The Terrible Mind Of The Lizard Man

Yup, still a catch.

The NFL is full of stubborn assholes. The events of the last couple of months bear this out. But at least there is some sort of human emotion behind all this lockout melodrama. At least that is being driven by the mighty whip that is human greed. I understand that, even if I hate it. It’s not like this is some complex issue in which the various motivations are so Byzantine that they completely flummox the layman. No, this is all about greed and so be it. It is ugly and it is mean and it reminds us all that as fans we don’t mean shit to those ugly greedheads hunched over the extra bidet they just had to have in their state of the art luxury box, shooting water up their horrible old assholes and eating Fried Baby served by a Pygmy butler imported from Madagascar because all the other owners have Pygmy butlers and hey, fuck you.

But that’s not important here. That’s easily deplorable, simple in its way and, like I said, it’s easy to understand. The NFL owners are like some sort of silent movie villain, tying us as fans to the railroad tracks and rubbing their weaselly little hands together, but not before they rummage through our pockets for every last thin dime they can get their hands on in order to buy an extra inch or two for their miniscule dicks. That kind of cheesy evil is easy to boo and hiss. It’s almost absurd that it actually exists, but, well . . . here we are. But again, that’s not really my point. I promise I’ll get to it soon but I am having too much fun pistol whipping the owners for their vile greed. And why wouldn’t I, since it is basically the only recourse I have as a fan? I am impotent. (Jesus, that would be really easy to take out of context, wouldn’t it? I MEAN AS A FAN.) I can’t do anything but bitch and moan and accuse Al Davis of stalking through the night like some sort of leprous Nosferatu or Jerry Jones of beating the shit out of a blind retarded backwoods Arkansas hick child and stealing his fillings to sell for coffee money or Daniel Snyder of being, well, Daniel Snyder. That’s all I have as a fan. They don’t give a fuck about me and that’s obvious.

It all comes back to money and hey, it is what it is. It is what it is. Money is a powerful motivator and it turns men into lizards, slithering around and flicking their horrible tongues in every direction, intent on sucking up everything in their horrible little worlds. Greed begets more greed and pretty soon you are suing your own fans and kicking little Timmy’s one good leg out from under him and laughing about it and even the old school silent film villain steps away from the railroad tracks to see what you’re doing, shakes his head, his eyes wide, utterly shocked, while black and white words pop up on screen registering his disgust and horror at your own despicable villainy. So be it. The NFL owners have made that their reality and there isn’t a damn thing anybody can do about it. They have us over a barrel and they know it. If we want NFL football, we just have to suck it up and beg for more. We have to laugh with them when little Timmy collapses in pain and we have to throw our wallets at them just because they tell us to. They don’t have to be nice guys. They want our money and by God they are going to take it. Fuck you, you’re just a dumb mark who makes their mouth water with anticipation. You’re a fucking addict, willing to suck a dick for a fix of your NFL football and they know it. They are violent pimps and thieves, dealers who will suck your soul dry one goddamn crack rock of a game at a time.

They are what they are and that’s not going to change any time soon. It’s horrible but that’s just the reality of the situation. You and I can’t change it. We’ll be back down on our knees when the time comes and they will smile at us with row after row of teeth made of gold and contempt and tell us to get suckin’ because that’s the price to pay for our fix. But that greed, that simple outrageous villainy doesn’t explain what those shitheads just did.

You see, apparently they all got together in their little conclave, probably in some subterranean cave where Mike Pereira lives and sups upon bats and molemen, and decided to uphold – unchanged, of course - the infamous and stupid so-called Calvin Johnson rule. You all remember that heinous rule, right? Of course you do. None of us will ever forget the sight of Calvin Johnson scoring a game winning touchdown against the Bears in the opening game of the season, landing, getting up, getting a hotdog, taking a shower, maybe screwing couple of groupies in a locker room closet after the game and then handing the ball to the ref only for the refs to then freak the fuck out and decide – apparently just because they felt like it – that the catch violated some obscure and ambiguous rule seemingly designed to exist simply for moments like this, so the refs could just pull it out of their back pockets like a dagger soaked in poison and just stick it wherever the fuck they felt like. I mean, that’s what that rule has to exist for because if it doesn’t then I will drive myself mad trying to come up with valid reasons for its existence. If that wasn’t a catch then neither are half the damn catches in every other game. And that means that . . . that . . . that, well, that no one fucking knows what the hell is even going on.

