Finding Harmony In Purgatory

Yeah, why not?

My head is in kind of a weird place right now (I know, I know, how is that any different than usual), especially as it relates to football. That should have been made epically clear by that ridiculous winding snake trail of a post that I put up last week, an abhorrent and stupid thing that we should collectively agree to never make mention of again. But these are the things that happen just after the world stops and just before it starts spinning again: chaos, anarchy, rampant stupidity and shameful self-indulgence which calls to mind the peasant making midnight deals with God because the world seems foreign and strange and he’s not sure what the fuck is going on or what’s about to happen. That is where I find myself with regards to my own fandom right now. I’ve been confused and stupid, wandering in a daze in a confusing landscape devoid of meaning or order. The past is the past and the future is the future but now? Who knows?

And it’s that which has been at the heart of my own confused malaise over the last few months, during which I have rambled nonsensically and made a horse’s ass out of myself in lieu of anything with a real, genuine point. I know that this post feels like more of the same, but I feel more in control of it now, like I’ve gotten my head wrapped around the simple idea that I have been struggling with all this time, that I’ve learned to accept it and now I’m ready to move on. That idea is that we are stuck in a kind of strange purgatory right now, hovering somewhere between heaven and hell, afraid that if we say or do or even think the wrong thing, some cosmic lever will be pulled and we’ll be sent down a slide lined with barbed wire and flames back to the hell from whence we came. Yes, whence, I said it.

And that’s the trick, trying to ignore the reality that that hell is there and that it is very real and that it has caused us so much pain, so much agony over the years, while at the same time respecting it and acknowledging its role in shaping who we are as fans. We can’t afford to ignore it completely – which I have been trying in vain to do – because that is a fool’s pursuit, naïve and childish, but we can’t wallow in it and give it too much power either. What we have to do is find a way to put it into its proper context so that we can finally move on in a healthy way.

Because if we don’t, if we continue to white knuckle our way through every game, a manic smile on our face, our eyes huge and frenzied, like some maniac meth head, trying to fight the terrible and unwinnable battle between the horrors of the past and the hope of the future, then we won’t even be able to comprehend that future when it does arrive. Instead, we’ll be too busy fighting off the savage hordes of Failure Demons harassing us with their forked tongues and their poisoned claws. And by the time we manage to defeat them, the future will be the new past and we won’t know what the fuck is going on.

So . . . yeah, we need to come to terms with the past, learn to respect it and face it like grownups or else it will never let us enjoy what’s to come. I don’t want to spend every game wondering if things are going to fall apart, holding on to some terrible darkness that lives deep inside of me just because I’m afraid that if I don’t pay it homage then it will come roaring out to eat my soul and destroy my dreams. I don’t want to be a slave to The Fear. I want to be able to give The Fear a curt head nod and then go on with my day. Because if we ignore The Fear, then we just make it stronger. We feed its power.

One of the worst things we can do as fans is become unrealistic and star eyed and think that nothing bad will ever happen again only to become raving lunatic street preachers moaning about the end of the world every time someone fumbles or Matthew Stafford’s shoulder spits in our face or some fool wearing the other team’s uniform scores a touchdown. This will happen, though. I guarantee it. And it will happen because we have no idea what we’re doing or where we are or how to deal with any of this . . . this new reality.

At some point next season I will flip out and start yammering on about werewolves eating my soul and escaped vampire apes hunting me down so they can nourish themselves with my spirit because I won’t know how to handle something bad happening. I will be like an idiot child, gibbering to himself after he pisses his pants, trying to make excuses and draw attention away from the fact that I am walking bow legged because my pants are soaked and I am horrified and confused and nobody can help me and that I am all alone in my pain while the rest of the world laughs and points at my failure. This will happen because of my refusal to understand that the past and its pain are still a part of the story. They add gravity and wisdom to the manic gayety (yeah, gayety, leave me alone) of the future. It is only through understanding that past that we can use it to temper and put into context the wild unpredictability and bipolar madness that so often comes with daring to hope.

It is tempting – hell it is damn near seductive – to stand like rebels in this purgatory and refuse to look back, to grit our teeth and snarl at the past, to have the immature and stupid gall to believe that we can actually wrestle with the past and defeat it, obliterate it, before we smugly move on to the glory we demand. On the flipside, it would be all too easy to behave like Lot, afraid to look back at the past for fear that our hopes and dreams would be turned into a pillar of salt that would then crumble and blow away in the breeze of our fractured and ugly memories. Either through stubborn pride or through fear, it’s too easy right now to run from the past, to not look back, but in the end, that is either stupidly arrogant or cowardly, or maybe some combination of both.

