The Fear

Oh God, the Packers. There is no team that fills Lions fans with a combination of fear and loathing like the Packers. That’s right, I said it. Fear. The Fear. It’s not shameful to admit this the same way it’s not shameful for an abuse victim to tell people that they’ve been abused. We have to say these things, if only to ourselves, before we can start to heal.

Brett Favre and his mushroom dick to Sterling Sharpe, Barry Sanders rushing for negative yards in the frozen hellscape of Lambeau, the Hail Mary, the 16 in 0-16, fucking Matt Flynn stealing glory away from us in Green Bay which in retrospect was the beginning on the end for Jim Schwartz, Ndamukong Suh stomping Aaron Rodgers on Thanksgiving which was the beginning of the end for Suh, Aaron Rodgers being Aaron fucking Rodgers so many goddamn times that devil . . . no other team has personified The Fear, brought it to life like Freddy Krueger, a manifestation of our pathos and darkest dreams, like the fucking Packers. Feel free to tell me your own memories in the comments. Let it out, my dudes and lady dudes.

It doesn’t even really matter that the Packers don’t even seem to be that good this season. Yeah, Rodgers hopped out of hell on one leg to torment the Bears, but the only reason anyone even remembers that is because the Bears were whipping that ass in the first place. They tied the Vikings, lost to the Redskins, and beat the Bills, but so what? They look mediocre, and yet we all know that in the end, they’ll still be standing, Aaron Rodgers broken yet slaying like a cyborg and none of this will have mattered.

It doesn’t matter that Aaron Rodgers has lost most of his supporting cast. The Packers just reach down into hell for him and pull out another randomly generated Madden dude who inexplicably turns into a Pro Bowl receiver. This year it’s a dude named Geronimo Allison. A dude named fucking Geronimo. Christ. Now we even have Apache ghost warriors on our asses.

I’m not even sure that I hate the Packers anymore. I mean, I do, but it’s all buried beneath The Fear. They’ve cowed me into groveling respect. This is sick. It’s gross. Not as gross as their vomit colored alternate unis, but still pretty damn gross.

I thought we were through with all this when Dr. Bert Fever retired to make Wranglers commercials in hell. I thought we were done and wouldn’t have to hear about how he was having a good ol’ time out there and he’s just havin’ fun, Troy! But that seems like an eon ago, lifetimes on lifetimes buried by Rodgers, who has somehow been even worse and how long, Lord? How long?

I mean, what comes after Rodgers? He’s already some dead-eyed soulless ghoul, feeding on the souls of the damned, and when he’s not doing that he’s omnipresent in All-State ads and it’s all just too much. Does the literal devil show up after Rodgers leaves? I mean, come on.

I can’t handle the Packers in a rational way. The Fear is just too great. The Lions could be leading 56-10 in the 4^th quarter and I’d be convinced that Rodgers would molt like a fucking snake and reemerge as Cthulhu or some shit and just start eating everyone in the stadium. The Lions could knock him out, Ndamukong Suh could rush the field and stomp his nuts into a jelly and I’d be convinced that he’d just escape his mortal shell and possess whoever the fucking backup is like he did with Matt Flynn that one time and then you’re Denzel Washington killing himself only to watch with your dying breath as Rodgers possesses a fucking cat in order to survive and yes I’m making semi-obscure movie references now because I don’t know what else to do.

The Lions are 1-3 and they’ll probably be 1-4 after this game because of the whole Aaron Rodgers of it all, but that feels like it doesn’t even matter right now. The Lions aren’t winning shit this year and so each game feels like its own individual war, its own Test of the Will, and this is especially true when it’s a Packers game.

The one thing the Lions have going for them is that it’s at Ford Field and not Lambeau, but let’s face it, half of our horrible memories of this goddamn team have taken place here. Favre to Sharpe, The Stomp, The Hail Mary . . . all at home. Besides, playing them at home in early October just means that we have to play them at Lambeau in fucking December because this is how it is every year and there is no rest for the weary and the damned.

Honestly, I just want the Lions to look reasonably good before the spiritual buttfucking occurs. I want to see Kerryon Johnson run it up their asses (two sodomy references in two sentences because that’s how I roll, baby, please don’t psychoanalyze me), I want to see Frank Ragnow push people around, I want to see Good Stafford instead of Walkabout Stafford, I want to see whoever the fuck is playing defense to show that they at least understand the concepts they’re supposed to be executing, and I want Da’Shawn Hand to give me at least a glimmer of hope for the defensive line’s future. I want to see all of that and then I can at least bury my head in a bucket of ether when Rodgers puffs up like the devil escaping a genie bottle sometime in the 4^th quarter.

