Dreams

Last night, I dreamed I was in hell. I didn’t know it was hell at first. It actually seemed sort of like paradise. There was the sun, a beach, beautiful women, and yet I knew that something wasn’t quite right. I couldn’t quite figure it out, but I knew I had to escape. So, I did. I’m not sure how. Can’t remember that part. All I know is that there was some sort of door back to the other side and I made it through.

Of course, doors go both ways, and because I knew that hell was on the other side, I felt like I had to stand guard and keep others from going through, fooled by False Paradises. But they wouldn’t listen, and they went through one after the other, and in some tragic incident I again can’t quite remember, I got pushed through again and the door disappeared. I was trapped in hell forever.

It wasn’t all bad. I mean, it was still a False Paradise, but if I just made myself stop thinking I could convince myself I could take it. I still knew, though. Knew that it wasn’t right, that despite the beauty and the bikinis, that it was wrong . . . all wrong. I blinked, and suddenly, the beaches disappeared and I realized I was actually in a sewer, surrounded by my friends from life, and we were all doomed to literally clean the sewer for eternity. My mind had simply invented the beach because it couldn’t take the reality.

Of course, cleaning a sewer is a meaningless task. That is the horror of it. You keep scrubbing and more shit keeps flowing. What I remember even more than that, though, is the utter hopelessness of it all, the knowledge that this was it, this was Forever. It was unbearable. I could feel my soul breaking apart, my very essence crumbling in the face of it. And so I tried to escape once again.

This time, I didn’t look for any hidden doors. There was a set of stairs leading downward from the sewer, and so I went down them. It got hotter as I descended and I could see a glow. As dream metaphors go, this one was pretty obvious, not to mention embarrassingly literal.

I rounded a corner, and there he was, the devil himself. I told him I wanted to leave, that I wanted to go home, that I didn’t belong. He laughed at me.

Somehow, I acquired a handsaw and, yes, I attacked the devil. He had a humanish face, more or less, and I sawed right through it. It fell away to reveal a stereotypical devilish demon face, all red and glowing with hot fire. And so I sawed through that too, right through the middle, cutting his head in half horizontally. Of course, it just sort of repaired itself like a fiery liquid metal terminator, and I again felt the hopelessness of eternity, the hopelessness of knowing that nothing I did would – or could – make any difference. It was an awful feeling. I’m still affected by it even now.

The devil actually told me he was impressed by my fervor, by the lengths I was willing to go to escape from hell, and so he offered me a deal. He offered to send me back, with the caveat that when my life was over, that I would return to hell forever. No bargains, no trying to escape. To sweeten the deal, he even offered to let me live 16 human lifetimes. The catch was that at the end of each lifetime – roughly 80 years – he would take a digit, a finger or a toe, to remind me of my ultimate fate, of my inescapable damnation.

I agreed. It was the only way out. Even if it was temporary, I did the math. 1,280 years. That’s how long I would have on Earth before I would have to return to hell. Sure, I would lose some fingers and some toes, but I figured I would adapt. It wasn’t ideal, obviously, but what other choice did I have?

I blinked again, and suddenly I was back in the real world. I had escaped hell, and had a long, long life – or 16 lives – to live before I would have to go back.

But it didn’t matter. All I could think of was hell. I could taste it. I could feel it. It was everywhere. It was life without Hope, life without meaning. I knew that an eternity of hell awaited me, that no matter what I did, no matter how long I lived, it was nothing compared to the Forever of hell. My soul broke and my will crumbled, just as it had when I was in hell itself. Hell is a state of mind. I realized that then. I realized it, and knew that I had no way to defeat it.

I panicked, and I did the only thing I could think of: I summoned the motherfucking devil. He appeared. He was annoyed, obviously, yet curious. What could I possibly want from him this soon in our deal? I suspect he knew, knew all along. That was the game. The torture.

I somehow acquired a chainsaw this time. We were in a bar, and we were talking around a pool table. I lunged at him with the chainsaw and again I sliced through his skull horizontally, but this time I just kept cutting and kept cutting, his skull sawed into tiny pieces, and as they tried to reassemble like the liquid metal terminator, I kept cutting, not giving them a chance to reform, and as the bits of his skull, the bits of Satan, fell to the surface of the pool table, I furiously tried to push them into the table’s pockets. Somehow, I felt like each pocket would hold them separately and they wouldn’t reassemble. It was awful, terrifying, just complete panic and desperation, an impossible fight against Fate, against Damnation, against the permanent ruination of my soul.

And that’s when I woke up. There was no resolution, no salvation, other than to escape that realm of consciousness, to obliterate my dreams and return to my waking life. This is a true story. 100%. That dream happened, and it remains vivid in my mind. Part of me worries that it’s real, that this is the delusion, that I’m already damned to hell, that I’ve already been there and that there is no escape, not even in waking.