The only way to keep from making complete fools of ourselves is to recognize and accept the past, terrible as it is, and remember that when the glory comes, when all our hopes and dreams are fulfilled, it will just make it taste that much sweeter. We cannot afford to be idiot children. We’re better than that. We are Lions fans. The world has whipped our asses and tortured us for so long that we forget that because of all that we are made of iron. We are tougher than other fans. Never forget that. We can handle this because we handled 0-16. We can handle hell because we already were swallowed by the devil and he tore us apart molecule by molecule, laughing the whole time, and yet we are still here. As fans, we have been to places no one else has even had to fathom and yet here we are, embracing Hope and standing before the gates of heaven, waiting impatiently to be let inside.

The past is the past and the future is the future and right now? Right now the world is alive with possibility and so are we. I thought the past needed to be obliterated in order to appease whatever mysterious forces hold the keys to our future, but I was wrong. The past is what will give shape and dimension to the future. It will give us perspective and it will make us appreciate it that much more. We have to understand that the past is what it is. We can’t change it. We just have to stop fearing it. It’s called the past because that’s where it is, in the past. It isn’t the future. It isn’t now. It can’t touch those things because it is locked behind us. We have to draw upon that past, understand it, allow ourselves to feel it if only to remember that when things go bad, this is still not it. Bad shit will happen this season. We will be disappointed from time to time, but that’s okay. The far horizon is still alive with the color of the dawn of a new day, exploding in brilliant reds and yellows and oranges and it will still be there no matter what lies behind us. We can look back and then we can look forward and when we do we will realize the true beauty that peaks over that horizon and calls us home.

One Minute To Midnight

It’s March and there are only two things to really talk about when it comes to the Lions and the NFL: the upcoming draft and the league’s interminable labor issues. I don’t want to really talk about the draft until after it’s over because there is a ton of dumb noise about it out there and really it’s all meaningless until after the fact. Draft coverage and prognostication has become its own nerd industry and each year it has grown and grown and grown until finally, this year it just feels like a massive storm of absurd noise and I don’t really want to add my own senseless braying to that cacophony of buffoonery. That’s not to say that I don’t follow it – I do, the same way I slavishly follow all the bullshit peddled by the NFL factory throughout the year and of course it is sometimes interesting and I would be lying if I said that I didn’t get caught up in it from time to time, but really I’m just kind of sick of everyone trying to play amateur scout. Opinions are awesome and I like the nakedly enthusiastic opining of a fan, and I dig what Ty does over at The Lions in Winter. He accumulates information and then assembles it into something coherent and interesting. If more people were like that, I would be more inclined to join the discussion, but I don’t really want to get swept up into a debate with a bunch of nerdy faux robots who approach everything like they’re desperately trying to impress the junior scout for the Jacksonville Jaguars.

I mean, let’s face it, most football blogs – most sports blogs – are horrible things, absurd wastes of time which just parrot one another, written by people who have no appreciation for the art of writing. And since they are incapable of writing they fall back on playing amateur scout and firing off bland, stale opinions recycled from the braying jackasses on ESPN. It’s boring and it’s noisy and it’s worthless and it makes me actively not want to discuss certain things because by the time I get around to feeling like I have something worthwhile to say about the subject, the subject has already been beaten to death and then dragged around town behind a gunslinger’s horse while all the townspeople fire guns in the air and whoop and holler and ready the pine box. When I sit down to write something about actual football this time of year it sort of feels like I’m just a degenerate vulture, desperate to pick the bones of a long dead corpse.

In the past I have remedied this by delving into the drafts of yore and mining them for relevant information. I have broken down an entire decade’s worth of draft classes in an attempt to see how things went horribly, horribly wrong. I have discussed the many, many terrible busts who have caused us so many tears and I have even discussed those precious few Lions draftees who turned out to be pleasant surprises. I have done all of this which means that now I have nothing left to do but . . . this. This horrible, horrible bitchy post.

So . . . yeah, I guess that leaves draft coverage out. But that just means that all that’s left to talk about is labor issues, and, uh, I’d rather set myself on fire and then jump naked out of a plane into a garden filled with cacti and scorpions with giant talking Matt Millen heads than do that. I’ve already said my piece on the labor issues and I don’t want to beat that horse to death and then get caught defiling that poor horse’s corpse while all of you look on, horrified and ashamed.

