One More Day, One More Game, One More . . .

If the concept of "Lions fandom" had a face, this is what it would look like.

The thing about being a Lions fan is that you get used to having to constantly recalibrate your expectations and goals – and when I say “recalibrate” what I really mean is “downgrade.”  As awful as it is, we’re used to it.  It’s the only way to survive as a Lions fan without being driven completely into an insane nether world of the soul where Failure Demons gnaw at your liver and the Ghosts of Failures Past all rattle their chains and then choke you out with them while you weep and beg the bad man to make it stop.  You have to stick and move, play little shell games with your own mind and convince yourself that up is down and black is white and that little things – idiotic, self-contained goals that are meaningless other than in a symbolic sense – are what truly matter.  Because, year after year, season after season, death march after death march, all we really have are symbols and meaningless tests of manhood and the scraps of our obliterated pride.

And so going into the game against the Packers, in the frozen hell of Lambeau Field, that blasted and barren plain where so many have died, where the corpses of shattered pride have come to rest year after year after year, I did what so many Lions fans did and made a solemn plea, spoken only to my own heart, and asked “Please.”  Simply . . . please.  In this year in which we have lost so much, in this year in which we dared to dream and were decapitated by fell beasts with swords made of our own suffering as we tried desperately to scramble up the beaches of the Promised Land, all we had left – all we have left – is that familiar battle for meaningless symbolism.  And it is because it is meaningless that it has come to mean everything.  In the absence of all else, in the absence of meaning, all that we have left to cling to is the meaningless, to root for abstract concepts like pride and honor, words that don’t mean a whole hell of a lot when you’re 4-8 and staring down a vintage season from hell.  But in the blasted wasteland of our souls, a wasteland made all too real in Lambeau Field, we cling to vestiges of meaningless words and the ghosts of abstract concepts that mock us with meaning that stretches forever just beyond our reach, turning us into poor Tantalus, forever trying to drink from forbidden waters.  And in the end, even though it’s just a sip, just a taste, something so small and absurd and insignificant that others would shrug their shoulders or laugh at our struggle, in the absence of all else, that struggle, that tiny little sip is all we have and it means everything.  When all else fails, when the world crumbles and breaks beneath our feet, when possibility narrows and leaves us suffocating in a fetid and collapsed tunnel of our own disappointment and naked terror, the one thing – the one goddamn thing – we always have left is the possibility, no matter how remote, that we can finally watch our team beat the Green Bay Packers in that godforsaken wasteland known as Lambeau.

It is such a fragile thing, such a delicate and barely tethered to reality idea, that it was impossible for me to even talk about out loud before the game.  To even admit that it was there, to even admit that I wanted it so very badly, would threaten its very existence, would remind me that it was all I had left to look forward to, that if this barely breathing symbolic dream was somehow smothered and then died that I would have to search for new battles, for new symbols, for new meaningless wars to wage, and goddammit, I am tired of having to do that.  I’m tired.  So very tired.  I’m tired of having to create new reasons to keep going, to keep watching, to keep caring.  The heart of my fandom wants to die.  It wants to quit beating.  It wants to give out and tell me to go do something else, like hunting hobos or writing poetry about aardvarks or something, anything other than forcing my corpse like a zombie through the halls of fandom one more time only to see it obliterated by failure and then picked apart by vultures from hell.  This is what it means to be a fan of the Detroit Lions for a lifetime.  It is a sentence, not a gift.

This is all very depressing but then again, so is being a fan of this shitbird franchise.  Last night, I even decided to do other things – ridiculous things – that at least made me feel happy while I DVR’d the game.  That kind of detachment is dangerous, warning signs from a heart that’s had to deal with way, way too much stress in a lifetime of misery and abuse.  But before you freak out on me, just know this – by the end of the Lions first drive, I had the game on live again because I am a goddamn addict and I don’t listen to my heart and one day that heart will explode and the fan in me will die a ridiculous and ugly death, I will poop myself and that will be that.  I will ride this thing to the fuckin’ grave because in the end, not knowing, not caring, is even harder than the knowing and the caring.  And that’s because deep down, in a place that I have no control over, I am utterly helpless and I am so inextricably tied to this idiot team, this horrible shitty franchise, that to simply cease to care is unfathomable.  You might as well ask me to quit breathing.