That rule is so ambiguous that it is meaningless. The refs can choose to invoke it whenever they want and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. It is like a catch-all (no pun intended or fuck, maybe it was) of stupidity. It is so ambiguous that it can be used to overturn or confirm any damn thing the ref wants. It is pointless and absurd and it is just one of those terrible things that you have to come up with conspiracy theories in order to explain because the truth is just too silly and random and dumb and inexplicable to accept without your brain melting. We have to tell ourselves that the whole thing was just some way to cosmically fuck us once again because otherwise the whole damn thing doesn’t make any sense. It will break our fragile brains to try to determine any sort of order or meaning behind the rule’s existence and application.

Human beings like things to be neat and orderly. We pride ourselves on being rational beings and in our minds everything in the universe must conform to us. Everything must be rational and explainable, especially those concepts – like football rules – that spring from the human mind. And maybe that’s our biggest mistake. We assume that the minds that thought up this idiot rule are human minds and not the minds of some breed of greedy lizard people. They don’t think like us. We don’t understand each other and we never will. Sure, we understand one another’s basic motivations – they are greedy assholes who won’t stop until they own the whole world and we are desperate junkies willing to completely debase ourselves for a fix – but we don’t understand each other on any sort of deeper level than that.

To us, the rule is obviously flawed and should be changed. Actually, to us, it never should have been conceived of, but hey, mistakes were made. We can understand that but now is the time to fix those mistakes. After all, that’s how the human brain approaches the situation. And like I said, therein lies the problem. The only human brains the cretins in charge of the NFL’s rulebook have in their possession are the ones that they snack on in between sucking the marrow from the bones of orphans. Their own strange lizard brains see nothing wrong with the rule. It is inexplicable and utterly maddening but there it is.

We can understand the basic motivation of greed. It’s obvious and easily condemnable. But we can’t understand what drives them to zealously and maliciously protect a rule that simply doesn’t make any damn sense. They have been bred to fuck us over. It’s at the core of their being. The little double helixes that make up their DNA are actually composed of tiny little demons laughing at us with tiny little extended middle fingers. We understand that. It’s why we’re in the situation we’re in. It’s why 100 gajillion dollars isn’t enough for everybody to be happy. But still, that doesn’t explain why that infernal rule is still allowed to exist.

I mean, come on . . . yeah, I get that they live just to fuck us and rob us blind, but that rule hurts them too! Honestly, how does it help them? It just makes their league look confusing and stupid and it actively detracts from the quality of the smack they are trying to push on us. If you’re going to make us suck your dick, at least offer us something worth sucking for, you know? You would think that they would understand this, but again, we find ourselves making the same damn mistake we always do: assuming that these beasts are capable of thinking with human brains.

And so all that’s left is to try to think like they do. It’s a horrible experience and only the professionally deranged should try it. Thankfully, for all of you, I belong to that strange and terrible tribe of professional lunatics and so I will try, right now, for all of you, to figure this shit out. You’re welcome. Okay, deep breath and here goes nothing . . .

Alright, so I’m an NFL owner. What do I do? Well, first I’m going to eat this adorable little puppy and then I’m going to grind up and snort the bones of a newborn kitten. And . . . done. Okay, now that that’s out of the way, maybe I can start to understand these freaks. Goddamn, I feel like that dude in Avatar, only my tail is longer and I can’t get any Pterodactyls to let me ride them. Alright, alright, come on, focus. Focus. Beat up that orphan and shave his head so you can sell the hair for fifty cents to a wig maker. Yeah, yeah, okay, now you’re getting there. Money. Power. Hey, where’s my dick??? Don’t panic, Neil. Remember, you’re one of them right now. You don’t have a dick. Okay, okay, okay, breathe.