And so . . . what then? I don’t know. You’ve got me. Maybe I should start taking requests. I don’t really feel like doing a Willie Young thing because, honestly? I feel like I have played that one to the bone. Maybe I will drag it out of mothballs every now and again, but I think I either need to just let it rest or reinvent the whole damn thing. Some of you are probably disappointed and just as many of you are probably saying to yourself “Finally!” I don’t blame you if you feel this way. That shit was weird and had no merit whatsoever beyond making me laugh, which, I’ll be honest, is my chief motivation when it comes to half the stuff I write.

Of course, this means that I will have to come up with something new and ridiculous to write about and I’m sure I will soon, but right now, I just don’t know. And as a result, you get this garbage, this nauseatingly meta bullshit which has become more and more the norm from me here. But that’s what happens in the great vacuum of February/March. In a couple of weeks, the draft will have taken place and then I will have a bunch of new players to talk about. Let’s not forget that this time last year, the Lions drafted a prince by the name of The Great Willie Young, so . . . yeah, I can find inspiration in the strangest of places, in the small cracks where no one else looks, like 7^th round draft picks. But there has to actually be, you know, small cracks to look into. Right now, there’s just . . . nothing. It’s either rant and rave about how the left tackle from Bumfuck U has arms that are too short to warrant a first round pick or wag my e-finger at Roger Goodell some more.

I had no idea what I was going to write about when I sat down to do this and a thousand words later, I still don’t. This post is useless and absurd and has no meaning other than to explain a few of the inner workings of my own weird, fractured mind. It hasn’t been interesting, it hasn’t been funny and I sort of feel like a man just vomiting up drivel, horrified that he can’t stop it. Because I didn’t know what to write about, I decided to sit down and just write and see where I ended up. Sometimes, that serves me well and I end up twisting things in a fun and interesting direction, like a guitar soloist just fucking around until he hits on something electric and beautiful and then wrestles with it until he has tamed it and made it his own. And sometimes you get . . . this. Whatever this is anyway.

I suppose I’m glad that I got some of the bitching out of my system. I didn’t mean to shit on anybody and if you’re feeling offended or worried that I was talking about you when I was spitting venom at amateur scouts, don’t be. I am just a horse’s ass. Fuck me. Do what you do and don’t feel bad about it. I just want people to be honest and cut the bullshit. I think that’s probably the one thing everyone who writes here for Armchair Linebacker is proud of. There’s no pretense here, just brutal truth bombs. Sure, sometimes it might not be the truth but it is always our truth. We don’t write shit we think other people want to hear. We just write what we want to hear, what we hear in our own hearts. We are translators of our own diseased and fucked up minds. Some days we are poet kings and other days we are absurd fools, shitting on ourselves shamefully. Today, I just happen to be shitting on myself. So be it.

Trust me, I really want to write something interesting about the Lions instead of this senseless drivel. I do. More than you know. I am restless and I am hungry for something – anything – that I can tear into like a, well, like a lion. It’s just that all the stories that are there now – all the angles, all the themes – are stale as hell. I have beaten this shit to death over the last few years and the only way forward is, well, forward. Burn the past. Burn those terrible boats that brought us to this strange shore. Burn them and then stand there and watch them burn. Watch the only thing familiar go up in flames so that you have no choice but to move forward. And then when it’s gone, set your jaw, stare at the far horizon and roar at the future, strange as it may seem. I will live or die with the Detroit Lions of today and tomorrow, not the Detroit Lions of the past.

That will be both more easy than it sounds and more difficult. It should be easy to leave such a rancid past behind but there is also a strange sort of comfort in it. There are no expectations in that past, nothing but a numbed sort of acceptance of misery. You don’t have to worry about failure when failure is your default state. And for me, personally, there is comfort in the familiarity of that past. It is a readymade storyline, something to draw upon whenever I need something to write about. The themes are familiar – haunting and terrible, but familiar – and I am so familiar with them that I can call upon them almost at will and dance with them and play with them and produce something gorgeous or profound. That is not bragging. I know it sounds like it, but it’s really actually quite sad. I am so familiar with the pain of the past, so in tune with it, that I can interpret it like no one else can. I am a mouthpiece of the Failure Demons.

