A Haunted House

 

I’m still not sure, even while writing this, how I feel about Matthew Stafford winning while Jared Goff came home, a reject, an exile, a goddamn loser, and lost again, throwing a couple of crippling interceptions while Stafford calmy dispatched his former team.

 

I am happy for Stafford, that he is getting this chance to show everyone that it was not him, but the deeper rot of Lions Disease, a disease which infects everyone who touches this godforsaken team, the Covid of football fan diseases. And it has taken men greater than Stafford, like Barry Sanders and St. Calvin Johnson, Spirit Warriors and otherworldly gifted angels that were stricken with the disease and ended up burning in hell with the rest of us.

 

But Stafford was given an out, a reprieve, and so far, he seems to be using it to both show that he is worthy of such a gift and that it has become cruelly obvious that the problem was never him, but us, and the ghosts and Failure Demons, and whatever other wretched creatures have attached themselves to this horrible thing.

 

I’m happy that a dude like that, a standup dude no doubt, gets to find something akin to spiritual justice in those Hollywood Hills, taking a team that is built to win and guiding it using all the lore he has picked up in these past however many years, along with skill that has not yet declined. There is wisdom gained in losing, especially in the hell storm of Detroit Lions football. It breaks a man’s soul, which is why Barry Sanders rolled over and went to sleep rather than chase greatness, and why Calvin Johnson is locked in a bitter blood feud with the Fords. It is an ugly thing, but if you can escape its claws, like Matthew Stafford seems to have done, you can take all that losing and all that spiritual dreck and turn it into something good. It’s easy to sling the ol’ football around in sunny LA after having spent eons in Detroit Lions Hell.

 

On the other side of things, you have Jared Goff, rejected, coming home to show everyone that they fucked up by ditching him, but finding out that, yes, they made the right choice and that, yes, you are basically garbage, and that everything they said about you is true, and how does a man deal with that sort of failure?

 

Unfortunately for Goff, there is a whole heaping pile of Failures to dig into around these parts, and I think it is safe to say that he is a broken man, haunted, already cursed and ruined, tainted not only by Lions Disease but also some inner disease of the soul that led him here. We will never win a thing with him at quarterback, and the sad thing is that we all know it, the coaches know it, the front office knows it, and worst of all, Goff himself knows it.

 

So, things are desolate when it comes to quarterbacking the Detroit Lions, but buried beneath all the quarterback drama is that the Lions are becoming a team that mirrors their head coach, which can be good and bad – mirroring Matt Patricia was, uh, not a good thing – but in this case, it is absolutely good, given the soul wrenching, open heart weeping of Dan Campbell that yearns for victory. The Lions threw every fucking thing they had at the Rams, and of course, they lost, because they do not yet have the dudes to execute the Glorious Purpose. But it is in the fighting, the throw everything but the kitchen sink at them attitude that tells us that from a Spiritual perspective, or a Morale perspective, that this is a team of Spirit Warriors bent on warring with their own doomed Fate.

 

Where that will lead us, only the Failure Demons know, and at some point I expect this all to disintegrate into an emotional bloodbath, the poor Lions forced to go through a passion play. But there is an identity here now, and it is a good identity, even if it is right now being stomped upon. Give me a team that fights, that loves the brawl of it all, the glory of giving everything of yourself to the moment. You can’t ask men to do more than that.

 

Of course, the world is cruel and terrible, even the air has turned suspicious, and the losses will pile up because the Lions do not have a quarterback, only a broken man who has been examined ruthlessly by the gods and found wanting. And the psychic and spiritual history of Detroit Lions football will continue to drag and pop out of closets like a Halloween ghoul and it will always be there. No one wants to live in the haunted house, but someone has to and I guess that’s us.

 

But you have to learn to live with the ghosts, the Failure Demons, the cruel tricks they play on the living because they cannot find respite for their own damaged souls, and you have to accept that it is not just the house that is haunted, but you are too.

 

People say that we should just burn down the house, but it is still our house and as fucked up and macabre as it is, it makes us stronger than you. Sure, we are beaten and bloodied, and we have SEEN THINGS, but your ass is country soft and you will wither and break when the real shit starts raining down, and we’ll just peak out our window of our haunted house and laugh as you shit your pants while the world burns.