What’s next? Money. You want it. You’ll do anything to get it. Yeah, fuck you, peasants, get on your knees. What’s that? You want me to what? Change a rule? Why? It doesn’t make sense? Who cares? What does that have to do with me? Oh, you’re refusing to gnaw on my nonexistent dick until I change the rule? Well, fuck you, peasant. I make the rules, not you. I won’t have you dictating to me. God, just shut up already. Fine, I’ll look at the damn rule just so you’ll quit using that mouth for yapping and start using it for sucking.

Whoa. The peasants are right. This rule doesn’t make any damn sense. Still, I’m not going to change it. Fuck them. I can’t go letting them think that they have any sort of control here. Fuck no. That would be madness. Who knows what they would demand next? Sorry, peasants, the rule stands. Now get busy sucking or get busy dying. (In my head, I wrote that last sentence using Morgan Freeman’s voice in Shawshank Redemption. I . . . I apologize.)

And there you have it. The mind of an NFL owner. I have to go now because I feel filthy and exhausted, like I just got mind raped by a lizard from hell. I will be having nightmares about this experience for months. But I did it all for you because I am a warrior of light and am willing to tread in the dark places so that all of us can one day find salvation and hope in these strange and terrible times. I wish there was a happier explanation and I wish that I could tell you that these pigfuckers would get what was coming to them, but being naïve doesn’t help anyone. None of us can afford to be simple, otherwise we will be eaten alive and left as gibbering messes, confused and stupid. All we can do is snarl at the vile bastards who have us in their thrall. But don’t get depressed. I know it’s hard since, well shit, this is depressing but there are more of us than there are of them and this is still our game. They need us to survive. We don’t need them. We may think we do, but really, we’re just addicted to what they’ve been shoving into every orifice of our bodies for half a century now. They are not the product. They are just scared old men. Fuck them. Can we do anything about that? No, not really. But still, fuck them. I love football and because of that, I am destined to lose this battle. I have to make my peace with that. But then again, none of that really matters because when the games are played again, I will watch and I will smile and I will high five my friends and I won’t give a shit about the Calvin Johnson Rule or how many bidets Daniel Snyder has because that is just so much petty bullshit and my enjoyment of the game is so much more than that. And in the end that petty bullshit is all those old lizard men have to hold over any of us. So fuck them. We’ve got football.

A Thousand Apologies

I . . . I've got nothing. There's nothing happening other than soul crushing labor bullshit and I have already said my piece on that. I had an idea swirling around my head but I can't get it to come together and my brain feels tired and abused and I don't want to just half-ass something because goddammit, I have an internet reputation to uphold. That was a joke, by the way, lest you think that I have begun to take myself too seriously. I am creatively barren at the moment and don't have a fucking clue what to write about. I am pouring too much energy into other projects at the moment, some of which have yet to see the light of day and probably won't ever see the light of day unless some fearless agent falls under my spell, in which case these mysterious "other" projects may see the light of day a couple of years from now. Fuck it, I'm sorry. I'm just rambling now about shit that you don't care about at all but I just wanted to at least throw something up here today, especially since I tweeted (Jesus . . . what a ridiculous word.) last night that I would have something. But it turns out that I lied. As I mentioned on twitter, I was kidnapped by a vicious biker gang who chained me to the back of their bikes and dragged me around town, howling like lunatics and verbally degrading me with horrible taunts. After they had enough of that, they dumped me in an abandoned quarry, beat me with sticks and tire rods and then dumped gasoline on me and threatened to light me on fire. I wept and begged for mercy and I even pissed myself, but those girl scouts were vicious and mean and they refused to let me go until the sun finally peaked above the horizon and they had to ride their bikes back to school so they didn't miss English class. I can still hear the sound of their bells ringing in the distance as they rode away, laughing and swearing at me, and I know that I will have nightmares about their leader threatening to sever my head and keep it as a souvenir in the little basket on the front of her cheap little bicycle. She said that she was "sick of these ugly plastic flowers" and that the basket would look much better decorated with my blood. Horrible, just horrible. Anyway, that's why I didn't post anything yesterday even though Thursdays seem to have become my default Armchair Linebacker day in this, the wretched offseason.