When the season feels lost, you start to recalibrate your expectations and you start to live for moments, for flashes, for the simple yet all too elusive idea that your team might someday be something different than the same sad sack losers you’re used to dealing with. There is a depressing sense of inevitability about it all, and when all else seems lost, you start to look for reasons that it might be different this time. I am all too familiar with this game as a Lions fan, and as much as I don’t like to play it, what else can I do? Demanding excellence and success this season would be insane, the act of an extreme masochist. To be fair, that’s basically the definition of being a Lions fan, but come on, there are limits even for us.

At some point, you have to set aside winning and losing and just try to survive somewhere in the details, man. That’s where I’m at, and that’s what I was trying to get at in the gibberish of my Cowboys game recap. I can’t sit here and reasonably expect the Lions to whip on the Packers, both because of what’s already gone on this season and because of, well, the whole Packers of it all. And so I try to survive on details, on moments, on reasons to believe in some far off future that I can barely even imagine right now. This is almost unbearably sad, especially because it is so unbearably familiar, but so it goes, friendos. So it goes.

I think the Lions at least have a shot at winning this game, and that’s an improvement over the beginning of the season, and for now that’s enough to keep me going. If the Lions do win, I’ll be happy, but it’s a weird sort of happiness. It’s a happiness that will be about beating the Packers, about beating Aaron Rodgers, and it’s a happiness that will be about potential futures, but it’s a happiness that will exist in a vacuum because I know this team isn’t good enough right now. I know the defense is hopelessly flawed, and I know the Lions aren’t winning shit this season. It’s a sort of melancholy happiness, but that is the oxymoronic life of a Lions fan.

You make secret deals with your own heart, make secret deals with the Failure Demons, with the Devil, and you try to ignore that while he’s dealing with you, he’s also making deals with Aaron Rodgers, who stares at you with those dead serial killer eyes, and you try not to shudder and the devil laughs at you because you’re a Lions fan and you’re already damned and you’re just too stupid to know it and then Aaron Rodgers drags you to a deeper level of hell and straps you in a chair and sits down with you and makes you watch his All-State commercials for eternity and then Brett Favre shows up and starts talking about Wrangler to you and then takes out his tiny penis and you forget why you even wanted to make deals with the devil in the first place and it’s then that you remember that heaven is closed to you and this is the only thing left for you to do and then you try to scream but nothing comes out and they’re laughing at you, Rodgers and Favre, and their commercials are burned into your brain and then you wake up sweating in your bed and you try to forget it but oops, now it’s game time and there they are again on your TV screen, those soulless serial killer eyes staring at you in HD and you’re mad, you’re utterly insane and you’re a Lions fan.

Prediction: Packers 24 Lions 23

This Is It

Aaron Rodgers was visited by the Ghost of Charles Rogers (no relation, because, well… obviously.  I mean, one of them has a “d” in his last name.  Wait… what did you think I meant?), and after Chuck’s ghost rummaged around Rodgers’ place looking for shit he could steal to sell, he remembered why he was there and shattered his collarbone with a tap of his magic bong wand.  This effectively knocks the Packers out of the race (hopefully, I mean I know I am putting the cart waaaaay before the horse here, especially since the Packers have famously overcome major injury issues in the past, but Rodgers was always the one constant, the dude holding everything together with perfect passes and general Aaron Rodgersness, but then again, we all remember the Matt Flynnapalooza, which… I’m just going to stop this line of thinking before I have a panic attack, but anyway, yeah, the Packers’ hopes took a major hit when Rodgers’ collarbone said fuck it and hung the gone fishin’ sign.  Incidentally, the Ghost of Charles Rogers also took a major hit, but an entirely different kind.)

This sets up this week’s game against the hated Bears, with both the Lions and the Bears sitting at 5-3.  The Bears themselves have a wounded quarterback, and there were some who said the team was better off once he was gone.  I don’t necessarily agree, but there does seem to be some smoke that their coach, Marc Trestman, and Jay Cutler aren’t on the same page to support that particular fire, and so, hey… maybe.  The point is that for all the Bears’ stubborn refusal to go away (and isn’t that usually how they end up grinding out these weird 12-4 seasons every few years?) they still seem to have some internal issues, and once a quarterback and a coach get on different pages, the whole book tends to fall apart and becomes a weird choose your own adventure in which one of them gets trapped in a dungeon and eaten by a dragon.  They are there, and they are always a pain in the ass, but they are significantly less scary than the Packers, and given that the Vikings rowed their sad little boat full of holes out to the middle of the sea and set fire to it really before the season even started, this means that it’s just the Lions and the Bears left standing.  And here’s the thing – the Lions have already beaten the Bears once this season, and if they win this game, they’ll be a game up in the standings, they’ll own the tiebreaker, and they’ll be facing down a pretty manageable schedule the rest of the way (Just look at it.  12-4 is not out of the question.)  This is really happening, y’all.  Win this week, and there’s a very, very good chance the Lions are winning this fucking thing.

