You Are A Lions Fan

On the first play of the game – shit, before the first play – Sam Martin kicked off, slipped and fell on his ass, and 60 years were condensed into one dumb moment as our skin melted off and Failure Demons pecked at our livers, cackling in between bites and vomiting sessions like ancient Romans eager to go back for more. Almost four quarters later, Matthew Stafford tried to feebly pitch the ball which hit the engorged gut of a Failure Demon, became lost to time and space and sanity, and was then picked up and run back by a Viking for a touchdown. In between, Stafford was sacked ten times, mutilated, and left for dead along with our souls as that goddamn Viking horn sounded again and again and again and . . .

I mean . . . what can you even say? What is left to say? Stafford looked lost without Golden Tate, the offensive line collapsed – again – and everything feels so far away that mere distance isn’t adequate to describe it. This is not a straight line to success, it is just an eternal maze where all the exits are blocked by Failure Demons and the howling ghosts of our dead.

It’s like those few weeks where the Lions actually looked good, like a new team, never existed. It feels like fucking Flowers for Algernon, or for you uncultured swine, like that Simpsons episode where Homer got the crayon removed from his brain and became a genius for a few days before realizing how fucked the world is and making them put the crayon back.

Ten sacks. TEN SACKS.

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TEN SAAAAAAACKS.

TEN S A C K S

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In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;

Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,

In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Long ago and eternal.

My brain is breaking. My brain has broken. Kerryon Johnson went from looking like DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, all swagger and youthful hubris, to looking like DiCaprio in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, retarded, doomed to die smothered by the eternal mass of his monstrously obese mother’s corpse. Lions Disease is that eternal corpse and it is a cruel way to die.

This is all hopelessly bleak, of course, and very much In The Moment, which is something that fans of all kind, and maybe Lions fans in particular, don’t deal well with, but fuck, man. FUCK.

All the old questions are back, both in terms of this season by itself, and the old, old questions that we’re all so hideously and intimately familiar with, and I’m sick of asking them. I’m sick of trying to come up with the same dumb answers and having the same dumb arguments and then sitting down on Sunday and it’s just the same ridiculous shit for 60 fucking years. I’m sick of steeling myself, of gearing up for another long march towards some ambiguous Promised Land that nobody’s actually seen, like apocalypse survivors who’ve heard rumors of some fantabulous safe haven where everyone eats three meals a day and laughs and fucks at night. You know it’s bullshit and probably doesn’t even exist, but you make yourself believe because the alternative, the utter nothingness and oblivion of it all, is just so depressingly horrific to even contemplate. I’m sick of it all.

Trust the Process. These words taste like acid after games like this. They feel mocking, cruel. “The Lions just aren’t ready,” Chris Spielman said as the Vikings scored a touchdown, and you felt like he could have said that at any moment since the Eisenhower administration. And there he was, as the game was ending, and Matthew Stafford led the world’s most pitiable and pitiful field goal drive, telling us all to trust Matt Patricia and Bob Quinn and those 60 years unhinged their jaw like some monstrous anaconda and swallowed those words and every one of us.

It’s been a shitty couple of weeks for the Lions. It’s been a shitty couple of centuries. What’s the difference? It all feels the same, and it all feels like forever.

This is the part where I’m supposed to rally you and tell you that it isn’t forever, but why would I do that? The shrill emptiness of such words just feels so hollow, not the words of an optimist but those of a great fool, almost cruel and mocking in their perversity. This is forever, and that’s what it means to be a Lions fan. You want more from me? Fuck you. You need more? You’re weak. This is life in the desert. This is life after the apocalypse. There is no safe haven, no Paradise City where the grass is green and the girls are pretty. You’re just an urchin living under the street. This is life as a Lions fan. You’re gonna live here and you’re gonna die here. You’re not some secret genius. You’re just some dumb motherfucker with a crayon in his brain.

You Are A Lions Fan.

Groundhog Day With The Detroit Lions

Don't worry. We'll get to do it all over again next week. Yay!

Right about now I feel like Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day. And I don’t mean the part where everything is fascinating and kinda fun and he is getting to know Andie McDowell and fucking around with people and astounding everyone with his Jeopardy prowess. No, I mean the fucked up part in the middle of the movie where he just wants it all to end and is dropping toasters into the bathtub and kidnapping Punxsutawney Phil and driving off the side of a cliff. That’s where I am right now.