I don't know what the weekend will bring, so no promises there either. It's possible that I will be hunted down by that vicious gang once more. After all, they told me that they knew where I lived because I had ordered cookies from them one time and I cursed myself for my careless folly. Who knows? But if I find the time and inspiration manages to strike, then I will try to write something and get it up here before the weekend is through. Like I said, though, no promises. I hate planning out what I'm going to write. I feel incredibly comfortable just doing this kind of shit. I can write and write and write all day long, and I suppose creativity isn't really the problem. The problem is focused creativity, I guess. But again, I am just gibbering about shit that you don't care about and so I suppose I'll just stop now.

The City Of Our Dreams

Draft day is getting closer and with that everyone and their mother’s uncle’s roommates’ dog’s turds are opining about who the Lions should take with the thirteenth pick. My opinion? I don’t really have one right now. Of course, of course, I wouldn’t mind seeing the Lions pick up a player who fills a position of immediate need, like cornerback, but I’m not stressing about it either. I’m just not. It’s a weird feeling. I’m so used to expecting the Lions to accidentally draft a ham sandwich or a waffle with their first round pick that it’s easy to let my anxiety spike and to start gibbering like a lunatic on a cocktail of speed and fear.

But I’m not going to do that this year. Fuck that. I trust the dudes in charge. I trust Martin Mayhew and I trust Jim Schwartz. I believe they know what they’re doing, I believe that they have a plan, and I believe that whoever they draft with the 13^th pick will be someone who they feel confident can help the team. Or they could trade the pick. I’d be cool with that too. You see, it’s not just that I trust them, it’s that for the first time in years it doesn’t feel like this pick is a desperation pick, a winning lottery ticket that the Lions absolutely must cash in if they want to ever become anything more than the screaming shitheap on fire that they’ve been for so long. Joey Harrington, Charles Rogers, St. Calvin, The House of Spears, these were all dudes who had to pan out. They were all potential saviors. A couple of them didn’t and, well, we saw what happened.

Those have been the stakes for us as Lions fans whenever draft time rolls around, but it’s not like that this year. The Lions are as close to being a complete team as they have been in a long, looooooong time. Are there obvious holes? Definitely. Especially on defense. But they are holes that – for once – seem like they’re capable of being filled with minimal effort. (I’m trying really hard here to not fly off the rails and take this filling holes talk in a really weird direction. Just so you know.) That’s sort of the point. The Lions holes now are not really any different than any other team’s holes. In the past, the Lions had to move heaven and earth and also parts of hell to try to fill even half of their holes. It was an unwinnable battle, an impossible fight and we all knew it. The best we could hope for was that we could drag our corpse closer to Dr. Frankenstein’s lab. But that also meant that the holes that we prioritized - those positions which we felt had to be filled, even if it came at the expense of other holes – had to be filled without fail. We couldn’t afford to miss. The dudes we picked had to come through. If they didn’t, it was back to screaming and clawing at the dirt while the Failure Demons dragged us back down to hell.

It’s not like that now. It just isn’t. We can afford to be a little more choosey. We can afford to take the guy who’s the right fit rather than the guy who’s just available right now. We don’t have to be desperate. We don’t have to be frightened. We don’t have to be manic. We just have to be smart. Fortunately, I think that describes our dudes in charge pretty damn well. They’re smart, they’re patient, they’re calm and they believe in what they’re doing. That’s the necessary formula for building a quality NFL football team and it’s amazing to realize that this is honestly the first time I have ever been able to say that about the dudes running my favorite team.