Naturally, Lions fans are completely terrified.

Look, I don’t have to explain why.  You all know it, and yet another recitation of this Shakespearean tragedy known as our collective history isn’t what anybody needs right now.  It’s right there, screaming at us from inside our own brains with a goddamn megaphone made of Fear and cold, naked Terror. 

But the reason The Fear is currently squatting in our souls like a shiftless hobo, pooping in the corner and making a fort out of old newspapers, is because this game carries a weight to it that’s impossible to ignore.  This is it.  For better or worse, this feels like the moment when we’ll Know.  If the Lions win, then goddammit, we just might do this, and it could very well signal a turning-point for this insipid franchise.  If they lose, well… they will have blown their best shot at really changing things, and while that might not mean they won’t eventually somehow pull it together, this is the NFL, and these are the sorts of shots that don’t come along often.  There’s a sudden vacuum, and you’re either the team that fills it, or you’re the team that spends the late winter months fretting about draft position.

That’s perhaps overly stark and simplistic, but such is the weight of this game on our psyches.  It is pivotal in a way that truly defines the word.  It is a pivot point, for better or for worse, and we don’t get many of those.  And when we do, let’s face it, we know which way it usually goes.

Still, the Lions physically beat on the Bears the first time they played, and so there is every reason to believe they can pull this one out.  They are the better team.  Or at least they can be.  But let’s face it, the reason I immediately hedged there is because we have seen this team completely shit itself before, especially against these Bears and especially in Chicago.  Weird and terrible shit happens at Soldier Field, from our dudes becoming allergic to the football to Devin Hester or Hester Prynne or whoever the fuck dancing down the field at ludicrous speed while our dudes flail uselessly behind them to Matthew Stafford being taken apart like the black knight in the Holy Grail to Mike Pereira popping up to explain that there is something called The Process of the Catch.  Those are the sorts of things that happen in Chicago and Oh Lord…

Okay, get a grip.  Here’s the thing: I don’t think the Bears are that good.  Here’s the other thing, though: I don’t think the Lions are that good.  But, the Lions are coming off of that galvanizing win over the Cowboys in which Matthew Stafford and St. Calvin became the Maverick and Goose of our hearts once and for all, and… you know what?  That’s a bad reference.  I mean, Goose gets fucking killed in that movie, and now Calvin will end up hitting his head and breaking his neck on the goalpost after going up for a jump-ball, and… Jesus, you see?  I can’t hold it together.  This game is fucking with my head, and I know I’m not alone.

This is The Fear in all its naked and terrible glory, thrashing about because it knows that we’re standing at the edge of something.  And sure, that something might be more about what’s going on with other teams than the Lions at the moment, and yeah, I’d rather have the Lions just show up in Green Bay and beat an Aaron Rodgers led Packers team one of these days, and some would say this opportunity is more a technicality than a true potential passing of the torch, but fuck you, after what we’ve been through, I don’t care if the Lions win this division because every other QB slips and falls in the shower like an old woman, I’ll take it, and then I’ll jam that fucking torch up your ass.

Even if it is an unusual and unlooked for opportunity, it’s still an opportunity.  And there’s no telling what can happen once you find yourself sitting on that throne, what kind of confidence that can give you, what kind of subtle yet all too important changes in perception that can create.  Sure, if the Lions do pull this out, and do ride it to a division title, we know damn well that Aaron Rodgers and the Packers will be coming back next year for that throne, but fuck them, if they want it, they’ll have to come and take it.  That’s what being on the throne means.  It doesn’t really matter how you get there, it just matters that it’s sitting underneath your ass and not someone else’s.

But I am getting hilariously ahead of myself and taunting the football gods with my hubris, which is always a spectacularly stupid idea, especially given that I’m a fan of the team championed by Hades while Zeus just sits in the sky and hurls lightning bolts at us, laughing while we perpetually dive for cover in piles of pig shit.  There is still this goddamn game against the Bears to get through, and even if we make it through that, we have to somehow put aside what seems to be encoded in our very DNA and still finish the season strong, but all that is really just noise, thunder on the horizon.  Today, we’re staring face to face with that rare beast, opportunity, and there is nothing standing between it and us for the first time in ages.  It’s ours if we can just take it.