The game itself was awful in the same way that all of the games have been awful this season.  There is no point in breaking it down, in asking what went wrong or why, because we all know what went wrong.  We all know why.  It is the same story, week after week after miserable week.  Slamming our heads against the wall one more time in the hopes that somehow we can piece the goo that was our brains back together into something coherent and sane and illuminating is not going to help us at all.  No, instead all we have is a sort of stunned and belligerent bewilderment, a vague disbelief constantly struggling with an insane and volcanic sort of rage.  In one moment we are moaning “Whyyyyyy?” like Nancy Kerrigan after getting clubbed in the knee and the next we are saying and thinking and feeling the vilest shit a dude or lady dude can say or think or feel.  This team breaks our heart, again and again, and we hate it so goddamn much because we love it, because it has the capacity to shatter us like that.  Jim Schwartz hasn’t caused so much vitriolic disdain because we think he’s just a useless turd or a worthless coach, but because his utter failure this season has been such a vicious betrayal of everything we believed about him and about his team.  Perhaps that isn’t fair and perhaps it says more about us than it does him or this team – it almost certainly does and that’s the tragedy of it all, the reason why this damn thing always feels so hard.  Every loss, every failure is magnified by the horrors of the past, and it’s why we sizzle like helpless ants underneath that magnifying glass while the universe laughs and tortures us like the cruel child holding it.  Jim Schwartz and this Lions team are caught up in something much bigger, much more horrible and much more tragic than themselves.  This is not about them but about us.  But this is just the way it is, and their failures, magnified though they may be into something warped and monstrous, remain failures all the same.

So where do you go when your hope lies shattered and the last vestiges of a symbolic triumph lay smoldering on the wasteland behind you while vile heathen natives wearing cheese on their heads dance to awful Todd Rundgren songs and mock your sorry ashes?  Well, you do what you always do, you somehow clamber back to your feet like a zombie and you lurch into the horizon, searching for brains and for a new symbolic battle to fight.  It’s already happening now.  We look at our remaining schedule and we see the opportunity to play spoiler to the Bears, to ruin their playoff dreams, and we groan BRAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNSSSSSSSS and off we go.

This is what it means to be a Lions fan.  Understanding this is an exercise in naked horror, and yet understanding it is vital to keeping yourself from falling into the pit of madness and despair that lies at the heart of places like MLive or the talk radio circuit.  You have to make at least a measure of philosophical peace with the horrible truth.  You just have to.  You don’t have to like it – hell you can hate it and kick and scream about it – but you have to at least reconcile yourself with its abominable truth.  The alternative is to simply cease to care, and when there is a part of you that takes that option completely off the table, that refuses to quit caring, all you have left is, well . . . the grim recognition of a horrible truth, which at least gives you something to work with.  You can do something with that, pivot around it, stay just far enough in front of it that it doesn’t consume you completely.

I am rambling, but such is my wont.  In the end, I suppose all I have come to say is that deep in my idiot heart I really, really wanted to beat the Packers, not because it means anything in terms of playoff races or momentum or anything like that, but simply because in its absence of meaning it meant everything.  It was a symbolic crusade in a world gone mad, a lonely old knight tilting at windmills, not even sure what to hope for, what to believe in, but finding something, anything really, just to keep going one more day, one more game.

That is what we have left as Lions fans in this season of despair.  That is what we have left as fans of a franchise that has redefined the concepts of failure and despair in the world of sport.  One more day, one more game, and then when that day and that game end the same way they have all seemingly ended for the last 55 years, the way they have all ended before you were even born, when your parents were babies and your grandparents were you, looking out over a world spread before them, hoping and dreaming the same way you do, you scrape yourself off of the earth and you look to the next day and to the next game and you keep doing this and you keep doing this and you keep doing this because it is all you know, because it is what it means to be human, to push forward with an indomitable spirit, with an unbreakable sense that someday, someday, someday either the world will reward you or it will end in a monstrous fireball, but you will not end first.  And this is what it means to be a fan of the Detroit Lions.

That's What You Get For Falling in Love

Lions fans, after the game

Shortly after the Lions lost in the 11,689^thperformance of The Passion of the Roary, I did the idiotic thing and headed to Twitter where of course everyone was freaking out and beating each other about the heads with spiked bats laced with the tears of the fallen.  While I was there, I noticed this tweet from Jim Schwartz earlier in the day:

@jschwartzlions: Some Bon Jovi on the way to Ford Field: " In and Out of Love", "Bad Medicine".

Indeed.

Hey, that’s what you get for falling in love.

It’s hard to know what else to say in the wake of that fiasco, which somehow made the previous fiascos this year look like orderly and happy parades through the streets, with children laughing and waving from high atop floats rather than the screaming firetrucks down a burning main street with half-naked firemen hanging off the back wailing and telling everyone to run for their lives that they have felt like.  No, somehow this one managed to be even worse, which is a hell of a trick to pull off and yet here we are.  I guess in this scenario the firetruck also blew up right in front of a school and all those laughing and waving children are on fire and hey look, now they’re dead.

