Wandering the Halls of Madness

It’s hard to really know what to write after the Lions win over the Redskins.  I have absolutely no idea what to say, and I think that probably is the only thing to say.  It seems a perfect summation for the sort of purgatory I feel like we’re all just kind of lounging in as Lions fans – happy we’re not roasting in that inner circle of hell but resigned to the fact that we aren’t seeing heaven any time before the rapture, and even then, we’ll probably still be on the waiting list, dropping Jesus’ name to St. Peter at the door, trying to casually slip him a twenty while the Packers and Bears and all those shitheads just sort of slide on through, laughing. 

The Lions beat the Redskins and that’s good.  It’s better than losing.  Shrug.  I don’t know what you want to me to say.  Last week, the Lions pretty much played this exact same game against the Cardinals, only they lost.  They are sort of bunched together with teams like the Cardinals and the Redskins in a jumble of dumb assholes who just sort of meander around for 60 minutes and then check to see who fucked up the least before either triumphantly throwing down their headsets like 14 year olds or angrily throwing down their headsets like 14 year olds.  It’s a kind of brutal ennui, and when you find yourself trapped inside of it, I guess the only thing you can do to get through it all is to take relative pleasures.  And by that, I mean you celebrate – quietly, otherwise you look like kind of a dumb asshole – the fact that you were able to overcome and maintain at least for a day.  You’re still a junkie, but at least this week, you didn’t pass out on the bathroom floor while other junkies like Carson Palmer stepped over your body to take a piss.

Yes, the Lions won, but let’s not pretend like they blew the Redskins off the field either.  The defense probably played its worse game of the season, and it’s obvious that without Reggie Bush the offense is depressingly all too similar to last season’s.  Look, that’s not to say that they are bad, it’s just to say that the line between truly good and fatally inconsistent is remarkably slim.  With Reggie Bush, the Lions are a multidimensional offense, capable of hurting you in any number of ways.  Without them, they are Matthew Stafford standing in the pocket trying to throw fifteen yard laser beams to covered receivers.  Sometimes it works because the Lions have Calvin Johnson and when Matthew Stafford is on, his laser beams are diamond cutters that even the dudes at CERN probably freak out about. (Dork science jokes, what up?)

But it doesn’t work consistently, and just watch the Lions in the red zone against the Redskins for evidence of that.  On three separate drives, Stafford just sat back and fired those lasers of his at the endzone, ignoring all the space in between because he and Scott Linehan apparently didn’t have faith that the Lions could do anything with that space.  That is inherently self-limiting, and sure enough, Stafford missed 8 of those 9 passes and the Lions were forced to settle for field goals before he finally threw an impossible pass to Calvin Johnson on the 9^th to score the touchdown that effectively ended the game.

That’s great, but you don’t want to put your trust in impossible passes, you know?  The point is, again, that without Reggie Bush, that’s what the Lions are reduced to, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.  For further evidence, watch the 2011 and the 2012 seasons back to back, and watch as the law of averages plays havoc with our idiot hearts.

I don’t mean to sound overly negative here.  I mean, again, the Lions won, and WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!  But it doesn’t do us any good to pretend, either.  The good news is that Reggie looks like he should be back, and that holding him out this week was just a precaution, a calculated gamble meant to ensure that the Lions would have him for the long haul and not just for one game against a shitty Redskins team.  And, looking at it through that lens, you have to say that the gamble paid off, the Lions pocketed their winnings and moved on, hooray. 

Still, there were moments in that game that made me remember why I can’t devote my whole heart to this team.  There was Nick Fairley taking a ridiculous cheap shot at Chris Chester behind a play, which was roughly 10,000 times dirtier than anything Ndamukong Suh has done recently.  And there was Jim Schwartz’s I’M A MAN headset abuse moment, and no matter what the reason – and yes, I have heard all the buts here, “But he was just excited to close out the win,” “But he was angry because the Lions communications had broken down in the last minute,” “But he was upset that the Lions didn’t beat the Redskins more handily” – he looked like a huge asshole, and let’s face it, this is not Schwartz’s first dance with the Huge Asshole Queen.  This is a team filled with dumb assholes, coached by dumb assholes, and cheered on largely by dumb assholes.  I am continually shaking my head in shame, like a parent who opens the door only to see his son tying off his arm again.  Goddammit.