That’s a thought that almost makes you want to hyperventilate, doesn’t it?  Both for good reasons and for bad, but such is the yin and yang of Lions fandom, that perpetual push and pull between Hope and Fear.  But today, Hope doesn’t seem like such a crazy thing.  That’s what makes it so scary.  It’s real, and so are the Lions chances, both against the Bears this week and for the rest of the season.  There is a very good chance this is a playoff team, and somehow, unfathomably, if the Lions win today, there is a very good chance that it’s a division winner.  And if it’s a division winner, no matter the reason, whether it’s because the Lions are truly the best team or just because Aaron Rodgers’ died on his way to his home planet aka a commercial set, it means that it’s a successful team, and if it’s a successful team it means… well, you fill in the blank with whatever your heart wants to.  That’s what's on the line right now, and that’s why today’s game is both deliriously exciting and completely and utterly terrifying.  And if that’s the new normal, then I think I can live with that.  Because that will mean that the Lions win today, and you know what?  I think they will.

Jahvid Best

 Jahvid Best's brain.

Some of you might recall that the last thing I wrote for the site before devolving into a steady stream of embarrassing histrionics about burnout was a piece about Junior Seau’s death, concussions, how enormously screwed up the NFL is when it comes to player safety and all that jazz.  In the end, I essentially concluded that nobody knows what in the hell is going on and we’re all just fucking vultures and jackals trying to make peace with ourselves.  Naturally, the Football Gods have seen fit to reward my delicate contemplations by turning Jahvid Best’s brains into a bowl of lukewarm soup (Cream of head trauma?)

Of course this has led to everyone fretting and pulling out their hair and wearing placards on the side of the road, ringing a bell and screaming the end is near.  This is because Best is our most explosive playmaker at running back and because the other option there is coming off his own grotesque season-ending injury and is one bong hit away from being strapped to a table and tortured like William Wallace by Sheriff Goodell.  The situation, she’s-a-no good.

There is hope – fading, but it’s still there, well, kinda anyway – that a doctor will examine Best and shine a flashlight in his eyes without making the poor dude puke, but that hope is tested week after week when Jim Schwartz is asked about Best and responds with what can be described as a shrug and a “Well, fuck if I know.  The dude’s head is made of cheese-whiz and shattered dreams.  Uh, ask me next week?”  This is not a good sign.  I mean, even if Best is medically cleared to play, let’s face it, all someone has to do is breathe on him like a child blowing on a dandelion and the dude’s head is going to melt like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Now, the question then becomes, do we even want him to come back?  And this is where things get tricky.  Refer to the whole Seau article for more on that.  I mean, as much as I feel like we need Jahvid Best, I also don’t really want to be watching a game in October and have to take a half-hour long break while the stands go silent, all the other players gather on the field in prayer, the announcers take that hushed “Oh fuck, I hope he isn’t dead” tone and Jahvid Best himself lays on the field, swallowing his own tongue while trainers try to strap a surfboard to his back.  As it is, he’ll probably be slurring his speech like me on a Friday night by the time he’s 35 and shaking like Muhammad Ali by the time he’s 40.  Every time he touches the ball we’re all gonna get a knot in our stomach, hoping that this won’t be the play that turns him into a broccoli stalk. 

But aside from all that pesky human interest shit, there’s also this: is it really a good idea to pin so much of our hopes and dreams on a dude who probably has his own personal ER team on standby in the locker room every game?  At some point we all have to come to terms with an obvious and terrible truth: Jahvid Best is fucking broken, y’all and what he’s got, nobody can fix.  It’s just the way it is.  It sucks.  I know.  I want him to be the Superman Made of Lightning and Joy backfield counterpoint to Matthew Stafford’s Bombs Over Baghdad (and Green Bay, and Minneapolis, and Chicago, and . . .) aerial attack just like the rest of you.  But right now, all we’re doing is making love to wishes and I don’t know if you’ve seen the Wishmaster but that shit doesn’t turn out so well.

The scary thing is that we really don’t have too many alternatives.  Like I said, there’s Mikael LeShoure, his slain Achilles and a cloud of smoke and then I guess there’s Kevin Smith who I think we can all admit is a nice story but I think we can also all admit that we wanted something better than the Littlest Engine That Could at running back this season, right?  I know that’s not really fair to Smith, but his own track record isn’t exactly one of pristine health and dependability, you know?  I guess we could clone Calvin Johnson and teach him how to take a handoff or just eliminate the running back position all together and just have our receivers carry shotguns during the game so they don’t get killed, but . . . yeah. 