It’s amazing and it’s unfathomably sad. But it’s also calming and it also fills me with an almost indescribable sense of sports fan giddiness. I have spent so long agonizing over the past that I just don’t want to do it anymore. I don’t want to focus on the things we’ve never had. I just want to smile and be happy that we have them now. Mayhew and Schwartz aren’t gonna fuck this up. They just aren’t. I feel incredibly confident about this. I just do. It’s a hard thing to explain. It really is. But when I think about the Lions right now, I am overcome by a tranquil, peaceful easy feeling.

Is this all just a hilarious setup concocted by Fate? Maybe, but fuck it, I don’t really care. This may just be a way to get me in a place as a fan where Fate can destroy my football hopes and dreams once again, but I want to be in that place. I want to have faith. I want to believe that this time everything will be okay. This not a stupid dream, not some half-assed and desperate attempt to grab hold of something just because I’m afraid of the nothing. This is a calm, reasoned outlook. I’m not half expecting the ground to suddenly open up and to be sucked down to hell to be poked at by laughing hordes of Failure Demons, which is how I have always felt as a Lions fan, even during those rare times when I’ve been cautiously hopeful. There is no caution here. There is just certainty that the ground beneath my feet is real and safe and that all I have to do is to keep standing, keep walking on it, and the city of my dreams will be glittering on the horizon before I know it.

It’s happening. I can feel it. You should believe me. I am an enlightened truth warrior. (By the way, fuck Charlie Sheen for biting my style. You son of a bitch, you may have tiger blood, but I am a fucking tiger and I will gnaw on your wicked bones.) I am in tune with the universe and I can interpret its cosmic energy for you. Never in my life as a Lions fan has that energy felt right. But it does now. I may be crazy. I almost certainly am. But crazy people are always the first to know when a change is going to come. They’re the ones standing on street corners gibbering back and forth with unseen voices. Dumb animals are the ones freaking out and shitting on the floor whenever disaster is about to strike. There is something subhuman about it, something elemental that the great big human brain refuses to accept. The brain overrides the instinctual and tries to reason with the world. But the world can’t be reasoned with. It is strange and it is whimsical and it doesn’t give a fuck what you think. That’s why only the dumb and the mindless – or at least those willing to tap into that part of themselves that exists below the brain – understand when the shit is about to go down.

What the fuck am I even talking about? Who knows? All I’m saying is that I feel okay – shit, better than okay – about what’s going on with the Lions right now. I feel it in my bones. I have spent my whole life trying to interpret these football feelings. I became so in tune with the pain of being a Lions fan that I am aware of even the tiniest changes. And this is not a tiny change. This is a great sea change. This is a seismic shift that even the most tone deaf of Lions fans should be able to feel and hear and see. This is not hope for hope’s own vain sake. This is a hope built on truth, built upon an inescapable feeling that the world has changed and that the future is ours and all we have to do is . . . is be.

I am well aware that I sound like Deepak Chopra on mescaline and angel dust. It’s kinda embarrassing but fuck all that. There is an element of truth in the midst of those ridiculous words. All we need to do is be. I firmly believe that. We don’t have to panic. We don’t have to freak the fuck out and demand that the Lions airlift Albert Haynesworth in using one of those giant harnesses they use to haul elephants. We don’t have to wring our hands in fear about what’s going to happen next. We just have to be. We just have to let it happen and live it when it does. Otherwise we’re gonna end up missing it all. I don’t want to be pissed off all the time, and miss the good shit. I don’t want to shit my pants and then throw the resulting feces at my fellow fans just because I’m worried that the Lions didn’t take an outside linebacker or tackle or whatever with their 3^rd round pick. Fuck all that. I don’t want to bury my head in my hands and insist that the Lions will fuck it up because that’s what they always do. We’ve done that for too goddamn long and it has to stop. I don’t want to find myself watching a playoff game with the Lions in it and turning and sneering to my friends about how they’ll blow it because I’m a pussy. Because that’s all I’ll be if that happens. That’s all any of us will be if we allow ourselves to be consumed by all of our petty fears and deep seated misery.