Prediction: Bears 28 Lions 17

Dead Horse

Let’s just get right to it.  The Redskins are awful, okay?  Just terrible.  They have imploded in ways that have horrified and disgusted their fans.  Once upon a time, that would have included my friend, the esteemed Raven Mack, who I’m sure many of you are familiar with, but he was psychically poisoned by the terrible reign of Dan Snyder: Boy Prince, and had to flee to the Congo to be healed by a witch doctor.  The Lions should win this game.  The Lions had better win this game or else my idiot fan heart will be devoured either by my tears or by hideous laughter, whichever comes first to protect and cleanse me.

But here’s the thing, and this is the sort of thing that makes you just sort of sit out on the porch and smoke a cigarette even though you haven’t smoked in years – the Lions haven’t won in Washington since the Burning Bush administration, when George Sr. screamed at Moses to mobilize his forces in the Egyptian desert.  This makes sense when you consider that, for the most part, recent fuckery aside, the Redskins have been a fairly respectable NFL franchise, while the Lions have been a fairly respectable circus clown franchise.  I mean, it’s not just Washington, the Lions also have that abominable Lambeau field streak, which will only end after the Rapture as foretold in the Book of Revelations, and they once went approximately 252 straight years without winning a game on the road, which we all remember because you don’t forget things like that or like getting bamboo shoots barbed with razor wire and hot sauce plunged into your urethra.

Historically, there is no reason to believe that the Lions should win this game, and so I’m sure that if they do lose there will be people who explain it away as too high a mountain to climb or some such shit, because there is always an excuse and let’s face it, this one is pre-made.  But all of that terrible history is just that – history, and while it may be too much to say that history is a dead thing, which we all know is a hideous lie, as that fucker always comes back like Jason Voorhees and jumps out of the lake to decapitate you just when you finally think it’s all safe, it should not carry as much weight as we give it.  History can be overcome, and it can be beaten, but only if you embrace the now, and while the now isn’t any great shakes for the Lions, the now fucking hates the Redskins.

Their quarterback, their savior, Robert Griffin III, was descended upon by vultures sent by the fates, who tore away his knee ligaments and then pooped all over the souls of every fan brave enough (or idiot enough, depending on your point of view) to believe in the spiritual healing powers of RGIII.  Rather than cleanse the Redskins of their recent woes, RGIII provided damning evidence that the franchise had been taken over by Failure Demons, those vicious parasites.  Most Redskins already suspected that Dan Snyder had secret shadow partners, steeped in evil and misery, but when RGIII went down and a circus erupted involving coaches feuding with doctors and quarterbacks being called cornball brothers on ESPN, perceptive Redskins fans sadly knew that those shadow partners were none other than the dreaded Failure Demons, and that even worse they now had a controlling interest in the once proud franchise.

Like I said, it was bad enough that it helped cause my boy, Raven Mack, to sever the Redskins like a gangrenous limb, if only to save what was left of his own broken soul.  After all, he has seen what that sort of fandom can do to a man during his dealings with me, and I don’t blame him for disappearing into the heart of the Dark Continent to wrestle giant crocodiles and grow Iboga, which he sells to Somalian pirates in exchange for guns and potions he uses to ward off the transmogrifications of the spirits of the white devil men who became trapped in those jungles back in the day and exist now only to haunt and twist the living.

Wait, where was I?  Oh yeah, the Redskins.  Anyway, all of that happened before this season even started.  Once the ball was actually kicked off, the Failure Demons went completely nuts and started openly wandering the field during play, gnawing on whatever was left over of RGIII’s soul, attaching spiritual chains to Alfred Morris and seeping out of Mike Shanahan’s anus shaped mouth like wispy smoke leaking out of a genie lamp.  It hasn’t been good in Washington, which we all knew in a larger, general sense, but as if to mirror real life, whatever the hell that is, the Redskins have abandoned “not good” and entered into an era of dumpster fires and hobos beating off on city buses driven by cackling skeletons, while snake handlers and charlatans sit in the halls of power and do the bidding of their dark masters.  People make fun of Detroit and its football team, but GODDAMN, have you checked out DC lately?

RGIII suddenly moves more slowly than a stoned ground sloth, and has taken to publicly feuding with his top receiver, Pierre Garcon, which in French means Peter Boy.  Actually Pierre is a derivation of the Greek petros, which means “rock” or “stone”, so in reality RGIII is arguing with a Stoned Boy, which makes all the sense in the world.  The open bitchery began when Stoned Boy publicly questioned RGIII’s speed, which is of course a good, sensible thing to do to your quarterback coming off of knee surgery.  Naturally, RGIII handled it like a true leader and had a frank, private conversation behind closed doors with Monsieur Boy, in which… oh wait, you mean he didn’t?  No, instead RGIII took to the press and challenged T.T. Boy to a race.  And all the while the Failure Demons cackled and Dre Bly and Joey Harrington reminisced fondly about selling each other out in times of crisis.