So what do we do?  What in the fuck do we even hope for here?  I mean, really, what we’re down to when it comes to Jahvid Best is praying for miracles and healing potions discovered in the Amazon Rain Forest.  We’re about one collective day away from kidnapping him and dunking him in the Healing Waters of Lourdes.  And while Hope is great and a good thing, there is honest, productive Hope and then there is wide eyed, buoyed by terror Delusion disguised as Hope and we spent way too many years dirty dancing with that motherfucker for me to want to go back to that shit.

What’s left?  I don’t know and neither do any of you.  I’ll admit that I haven’t exactly been the best fan this offseason.  I still know my shit but I haven’t been obsessively tracking the fringe roster invitees and scouting the backup punter’s cousin’s dogs trainer’s nephew’s 40 time like a lot of you probably have so maybe there’s a surprise dude just hanging around ready to tear shit up at camp.  I don’t know, but probably not.  So that leaves us with praying to the Football Gods, to Crom and to The Great Willie Young for Jahvid Best’s brain to be suddenly touched by the Holy Spirit and healed of its sins before week one.  I mean, I’m willing to strangle a goat or two if that’s what it takes and I’ve already started stringing up virgins to trees and lashing them with whips made from the hair of a unicorn in order to curry the gods’ favor but I don’t know if that’s gonna be enough.

Look, I didn’t mean this post to be so HEAD FOR THE HILLS ONLY THE STRONG WILL SURVIVE but even in the afterglow of a playoff season, these are still strange and terrible times and none of us can afford to be naïve, otherwise when the inevitable Doom comes down on Jahvid Best’s withered brain stem, we’ll take to embittered name calling and mud-slinging and then we’ll all make asses of ourselves on MLive and I’ll be forced to call a synod where we’ll elect a new Pope who will have to call a crusade against stupidity and then we’ll all tear each other apart because we didn’t have the balls to stare Truth in the eyes now and accept his wisdom. 

So maybe we should just accept that Jahvid Best’s future lies in the halls of Valhalla and try to make our peace with that.  Or not.  What the fuck do I know?  Oh God, please heal Jahvid Best’s broken brain and also while I have you can you turn Jared Allen into a giant butt, not a metaphorical butt like he is now but like an actual giant butt with a big hole in the middle where poop comes out of because that would be kind of cool and I think we deserve it after the 50 year desert wandering we were subjected to which was worse than what you put Moses through and that motherfucker spent his childhood cavorting with Egyptian whores and his adopted brother, Yul Brynner, who I think you’ll agree was a real dickhead.  Anyway, you let Moses off with 40 years so I think you can give us a little credit and grant us our three wishes like it says you can in the Bible.  I’ve seen Aladdin.  I know how this shit works so I need you and your pet monkey to show up.  But if you sound like Robin Williams, I’m fucking out.  I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.  Forgive me.   I’m even rubbing the shit out of this reading lamp.  See?  See???

This is what it has come to because when it comes to Jahvid Best and his rebellious brain, this is all we have left.  This is the dark heart that lies beneath our outer jubilation.  The Fear is always chasing after us, like some evil assassin in the night and The Fear will reduce us to gibbering ignoramuses (ignoramii?) if we let it.   So, uh, let’s just see what happens?  I don’t know.  I don’t fucking know.  But I’m going to force myself to consider the possibility that this one won’t turn out so well and I’m going to do something that we as a fanbase aren’t very good at – I’m going to try to be reasonable and if it works out, great and if it doesn’t, I’ll only sip from the Drain Cleaner, I won’t chug.  After all, I have matured.

The Weight of Hope

Ndamukong Suh, the Archangel of Death, come to take poor Matt Cassel's soul up to heaven.

I don’t like to think too much about these things before I sit down to write them. (Insert joke of your choice here.) Whenever I do, I only end up getting frustrated because what I write inevitably turns out only to be a shadow of the grandiose symphony I have already conducted in my head. I work better with spontaneity. This is why I tend to go off on tangents and wild flights of fancy, which is either my greatest gift or my greatest liability as a writer, depending on your point of view. But I do like to have at least a general idea of what I’m going to talk about whenever I sit down to write about the Lions and this week I was pretty sure I was going to talk about how good it feels to finally escape the muck and the mire and about how much we deserve this after all we have been through as Lions fans, and while that is all still very, very true, I was struck by one powerful sentiment which seems to have ripped through the fanbase like a supercharged current, and that’s that people are fucking terrified.

That may seem surprising after a triumphant week one victory which did a lot to validate the desperate hope that we all feel, but it’s really not. At least not when you sit back and really think about it. And especially when you consider that that adjective “desperate” kind of stands out in big blinking lights. Because that’s the key here. As much as we have hope as Lions fans, it’s not a cool, calm quiet kind of hope. It’s desperate and wild-eyed and it is just hanging on with bloody fingers to a dream that is the only barrier we have left between our continued existence as fans and the ceaseless horror of oblivion.