And so leaving all of that behind is not only exhilarating, it’s a little bit scary. Both as a fan and for me, personally, as a writer. From now on, everything is new and unfamiliar. I have nothing to draw upon but the immediacy of my own experiences as a fan. There will be no time to put things in context. Something will happen and then I will write about it, using only my own muddled feelings and confused mental state as my guide map. I don’t know this story. Not yet. I am excited as hell to write about it, both because it’s something new and interesting and because it’s something that will hopefully challenge me as a writer.

It is the height of egotism to declare that I am the voice of Lions fandom and yet that is how I approach all of this. Beneath all the weird bullshit, that is the beating heart of what I do here. I take it upon myself to translate the story, to explain the themes, to let everyone know what it feels like to be a Lions fan, what it means, what it is. Like I said, that is incredibly egotistical, but that’s the only way I know how to do this. That’s what I bring to the table. I am not someone who is going to break down stats – although I sometimes do this if only to provide a construct for my own unique brand of bullshit – and I’m not a news guy. I’m the voice of the damned crying out in the wilderness for comfort and understanding.

That is all completely ridiculous and utterly absurd and I sound like a complete jackass right now. I understand this, but it’s the only way I know how to do this. And now that the story has changed, I have to be able to keep up with it while it evolves. I can’t get stuck repeating the same dull themes, the same extinct ideas which are fossilized and stuck in a past to which no one can ever return. If I do that, I just become an archeologist or a paleontologist (By the way, when I was 4, my parents asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I told them I wanted to be a paleontologist. They were expecting me to say a policeman or a fireman or some lame shit like that, but I suppose that even at that age I was anti-authority, and besides I loved dinosaurs and so paleontology was where it was AT.) I would cease to be relevant as a Lions writer. And yeah, yeah, I understand that the phrase “relevant as a Lions writer” is in itself laughable and worthy of scorn and derision, but fuck it, you know what I mean.

The point to all this ridiculous self-serving gibberish is that if I want to survive as a writer and chronicler of the peculiar condition that is Lions fandom, then I have to keep moving forward. That’s why there haven’t been any season reviews or anything like that from me. I’m waiting and I’m watching and I’ll be ready when the story starts anew. It’s just that, right now, it’s just sort of sitting there, hanging in some weird purgatory, which means that this is where we are too – hanging in some weird purgatory, waiting for the gates of paradise to swing open and let us run inside.

I know this whole thing has come off as egotistical, self-serving and overly serious and I don’t really like that, but it’s something that I feel needed to be said. When I say that I want to stay relevant as a writer, even I cringe at that shit. I am just a jackass braying on the net like everyone else. There is nothing really all that relevant here and I don’t want anyone to think that I take myself or any of this shit too seriously. When I say that, I mean it within its proper context, and by that I mean that everything I just wrote is how I remain relevant as a writer to myself. I know in the grand scheme of things that it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to anything or anyone, but these are things inside of me that I need to say and the only way I can say them is if I have some sort of compass guiding me, or in other words, some sort of self-relevancy. I know I’m not explaining this well at all, and I don’t blame you if you are confused or annoyed right now. All this Voice of the Lions Fan bullshit is just that – bullshit. It’s just that this is how I feel like I must approach things in order to not get sucked under the massive rancid pool of dirty shit-water that is both Lions fandom and my own tendency to go wild when I write. It’s a focus point. That’s all. Besides, anyone who thinks that I take this shit too seriously really, really hasn’t been paying attention.

Goddamn. I ended up getting 2,500 words out of nothing here which – even for me – is both impressive and utterly ridiculous. Anyway, I’m beyond excited for the season – or at least the preseason and by that I mean the post draft world – to start. Because that’s when the new story starts and that’s when all sorts of new themes and ideas will emerge, like brand new notes on the first morning of the world, just waiting to be harnessed and played. I know, I know, I’m getting ridiculous again, but that’s how I feel. I’m excited as both a fan and a writer. I can’t wait to feel all these new feelings and I can’t wait to attempt to describe them. And yes, I know that I am just setting myself up for something both monstrous and comical, a gigantic letdown that could completely crush my fan spirit, but to hell with all that cynical bullshit. It is 11:59 PM. It is one minute to midnight and the start of a brand new day and a brand new world and I am excited. I just can’t wait for it to get here and right now that one minute feels like it is taking one year.