That may sound harsh, especially in the wake of a victory, but I have to say this because this is what makes it hard for me to just lose myself in this team, which is really the one thing every sports fan wants to be able to do.  It’s just a feel thing, you know?  I felt like I was watching the same team that passed out on the bathroom floor every week last season.  It’s just that the Redskins are that junkie who has to shoot up between their toes because their arms are too scabbed up now, and they don’t just routinely pass out on the bathroom floor, they get their mail delivered to the toilet.  The Lions essentially won because they weren’t as fucked up, which is still a victory, yes, and we should feel glad, but come on. 

This is far more negative that I meant it to be, it’s just that, really, what can I say that is positive here besides “Well, they won, that’s good”?  Think of one thing from that game that merits rapturous praise or satisfied relief.  To be fair, “Well, they won, that’s good,” is probably the best thing you can say after any game so I should probably chill out a bit, especially since I said I wanted to take this a game at a time, and just savor the small victories instead of worrying all the time about the big picture, but it’s not as easy as all that.  I can say that shit all I want, but sometimes, the dark, black clouds seem a little bit too close to ignore, and I guess that’s where I’m at right now. 

It’s weird, because I really don’t feel any better or any worse than I did after last week’s game against the Cardinals.  And that’s because I feel like I just watched the same goddamn game.  The result ended up being different, and hey, again, the result is kind of the only thing that seems like it should matter, and that means that I’m probably being ridiculous, but like I just said, when those clouds are following you around, it doesn’t really matter if it’s raining right now or not, because you’re kind of always preparing yourself for the inevitability of rain.  You look outside and see dark clouds, and you don’t think “Phew!  Thank god it’s not raining.”  No, you think “Awww shit, it’s gonna rain,” and then mentally and emotionally react like it already is raining.

It didn’t rain on Sunday, but it sure as hell felt like it might, and sometimes that’s close enough to the same thing.  But hey, like I said, the absence of Reggie Bush seemed like a calculated gamble, like going for a picnic even though those clouds are rolling in and hoping it doesn’t rain.  And it worked, so perhaps I should just feel thankful. 

I don’t know.  I just don’t know, and this mess of a post is evidence of that.  I keep going back and forth here because that’s what I’ve been doing in my head.  I’m happy that they won, but I can’t quite allow myself to feel it.  It’s better than a loss, and I know that intellectually, but emotionally, I’ve been having a hard time reconciling what I see as storm clouds with the lack of rain.  I’m fucked up in the head as a fan, but this is what being a fan of the Lions will do to you.  In the end, I guess the only thing I can say is that it didn’t feel like the Lions won that game so much as the Redskins lost it, which might sound extraordinarily picky to you, the fan who just wants me to shut up and lead a parade down main street with magic monkeys and clowns shooting fireballs out of their mouths, but goddammit, that matters.  That matters.

This is probably a temporary setback in my own junkie battle.  I’ve fallen off the wagon and let the big picture overwhelm me again, the realization that I’ll always be a junkie causing me to reach for the needle because, hey, why not, what’s the point?  If you’re going to lose in the end anyway, you might as well just pass the time comfortably numb.  But that is also loser talk, and I recognize that.  I’m trying to do better, trying to be better, trying to overcome and understand that there is a sun shining somewhere behind all those goddamn clouds, even if I can’t see it, even if I never see it.  I am just sort of rambling here, but I told you right at the outset that I had no idea what to say, or what to write, and, well, you were warned.  I suppose all that’s left is for me to gibber some bullshit about enjoying the picnic and trying to ignore the clouds, and being thankful that the rain didn’t come, and blah, blah, blah, I am drowning in metaphors, somebody save me. 

Look, the Lions won, and I guess that’s all that matters.  Last week they lost.  Their two wins have both been against 0-3 teams, and nobody knows where this is really going.  We’re just junkies drifting in a rowboat in the open sea underneath cloudy skies.  Maybe somebody will find us and bring us back to shore, get us cleaned up, and maybe put us in a recovery center for metaphor addiction, or maybe we’ll just drift out here forever, the skies will open up, the rain will fall, we’ll run out of junk and then devour each other in our own madness before the boat finally disintegrates and we sink to the bottom of a sea that doesn’t care. 