Right now, all anyone wants to do is parse through the rubble, the broken bodies, the ashes of the dead and look for clues and evidence and argue and argue and argue and ARGLE BARGLE ARGLE BARGLE!  The camps have armed themselves and are going to war and now I find myself galloping away back into the woods where I once roamed in solitude, alone with my own insanity, leaving behind the cookfires and both the happy people with their grand dreams and the sad people with their hairshirts and prayers to the drowned god, where I will live in a shack and shoot anyone who trespasses on my land.

The Lions are 4-8 and they have gotten to that point in ways both awful and hilarious.  In other words they are not just 4-8 but a true Lions 4-8.  Our good pal @Geekized tweeted me after the game and asked me what the hell happened and I told her the only thing I could: at the end of the game the Lions went Full Lion.  She understood exactly what that meant and I’m sure all you do too.  The Lions went Full Lion.  What else can you say?

Look, it doesn’t really matter why the Lions are 4-8.  They just are.  There is no one who deserves to be saved from the rabid scorn of Lions fans right now.  But everybody has their reasons.  Everybody thinks everyone else is an idiot or a charlatan and the tribe has been torn asunder, with one side saying we should string up Jim Schwartz and the boys and let the crows eat their entrails and the sun bake whatever’s left-over of their clearly shrunken brains while the other has taken up arms to defend poor King James and his court, patting him on the back and saying Buck Up There, Lil’ Camper and telling the others that they should be ashamed for speaking against their Lord and Savior and this is why I have retreated to the woods, to this safe-haven known as Armchair Linebacker, where I can sit in my shack and shave my head and beat myself with a club in peace.

I am done arguing and I am done because what the fuck is there to argue about?  The Lions are 4-8.  Nothing else really matters.  I sort of just want to take Calvin Johnson and The Great Willie Young fishing for a weekend where we can sit in peace and quiet in a tiny boat while a giant bulldozer plows over Ford Field and everybody inside and the zombie hordes stalk the streets eating each other’s brains.  And then we can come back and make a better world together.

I’m going to say something really awful here but when the Colts were driving at the end and were down to their final handful of plays, a sick, masochistic part of me actually wanted them to score, I think.  That is a horrible thing to admit but I think my disdain for this team has gone that far.  A part of me – not a big part but it’s there – takes a perverse sort of satisfaction in watching them suffer, because then at least they will have no excuses.  At least then they will have to take to their quiet places, where they are alone with their own hearts and souls and admit to themselves that goddammit, they need to change.  The horrible truth though is that they won’t do this and instead they will find some crack to squeeze through, some shell-game of the mind that they will play that will make it all okay, that will make it not their fault but the result of some ineffable THAT’S JUST THE WAY IT GOES SOMETIMES madness.

And while yes, that is just the way it goes sometimes, sometimes should not equal fifty years and to just blithely accept that crosses the line from wise serenity to depraved madness.  It’s exactly the sort of willful denial I was talking about in my last piece, when I went nuclear on everybody and felt like I needed a cigarette or perhaps a nice fine shot of China White after I was done writing it.  But I don’t want to do that again.

Look, I feel horrible and ashamed that even a tiny part of me felt like that, that even a single molecule of my body wished for bad things to happen, but I suppose it’s no different than a beat up woman, aged beyond her years, sitting in a run-down apartment complex secretly hoping that her man gets knifed on the way to the horsetrack by a gang of lowly muggers.  This is what it has come to.  I don’t have the strength to leave him myself and so I hope Fate will somehow figure my shit out for me.

It’s vaguely cowardly and definitely tragic and yet it is all too real.  All too real.  I was all set to show up here after the game and sing psalms about the glory of St. Calvin.  I even had a title picked out and everything: “Divine Intervention”.  Yes, I planned to spend roughly eight billion words fellating St. Calvin but then everyone else went and fucked it all up and, well, here we are, sitting in a run-down apartment complex wondering whether or not we should blame ourselves because our man got knifed by some street thugs who stole his wallet.

The truly tragic part of all this though is that after getting knifed and robbed, that son of a bitch is just going to stagger home and beat our ass and in the end we’ll be lying in the bathtub again, bleeding, eyes swollen shut wondering if that support beam can hold the weight of a body.  And meanwhile that son of a bitch is just sitting in the living room, drinking his own pain away, having sloppily stitched himself up, and he’s shouting at us and telling us it’s our own damn fault, that we should’ve done this or done that and that if we only loved him better, loved him harder, that he wouldn’t have to do things like this to us.