I just want to watch this all play out, from beginning to the end. I want to be able to look back after it’s all over and smile at my memories of the beginning. I want to be able to say that I knew it all along, that I saw it happening and that I saw how the pieces on the chess board all fit together. I don’t want to have to look back after it’s all over only to realize that I didn’t enjoy any of it. After all, I have spent my entire life as a fan twisting in agony, bitching and moaning, beaten by misery and pain. I’ve had enough, goddammit. Enough.

The Lions will draft someone in the first round a month or so from now and we will all pick apart whoever it is like he’s the lone survivor of a UFO crash site. People will bitch and wring their hands and wonder aloud if the Lions should have done something else. They just will because that’s what fans do. I understand that. I will probably do this too. Fuck it. It’s how we stay invested as fans. It lets us feel like we have some sort of ownership in the team. But until then, I just want to sit back and see what happens next. I don’t want to miss to a thing. I just want to keep my eyes and my heart open and I want to feel the full force of what is coming next. That may make me a fool and I will be destroyed as a fan if things go badly, but there comes a time in every fan’s life where he needs to stand up out of the trenches, look across the field at his enemy, at the Failure Demons armed with machine guns, machetes and evil intentions, and smile defiantly because it’s better than dying of disease in a hole filled with the piss and shit of you and all your miserable comrades. If I’m going to die as a fan, I am going to do it on my feet, with a smile on my face, fire in my eyes and thunder in my heart. If I’m carried off to Valhalla on my spirit horse then at least I can look back and say that I lived as a fan and didn’t just cower in fear in my dark little hole.

I believe in the future. I believe in the now. The past is dead and the world is open and beautiful and there is a city glimmering on the horizon and all we have to do is be. All we have to do is keep looking at it and keep looking at it and keep looking at it and pretty soon, we will be at its gates and The Lord of the House of Spears will smile at us, swing those gates open and then everything will be beautiful and the world will finally belong to us.

I Love Football But Sometimes I Kinda Hate The NFL

Damn, February is a brutal month for writing about football. I suppose I could just throw up another Willie Young tale, but the last one was so ridiculous that I think I need some time to recuperate. The good news is that I have been writing about football. A lot. You just haven’t seen it yet. You see, my colleague, the esteemed Raven Mack, and I have been working on an Armchair Linebacker All-Pro team, and so I’ve been writing a ton of wild shit for that. It will see the light of day sometime this century, but at this point it’s sort of like Axl Rose’s Chinese Democracy. There’s no release date and speculating about that shit is a fool’s errand. It’s a labor of insanity and love and it’ll be out when it’s out. Raven said elsewhere that it will be 40,000 words of insanity and he’s right. This shit is out of hand. Both of us like to, uh, let the words flow freely and so when you combine our powers you end up with something monstrous and beautiful, terrible and fierce. This is an epic on par with The Iliad, only with more dudes getting speared in the balls and slightly less homoeroticism. Or, as Raven put it, “it’s like football prospectus on angel dust.” Indeed.

Anyway, look for that at some point. I won’t tell you how far along we are exactly, but we are at a point of no return now. This thing is happening. We are so far inside the belly of the beast that the only way out is for us to hack our way through with machetes until we escape out of the beast’s ass, bloody and covered in shit. It won’t be pretty but it will be glorious and it’s just something we have to do because we are men of honor and we don’t want to die in the colon of some terrible shitbeast.

But in between crawling through the beast’s intestines, I suppose I should take the time to take a look at the world of the Detroit Lions, and . . . nothing much is happening.

Okay, I guess I could talk about the Lions getting busted for tampering by the NFL due to their pursuit of Chiefs safety Jarrod Page last year but really that is just a bunch of dumb noise about nothing. The Lions were robbed of a 7^th round pick – and shit, those actually tend to mean something to Martin Mayhew since it was a stray 7^th rounder that nabbed us Shaun Hill in a trade – and were forced to swap their 5^th round pick with the Chiefs all because Gunther Cunningham is an old man and old men do whatever the fuck they want to do. Sometimes that means they whip it out in public or take a shit in the town fountain, but sometimes that means they just talk to old friends even when they’re not supposed to. That’s what happened in this case.