This is an absurdly depressing post that went off the rails a while ago, a gibberfest that should have left you hitting the back button about the time I started talking about clouds, or maybe even when I made that feeble CERN joke.  Clearly, it just isn’t happening and I’m just sort of wandering the halls of my own diseased mind, hooting at whatever I see like a mental patient, but I guess that’s oddly appropriate because right now, that’s how I feel about the Lions.  They’re just sort of wandering, lost in the halls of their own sordid past, unable to do anything really to escape, hooting and throwing down headsets like mental patients.  And in our respective wanderings, maybe we’ll cross paths, and I’ll look at the Lions and the Lions will look at me, and we’ll know each other, and maybe we’ll laugh or maybe we’ll cry, and this is all just horseshit.  This is all just horseshit.

Fuck it, the Lions beat the Redskins.  HOORAY, LET’S START THE PARADE!

Standing on the Edge

I’ll be honest with you, I’m not sure what to write about this game.  I’ve already spent the last couple of weeks running around wearing a hair shirt, whipping myself with chains made of despair and so it would be sort of disingenuous of me to huff some ether and say that everything is going to be alright just because that’s what people want to hear.  Hell, it’s what I want to hear but I just don’t feel it in my bones.  Not this year.

Still, no one wants to read a bunch of bullshit every week about how the sky is falling and how about how there’s no hope so . . . yeah.  I don’t know.  I just don’t know.  The Lions fan in me feels ragged and beaten right now, sort of exhausted and on the edge of a precipice of sorts.  I’ve been here before and I don’t like it.  I don’t like it when I just feel snippy and bitchy about the Lions.  I don’t like it when the only thing I have left is a sort of sarcastic veneer behind which I hide my heart.  I don’t like watching the games with a sort of faint disgust, vaguely passionless, shaking my head and wondering why things just can’t be better.  I hate it.  I hate that feeling, you all know the one, where my heart dives behind those old familiar barricades, where parts of me just go . . . numb. 

I hate it.

But I love the Detroit Lions.  I always have and I always will.  That’s why I hate that feeling so much.  I want to feel that limitless sense of pure Hope that I’ve felt for the last few years, ever since Martin Mayhew and Jim Schwartz took over.  I want to believe, even when things aren’t going so well that eventually everything is going to be alright.  That’s how I felt even when the team was wobbling like newborn deer during that 2-14 season.  It’s how I felt in 2010 when Matthew Stafford had various body parts eaten by wolves, Sheriff Goodell and his Necromancers robbed St. Calvin of that opening week touchdown in Chicago and the Lions started 2-10 before rallying to finish 6-10.  Throughout all of that I believed, with all my heart, in the promise of the future, in its guarantee.  Last year I lived and died on every single goddamn stupid play and I did that because it all felt meaningful, necessary and exciting steps on the Road to Salvation.  I want to feel like that so very badly.

The problem is, is that I just don’t.  I care.  I absolutely care.  But that conviction isn’t there, the absolute belief in where this thing is headed.  And it’s not just that I’m nervous or conflicted or anything like that.  I wish I was.  At least that’s something.  Instead, I just feel drained.

I’m a Michigan fan.  Most of you know that by now and the way I feel today about the Lions is eerily similar to how I felt in the dying days of the Rich Rod era.  That is a horrible thing to say but it’s true.  And believe me when I say that I hung onto that ghost until Peter Venkman and the boys showed up to suck it out of Ann Arbor.  I believed with all my heart, with my head and various other organs that the Rich Rod era would end with parades, with candy and blowjobs and kittens and kittens made of candy and kittens giving blowjobs and . . . okay, I’ve gone too far.  The point is, is that I held onto that until finally I was just that dude clinging to a corpse, talking to it, making plans and screaming that everything was  gonna be alright even while most sane and rational people were trying to pry me away, shooing the flies away from the corpse and digging mass graves.  Hell, instead of gibbering on let me just copy and paste what I said on the subject in the comments section following my post after the loss to the Vikings:

“Right, it's the lack of progress that is just whipping my ass. In fact, they seem to be regressing. I'm not talking about scheme or playcalling or any of that shit but in terms of their cohesiveness as a team/their mental game/all those little things that bridge the gap from talent to wins. The talent is there - for the most part, they still have holes but then again who doesn't? - but that talent never seems to grow. I'm not asking for sheer dominance, just basic competence and in several fundamental areas they're still playing like a team full of rookies with a first year coach, which, uh, this is year number FOUR of the Jim Schwartz era. Granted, coming back from 0-16 makes it almost impossible to calibrate where this team should be and Stafford's injuries rocked the timeline further, but in year number four if all those little niggling things still haven't snapped into place then why the fuck would they in year 5 or year 6 or... you get the point.

I was so hopeful, not because this was a dominant team last year or because they were even a good team the year before that but because I was sure that all those little things would catch up to the talent. I was in love with the future and yet when I look at them today they are still that same team of talented fuck-ups. My hope, my belief was based on the presumption that all this shit would be cleared up once the team grew together. Instead, it just lingers, like a stale fart and nobody - no one, not the team's leaders, not its coaches, not Jim Schwartz - has shown the ability to do one goddamn thing about it.

There is a lot to like, a lot to get behind, a lot to believe in, but it all means nothing if that missing piece can't be fixed and right now I see no reason why it will.

That is an enormously hard thing to write. Nobody wants to shit on Jim Schwartz. I don't. I want to believe in Schwartz. I want to love him. I want him to be The Man who leads us to the promised land. I want this so very badly but I refuse to become a slave to delusions built on an altar of fear. I'm not going to convince myself that this is working just because I need it to or because I'm too afraid of the alternative. The Lions are a fucking mess and there is simply no excuse for that shit at this point. It reminds me of - here we go - the Rich Rod era at Michigan. It was so full of promise, so full of potential and I went down with that goddamn ship. I believed in it until nearly the very end, contorted myself every which way I could in order to make it work in my head and in my heart and then one day it fucking sucked when I had to admit to myself that it was broken and that it wasn't going to get better.

Now obviously the two situations aren't exactly the same, although there are similarities - both Rich Rod and Schwartz took over and had to rebuild programs/teams that had cratered, both worked from an early talent deficit, and both had teams that constantly fucked up all the little things. I'm not there yet with Schwartz. I still think it's too early to definitively say that but goddamn, it's not that far off and I'm not going to contort myself and the truth just because I need to believe in him. My eyes are wide open and the possibility that he is not The One is at least on the table in front of me, in front of all of us. I don't want it, I don't like it, but here we are and there it is.”

Right.  Anyway . . . yeah.  I stand by all of that, even if it was written in the heat of the miserable moment.  If anything, two weeks later, that feeling is even stronger.  That is not to say that I’ve totally abandoned all hope.  I want nothing more than for Schwartz and the Lions to make a goddamn fool out of me.  Five years from now, my hope is that you will all look back on this and mock me but goddammit, right now I have to be true to myself, and what I believe, what I feel, at this moment is all that gibberish above.  You don’t have to like it.  All I ask is that you respect it.  After all, I have given big chunks of my sanity to this team, I have ripped myself open as a fan and laid it all on the table for you to read, week after week, for over four years now.  When everyone else was burying their head in the sand and predicting fantastical playoff runs prior to the Trail of Tears 2008 season I was the only one beating the drums of Truth, warning everyone that the ship had run aground and sharks were eating the bodies of the dead and the dying.  And then when Jim Schwartz and Mayhew came aboard I dared to believe and I have spent the last three years painting glorious pictures with my heart.  The point is, is that I have never been afraid to listen to my own heart, to face the gods of Truth and take whatever they had to give me.  I am not just some asshole cowering before an altar of Fear.  I am Neil, and goddammit, if that means anything to you at all, then at least understand where it is that I’m coming from and what I’m trying to say and don’t reduce me to a simpleton caricature.

The bravest thing any of us can do right now is to respect the fact that we’re all dealing with this in different ways.  We’re all just trying to find our way through the dark places, trying to hang onto something, anything, that can . . . that can . . . look, I don’t know what to say.  I really don’t.  If you still believe in this thing, if you believe with all your heart that this is heading in a good direction and that this will all work out for the best, then may God, Buddah and Patrick Swayze bless you.   I have ridden with you for the last few years, but I get the sense that a lot of those same people were also the ones telling everyone to believe while Rod Marinelli was waddling around the field gibbering about pad level, you know?