The whole thing has become a hideous circus, with Griffin hee-hawing constantly to the press about how maybe he needs to run more even though his knees are now made of old cheese and ghosts, while everyone else openly speculates that he’s already done and that Shanahan should smother him with a pillow or at least do the sensible thing and go behind his back to Darth Snyder and ask permission to change quarterbacks, which is always a good sign that your coach has control of the situation.  Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Kirk Cousins, who looks like a dude who should be terrorizing new arrivals at the police academy, stands ready for RGIII to fall, so he can pick off whatever’s left like a vulture and “rescue” the Redskins from the unrescuable.

I have spent this entire piece talking about the Redskins and for good reason – if the Lions can’t beat a team like that, a team that psychically damaged, a team being publicly feasted on by the Failure Vultures – then it’s probably time to call it a day, and by call it a day I mean start hanging dudes in effigy and wearing paper bags on our heads like our forefathers did.

The flipside to all that hideous nonsense, though, is that the Lions should win.  They should definitely win.  For once, the psychic energies favor them, and sometimes all you need to do is look at a team in the midst of true hell to understand that your team is actually doing okay.

The Lions lost last week and that sucked.  You know how I feel in general about this team, but my new stance is to just take everything as it happens, one game at a time, like an addict in recovery, and see what happens.  Last week was confirmation to me that things aren’t going to get better, but maybe they can stay just okay enough that the Lions can sneak their way past the gates of hell and get in a couple of nights partying before the demon authorities show up and drag them back in chains, and if that happens at just the right time, then who knows? 

There is a hierarchy in hell, and right now the Lions are just sort of chilling in one of the outer circles, tormented by their past and by the general hopelessness of the future, but not really openly suffering in the present.  The Redskins, meanwhile, are being slow-roasted near the center, hanging with Hitler and the gang, and screaming for a mercy that just isn’t going to come.  This is the new way we have to look at things as Lions fans, our new reality, depressing though it may be.  But really, it’s only depressing if you really think about it, if you let the inevitability of the doom really settle in.  If you just get drunk and scream at the TV every week and pretend that something good could happen, then you can at least tolerate it.  It’s better than what Redskins fans are going through right now.

And so, that’s all that’s left to do on Sunday – revel in the fact that the Redskins are now Failure’s whipping boy, and while Failure promises to get around to us before too long, for now all we can do is hold the Redskins down while they get the belt.  It’s kind of shameful, and in a just universe we’d all just band together and overthrow the Failure Regime, but people are addicted and the Failure regime knows that and will continue to play with us like puppets using their subsidiary, the NFL aka the Dumb Asshole League.  We are a collective of junkie slaves, and we’re just happy when we don’t get the whip. 

Listen, that is a hideously offensive metaphor, but in a lot of ways this is a hideously offensive game.  There are no real winners here, only a sad sort of jockeying to not be at the bottom of the pile.  And right now, the Lions aren’t while the Redskins are.  It’s that simple, and in the Land of Misery, the only things we have to cherish are the simple and the petty.  Most days we wish we weren’t us, but for one day, we get to be glad that we aren’t them.  And for one week, at least, that’s enough.  And that’s how we survive.

So, This Is Hell

I have a headache, I feel dehydrated, my eyeballs are on fire and I’m nauseas. I’m not sure whether this is because I am apocalyptically hung over or because I just had my heart and soul put through an industrial press and then shit upon by a coked out elephant with a spastic colon. Maybe both? I don’t know.

What I do know – the only thing that I feel like I know right now – is that Fate is awful and cruel and unmerciful and that someone wearing Honolulu Blue, somewhere, sometime in the awful, awful past must have done something so obscenely terrible that we are doomed to be punished for his sins for all of eternity. Maybe Hitler was a Lions fan. Who knows?

I’m pretty sure that at some point last night I died, my soul carried off by the heathen spirits who lived at the bottom of all those terrible bottles of wine that lived behind the open bar at the wedding I attended yesterday. I was drinking wine because I am a civilized adult (Okay, fine, beer and wine were free and hard liquor was strictly cash bar, which is some bullshit, you know? I made my decision to drink wine because it is more efficient than beer and I was going for the Righteous Kill on my sobriety.) As I passed away, I screamed at the Grim Reaper and told him to let me go because I had a football game to watch. He just laughed at me, a sinister little snarl and then agreed to release me. I didn’t understand the meaning of the laughter until about an hour or so ago, at which point it became clear to me that the whole conversation was a terrible drunken delusion and that I had actually just died and gone straight to hell.