In that sense, maybe that is actually the most powerful thing I could have written about the NFL’s labor issues without actually writing about them if that makes any sense at all. It’s one minute to midnight and if those motherfuckers stretch that one minute out any further than it already is, then I might go completely insane and I have no idea what kind of weird and terrible shit I will come up with in the absence of the world that I have been waiting for all this time. Because in some ways, this new season, this new world, is something that I have been waiting all of my life as a fan for. This is my time. This is our time, the dawn of a brand new and glorious day, filled with brand new colors, brighter and more brilliant than any we have seen before, alive with sounds and smells and sensations that will leave us breathless and stupid, our own dumb grins keeping us company as we wander and explore our new world. And fuck anyone who tries to take that away from us. It’s one minute to midnight and I can see the future. It’s almost here. Almost, almost, almost . . .

How Being A Lions Fan Led Me To Never Walk Alone

So many conflicting emotions . . .

I’m about to admit something that will make half of you wrinkle your noses up at me and shake your head like you just caught me taking a shit in your bed or seducing your dog. The other half of you will be split into two camps: one will clap me on the back and bid me welcome to their ranks while the other will just shrug and wonder why in the fuck I am writing about this particular topic. But it’s March and it’s either this or talk about labor issues some more and that would just end up making me want to throw a chair through a window or set my car on fire and then drive it into the Le Brea Tar Pits, so fuck that. I know, I know, you’re all on the edge of your seat waiting for this stunning admission (Just humor me and agree that you are, okay?) so I’ll just get to it: I really, really like soccer.

There I said it. There is something unwholesome and un-American about that. I feel like just by admitting that, I metaphorically allowed a whole platoon of redcoat British soldiers to storm into my home and rifle through my underwear drawer and defile my wife. (I’m not actually married but sometimes I do like to wear a dress and put on some lipstick and put on a little smooth jazz and . . . shit, back away! Back away!) The Great Willie Young would be so disappointed with me. But to hell with all that. Those are the piddling complaints of a stubborn and tiny mind, the sort that gets hard to Toby Keith songs about putting boots in asses and who suck at the teat of the true American religion, which is America itself and more specifically, the fetishized ideal of American exceptionalism.

Before I get too carried away here and end up getting dragged away in chains by the ghost of Uncle Joe McCarthy, let me back up and say that there are a lot of valid reasons for not liking soccer that have nothing to do with xenophobia or anything like that. There isn’t a lot of scoring, there is a ton of flopping and embarrassing histrionics and – perhaps most importantly – there just hasn’t been a lot for most Americans to root for over the years.

More than anything, I think it’s that last point that explains the American refusal to embrace soccer. It’s not ours and so fuck it. I think that’s the general idea. It’s kind of a visceral mistrust because we didn’t create it and therefore it must be inherently inferior, but I am veering too far towards all that bullshit about American exceptionalism again and so I’ll try to twist it back to something more innate than that: it’s hard to root for something that you were not born into.

Most of us have been fans of a sport or a team for as long as we can remember. We didn’t choose to start rooting for some shitbag franchise that would only break our hearts over and over and over again in what is essentially a quasi-abusive relationship. You think I woke up one day and said “Hell, I think I’ll start cheering for the Lions. That seems like a lot of fun.” Fuck no. I was born into this psychotic circus and I will die a part of it too. It is inextricably bound to my DNA and there is nothing I can do about it. That doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy it. I do. But it’s a complicated enjoyment that really requires a whole post of its own. Hell, to be honest with you, that is what I have been trying to explain in the three years or however long it’s been that I’ve been writing here. It is the fundamental question that lies at the heart of everything that I do here. Why the hell do I follow this team?

And that’s the key: this team. I am a fan of football, but more than that I am a fan of my team, the Detroit Lions, and everything else about football that I love and hate has grown from that. Everything is an offshoot of my team fandom. The league itself exists as a mere construct for my team to compete within. Football is the game that the team plays. The players are knights of a kingdom that doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to people like me. It is a kingdom of my heart and it is forever. That’s a powerful thing, and that’s what drives the success of professional football in this country. People aren’t so much NFL fans as they are fans of teams that happen to compete within the NFL. That is obviously overly simplistic – there is a whole symbiotic chicken or the egg element to this whole argument – but at its core I think that it’s correct. You can use this same line of thought to explain fandom in any of the major sports. And really, that line of thought explains why they are major sports. There is an inborn sense of fandom that comes with supporting a team that is generational and powerful and in some ways it transcends mere sport and becomes a communal sort of thing. It is primal and vaguely ridiculous and it’s something that you just can never get with golf or tennis or Nascar or anything like that. It’s also powerful as hell.

