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!

And . . . Curtain

I actually sat down to do this late last night, half drunk, completely insane, filled with a whirlwind of conflicting emotions, but I was just too wrecked, both physically and spiritually, to do anything other than pound my keyboard like some pathetic half-mad ape and the final result would have no doubt resembled a cuneiform version of a succession of hoots, grunts and whistles and throughout it all there would have been a terrible eerie soundtrack playing through all of our heads, the ghostly sound of me weeping like a faithless man from far away. Terrible, terrible . . .

And so I decided to put it off until today when I would no doubt be refreshed and re-energized. Instead, I am vaguely hung-over, my eyes burn and so does my soul. There will be a time when I look back upon this season with happiness, when I give it the fond farewell it deserves, but it still hurts too much and so all I can do is try to explain what last night felt like, which is kind of impossible because in order to do so I would have to die and then be reincarnated as Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”.

The weird thing is, is that it wasn’t all horrible. Hell, the Lions actually led at the first half and I managed to tweet some gibberish about the team playing well, and even as I wrote it, a vague thought was flying through my mind which resembled something like “No, stop, you fool, you are only setting yourself up for something ridiculous.” I promptly ignored this thought because it seemed a product of old fear based thinking and then I went back to watching the game. And then the world caved in on itself, my head melted like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark and I’m pretty sure I traveled back through time and was crucified by Pontius Pilate. Or maybe it was by David Bowie playing Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ. Who can say?

Anyway, sacrilegious babble aside, there was still never a moment when I lost faith, which I suppose is a good sign. After all, I’ve seen too much wild and crazy shit this year to completely fold in on myself, too many comebacks, too many manic adrenaline fueled “Holy shit, I can’t believe this is happening!” moments, and so I kept my heart alive for as long as I could, a dangerous decision given that I should have disconnected and gone into protectionism mode far earlier.

After all, I was a goddamn beast last night. During gamedays, I am continually thankful that my neighbors don’t regularly call the cops on me. After all, during the course of your average game it probably sounds like I’m doing everything from strangling a goat to singing death metal – while strangling a goat. I am not what you would call a cool, calm, composed fan while the action is actually happening. So . . . yeah, following a game I always feel like I both survived a war and thankful that nobody had me arrested or committed.

But this game . . . this goddamn game . . . well, I wouldn’t be surprised if my neighbors went into hiding at some point in the second half. Shit, they’re probably all in the Witness Protection program while the feds try to build a case against me. “Yes . . . yes, sir, that’s the man . . . that’s the one I saw wrestling a bear in his living room and then eating the bear’s heart while punching a puppy. That’s him!”

At various points in that second half of woe, it probably sounded like I was wrestling with the devil while simultaneously arguing with God like we were some sort of dysfunctional couple on Cops. “You said you were gonna stop all this nonsense, God! This is fucking bullshit! Never again!” That sort of thing. If someone would have looked in the window, it probably would’ve resembled the scene from Highlander right after he chops a dude’s head off – just lightning flashing everywhere, people screaming, headless bodies flopping on the ground, swords slashing, madness, just . . . utter madness. At one point I lost my shirt. I ripped it off like some sort of degenerate street thug getting ready to throw down. A couple of hours later, I couldn’t find it. I finally found it earlier today. To be honest, I forgot I was ever wearing it. It was just a sweatshirt and I still had a tee-shirt on so it wasn’t completely absurd, but . . . okay, fine, it was but I just don’t want you to think that I was just stomping around bare-chested and violent all night long. I’m a civilized man, after all.

Not that anyone would have been able to tell last night. Had the cops actually been called, they probably would have broken down my front door and then tied me to a chair and called in an exorcist while I swore at them in tongues and spit pea soup and vile, vicious words, my head turning 180 degrees while I vowed to eat Drew Brees’ soul and to banish Aaron Berry to some dark corner of hell.

So . . . uh . . . yeah, it wasn’t the best night. I’m an emotional dude, a passionate dude, and I make a goddamn ass out of myself watching this thing we call football. I scream and I yell and I carry on like a freak. I scream “Fuck you!” at the television like a goddamn petulant child, I try to bargain with all manner of deities and I’ll even change clothes during the middle of the game because I think that it somehow makes a difference in the outcome of the game. My adrenaline spikes, I shake like a junky, I weep like a faithless man when things are going bad and I cheer like a Roman Coliseum fan hopped up on crank and blood when things are going well. I do not temper myself because this is sports fandom and sports fandom is carnal and wicked and beautiful and completely unreasonable. It exists completely within its own sphere, its own world, and this world is insane and has no laws other than the laws of the beast. It’s feral and strange and completely fucking insane and I revel in it because why not? Why not? It’s perhaps the only socially acceptable way to touch the madness, like scream therapy for the crazy.