I mean, come on. How ridiculous is this bullshit? One more time, the Lions were controlling a game into the fourth quarter only to once again see everything slip away at the end. I suppose I could take the optimistic road here and talk about how this is a sign of progress and we’re oh so close, but that would require waking up and actually having it be tomorrow instead of Groundhog Day yet again. It’s hard to care about the future when you never actually get there.

The Lions are 2-10. They probably should have won at least half of those ten losses. But they didn’t, and so here we are. Once again, we had to watch as the other team pulled it together at the end of the game and once again we had to hear from the announcers and those same opponents about how this wasn’t the same old Lions and about how we should be proud because they fought hard and blah blah blah and shut up, shut up, shut up!

Once again, Mike Pereira appeared on my screen with his lizard tongue and tried to explain why it was good and just and proper that the Lions got fucked over on a horrendous call by the officials and once again his scaly face caused my bile to rise and I swore under my breath and I snarled and waited for him to slither back to whatever rancid hell he crawled out of. Fuck him and fuck this ridiculous bullshit. Ndamukong Suh is apparently only allowed to tackle people via angry thoughts because any time he lays hands on a dude, the refs freak the fuck out and throw a flag. Although if a dude did just fall on his own, they would probably just flag Suh for compelling him to fall via mind control or some such bullshit and then we’d have Mike Pereira back on our TV screens gibbering on about Karnac and about how ESP and mind control are clearly prohibited in Article ZZZ Section K Subsection 666 of the special NFL rulebook that can only be read by lizard men from hell like him because it is written in some sort of backwards ass hell language and would cause a mortal soul’s brain to cave in on itself it if were read aloud. Seriously, is the fucking NFL rulebook actually the Necronomicon? Whenever that asshole Pereira pops up on my screen and starts blathering, maybe he is just cursing Suh and causing our brains to bleed a little bit in order to appease his dark master, Lord Goodell or Satan or whatever the fuck he’s calling himself these days.

But that was just a moment, a heartbeat, in a day that we have lived so many times before. There were all the other familiar moments – the mocking sense of false hope, the inexplicable miracle play from the other team (in this case, the career long billion yard field goal from Robbie Gould), the stalled drives in enemy territory, the tragic collapse of the secondary, the soul crushing final drive that felt like some sort of slow, terrible torture engineered by Nazis or Failure Demons or some mad Chinaman – and when the clock struck zero, we got to watch Rod Marinelli and Mike Martz celebrate in the middle of Ford Field and what the fuck? Just . . . what the fuck? I am at a loss here, you know? I mean, I have joked that Hitler must have been a Lions fan in order to explain the almost hilarious hate boner that Fate has for us, but this is just fucking absurd. Who’s worse than Hitler? How much uglier a reference can I make? Was the Roman soldier who nailed Jesus to the cross a Lions fan? I mean, what’s going on here?

In a sense, it would have been easier to watch the Lions just get blown out in this game. After all, I had made my peace with that. I had said “Okay, fuck this season” and then prepared to spend the next month in the comfortable embrace of macabre humor. But I got sucked in anyway. HEY LOOK, THE LIONS MIGHT WIN A GAME! It didn’t matter that it didn’t really mean anything for the future. I just wanted to watch my team win a meaningless game because, well . . . hell, none of them are really meaningless for us, you know? I have made my peace with the savage reality that this team just isn’t any damn good again, but that doesn’t mean I am a robot. I am a man and I bleed.

I didn’t mind that the Lions lost. I didn’t. Like I said, I have made my peace with that already. It’s just the way that they lost, you know? I can’t even blame this on Ol’ Plucky. He didn’t fuck up. He didn’t really do anything to win us the game, but he didn’t fuck up either. You can’t ask him for much more than that. I can’t just shake my head in disgust because the team didn’t have a chance and so hey, fuck it, you know? I have to live with the knowledge that the Lions were two or three plays away from winning that game, just like they are every fucking week. That is a maddening thing to have to live with because it never changes. Every game is the Jets game.