You see, Gun used to be the head coach and the defensive coordinator for the Chiefs and so he still sees a lot of their defensive players as his dudes. That’s how Turk McBride ended up in Detroit. Well, last year Jarrod Page seemed like he might be available and so Gun came out and was all fuck yeah, we’re interested, but since the NFL is a league run by uptight Nazis, the Gestapo swooped in and tossed Gun on a train to Poland.

That is all one wildly offensive way of saying that the Lions just got busted for . . . what? Who fucking knows? The Chiefs whined and bitched and moaned because they apparently thought Gun was throwing wild hooker parties for their players or something. Shit, maybe they thought that he had turned his basement into an opium den and after Jarrod Page showed up for practice all glassy eyed and stinking of sex, sweat on his brow, unable to work out because of all the cramping thanks to massive dehydration, they freaked the fuck out and told the league that Gun was in cahoots with the devil. I don’t know. It’s just a guess. Tampering. What the fuck? It’s football. Quit making it sound like Watergate, like the Lions sent a team of accountants to break into the Chiefs’ records and steal classified information about the size of Hank Stram’s prostate or the lurid details of Derrick Thomas’ autopsy. Oh no! The Kansas City Chiefs state secrets are in jeopardy!

Dudes talk. I’d rather they do that than creepy shit like showing up at midnight with a box of chocolates and a bouquet of roses on the first day of free agency. Sure, Jim Schwartz was forced to do that shit to get Kyle Vanden Bosch but I don’t blame him, I blame the stupid rules that make it a felony NFL offense to call up your boy on the phone and shoot the shit. Gun’s a grown ass man, an old man, and he doesn’t need to ask your permission Sheriff Goodell to talk to his friends. What’s next, are you going to start fining people for not cutting their hair? Maybe you should start tying guys to posts and whipping the shit out of them instead. After all, as a society there’s nothing we’re more comfortable with than the site of an arrogant rich white dude whipping a young black man for not doing as he’s told.

Shit, this kind of took a wild and unexpected turn, didn’t it? Jesus. I didn’t mean for it to happen, but when that starting gun goes off there’s no telling in which direction I’m going to run. There’s no saddle on my back and I haven’t been tamed and so I’m just going to run wherever the mood takes me. Yes, I just compared myself to a wild horse. Let’s just move on.

The point is that it’s become clear over the last season that the NFL is completely power mad. Actually, it’s been clear for a long, long time but the events of this past season have made it so blindingly obvious that even the dullards who jack off to the myth of the all-powerful NFL machine, pawing themselves to a soundtrack of Chris Berman braying while the music from those old NFL Films plays in their heads, have had no choice but to notice that shit has gotten out of hand.

If the NFL had its way, it would just be importing players straight off the boat from Africa. That’s right, I said it. They’d have Goodell standing at market waiting to inspect them while his lizard Pereira would stand by with a whip, ready for any “trouble”. The NFL doesn’t give a fuck about the players. I think that’s made clear by them trying to push an 18 game schedule on the players even while rummaging through their pockets for spare change every time somebody gets hit too hard. The NFL is all about the illusion of player safety and welfare. The ingenious thing about it, which is also the insidious thing, is that they convince the average Joe Dipshit that they care by attacking the players. They don’t try to find ways to improve equipment or look for ways to minimize the long term effects of an inherently violent game. No, instead they fine the players $100,000 dollars for smacking a guy in the head in a game that moves a million miles per hour, or $15,000 dollars for reaching out and grabbing a guy’s pad and, uh, tackling him because it looked a little too violent. Instead of dealing with reality, which is that football is an inherently violent and dangerous sport, they try to change the perception of reality and show people that football is a safe sport with no consequences and that the players are just idiot renegades who need to be tamed and broken via a steady stream of fines and debasement.

