the emails and the minutia of your life like minions of both heaven and hell
looking through your final records to decide whether its dreamy eternity or endless
misery for your soul, and then you play a football game, both teams doomed and
irredeemable in a desert which exists like a beaconing mirage, offering you
lies and False Hope, as holes are dug in it to suck you down into them,
grasping and keeping you buried there as life goes on without you. Are you
ready for some football????????????????????????????
Pick: Raiders
Houston (+17.5) at Arizona
lololol, man, the Fates aren’t even fucking around with that
line, are they? Yes, the Houston Texans are broken and ruined and irredeemable even
to those who profess to love them because, really, what is there left to love?
Your franchise golden boy told you to go fuck yourself and moved to Arizona of
all places, which is a Retirement Community for people who have auctioned off
their soul to the highest bidder or at least to one which will let you stare in
drooling incoherence at a 1,000 foot Hi-Def TV in air conditioned sterility
like a mummy bundled up in a carefully preserved mausoleum where time does not
exist as the world melts and ends outside, you and it both mutually indifferent
to one another. And your quarterback is running around amidst the wreckage and
carnage of it all, raping anyone who happens to catch his eye and now you are
making desperate deals with Cocaine Demons in Miami to take him off your hands
so you can just die in peace and hopefully be reincarnated as anything other
than as the taint of a insatiable Failure Demon which collects pieces and parts
of the wrecked desolation of humanity as it careens into the The Void where even
the screams of innocent and doomed babies can’t be heard above the sounds of it
sucking and tearing at the flesh of anyone unfortunate enough to get in its
way.
Yeah, man, that’s a team that has bottomed out. And all
Kyler Murray has to do is keep on dancing like The Judge in Blood Meridian
because he is dancing and he says that he can never die. Well shit, we’ll see,
won’t we?
Pick: Arizona
Chicago (+10.5) at Tampa Bay
Goddamn, I see you there. I see you rubbings your hands,
licking your lips with gluttonous and perverse desire, wondering just how
fucking low I’m gonna go with Tom Brady and Company to fit with the tone of
whatever the fuck this whole Gambling With Sanity has been this week, but I am
not a puppet to be used and abused with your finger up my ass, making me say
and do things like you do with the donkey at that fucked up donkey show after
you get it drunk and close in around it in a ring of the grossest parts of the
hedonistic monstrosity of humanity.
No, I am just a dude trying to get this fucking thing done before
the one pm games start raining down on the East Coast like the first bombs
dropping on the nuclear winter of our collective soul. And that dude is content
to just watch Tom Brady make a mockery of life and everyone in it as he devours
the soul of yet another witless football team and fanbase just because he can
and he doesn’t even get any joy out of this, he just does it because there is nothing
else to do as he combs his hair and flexes his nude body in front of the mirror
while Huey Lewis plays in the background.
Pick: Tampa Bay
Indianapolis (+4) at San Francisco
There is no reason to watch this game. No reason at all.
Pick: 49ers
New Orleans (-4) at Seattle
Look, until Russell Wilson gets back, all of Seattle’s games
are just a kabuki theater that don’t mean a goddamn thing except to the
prurient interests of people wandering buy who get titillated by the sight of
young men getting ruining each other’s brains on the Colosseum floor while the
jackals in the stands get drunk on overpriced beer and cheap violence just so
they can get some of their self-loathing channeled into a place where it won’t
have any real consequences for them instead of going home, brains and hearts
and souls all overloaded with hate, and beat the shit out of their wives and
kids who don’t think anything of it because just another Sunday with the fam.
The game has to be played just to satisfy that prurient
need, this ritual which is part of our Collective Death Culture, and whether it
means anything or not is beside the point. Someone will win and someone will
lose this game, and tomorrow we will all wake up and start collecting those
Hates again, fueling our tanks full of misery and despair because that’s what
it means to be human, that is what it means to be alive in this world.
One team will win, and their fans will get to make some more
room in those misery bags, looking for more to feed on before the weekly blood
bath ensues, and one team will lose and their fans will stuff that little hate
down into their bags of bigger hates and will poke at it and prod at it and
play with it all week because it is a distraction for what lies beneath, and
shit, I didn’t make you read any of this, you chose to. You *chose* to.
Pick: New Orleans