But we’ll crawl out of that bathtub and start cooking him his two dollar steak on the hot plate because that is just what we do, and we’ll snuggle up next to him tonight on the pull-out couch with the cigarette burns in it and we’ll feel glad and thankful that at least we have someone and don’t have to wither away all alone like that old biddy who lives next door and smells like cat piss.  This is what being a fan of the Detroit Lions means and I have no room to judge anyone because I’m frantically flipping that steak, trying to tell if it’s done or not through these swollen eyes and hoping that he’ll give me a kiss on the cheek and a slap on the ass when I’m done just like everybody else.

This has been a dark and fucked up post but this has been a dark and fucked up season.  Don’t blame me, I am but a humble chronicler of the times, just a poor fool living in a shack in the woods, trying to drown out the horrible noises made by the warring tribes with the click-clacking of a keyboard and the screaming of my own shattered soul.  The Lions lost today and they lost in a way that was horrible and yet somehow perfect, and I have become death, the destroyer of worlds and one day, a thousand years from now, some poor fool will find these words in a cave and his people will know the faces of both True Evil and True Pain.  And somewhere, my soul will still roam the cosmos, desperately awaiting that moment when the Lions, my Lions, fulfill that soul’s long-suffering hopes.  This is the sort of thing that religions are founded upon, epic tragedies and wandering souls, and today’s game is but a chapter, a sliver in time, a single stanza in that great dirge, and one day in that far off future people will kill each other over those words found in a cave, shields brandished with Lions logos and old priests will carry wooden crucifixes with a bearded idiot name Neil hanging from them and I can only hope that Pope Willie Young will find a way to end the madness before it consumes us all.  But don’t cry for me, friends, for I am already dead.  Go Lions.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

Somewhere, in the midst of the broken place that is my idiot fan heart, there still lives that thunderous whatever the hell that was I wrote only a couple of days ago, when I dragged myself off of my little corner stool, mouth filling with blood, spinal fluid pouring out of my nose and I challenged the whole world to a fight.  The problem with doing that is sometimes the world answers the bell too and when it does it is often hideous and gruesome and, well . . . you saw what happened.

It is fitting and terrible and gross and maddening and all too preciously perfect that the game turned on a play so heinous, so absolutely and slavishly devoted to the worship of the Necronomicon the NFL calls a rulebook, that 9,000 pound leviathan that hill trolls bring out of storage, rampaging orcs riding them and whipping their backs as they trudge and drag that monstrosity to the field anytime there’s a replay or a challenge or any other decision a referee has to make besides whether or not he is confident that he can make it to his car before he’s lynched by outraged fans.  And it was appropriate because after all that blathering I did about the New Americanism, there could be no more perfect moment to illustrate that the NFL, with all its corporatized double speak and Orwellian “No, the sky is not blue, it is electric green just like we tell you it is and no that knee was not down even though it was and everybody knows it was but argle bargle argle bargle and so on and so forth” inane bullshit, is the ultimate league of the New Americanism.  It embodies everything gross and stupid and asinine about that world, and that play and the hideous aftermath, itself gross and stupid and asinine, drove that point home more clearly than just about anything else I can imagine.  And in the end, it made me feel stupid for tricking myself into believing that real things matter, that what actually happens matters, that when a dude’s knee touches the ground and everyone sees it and knows that he’s fucking down that it matters.  My mistake, I guess.

Of course, it wasn’t just that.  The entire game felt like one that the Lions should have won, and for the second straight week they had the game pretty well in hand and then pissed it away in the final minutes, which is a new and oh so precious wrinkle that Fate and the Failure Demons have decided to send our way in this, the year of our great cornholing at the hands of the universe.  Like last week, the Lions had a chance to go up by ten points with only minutes left in the game, and just like last week they failed in that way that is far too familiar to all of us by now.  Last week, they settled for a field goal when a touchdown would have put the game out of reach.  This time, Matthew Stafford took a bad sack to take them out of field goal position and keep the game in reach for the Texans.  (God, I hate that senseless name.)

What followed probably deserves its own chapter in the long book of shame that is the story of the Detroit Lions.  Nick Harris managed to pin the Texans deep in their own end (something he managed to do a few times in this game so, uh, yay Nick I guess.) and then, naturally, the Texans drove the length of the field to tie the game at 31.  By the time they scored I was actually relieved that they did it fast enough so that Matthew “Sidewinder” Stafford could lead the Lions down the field and kick the game winning field goal because goddammit, in a just and fair world that is what is supposed to happen.