We have spent so long on this Trail of Tears that we have expended every last bit of emotional energy we have left. When 0-16 finally drew to its ugly and terrible close, we all took a deep, deep breath, looked at what we had ahead of us, grit our collective teeth and started marching forward. We knew there were a ton of hills to climb and that the road would be brutal and uncompromising. Along the way, some of us would die, some of us would strip our clothes off in a fit of madness and go running into the forest to live out our days hunting wild beaver and fighting bears, and some of us would quietly give into despair and become living zombies, propelled forward by nothing more than sheer momentum and the haunting fear of what lay behind us. But we marched, and we marched and we marched, with reserves we barely knew we had, and then when we came to this season, we all paused and took a deep breath and rested for a moment because this was it. Oh sure, the journey’s not over, but all the horrible hell hills and evil mountains were all behind us. This is what we had steeled ourselves for. This is what had made this journey worth it. It took more out of us than we ever wanted to acknowledge while it was happening because, honestly, acknowledging it while it was happening would have caused us to cave in on ourselves.

But there we were, staring down the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and we’d either die here where we rested or we’d take the next bold step on this journey. There would be no more savage mountains. There was just a long, broad plain left to cross, and while that is fraught with its own difficulties, its own particular challenges and horrors, at least we wouldn’t have to climb anymore. Fuck climbing. But then we beat the Buccaneers and with it we started to move forward and now we’re on that plain and we’re not quite sure what to expect. Where do we go from here?

And that’s the question that is causing so much fear, so much panic. At least when we were climbing, when we were just scaling peak after terrible peak, and crying ourselves to sleep at night in the valleys between, there was a sense of certainty. You woke up, you climbed, it was hard, it sucked, you stumbled and fell, you got back up, you climbed so more, and then you slept for a few hours and then you did it all over again. That was the story of Detroit Lions football over the past couple of seasons. There was nothing to truly fear because we knew what we had to do and we did it because what other choice was there?

But now . . . now, this plain stretches in a million different directions and we’re fucking terrified about taking a fatal misstep, wandering for a while and then finding ourselves at the bottom of yet another hill. We know deep down that we can’t climb anymore hills. We budgeted every last ounce of strength that we had to get ourselves to this point. We knew that the journey here would be hard and cruel and brutal and mean but we did it. We did it. But we can’t do it again and we know it. We know it. And that realization has finally settled in. We have something at stake now. Something real. We can’t fuck this up. And that’s why every game feels stressful as hell right now. Each game is a new step, a step fraught with Hope and Fear and Glee and Terror and everything in between. We are a fanbase which is feeling every emotion right now, both positive and negative and when you combine all of those feelings into one super-emotion, what you’re left with is a sort of manic, wide-eyed terror. And that’s what’s gripped the Lions fanbase this past week.

I don’t mean to make it sound like people aren’t happy, like they aren’t excited. I know they are. I am. I’m fucking elated as a Lions fan right now. I’m proud and I’m happy and . . . look, I don’t have kids, but I imagine this collective feeling is something akin to seeing your child born. We’re so, so happy, but there is a part of ourselves that is also scared as hell, because it isn’t sure if it knows where this is going or if we’re prepared for every eventuality. We love the Lions so much that the idea of something happening to them, of this new hope getting ripped away from us, is so horrible that we’re sure that we won’t be able to take it if it does happen for some improbable or insane reason. And since we’re Lions fans, we have become accustomed to expecting the insane, the improbable, the sheer ridiculousness which has eaten us alive for most of our lives as fans. In short, we can hear the Failure Demons cackling in our heads even though we can’t see them. They might not be here right this moment, but we’re always afraid that they’re lurking around the corner and their memory always remains, clouding everything.

I know that this is hyperbolic as all hell, but hey, have you read anything I’ve written? That is sort of my thing. Comparing the Lions to the birth of a child is insane. I recognize this. But the essence of what I’m saying is true. Recognize that. We are flooded with a billion different emotions right now (I almost said awash, but I thought better of it. You’re welcome, Dustin. You’re welcome.), all of them conflicting, and all we can do to try to make sense of them is to reach out and grab hold of the emotion that is strongest right at this moment and hang onto it with everything that we have. For me, that emotion is hope. Help me God, I have no idea how it happened, but somehow I feel like I have become an avatar for Hope within the Lions fanbase. I have decided to embrace it, to wrap myself in it like it’s a protective cloak, and I’m not taking that fucking thing off until someone rips it from my body and then whips me with it while I whimper and sob in the bloody snow.