I don’t know how to talk about this. I just don’t. I’m tired and I’m drained and I wish I could tell everyone to buck up, that this was evidence of progress but I just can’t. My whole being feels like it was ripped apart like that dude in Hellraiser, like Fate, along with his agent of cruelty Julian Peterson and Jason Hanson’s knee and Ol’ Plucky and Matthew Stafford’s shoulder and the whole goddamned universe, conspired to rise up through my anus and tear through my intestines until they were all swarming and howling around my chest cavity, at which point they devoured my heart whole and left me a broken shell, lying lifeless on the floor, just waiting for hell’s garbage man to come along and fling my desiccated corpse into Satan’s dumpster.

For the majority of the game, I convinced myself that we were locked in some sort of Holy War of attrition, that even though Matthew Stafford had once again been murdered and Jason Hanson’s legs had been whipped upon by a clearly possessed Trevor Pryce and Jahvid Best was getting beaten up all day and Cliff Avril had been carried away by his spirit horse that at the end of the day we would win, that this was the price for glory, that it would somehow all mean . . . something.

Everyone laughed when Ndamukong Suh came out to kick the extra point. I did not laugh. I felt it then – that it was a terrible omen sent by Fate to warn us to just commit ritual suicide right then and there – but I still believed because I have embraced belief and the world is simply not that cruel.

This is not The Fear. This is not even The Anger. This is just sheer and utter Bewilderment. This is . . . this is . . . how can I tell you what this is? How can I put into words the sheer naked emptiness of my spirit? The whole world seems barren and flat before me and I try to scream, but my throat is cracked, my voice useless and all that there is, is nothing, nothing, nothing . . .

As the Jets prepared to kick the field goal that would win them the game in overtime, the Lions called time out and I looked out the window, at the sun setting, cold and distant and I stared straight into it even though you aren’t supposed to do that, like a dying man daring the universe to give him his final, terrible kill shot. I stared and I stared and I stared and then I looked back and Nick Folk kicked the game winning field goal.

I shut off the television and I made something to eat. I tried to make sense of what had just happened but there was no sense to be made. How could there be? The only thing that I could tell myself was that there was no order to the universe, that all of this is just random and meaningless and that these things happen. The alternative was far too terrible. I couldn’t allow myself to believe that there was some sort of order to it all, some sort of cosmic meaning, because that would mean that as a Lions fan I was irrevocably doomed and that the universe did not exist for me but for others, and my existence was some sort of colossal error or a cosmic joke and that somewhere, Fate or God or Santa Claus or The Devil was laughing at me. Or hell, maybe they were all laughing at me.

I sat back down to eat something that hopefully wouldn’t make me want to throw up and I turned on the television, if only so I could find something – anything – that would take my mind off of what had just happened. The first words I heard were from a trailer for that new movie starring The Rock. They were loud, and they were said with the deep throated bass of a man meant to simulate the voice of ultimate authority, the voice of God, and those words were “You are already dead.”

How do you describe to people that your heart was just broken because your field goal kicker had his leg eaten by an out of control fat guy, and that because of this, the one point which made all the difference in the world was taken away from you because a second fat guy inexplicably managed to convince his coach that he should kick the ball? How do you explain to people how something that absurd, that random, could be the difference between utter joy and lifeless devastation? How do you even think about something like that without going utterly mad?

There will be people answering questions that no one should ever have to ask all week long. I will be among them. There will be people explaining that Suh is a former soccer player who has kicked in a pinch before. There will be people discussing Matthew Stafford’s brittleness. There will be people screaming at Julian Peterson and wondering why in the hell the team decided to throw the ball on 3^rd down up three with less than two minutes left in the game and with the Jets out of timeouts. There will be people wondering what would have happened if Ol’ Plucky’s harried pass managed to be just a little more on the mark of if Jerome Felton would have just clutched the ball to his chest. There will be people complaining about tackling and someone, somewhere, will scream about The Same Ol’ Lions. But today, right now, there are no answers, just the dull echo of a final gunshot, the lingering smell of smoke and burning gunpowder still hanging in the stale, dead air, and the realization that there is a bullet hole in our chest and that where our heart used to be, there is only sadness and death and regret.

Frequent commenter and friend of the blog UpHere sent me an e-mail at some point in the game that simply asked “Is this heaven?” Next to it was his follow up e-mail, which simply answered “Nope. Not heaven.” Nope. Not heaven. Never heaven. So, where are we then? I don’t need to tell you. You know. We all know. Here, heaven is just a rumor, a silly idea, and the universe is appalling and cruel and all that there is, is a memory of what could have been and the sadness that will live inside of that memory until the end of time.