But this isn’t a just and fair world and you would think that I would have learned that terrible lesson by now.  No, instead the Lions drive stalled out and they were forced to take the game to overtime.  But, lo!  What’s this?  The Lions won the toss and continued to taunt my idiot heart and make me believe that they were going to finish what they started and finally win a goddamn Thanksgiving game.  They moved the ball with ease, taking it into Texans territory and . . . and then Brandon Pettigrew remembered he was Brandon Pettigrew and decided to reenact the heinous week 3 fumble against the Titans. 

And so it goes.  But Fate wasn’t done with us.  No, not by a long shot.  The Texans painfully and depressingly moved the ball into field goal territory of their own but the Lions defensive wall stiffened and drove those sons of bitches back just the extra yard necessary to force Shane Graham to put one just wide of the uprights.  And in that moment, despite the years of failure, the incessant misery, the constant pain, the misguided Charlie Brown optimism, I lined up, smiled at Lucy, got ready to kick that fucking ball one more time, more sure than ever that the Lions were going to win the game.  Again, it was the only just and fair outcome, and besides, a way of life, proud and hard Detroit vs. soft, carpet-bagging New America Houston, was at stake.

And then Jason Hanson did what Jason Hanson never does and missed the game winning field goal.  Dom Raiola was the picture of perfect failure on the sideline, squeezing every last drop of hope he had left in his idiot body into a desperate prayer, a prayer that fell deaf and dumb on whatever football gods were hanging out at Ford Field, ready to bend us over and break one off in our fool asses.  The ball went up and it hit the upright.  It hit the goddamn upright.  One inch to the left and we’d all be celebrating the Lions triumph – and Detroit’s – over the Texans and the scions of the New Americanism.  But it didn’t go one inch to the left and Dom Raiola winced and felt the gods slap him upside the head just as they have for more than a decade and in that moment the Lions and their fans and everything about us was utterly broken.

Predictably, the Texans cruised right on down the field and Shane Graham kicked the game winning field goal while Ford Field turned into a half-living tomb, a sarcophagus filled with slack-jawed zombies stumbling aimlessly towards the exits while the players and coaches milled about the field like lobotomized cattle, lowing at the fates, tongues lolling idiotically out of their mouths, and in that moment the Failure Demons all laughed and if there was any justice in the world, the giant foot from Monty Python would have taken that moment to make its triumphant return to pop culture.

But it didn’t and so everyone in that goddamn stadium, zombie and cattle alike, were forced to try to come up with something, anything, that would both explain just what in the fuck just happened and give them all a reason to believe there was a point in continuing on with this mad charade, this chimera of the soul masquerading as belief.

And that’s where we find ourselves right now, looking for answers, for people to blame, for something, anything, that we can do to justify the heinous bullshit we had to experience today.  And the truth is, is that you can blame everybody and everything.  It was just that kind of a game, a hideous amalgamation of everything that we have come to fear as Lions fans.  The refs boned us and didn’t even bother to lube up or wear a goddamn rubber (let’s not forget that aside from that horrendous non-review was the earlier review in which they refused to acknowledge what was a clear fumble by the Texans – or rather a ball that bounced off of a Texan knee on a kickoff and into the hands of a waiting Lion), Matthew Stafford continued his decline into outright boobery, throwing damn near every pass with that side-armed, back-footed DON’T MIND ME I’M JUST SKIPPIN’ ROCKS FELLAS way of his, missing open receiver after open receiver, there were the ill-timed fumbles, the lead-blowing, the coaching nincompoopery, and the beating of the hideous heart.

But Edgar Allan Poe references aside, let’s talk about that coaching nincompoopery for a moment, okay?  Coach bashing is a sacred rite of passage for all Lions fans and God only knows that I have wielded a bloody club myself from time to time but for the most part – certain misgivings aside – I have stuck with Jim Schwartz and the general gameplan even as others began to turn on him like a savage cannibal army.  But today was unforgivable.  It just was.  It was the sort of bullshit we’ve come to loathe about this team all wrapped up in one petulant idiotic gesture.  And what’s worse is that Schwartz knew it and did it anyway.  This wasn’t a case of a dude who simply didn’t know any better and threw the damn flag anyway.  No, he knew what he was doing but he did it anyway because he was pissed off.  Hell, he even admitted it in his press conference after the game!  He knew and he did it anyway, just like his goddamn team has done time after time after time the last couple of seasons.

