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
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