I have chosen to hope, but that doesn’t mean it’s blind or that it’s easy. I struggle just like everyone else. You know how easy it is for me to touch the dark side. You’ve seen it splashed all over this blog. You know how easy it is for me to cross between worlds, to sing about the light in dark places and to tell tales about the dark in light places. I have one foot in each world and it’s up to me to choose how to deal with that reality. Like I said, I’ve chosen the light. I’ve chosen Hope. But I always know that there is a part of me that is shaded by the darkness, which is forever touched by the awful and vulgar realities of the past. I am a being of light shaded with shadow, a dark wraith with a sword of fire and a blinding light in my eyes.

Okay, okay, I have gotten out of control again, and I apologize. The point is this: for as much as I hope, for as much as I believe, I still struggle. Hope is a choice, man. And it’s a choice we make over and over and over again. It’s a choice we make throughout the day. That may sound Dr. Phil as fuck and it may sound like I’m tied up in the corner while Deepak Chopra ghostwrites this shit, but it’s true. It’s fucking true. I think about the Lions and my mind soars. It goes places that I never dreamed it could when it comes to this team. It stuns me. But every time I do, my mind starts furiously looking for reasons why it’s all a lie, for reasons why my hopes and dreams are nothing more than fanciful delusions, the fever dreams of the broken and the delirious. And then I have to take those fears, those terrible, terrible fears, and I have to try to put them into perspective. I have to blend them with my football fantasies and I have to trust in my own ability to decide what is real and what is twisted by the ugly wreckage of the past. I find myself doing this over and over and over again. A part of me looks at the Lions, looks at the schedule, looks at the talent, looks at the fact that the Lions have won the game the last nine times they’ve taken the field (yeah, yeah, four of those were preseason games, but they still won, you know?) and thinks why not? Why can’t this team win and win and win and win some more? Why can’t this be a magical season? Why can’t we be “there” – whatever “there” means – yet? And then the other part of me reaches up out of the darkness, hisses with the voices of a choir of Failure Demons and starts whispering about injuries and bad calls and Marinellis and Harringtons and everything else which has plagued us for what feels like a thousand years of madness and despair. And I’m forced to make sense of it all. I’m forced to put all that together and then decide whether or not I want to believe. It’s a choice, backed by legions of conflicting emotions and facts, and it’s one that I have to make all the damn time.

So far, I have chosen Hope. And so far, I have been vindicated. And I see no reason why that should change this week. It is a testament to the power of The Fear that it has grabbed hold so fiercely during a week when the Lions play a team that might be the most disheveled in the entire league. Yes, this week the Lions play the Chiefs, and everyone is screaming with wide-eyed fear about trap games and about making statements and all that jazz, and hey, I’m right there with you. This is not an opportunity that we can afford to fuck up. If we mess this up, suddenly it feels like we’re wandering in the wrong direction and like there are hills popping up in the distance and like I said earlier, fuck hills. But honestly, the Chiefs are fucking terrible. They’re a mess and I don’t honestly see a way the Lions can fuck this up. (Jesus, that is always a terrifying, idiotic thing to say.)

Their offense is in tatters, led by a quarterback who has seemingly imploded, his body going so far as to gnaw on its own ribs, leaving him both physically and mentally vulnerable going up against a defensive line which a few weeks ago made Tom Brady weep bitter, frightened tears. It’s possible that Matt Cassel will end the game hanging from a cross. I’m not saying it’s likely but I won’t rule out the possibility either. If things get wild enough and feelings get caught, I can see The Great Willie Young storming out of the locker room at halftime with two giant pieces of wood under each arm and spikes in his hands, can’t you?

Okay, okay, weird and offensive imagery aside, the underlying truth in all that gibberish is that Matt Cassel might die on Sunday. He is going to get the shit beaten out of him, and for a team and a quarterback which already seem to be hovering on the brink of a mental collapse, this is not a good thing. Well, not for them anyway. For us, this is a recipe for utter glee. Right now, you should be drooling and your eyes should be dancing with little soldiers made of blood and holding tiny hate filled knives. Call this Gunther Cunningham’s revenge. Call it revenge for those fuckers claiming that we tampered with their shitty safety. Call it whatever you want, but this should be a fucking bloodbath.

