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!

I Don't Know

“They could win and if they do, people living in denial will ratchet up their shrill airhorn voices and start gibbering like idiots about the Super Bowl and god only knows what else.  And they could lose, and if they do, blah blah blah, it’s all so much noise and I hate it all.”

And so it hath come to pass.  The above pull-quote, from Hey, maybe…, sums it up rather neatly, I think.  The Lions won, and they won in a way that anyone can spin anyway their idiot hearts’ desire.  This is kind of a fucked up place to be in, as a fan.  After all, nobody wants to read the sad gibberings of the man who storms into the party, drunk and angry, hollering about how everything is bullshit and that anyone who’s trying to have fun is a goddamn imbecile.  It’s just ugly and mean and hey, I get it.  I really do.  But here’s the thing, this team is still a junkie team of assholes who do asshole things.  I don’t like it, but our boy is still a goddamn junkie and just because he didn’t shit his pants today or get caught trying to suck-off the bailiff outside of his court appearance for smack money doesn’t mean we can pretend it’s not a problem, you know?

Here’s the thing – for as relieved as I am that things seem to have at least stabilized and that I’m happy that tomorrow I won’t wake up to find him dead in a toilet, that boy of ours is still a junkie and let’s not enable him, okay?

Like I said, this is hard because it’s human instinct to put all that bullshit away and just want to enjoy the game in sort of a vacuum.  I get that, I really do, but we don’t live in a vacuum, we live in a world in which the Lions have been addicted to Failure for 50 goddamn years, and it would be the height of naivety to try to deny that that matters just because they smiled at us today and told us they felt good, especially when early in the game they were practically crawling on the floor, drooling and begging us to call the rehab center again because they just couldn’t take it anymore. 

Right now, the Lions are in a weird place, and so am I as a fan.  They’re really not good enough to really make it.  In the end their junkie diseased souls will ruin them.  I know it, you know it, we all know it.  Deep down, it is the empty abyss of inevitability we’re all too scared to look into as fans.  But they’re not bad enough to hit rock bottom either.  They can keep their shit together just enough that we can’t reasonably sit their ass down and convince them to get clean once and for all.  They’re maintaining and we might as well go fuck ourselves no matter how much we care and wring our impotent hands.

It’s hard.  It’s hard to know what to really root for anymore.  That’s a disgusting admission, but it’s a horrible one every parent or loved one of a junkie can probably understand.  We want the best for them, to succeed and be happy, but we also don’t want them to get away with their junkie bullshit because we know that it will eventually consume them entirely and then we’ll be woken up at three in the morning by Ndamukong Suh trying to steal our stereo system to pawn off.  But, I mean, what’s the alternative?  To root for them to fail, to bottom out so they can finally clean themselves up seems like the responsible thing to do, but goddammit, we can’t just watch someone we love, someone we’ve loved our whole goddamn lives, disintegrate like that.  It’s a sort of spiritual purgatory, a damned if you do, damned if you don’t sort of existential malaise that leaves me watching the game while at the same time trying to drown out the screaming voices of the angels and the devils perched on my shoulders.  Those fuckers are noisy.

I guess, in the end, the only thing you can do is sort of hope for the best and try to hang on.  Believe in miracles and all that.  It’s obvious that the Lions have cleaned themselves up a little bit.  The defense looks like it could be nasty, and Matthew Stafford finally looked like someone gave him the spiritual smelling salts.  And then there’s Reggie Bush.  Goddamn, for all our idiot hopes and dreams about what he could do, about what he could mean to this team, he somehow showed up and blew them away.  When was the last time we could honestly say something like that happened?  That, all by itself, is enough to cause most of us to break out the incense and anal prayer beads (what?) and start gibbering to the Saints (of the non-New Orleans variety) for divine intervention and miracles of the most miraculous miraclosity. 

This is how I see it – the first half of the game showed us enough that we have to admit that this team is still a goddamn junkie.  All of the ugly bullshit we have come to associate with this team not just in the Jim Schwartz era but in the half century of Failure and Fear which we’ve had to collectively endure, happened in that first half.  It was an abomination, the sort of thing that had me looking up intervention counselors as we hurtled towards rock bottom.  But then Reggie, that new friend who everyone seems to like, showed up and kept everyone from making a huge mistake. 