I’ve begun to ramble and I haven’t touched on the actual events of the game nearly as much as I probably should, but I suspect this is just my way of protecting myself. After all, I don’t exactly want to relive what went on in that second half, you know? Some part of me still believes that it’s halftime and that the score is 14-10 Lions and the biggest thing I can be pissed off about is that the ref blew the whistle and caused the play to go dead after The Great Willie Young ate Drew Brees’ soul and knocked the football loose. A part of me is huddled in that memory, clinging to it like the last rickety life-raft in a storm from hell.

But I know that that second half happened and so do all of you. We all watched it and even though it caused me to descend into the heart of darkness, whispering The Horror, The Horror over and over and over again to my beleaguered soul, there was still that rational human side of me that stayed reasonable (well, sort of, anyway) and wondered over and over and over again “What if?” What if that ref hadn’t blown the whistle and the Lions were allowed to return that fumble for a touchdown and a 21-7 lead? What if the refs didn’t inexplicably spot the ball a yard further down the field thus giving the Saints a key first down following a third down pass which only netted nine yards instead of the ten they said early in the second half, which would have forced the Saints to punt? What if Eric Wright or Aaron Berry would have caught just one of the interceptions Drew Brees tossed into their arms? Just one? What if the Saints didn’t convert every single third down or all 168 (I believe this is the exact number if I remember correctly. You can trust me, I’m a professional.) 4^th down conversions? What if Sean Payton had behaved like every other caveman coach and punted on those 4^th downs? What if Titus Young wouldn’t have fallen down on that first Matthew Stafford interception, which in retrospect, was basically what ended the game? What if the Lions understood how to properly tackle? What if the refs decided to do their job and call holding on the Saints offense line just one goddamn time? What if, what if, what if, what if, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarfggggggfhkjkhjloksiflhweygfliwefi

And so it goes. So it goes. In a sense, I suppose there’s something macabrely good about all those “what ifs”. Even being able to ask them is a sign that the Lions were at least competitive, that they showed up, that an outline exists – no matter how hazy – for a different story, a story, a world, an alternate reality in which the Lions actually won the game. But it also makes it hurt more. It makes it more frustrating. The closer you get to heaven, the more bitterly painful the flames of hell feel licking at your feet. Because I can see that alternate reality, it makes it more maddening that it never actually happened and that I am forced to live in this world with its bullshit outcomes.

After the game, as I always do, I calmed down and began to channel my wild emotions into something approaching coherence. I tried to be philosophical, to put it all in its proper perspective but to be honest, I couldn’t. I still can’t. Not really anyway. I admire everyone who was able to do an immediate about-face and remind everyone else that this has been a hell of a season, a magical season, and hey, I’m right there with you. But last night is still too fresh in my mind, in my heart, my soul, to do anything other than grieve for what could have been but isn’t because of all those goddamn “what-ifs”. Later, I am sure that I’ll be able to summon something worthwhile and human to wrap up this amazing, wild, weird, fantastic season. And we’ll all smile and laugh and say things to each other like “Man, what a ride!” and “I can’t wait ‘til next year!” Those are things that are undeniably true, and maybe a part of me is starting to crawl into that place already. I don’t know. But the majority of me is just gritting its teeth and remembering all of the things – both big and small – that happened last night and caused the Lions to lose that game and that part of me is too big and too tough to conquer right now.

I do want to say this: for as much as the Lions lost that game (well, defensively anyway), and for as much as the refs stuck their little knives in, helping to bleed us to death while Sheriff Goodell cowered in Houston, shining his tin badge with a smug smile on his liar’s face, the New Orleans Saints won that game. They were pretty damn good and so was their coach. For as much as it rankles me that Sean Payton went for the jugular every damn opportunity he got, I respect him like hell for it. That’s what a real coach does. That’s what a winner does. That’s what allows a team like the Saints to reach their full potential and I commend him for it. Besides, I take that jugular hunting as a sign of respect. He knew he had to do that in order to put the Lions away. That was his acknowledgment that the Lions are a real team, a dangerous team, a damn good team capable of beating his Saints in their own building. He played to win because he knew that playing not to lose would have just meant that his team would be walking around in a daze after the game, wondering how they got knocked out of the playoffs in the first round for the second straight season.