I’m not discounting the fact that the Chiefs have weapons. Hell, I gibbered on about them in our Chiefs preview and I sprung an unseemly boner for Jamaal Charles but to hell with all that, weapons are great only as long as you know how to use them and the Chiefs, well, the Chiefs have been playing – going all the way back to the end of last season – like they have no living memory of those dudes ever doing anything worth a damn. Right now, The Fear is slithering up and sticking it’s forked hell tongue in my ear and hissing that this could be the week that the Chiefs finally get it back together, that Jamaal Charles might run for 200 yards and Dwayne Bowe could catch 3 touchdown passes, but . . . no. Just no. The Chiefs are a team in utter disarray, one bad play away from a full scale mutiny, from Todd Haley being stripped naked and tied to the back of the Chiefs’ bus by his own players to be dragged back to the hotel like a common horse-rustler. They are a team in free-fall and the Lions are a team that thrives on smelling blood. Our dudes are like sharks with chainsaws for teeth. Ndamukong Suh might literally eat someone on Sunday.

Because make no mistake – the Lions are just as aware as we are that they can’t afford to let down in this game. They understand the stakes. They get it. They know. That is perhaps their greatest strength, the one biggest thing that separates them from other Lions teams of the past, teams that might have had the talent but lacked the will or the attitude. These guys are keenly aware of what’s gone on here and they have a certain sort of pride in the fact that they have been tasked with the deliverance of our wounded souls. I love them for that and it’s for this reason, more than any other, that I trust them.

Besides, even if the Chiefs offense inexplicably comes to life, their defense won’t be able to stop Matthew Stafford and the Lions offense. Not even a little bit. Even if the Chiefs for some unfathomable reason are able to take away the outside of the field from Lions receivers they’ll get killed over the middle. That’s because the Lions have Brandon Pettigrew and Tony Scheffler, while the Chiefs have . . . Jon McGraw? Indeed. Thanks to a season ending injury to Eric Berry, the Chiefs defense is suddenly completely incapable of covering anyone over the middle of the field. There is a very good chance that by the end of the game Jon McGraw will be shaking all over the field like a ruined old junky, weeping and gibbering like a fool, his fractured mind capable of the merest of childish hoots and animalistic grunts.

There is no reason why the Lions shouldn’t beat the shit out of the Chiefs on Sunday, and in an odd way, that’s caused more fear than anything else this week. We’re not used to those kinds of expectations. We’re not used to everything being slanted in our favor. We’re not used to not having anything real to worry about. And so our brains are doing the only thing they can do: they’re making up reasons to be afraid, because that’s how strong The Fear is. The Fear enslaved us long ago, and there is a certain sort of comfort in being a slave (No, Neil! Nooooooo!!! Back away from this subject immediately you dumb son of a bitch!) But we’re free now, free to make our own decisions, to imagine our wildest hopes and dreams and free to either embrace them or deny them. Well, right now, the future we always wanted is staring us right in the face. It’s right here and it’s real and I say we don’t deny it. I say we embrace it. The Lions should beat the Chiefs. The Lions should beat the Chiefs. The Lions should beat the Chiefs. I can find no reason – no reason that is rooted in anything real or logical anyway – why they shouldn’t. And so that’s what I’m going to choose to believe in. Of course, a part of me – a huge part – understands that there is nothing logical about being a Lions fan, but to hell with all that, we do what we can. We do what we can. And all I can do is hang onto Hope and pray that it doesn’t betray me. If it does, I’m dead, but if I don’t hang onto it at all, I’m dead anyway, so fuck everything else, the Detroit Lions will beat the Kansas City Chiefs and that’s that.

FIVE NO DOUBT TERRIBLE PREDICTIONS

1. Matthew Stafford will have another big day, throwing for 335 yards and 3 touchdowns. He won’t throw an interception and his numbers will be slightly deflated when the Lions sit on a lead for much of the fourth quarter, causing me to write another bitchy post next week.

2. St. Calvin will play and will catch 6 passes for 90 yards and a touchdown.

3. Jahvid Best will run the ball 22 times for 96 yards and a touchdown. He’ll also catch 4 passes for 48 yards.

4. Matt Cassel will be found wandering naked and confused after the game, smeared with his own feces outside of Ford Field. He will be taken to a local homeless shelter and then fed to the Coyotes wandering the city streets. The Chiefs will file an official protest with the league but Sheriff Goodell will be too scared to set foot in the streets of Detroit and will be heard muttering nervous gibberish about Robocop. The matter will eventually be forgotten except for by Todd Haley, who will spend the next several months looking for answers. He will be found floating in the Detroit River next May. No one in Kansas City will care.

5. Jamaal Charles will run for 70 yards on only 14 carries as the Lions establish a big lead and then spend the rest of the game parading around Ford Field with a pike up Matt Cassel’s ass. His howls of pain and screams for mercy will cause Fox to be sued for indecency.

Predicted Final Score: Lions 31, Chiefs 17 (And it’s only that close because I figure the Lions will ease off and sit on the lead in the 4^th quarter and the Chiefs will get at least one garbage touchdown.)