It’s exciting because we jump out of our trench every week and we charge towards the enemy’s line, dodging bullets and bombs going off all around us and then we reach their trench and we just stand there, dull and stupid and stare down and then someone raises their rifle and shoots us. It’s horrible. We get close enough to believe in . . . in . . . something, but we never finish the charge. We’re just perpetually stuck on the brink of that terrible trench, getting shot to death. We have to relive it over and over and over again. Hell, it’s great that we made it that far but until we actually dive into the enemy’s trench and bayonet some cocksucker in the balls, it doesn’t mean anything. We might as well just die as soon as we peek our idiot heads above our own trench line. Same result. It’s not like you get some sort of bonus credit for not dying immediately. You don’t get to live just because you lasted longer than most people thought. A bullet in the brain is a bullet in the brain, no matter when it comes. It is brutal and it is cruel but it is just the way it is.

There are some obvious positives to take away from this game. Stanton looked okay (Which was more of a product of the play calling, at least in my opinion, than anything he really did, which I will get into later in the week, and I am going to do my best to be fair. I mean, I don’t want to be the guy who just starts twisting things to fit his own preformed opinion, which for me is that Stanton is a butt.), which means that the remaining games shouldn’t feel utterly hopeless. The team didn’t quit. They played hard, particularly along the defensive line. Cliff Avril had a monster, monster game. And Jahvid Best looked like he got some of his burst back. And there are other things to smile about – St. Calvin’s Beast Run towards the endzone, the safe but effective playcalling that emphasized Stanton’s strengths while hiding his weaknesses, etc. – but at the end of the day, it’s another Lions loss and it came in a cruel, mocking way and man, it just sucks that it had to happen like that, you know?

I’ve lasted a long time as a Lions fan, and I will last a lot longer still, but damn, this season has been revelatory for all the wrong reasons. I thought I had seen everything, felt everything, and then dealt with everything as a Lions fan. Win or lose I could take it. But this . . . this is something I’ve never really experienced, the cruel torture that comes with always being on the edge of a tomorrow that never quite comes. This has shaken me up. It makes me feel like Fate is punishing me for believing that I had seen it all. The lesson, I guess, is that no matter how much bullshit you go through, Fate has new and terrible ways of torturing you. You spend years covered in shit and you start to get used to the shit, to the point where you’re like “What’s the big deal? It’s just shit,” and then Fate tosses a bucket of special demon shit all over you and it smells even worse and it burns and Oh Lord, I forgot how much I hate shit! I guess I needed to be reminded.

Look, I don’t even know what I am gibbering on about anymore. I just spent the last half of that last paragraph discussing the difference between being covered in regular people shit and demon shit. Clearly, I am lost in the wilderness here. All I know is that I’m pretty sure that Mike Pereira is actually the devil and that for whatever reason, that son of a bitch has it out for Lions fans, and that every Sunday I wake up and my clock radio is playing Sonny and Cher and Jesus, someone draw me a bath and get me a toaster, and I’ll see you next Sunday.

Pluck And Luck

That's me, lying in the snow.

I am not a fan of Drew Stanton. That much is obvious by now. Fate and the Failure Demons all know this. Fate and the Failure Demons clearly hate me. Therefore, Drew Stanton will be the starting quarterback for the Detroit Lions for the foreseeable future. And why has this horrifying reality been thrust upon us? Well, because apparently, a Failure Demon rose up from a hell portal located in Shaun Hill’s living room, smashed his finger with a baseball bat made of fire and our broken dreams, cackled maniacally and then disappeared in a puff of acrid, black smoke.

What’s left to do at this point other than to wail and then smash our heads against the wall until our brains are made of pudding? Sitting in a height chair made specifically for retarded adults, banging a dull spoon on the tray in front of us and screaming “Applesauce!” over and over and over again is surely preferable than having to stare in wide eyed horror as Ol’ Plucky tries to prove for the millionth time that he is anything more than a degenerate con-man trying to sell us defective bags of grit that he swears will cure our pain.

Jesus. It’s snowing right now outside, which means that everything is dead, or soon will be. Drew Stanton is our starting quarterback. Which means that everything is dead, or soon will be.