I know, I know, it’s not fair for me to reduce you to a caricature either, and I am kind of talking in circles here but really, what else is there left to say?  At this point you either feel like that body riding shotgun is alive and kicking and that you’ll get to your happy destination together or you feel like you’re trapped in some horrible Weekend at Bernie’s sequel and that dude sitting next to you is just a corpse, man, and no matter how much you try to work its mouth and flap its arms around with wires and shit, it’s still just a corpse and pretty soon it’s going to start to stink.  Those two belief structures are so completely different that if you can’t agree on either one of those fundamental truths than everything else is meaningless drivel. 

Yes, this team went 2-5 over a seven game stretch last season, but the difference between now and then is that I believed that they’d pull out of that and that everything would eventually be okay.  I don’t feel that way now.  I just don’t.  Our varied perceptions of the basic structure of this whole damn thing colors everything else.  If you still think that everything will be okay then this is just a blip, a stumble on the Road to Salvation and you think I’m being a melodramatic ass.  But if you think that you’ve seen enough, that this goddamn thing just won’t be fixed because if it could then it would be already, then you think that this blip is closer to reality, that this is just The Way Of Things and trust me, that sucks.  I take no joy in being in that camp.  I am not some soulless misery merchant but goddammit, Bernie is starting to stink. 

Well there’s 2,000 words about anything and everything other than the Eagles and I would apologize but I think that’s where we are right now.  The Eagles are just a team, a game.  The story, I think, is about our identity as a franchise and that is just overwhelming everything else, and your perceptions about that identity are going to inform everything else you have to say about this team and this season.

I will say this – I don’t think the Eagles are that good.  They were embarrassed by the Cardinals and their three wins have been by a combined 4 points.  But hell, at least they won those damn games, right?  I mean, in the end, isn’t that what we’re talking about?  They won and the Lions, so far anyway . . . haven’t. 

Can the Lions beat the Eagles?  Of course.  I still think that on any given day, this team can beat any other shitbird team in the league.  We have the talent.  I just no longer believe that they will.  Every week feels like a tossup.  I don’t know what in the hell will happen.  The Lions might stroll into Philly, some switch having been flipped in the last couple of weeks, and they might style and profile all over those assholes.  Michael Vick might wind up covered in his own blood, rocking back and forth at midfield begging to be sent back to Leavenworth rather than deal with the Lions pass rushers.  And Matthew Stafford might turn back into Maverick and buzz the tower, fuck the girl and throw 8 touchdown passes while Val Kilmer starts a slow clap in the stands.  Sure, why not?

But I also feel like Vick could run for 100 yards, throw for another 300 while Ndamukong Suh gets wham blocked into oblivion, Stafford carries on like Morrissey and the Lions lose following a fifteen yard penalty after Titus Young runs on the field and trips DeSean Jackson during a fourth quarter punt return.  I just don’t know, and more importantly, I have no faith that the good scenario is more likely than the bad.  If anything it’s the opposite and trust me, that sucks.

Right now, if you leave aside the larger questions about where we’re headed as a franchise– and that’s almost impossible to do but try to stay with me here – I sort of feel like I did before every game in 2010.  I was not especially confident then.  I believed in the future, sure, but week in and week out I sort of felt like anything could happen, and it kinda did.  I never knew whether the Lions would win or lose or whether they would get blown out or blow some fool team out themselves.  All I could do was sort of shrug and watch and wait impatiently for the future to get here.  And that was fine then.  But that was 2010.  This is 2012 and it’s not fine now.  It just isn’t.  That’s called regression.  I shouldn’t be feeling before games this season the way I did two seasons ago, when we were still digging out from beneath the rubble of 0-16 and yet, here we are.  No matter how you want to frame it, that isn’t a good thing.  Maybe that says more about me than it does the team, or maybe it says everything about the team.  I don’t know.  I really don’t know.  All I do know is that this is not where I wanted to be, where I expected to be, as a fan at this point.  Some will say then that the problem is with my own expectations, that they were somehow wrong, but to hell with all that.  I have always approached this thing with clear eyes and a thunderous heart.  I am not afraid of the pain.  I just don’t like it.  And I don’t see why I should have to force myself to feel something I don’t just for the sake of belief.  Belief without reason can be a tragic, tragic thing.  It can also be a beautiful thing, a romantic thing.  I’m not denying that.  That’s something I value.  But goddammit, this team just isn’t any good.  I feel it in my bones, and honestly, that trumps everything else right now.