I mean, what can you say to that?  What can you say that will make that okay?  This was his moment, that one horrible, shameful, clownish moment that strikes every man who dares to try to coach this insipid franchise.  This was the moment that Jim Schwartz went from embattled savior to just another punchline.  This was the moment he lost Lions fans, the moment that he became Wayne Fontes, Darryl Rodgers, Rod Marinelli, Marty “Take the Goddamn Wind” Mornhinweg.  This was the moment he was struck down fatally by Lions Disease, and it happened on national TV with every Lions fan – even the casual, casual ones who only watch on Thanksgiving – watching.  This was the moment that crystalized who he was, for better or worse, in the minds of all of those fans and naturally, it was for worse, and when I say worse I mean it was about as worse as worse can get.  He could have shit his pants, sat down and started weeping and his reputation wouldn’t have suffered as much as it did following that descent into petulance and madness.  When people talk about him years from now, this is what they’ll talk about.  This was his Take the Wind moment and hey, that might not be fair – it almost certainly isn’t given how damn miraculous is was that he dragged us from 0-16 to 10-6 – but that’s just the way this turd disguised as a cookie crumbles.

That sucks but it is what it is.  It is what it goddamn is.  And while that was just one moment in an admittedly exciting game, a game the Lions should have won a thousand times over and a game the Lions managed to lose a thousand and one times over and in a thousand and one different ways, that’s the one that everyone will remember.

There is a lot that people can be happy with in this game – the Lions led the whole way against a 10-1 team, they were physical, they broke out the big plays, St. Calvin nearly rose to heaven, and when Matthew Stafford wasn’t flipping it underhand while falling backwards to a wide open expanse of nothingness he was making the plays that make people coddle him and overlook and enable all of the aforementioned bullshit.  Everything that we love – or want to love anyway – about this team was on display.  But everything that we hate was there too and in the end, that outweighed everything else – yet again.

People will nitpick this shit to death, because that’s just what fans do, especially hyper-obsessive internet fans, but really what’s the point?  We all know what the problems are, they’re pretty damn obvious by now, and now it’s just a matter of whether or not you have faith in the dudes in charge to fix it.  Unfortunately the dude we’re supposed to have faith in just entered the Mornhinweg Zone and shit, that’s almost an impossible place to come back from, you know?

In the end, I’m just sort of sad, not necessarily because the Lions lost (after all, what’s one more loss in this lost world of a season?) but because this felt like the type of game that represented a tipping point, a “there’s no coming back from this” point, because the symbolism was just too perfect, the fuck-ups crystalized in a way that will hang over this team’s head until they either obliterate them in a way we’ve never seen a Lions team do or until somebody else comes along and fools our idiot hearts into believing in something better one more time.  This was the type of game that defines a team, not just in the present but for the future as well.  This is the type of game that becomes a ghost and follows the team around, a ghost that howls and whispers terrible things in their ears at the worst possible times, a ghost that ultimately breaks them and us and everything and everyone involved with this accursed franchise.

It’s been a hard season, a miserable season, the sort of season that puts fans down for good, but on Thanksgiving, one more time, I dragged myself out of the corner, mouth filled with blood, spinal fluid pouring out of my nose, and I dared the world to knock me out.  And the world rose up before me, toyed with me for a while, and then it did.

And the Band Played On

Heeeeeeeeere's Neil

When Matthew Stafford’s desperate 4^th down pass to Tony Scheffler was batted out of the air and the Lions went 3 and out (well, 4 and out . . .) only moments after the Packers had all too predictably yanked the lead away which itself came only moments after the Lions were forced to settle for a field goal to go up only 6 rather than a touchdown that would have put the game on ice, I just sat there and I laughed hysterically, like a goddamn mental patient, and I couldn’t stop laughing such was the stark naked horror of the moment.  Yes, the Lions caused me to suffer a temporary mental break.  It has finally come to that.  But honestly, what in the hell else was I supposed to do?  How was I supposed to react?  With anger?  Been there.  Sadness?  Like an old friend to me.  Righteous indignation?  My whole fandom is one built on a pile of righteous indignation and the skulls of those fans who have done the only reasonable thing and put a goddamn bullet through their brain after drinking a gallon of Drano and then putting their heads in the oven.  I have no room left for righteous indignation, for anger, for sadness.  The only thing that’s left is that grim sort of macabre idiot’s laugh, the ghoulish howl of an insane man.  Oh Lord, why???