But enough about all that. Nobody wants to hear that shit today and I feel unpleasant even acknowledging it. Today is a day for us, a day to try to purge our own pain, not to celebrate the joys of another’s soul.

I have spent a ridiculous amount of words lately hyperbolically comparing this last month of the season to arriving in a New World or to Wild West shootouts at the OK Corral but today metaphors just seem cheap and trite. Today, the feelings are too real, too raw, too big, to explain away with some pithy imagery. There is nothing symbolic about any of this. There is just an open wound. I know I just said “No metaphors” and then with this open wound thing I, well, I just gave into the welcoming arms of metaphors, but this is just the way I think. Everything is a goddamn play, an opera of the mind, heart and soul and I don’t know what to tell you. My brain is a drama queen.

I guess the difference is that while my brain keeps searching for metaphors, for symbolism – and keeps finding it – last night’s game exists in that same brain as something separate, something that cannot be summed up with gunfight metaphors. Everything else – including my feelings (hell, especially my feelings) - is fair game for the symbolism addict that is my brain, but the game against the Saints exists as its own thing, immune to symbolism, to stories, to metaphors, to imagery. It does not fit in some grand narrative in my head. It just exists by itself, the facts cold and hard and brutal, the memories raw and untouched by anything other than themselves. I kind of just want to wrap that whole goddamn thing up in chains and dumb it to the bottom of the sea of my brain but that can’t happen and we all know it. I’ll always remember this game and I’ll always remember how much it sucked and that’s that.

I should never, ever, say that I’m not going to give into symbolism, to metaphors, because as I’ve already demonstrated, I am completely incapable of doing so. I don’t just write in metaphors, in symbols and dramatic imagery, I think that way too. This is what makes me the creative super-beast that I am, but sometimes it gets in the way. Sometimes, I just want to think in clear, concise terms and I want everything to be simple, easy, black or white, up or down. This is how I feel about last night’s game. I just want it to be a dead thing, not something that lives and blossoms and flourishes in my brain, taking untangleable (spellcheck says this isn’t a word but fuck it, I just made it a word) root, something that will pop up in epic terms later on, something that will inform the rest of my fandom, the way that the last 50 years of failure has. I desperately don’t want this to happen. I don’t want it to become some epic dragon, flying through the halls of my brain, breathing fire and laying waste to everything in its path. As you can see, it’s too late. Too late.

So, I guess all I can do now is try to put it into its proper context, to allow the metaphors and the symbols and the imagery to grow but to watch over them and make sure that they don’t grow into something too ugly or monstrous. Obviously, I’m rambling, but this is what happens when you write at the exact same time that you try to gather your thoughts, that you try to contextualize everything. In the end, I suppose I have no choice but to acknowledge this game’s place in the epic opera of my mind. It happened, but I have to remember that it is but a scene – a scene that marks the end of an act but not the whole damn opera. It is a scene that marks the end of an act, but there is more than one act in any play, in any opera, and even though this one is over, I don’t hear a fat lady singing, and even though the lights just dimmed and the singing just stopped and the curtain momentarily closed, I know that soon enough, it’s going to open up and there will be Matthew Stafford, at the height of his powers, and there will be Calvin Johnson and my God, what beauty, what a fucking show, and I can’t wait. I can’t wait.

Last night happened and there’s nothing anyone can do to change that. My mind still reels, and my heart still thunders against the ravaging horrors of it all, but it’s over now and maybe this is what people call acceptance, or at least something like it, or the faint whispers of it. I don’t know. What I do know is that as soon as I am done writing this, it will be time for my mind and my heart to move on, and I will begin watching that curtain, waiting for it to open, and I will remember that despite the way it ended, this act was a ton of fun, fucking incredible, awe inspiring really, and I’ll smile a faint, hopeful smile and I’ll remember that this opera is destined to be amazing, because it is my opera and all my operas are. And finally, I’ll remember that this is just a beginning, the birth of a star, and that soon – very soon – this star will shine and on some distant planet, someone will look up, see it shining up in the sky and they’ll wonder where this star came from, and what it actually is, and my soul will whisper that it came from my heart and what it is, is the Detroit Lions and it will never die.