The Lions might win or the Lions might lose.  I don’t know.  I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.  I’m not sure how many times I can say that but right now, that’s all I know.  You know?  And as I believe Socrates said, during his guest run on GI Joe, knowing is half the battle.  Or something.  Blah.

I suppose right now I just want this team to win.  I don’t care how they do it.  I don’t even care if they luck into it somehow, if it is more the result of the Eagles shitting the bed than the Lions kicking ass.  What’s important is that they just win – that for a change they not be the team that fucks up and looks like a team of coked out rookies with ADHD – and then we’ll go from there.  Just win, baby.  That’s something else Socrates said, or maybe it was Al Davis or maybe Al Davis was actually Socrates.  He was certainly old enough.  But we’re getting weird here and so, to end this morose dumpster fire of a post on a positive note, I’ll say it again – just win baby.  Please.

Oh God

We are all Prometheus. Also, you'd be surprised at how hard it is to find a picture where it doesn't look like the bird is blowing him.

I don’t know.  I just don’t know.

I know you want more from me than that but I’m broken.  I dared to dream and have been viciously smacked back down by the universe and now I am naked and bleeding, wandering in the desert with no water under a hell sun, suffering from delusions and conversing with a talking cartoon rabbit who I’m expecting to grow fangs any second from now, jump me and start gnawing at my liver while I try to cry tears that won’t come because even my tear ducts have abandoned me and left me to wither and desiccate in this fan hell where yesterday and tomorrow look an awful lot alike and today the sand just reaches up and chokes me while the devil laughs.

Right.  Welcome back, friends, to . . . to . . . sigh.  Even when things were at their worst we could look to the future, see that things would change, that they would have to change, and in that change we could dare to dream of something, anything, even if we weren’t sure what it was.  But now?  Now, I don’t know what to believe in.  I don’t know what to hope for.  Do I hope that somehow, someway, this team miraculously figures out how to actually play football like grown ass men and not like a bunch of simpering little boys?  I guess but then I might as well hope for my elderly neighbor to somehow morph into Jessica Alba with beer spouts for nipples.

I’m sure there at least isolated pockets that are raggedly and doggedly hanging onto their delusions, insisting that “Well, if only this wouldn’t have happened then . . .” but no.  Just no.  When it’s always something, that’s everything.  That’s football.  There will always be things that go wrong and you can’t make excuses for them, can’t say that somehow they don’t matter because they won’t happen again because even if they don’t, something else will.  I know that sounds suspiciously like some weird Yogi Berra like gibberish but I don’t give a fuck.  You’re lucky I’m even vaguely coherent right now and not just mashing the keyboard wildly and moaning into some computerized voice translation program that would just give up and commit suicide two paragraphs into this thing.

Right about now I imagine Danny Crossman is being escorted out of Ford Field with all his shit in a box while Stan Kwan watches from the box he’s been living in across the street.  Jim Schwartz is probably hearing voices echoing in his office and the ghost of Wayne Fontes is probably whispering breathy come-ons into his ear while he contemplates hiding under his desk and weeping.  Gunther Cunningham is probably thinking “I’m too old for this shit” and the defense is probably wondering how in the hell the Lions can lose a game in which it doesn’t allow a touchdown but surprise, motherfuckers!  This is what happens when you dance with the Failure Demons.

The Lions lost and they lost in a heinous way that ripped open the dreams we had all been clinging too, eviscerated the delusions and exposed this team for everything that it truly is in stark, naked clarity.  Truth was exploded like a supernova, and even the blind can see it now and they are all weeping tears that they can’t see but that they can feel and oh Jesus, it never ends.  It never ends.