I could sit here and bitch about this team, to dissect the whys and the what to dos, just like I have way too many times this season but by now what’s the point?  We all know the deal.  Trying to desperately find some sort of reason, something, anything to desperately cling to just sort of has the air of frantic Titanic passengers listening to the band and trying to pick out the occasional sweet note in between the terrified shrieks and the sound of the ship breaking apart while that bastard iceberg floats on by.  It doesn’t really matter what the iceberg is.  It just matters that the ship is sinking and I don’t know if I can squeeze myself into a lifeboat yet again and I can sort of empathize with ol’ Jack right about now because it’s so very cold and if I just let go then. . .

I’m getting maudlin.  Clearly.  But I don’t know how to deal with this like a rational fan and goddammit I shouldn’t have to.  After all, the rules are different for us, aren’t they?  A 4-6 team is just a 4-6 team and hey, half the league is hovering around that mark but a 4-6 team suddenly becomes something completely different, something infinitely worse and unfathomably more terrifying and gross when it has a fifty plus year weight, an immense weight burdened with the terrible, terrible fears and disappointments of fans who have had to put up with this madness for an entire lifetime, hanging around its neck, dragging it into the abyss where not even the devil can hear you scream.

The Lions are a shitty football team.  Again.  Anyone trying to deny that at this point is just a gibbering lunatic broken by reality, a mental patient claiming to be Napoleon standing before a mirror and barking out proclamations with a grandeur and pride that ignores the fact that he’s wearing a diaper and his aide-de-camp is actually a senile old beast with no teeth with applesauce running down his chin and piss down his leg.  It is unseemly.  And so yes, the Lions are pretty undeniably a shitty football team.  What in the hell am I supposed to do with that?  How am I supposed to face that when I had to summon everything I had left as a fan to pick up the pieces after 0-16?  That season was a savage, damn near mortal blow, and it took ungodly strength for us to crawl out of that pit of despair and try to move forward again as something resembling real live human beings.  I needed this team to carry me, to take up the fight for me because goddammit, I just didn’t have anything left. 

And now here we are, living in a world in which every goddamn professional football dream has blown apart, in a world in which Matthew Stafford has regressed to the point that I’m worried he’s going to be wearing diapers and shaking a rattle by the end of the year and crawling back into his mother’s vagina by March and a world in which Shawn Jefferson openly screams at an impotent Scott Linehan on the sideline while the world watches and it’s both awful and all too familiar and please just make the bad man stop.

I gibbered on a lot in my last post about the return of the dreaded Lions disease and goddamn, that scene was about as stark an example as you can get of that heinous beast.  That right there is the epitome of Lions disease.  That is an echo of Jon Kitna screaming at the sideline in the early days of 2008.  That is Dre Bly sneering and telling everyone that Joey Harrington sucks.  That is Dom Raiola challenging the fans to a fight.  That is . . . everything.

Let’s get back to Stafford for a moment though.  For once the Lions didn’t lose this game because of penalties or because they were acting like a bunch of jackasses.  They lost because Stafford was terrible.  He just was.  In a season in which he has been teetering on the brink, he finally fell, deep into the canyon and I fear that he is still falling and that when he goes splat we may not be able to save him.  He basically kept the Packers in the game with his rickety arm, throwing interceptions and missing wide open receivers over and over again.  Even his one touchdown pass should have been intercepted but St. Calvin swooped down from the heavens and snatched the ball away and gave Stafford – and all of us – a temporary reprieve from the horrors that Fate had in store for us.  The argument about his mechanics has ceased to become an argument and has become more a gigantic farce.  Early in the season, folks liked to gibber about how it was just evidence of that Favreian playmaker GIT ER DONE LOOKIT THAT BOY HAVE FUN bullshit.  It was excused and the coaches publicly said that they weren’t worried, that they believed in him, that it was cool.  It’s a refrain we’ve heard far too much of, that JUST STAY THE COURSE AND EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY horseshit, a ballsy load of drivel which has only managed to drive the team further into its own degeneracy, codifying its weaknesses, solidifying them and then feeding them like some treacherous cancer until soon they’re not just idiosyncratic little blips and bumps in the team’s road to success but its entire identity, the very essence of its being.  And because of that Matthew Stafford isn’t just making the occasional playground play.  No.  Instead, he’s damn near throwing the ball underhanded on every other throw, rocking off of his backfoot and watching as the ball is either turfed or sailed away into oblivion – that is when he’s not turtling on the turf after having run himself into yet another sack with his almost nonexistent pocket awareness.