The thing is, is that Reggie himself is a former junkie.  He’s spent too many years lying, cheating and stealing for anyone to truly trust him, and he’s notorious for getting involved with broken whores.  He’s had a rough time, but like a lot of junkies, he got himself clean and then moved to a new environment.  Naturally, because he’s empathetic to the plight of other junkies, and because he’s been a model citizen for a while now – he even managed to keep himself clean in the heathen slums of Miami – he’s taken a liking to our boy, the Lions, and has announced that he’s going to do his best to keep everyone out of trouble.  Today, he stood on the front lawn with a shotgun and fired a round into the back tires of the Failure Dealers as they sped away from the scene.  He then chased them down on foot with a baseball bat and clubbed them in the head as a warning to the other dealers in town.  And we watched from the porch and we celebrated and thanked God for sending us this miracle.

Of course, our boy still looks shaky and that fucker Schwartz won’t stop hanging around even though we know he’s been cooking Failure in his basement, and Mayhew keeps calling from the rehab facility gibbering about money and missing draft picks and hinting that he might sell everyone out to the feds to keep his ass safe.  There are still lots of dark clouds hanging overhead, and the sad reality is that sooner or later, Reggie is probably going to fall off the wagon too.  After all, there’s really no such thing as a former junkie, is there?

He has the best of intentions, and right now he’s a godsend, but how strong can one man be?  How can a man who’s wrestled with his own terrible demons stay strong in the Sodom and Gomorrah he now calls home?  It’s not a pleasant thought, but reality often times isn’t.  Still, we can’t just pretend that everything is cool now and that we’ll all have candy and sunshine parties before winning the lotto known as the Super Bowl, especially since we know that fucking thing is rigged by the state anyway. 

Meanwhile, while we’re celebrating because Reggie has come into our lives, we’re refusing to acknowledge another sad truth: things are looking bright for our boy just because the neighbor boy, Christian Ponder, is so unbelievably fucked up that anyone would probably look good by comparison.  We’re proud of our boy and will talk him up to everyone in the neighborhood, but we know those rich bastards who live up on the hill have kids in law school and medical school and if we try to brag about our boy, they’ll just laugh at us, and then Junior will get discouraged and start shooting up all the time again instead of just every once in a while to maintain like he does now.

We’re coming off a crash, off of a season in which things almost bottomed out again.  It was a shock and an absolute blow to the psyche.  Remember what I said earlier about it being foolish to look at games like these in a vacuum?  Well, it works the other way too.  We’re probably all too touchy because we give too much weight to the past, to that miserable half century of failure.  It’s a tough balancing act to pull off, staying realistic because of that past while also not letting it utterly consume us.  I wish I knew the answers, wish I knew what to feel, what to hope for, what to believe in, but I don’t.  And neither do you.  We’re all just sort of stumbling along, terrified about what tomorrow may bring while trying to cling to whatever native optimism we have left, whatever “Hey, maybes…” that still live honestly in our hearts and haven’t been perverted into sort of a cruel mockery of that same native optimism.

The Lions won today, and that’s good.  It’s good because it has to be good.  I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I’m elated or that my heart is full of Hope and Joy because that’s all bullshit.  I’m encouraged, but only in the sense that I think the Lions aren’t as bad as I feared they could be.  I’m encouraged in the sense that at least today I won’t open up their bedroom door and find them lying dead with a needle in their arm.  But it’s hard for that to really mean anything when I know that they’re still junkies, when I know that they’re still back there sticking that needle in between their toes when Reggie’s not around.  I know they’re still hanging out with that degenerate Schwartz and I know that there are days when I’m going to round the corner and find them strung-out, vomiting in the house plants and crying.  It’s hard for me to believe that any of it matters because the disease, this… Lions Disease, is so fundamentally unbeatable.  It’s like AIDS.  No matter what you throw at it, no matter how much money you spend on designer drugs to keep it from blowing up, it’s still always there and one day it will kill you. 

This metaphor has become sadly mixed and incoherent, but that’s okay because that matches my idiot fan heart.  I don’t know.  Anything.  I don’t even know whether I’m happy or weirdly bummed out because deep down I just wanted it to end, to bottom out so that we could finally have some goddamn finality.  I don’t know.  I really don’t.  This is not what you wanted to read, and I know that I’m going to get people telling me that I’m being a bad fan and to relax and just enjoy the win but fuck that and fuck them. 

“They could win and if they do, people living in denial will ratchet up their shrill airhorn voices and start gibbering like idiots about the Super Bowl and god only knows what else.  And they could lose, and if they do, blah blah blah, it’s all so much noise and I hate it all.”

Indeed.