I’m not sure if there is one obvious thing that is wrong here and that’s a big part of the problem.  There are a million little things wrong and when that’s the case it’s almost impossible to fix.  A big deal has been made the last few season about Jim Schwartz changing the culture of the Lions and he did.  They are no longer the downtrodden, the talent-deprived, the lesser.  But in the process, a new culture was created, a culture of rampant stupidity that at first seemed like something of a quaint Boys Will Be Boys thing that we thought they would grow out of into something that threatened to become a real problem, popping up at horrible times, costing us games last year, and then into this, this festering turd which has become the center of our team.  Our team’s identity is synonymous with stupidity because it was never checked, never controlled.  Everyone just stood by and watched helplessly while it became the new culture.  It is not the old one but in some ways it is more despicable, a reckless pissing away of talent that most teams would kill for, a wastrel degenerate that will never change no matter how much we love them, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves that one day they will grow out of it.  Because now, we look up and our rambunctious child is a goddamn adult and he just got arrested again for something stupid, like vagrancy or mopery, and he just called, half-drunk and begged us to come bail his ass out of jail again and . . . AAAAAAARRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

This asshole just isn’t going to change.  I just told UpHere that it feels kind of like watching a junkie family member, one who’s been sober – or at least tried to be – for a couple of years, shoot up again.  Instead of being angry, I just feel beaten.  All I can do is sigh, shake my head, disgusted and hope he doesn’t steal some more of my stuff, or in this case, my heart, to finance his fool ways. 

Where do we go from here?  I don’t know.  I just don’t know.  This team is still the team from last year and it can get hot and maybe it will put together a run but that run will blow up and then we will all die and right now it feels like the best – the very best – that we can hope for, both for now and for the foreseeable future, is that this team becomes sorta like the Wayne Fontes era Lions, too stupid to truly live but too goddamn talented to ever be completely counted out.  There is a certain excitement in that I suppose but there is not satisfaction.  No.  No, there is not.

I had a friend tell me that this team has peaked and the thought seemed ridiculous and made me immeasurably sad at the same time because there is a good chance that it is true, at least for this team with these coaches and these players.  They went 9-0 over a stretch beginning in 2010 and lasting into 2011.  Before and after that stretch they have been just another Lions team, and if that 9-0 stretch is all I get then goddammit, that’s just not fair.  That is cruel, in a way that nobody but Lions fans can understand.  To be given such a small taste only to have it ripped away again and replaced with sand and shit in our mouths is just . . . it’s just fuckin’ mean. 

I don’t want to say that they’ve peaked, that they can still move forward with this but it’s awfully hard to make that argument right now.  This is a team that has already seemed to regress, to fold in on itself and now the weight of it all, of the past, of the failure, of the expectations, of our own dreams as they fade, fade, fade into a panicked oblivion, is pressing down on us all and it’s kind of hard to breathe down here and oh Jesus, oh God, is this it?  Is this really all we get? 

The stark, naked horror of this is enough to make even the most stalwart among us go mad.  I don’t know what to do with myself as a fan.  I don’t know what to believe in, what to hope for.  There is a part of me right now that just feels . . . gone.  As if all there is left to do is detach, to just watch from some ghostly realm while the Failure Demons eat what’s left of me as a fan.  I just sort of sneered as Matthew Stafford stumbled, looking like a clumsy donkey, and then was sacked to end the game today and the worst part of it all was that it felt so familiar, that sneering sort of disgust and the sickening horror of that is that the familiarity is one that I vowed I would never feel again as a fan and yet here I am, sneering, disgusted and what happened?  Oh Lord, what happened?

Last week, the great Lions wave in my heart crested and broke somewhere in Tennessee, and now all there is left to do is try, somehow, not to drown as the wave collapses back on me.  That is, I fear, all that I have left to look forward to for a while as a fan, just trying to survive, just trying to make sure that my bloated fan corpse won’t show up on some distant beach, beaten beyond recognition, lungs filled with water, unrecognizable, just another forgotten body, something that used to be a person, that used to have feelings and hopes and dreams.

This has become maudlin and vaguely ridiculous but I don’t care.  Fuck you.  I am broken and there are no instructions on how to put myself back together again.  There are just pieces and parts and there are vultures picking at them in this, the desert of the damned and Oh God.  Oh God.