The absolute degeneration of Stafford has been the worst part of this whole damn thing, the one piece of evidence that has made me understand, with a depth that has left me utterly bereft of anything worth hanging onto as a fan, that this thing is headed in not only the wrong direction but a catastrophic one.  And the entire time, Jim Schwartz stands there, impotently, and gibbers on about keeping the course, confidently riding on the coattails of the last vestiges of barely earned credibility, a hee-hawing fool pretending that his team is anything other than a 6-10 ship sinking, sinking, sinking to a black death on the bottom of a sea of failure.

I don’t like having to say such things but the time has come to say them.  Saying anything else, pretending that anything else is the reality, only makes the situation worse and rewards this team for its all too obvious failings.  I have seen a lot in my life as a Lions fan and right now I have seen enough of this horseshit.

I’ve said it over and over again this year: when it’s always something, that’s everything.  Sometimes it’s dropped passes, sometimes it’s penalties, sometimes it’s special teams breakdowns, sometimes guys simply don’t put in the effort, sometimes the offense breaks down and then when the offense gets going the defense falls apart.  Today, it was Matthew Stafford just saying fuck it and throwing the goddamn football like he was bowling.  Today, it was 17-39 with 2 INT.  When it’s always something, that’s everything.

It’s a goddamn shame too because there is one dude, a certain sainted wide receiver who is performing like an absolute warrior, a hobbled thunder heart who is rising above all the bullshit and having himself a damn near heroic season.  Forget good, we should be composing sonnets and epic poems about Calvin Johnson.  His performance in spite of a body that is practically decomposing on him is awe inspiring.  But we don’t write such things – we almost can’t write such things – because while he tries so valiantly to hold the world together for us and him and his teammates and an entire city and state which is just sick of this bullshit, that same world catches on fire and burns, burns, burns.  In the end, his heroism is tragic and if I think too much about it, I will just get even more pissed off at his asshole teammates and I don’t want that.  Hell, I can’t afford that.

I don’t have any answers for you.  I wish I did.  Frankly, no one has any answers right now.  We’re all just watching with a combination of horror and revulsion, naked and gibbering while the bombs drop all around us.  We don’t even have the strength left to run for cover.  We’re just waiting for that direct hit to finally put us out of our misery or for some magic wizard to show up, tap us with his wand and transport us to some faerie land where this season never happened and where we can just pretend that everything will be alright.

Make no mistake, this is a 6-10 team.  And it’s a 6-10 team because it’s essentially the same team as it was last year, only without the absurd, charmed magic that turned that team into a 10-6 team.  The thing is, is that you can’t rely on magic, and you’d have to be especially insane to even consider relying on magic when the world of magic we’ve seen in the past half-century has been black and foul magic.  In the end, this 6-10 team is just like last year’s team, which was basically a 6-10 team, one that we forgave and even celebrated because we were seduced by magic, forgetting that magic has never been our friend.  We overlooked the cold, hard realities, the brick and mortar of the team, in favor of wizard’s spells and we told ourselves that once that magic went away that we wouldn’t need it anymore because by then the foundation would have been repaired, the brick mortared, but it turns out that the dudes who were supposed to be doing all that work were content to just get caught up in the same spellbound idiocy as the rest of us.  And now the magic is gone and all we’re left with is a crumbling house and a bunch of dudes with no clue how to fix it.  No, even worse, what we’re left with is a bunch of assholes unwilling to even admit that the house if falling apart.  They’re talking about adding on and building an in-ground pool and meanwhile the toilet just start spraying shit water and the chimney just collapsed.

And so what we’re left with is a 6-10 team, and it’s been a 6-10 team for the majority of the last three seasons.  You can’t take away the 4-0 finish to the 2010 season and you can’t take away the 5-0 start to the 2011 season that followed it.  You just can’t.  Those things happened and they were good.  But it’s become increasingly obvious, appallingly obvious, that that weird streak was the exception, not the rule.  In fact, the best the team looked during that run was probably the 4-0 finish to the 2010 season, when they just ambushed people with a monstrous defense led by an all-in Ndamukong Suh and a grit-merchant quarterback named Shaun Hill.  Even the 5-0 start felt more like an insane roller coaster ride than any sort of dominant bit of asskickery (the Passion of Jay Cutler Monday Night game aside which I’ll happily admit was the absolute highlight of this whole tragicomic era.)  But I have said all this before, in varying degrees of breathless bitching.  These are not new revelations but they remain important ones, and they sit firmly as the foundation of a new and despicable truth, which is that the Lions are a shitty football team, they are not the team we thought they could be, the team we needed them to be, and as of right now, it doesn’t seem like they ever will be.  And in the face of that, the mind reels and all that’s left is the insane laughter of the broken fool.