There is something heinous and dishonest about that, right? “Oh, no, we don’t have any problems at all. Football is perfectly safe. It’s just these asshole players who do it to themselves. They’ll be fine if they just play the game the right way. If they are retarded by the time they’re 50, well then that’s their own damn fault. Come, Pereira, let us steal some bread from some orphans and then twist our handlebar mustaches, ha ha ha!” It’s ridiculous. If the NFL gave a shit, they would funnel some of their many billions of dollars into long term health care for these players. They would do everything they possibly could to minimize the long term impacts that come from getting the shit beaten out of you for several years in order to make a living. They would do whatever it took to make sure that the players were financially secure and that there were people there to help them when they found themselves needing an hour to get out of bed every morning before they hit 40. Football is a violent game, brutal and fierce and we all must make our peace with that. We do every player a disservice when we try to pretend that it’s not and that there is some magical way we can change its very nature. It’s sickening to me that the NFL’s preferred way of attacking this issue is to attack the very players affected by it.

This post has gotten completely out of hand and has wandered far, far away from the original point. I didn’t mean to talk about this, but the opening was there and I took it. It’s something that I feel pretty strongly about and it’s been on my mind with all this labor strife and all that bullshit. I guess it’s pretty obvious that I’m firmly on the players’ side. I know the general consensus is that it is just a bunch of rich dudes arguing and that everyone involved is a millionaire, but not really. That’s just simple and wrongheaded. The reality is that a lot of these dudes only play for a few years, get the shit beaten out of them and then have to spend the money they made on a ton of horrible medical bills because the NFL doesn’t give a fuck about them and Jerry Jones has to have eight bidets in his private luxury box inside of his very own Taj Mahal of a stadium.

I know a lot of you won’t agree with any of this and there will be people who call me irresponsible for going wild with slavery references and Nazi talk, but fuck all that, I’m not the one burying my head in the sand and pretending like these dudes are going to be driving Ferarris on some tropical beach snorting diamond dust and eating bald eagles when they are 70. I’m a fan of football, but goddamn, sometimes I really hate the NFL.

And those are just the issues involving the players. I won’t even get into all the absurd bullshit about the NFL conning people into paying for Super Bowl tickets that they knew they wouldn’t be able to honor. Greedy bastards. Again, I love football. It’s the national pastime because it best embodies who we are as a people. It’s violent, it’s angry and there are moments of sublime beauty and glory that manage to make us forget about all that. It’s passionate and every moment matters and it feels like it’s always moving forward. There are no languid lazy Sundays. There is just a death race to the finish line and that is exciting as all hell. It is uniquely American and it always will be. But people can’t pretend that it’s something that it’s not either. We have to accept the ugly side of it and try to come to terms with that. We have to do right by the people who get their brains kicked in by it. In that way I feel like it’s also representative of who we are as a people – or who we should be anyway.

Look, this could spin in yet another direction here, with me gibbering about football and America and all that shit and while I think there is something interesting to say about all that, it’s just too damn much right now and I have said too damn much about this issue already. I don’t really like talking about it. I just want to talk about the Lions and what happens on the field and what it’s like to be a fan. In that way, I suspect that I’m a lot like all of you. But something is out of whack here and I would feel shitty about myself if I didn’t at least acknowledge it. I love football. I also love the dudes who play it. I just wish the NFL felt the same way. I think that it did, once. Now, I think it is run by a collection of greedheads more interested in power and money (really, I suppose they’re kind of the same thing) than they are with the health of both the game and the people who play it. In the end it’s about money. It’s always about money. It’s just that one side is trying to get more money so that they can have a better quality of life while the other is trying to hoard money because it makes them feel like their dick is bigger. And really, that’s what it all comes down to.

What that has to do with Gunther Cunningham and the Lions getting busted for tampering is anyone’s guess. Like I said, I have wandered far and wide here, but I suppose the tampering thing kind of opened the door for me to talk about a subject I’ve been loath to talk about because I knew that when I did, I would end up unloading all of my guns. As it is, I feel like I actually held back a little believe it or not. I like to keep things good natured here and this is not a good natured subject, you know? It sucks that it’s out there and that I felt like I had to talk about it, but that’s on the NFL, which is just one reason that even though I love football, sometimes I kinda hate the NFL.