Matthew Stafford is engaging in some “light throwing”, which, uh . . . great? Just so you know, I’m considering saving that last sentence so I can cut and paste it into every post until the year 2020.

Look, I’m not sure what else to say. In a ridiculous season which feels like it was constructed in hell as some sort of living torture chamber meant to teach each and every one of us the true meaning of pain, this feels . . . well, this actually feels kind of appropriate, you know? I mean, Hell had to find a way to ferret out the tiny pockets of hope that were still left in the fanbase and then crush their fragile spirits, and what better way to do that than to parade down the streets with a clueless Drew Stanton waving and smiling and throwing Grit at horrified onlookers while the devil rides an evil sleigh made from the bones of Matthew Stafford and Shaun Hill? These may be strange and terrible times, but for fuck’s sake, this has gone beyond strange and terrible, hasn’t it?

Poor Al over at The Wayne Fontes Experience has been broken to the point where he is a ball of pure rage, throwing out F Bombs (Bolded F Bombs even), and while that would normally delight me, those are not F Bombs of joy. Instead, reading it kinda made me feel like a little kid watching his normally jovial and responsible dad lose his shit and start tossing F Bombs around because the car won’t start or he hit his thumb with a hammer. It’s vaguely traumatizing and I might need therapy.

Meanwhile, Ty over at The Lions in Winter did his thing the other day and set out to prove, via the power of statistics, two things: number one, that the Lions are indeed better than they have been in the past, and two, that they have also been horrendously unlucky this year. It was an inspired post which epitomized both Ty’s eternal optimism and his devotion to rationality. Of course, I can only assume that the head Failure Demon read that down in hell, laughed, shook his head and said “Boys! We got more work to do.” Cue the Failure Demon rising from Shaun Hill’s floor with the aforementioned baseball bat made of flames and our broken dreams and it was only hours later that Ty’s post felt like some sort of dark and twisted omen.

Steve at Detroit Lions Weblog, a good dude who I don’t mention nearly enough, hasn’t even posted anything for the last week, which I can only assume is a survival mechanism. I’m also going to assume that he is halfway to Tijuana with a duffel bag full of assorted small arms (and I mean literal arms, not guns), wearing a human head for a hat, wearing a dress made from human skin and gibbering wildly about Matt Millen and Rod Marinelli and muttering “Same Ol’ Lions” over and over and over again while the 1 percent of his brain that hasn’t been destroyed by the Lions tries to decide whether to drive the car into the ocean or to disappear into the Mayan jungle like Col’ Kurtz and live out his days ordering around frightened tribal villagers and accosting photojournalists from TIME sent to document his crazed new world.

We are all coming apart at the seams and Drew Stanton’s head is now just floating above all of us, disembodied and huge, sort of like some fucked up version of the Wizard of Oz, laughing at us and vomiting out horrible, horrible streams of Pluck. We have three choices: one, to give in and worship the darkness and it’s avatar, Ol’ Plucky; two, to dare to fight back and be drowned by a river of Pluck, a toxic river which will carry us straight into the heart of hell; or three, to cut whatever tether keeps us bound to reality and to start writing weird shit about time traveling with some degenerate version of Doc Brown. It’s not a pretty choice to have to make. Each possible path is undignified and terrible and should leave you weeping and begging for mercy.

I have no idea what else to say here. Perhaps it’s all been said. I don’t know. Perhaps we have finally reached a point where words are just a pale mockery of the cruel emotional torture wrought by reality. I could gibber on for another billion words about how terrible Ol’ Plucky really is, but what’s the point? Everyone knows already. At this point, the Failure Demons are just standing around our broken bodies and hearts in a circle with their hell dicks out, pissing all over whatever the fuck is left of us. We’ve already been beaten, whipped, shot, stabbed, set on fire and blown up, so why not, you know? I just hope my spirit horse shows up, throws what’s left of me on its back and furiously gallops away before they start shitting on us too.

Like I said, we have gone beyond strange and terrible times and we find ourselves in a world that is not bound by mortal rules. Up is down and down is up, the sky is green, cats bark, water tastes and feels like sand and Drew Stanton is the starting quarterback of the Detroit Lions. It’s snowing out and that means that everything is dead and I’m cold, so cold, and it wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.