Which brings me back to soccer. Over the years I have always been intrigued by soccer. I mean, why wouldn’t I be? I am a naturally curious dude and if billions of people swear by this shit like it’s a religion then there must be something to it, right? But there was never anything there for me to grab hold of and claim as my own. And therefore there was never a way in for me. The soccer world was effectively cut off from me and millions of people like me. The only time we got a glimpse into that world was every four years when the World Cup came around. I have always loved watching the World Cup, even when I was a little kid, if only for the sheer spectacle and the utter pregnancy of every moment. It was life or death, laughter or tears, rioting and screaming and absurd nationalism. It was ritualized war.

But there were two problems: the United States never had a team worth a damn, so I always felt like an outside observer, like some cracked anthropologist studying a fascinating and bizarre world he could never be a part of, and second, the tournament would always end and then there’d be . . . nothing. Of course, every so often people would rumble about a new American soccer league but it was always stale and antiseptic and I would watch and try to get into it, but it just wasn’t the same. It was a forced fandom, a ragged bone thrown to people like me who wanted to keep watching soccer. (Oh, and fuck calling it football or futbol or whatever. I have to draw the line somewhere and that’s it.) It was pointless and sad and eventually soccer would just fade from my mind like so many other stupid fads.

But every time it comes around – every time the World Cup takes place or every time the U.S. plays an important “friendly” (These terms are all fucking ridiculous by the way. And yeah, yeah, when I complain about shit like this I am about one step away from humming those goddamn Toby Keith songs I was bitching about earlier but fuck it, these are complicated times and I am a complicated man.) – I find myself getting sucked in more than the last time and it takes longer and longer for it to fade after the event itself ends.

There are several reasons for this, I think. One is that, obviously, I actually enjoy watching the game on an aesthetic level. I love that it is a game of continuous flow and action. Once you understand the whys and strategy of it all, it’s genuinely compelling to watch, like human chess. I know a bunch of you just scoffed at me but I don’t fucking care. This is just how I feel. Leave me alone, you brutes. And then there’s the fact that there are no commercials or anything like that, which is a stark and welcome contrast to the NFL’s wringing of every advertising dollar from our withered souls. I mean, we’ve all bitched and moaned about the NFL’s maddening and damn near insulting policy of embracing this sequence: touchdown-commercial-kickoff-commercial. That shit is infuriating. And it’s not just the NFL. I was watching the Michigan-Duke NCAA Tournament game (Fuck Duke forever, by the way.) and there was one sequence in the first half that saw two possessions run in between commercial breaks. Two fucking possessions! That’s why all our games are 18 hours long. But soccer moves quickly, it doesn’t stop and two hours later the whole thing is over with.

Another reason for soccer’s inexorable march to the glorious fields of my heart is that the US National Team has actually risen to the ranks of “Worth a damn” after years of being just a comical reminder that soccer is most definitely not our sport. And that’s been the hook. That’s where the rootability comes into it. (Yeah, I just made up a word but fuck it, language is fluid and I will rewrite the dictionary before my day is done.) Finally, people like me had that door to the inside crack open a little bit. Finally, I could feel what everybody else around the world feels, instead of just watching it like a curious Leakey or Dian Fossey staring at wild apes. And I have to admit it was kind of intoxicating. This past World Cup was the ultimate example of that. The U.S. was actually there. Their games were important and I could feel the tension of the moment and I was hooked and I could watch it all unfold live.

And that right there is the other big reason why I finally fell for soccer. You see, the U.S. has had some success in the World Cup before. In 2002, the U.S. shocked Portugal and managed to move on in the tournament but it existed as only a rumor, a far off tale from another land because the damn game was on at, like, Never O’Clock in the morning. It was impossible to make a connection to any of it because I never saw it happen live. Therefore, I never really felt it. Instead, it was “Oh hey, that’s cool, I hope they keep winning.” But that was about it. When they eventually were knocked out by Germany in the Quarter-Finals, I remember feeling disappointed, but it didn’t really resonate because who the fuck were these guys, you know?

Still, that tournament piqued the curiosity enough so that when, eight years later, the US was ready to make another run, people were primed to fall for it. And fortuitously, this next run happened during the waking hours, with ESPN furiously peddling it to anybody who could get themselves in front of a TV. This wasn’t some rumor in the dark. No, this was something that was happening here and now and we could watch it all unfold while it was happening and we could feel it. Even after the US National Team was knocked out – which I felt just like I feel when one of the teams of my birth is knocked out – I kept watching. I knew who all the big time players were. I knew who was good, who sucked, who was just lucky to be there, etc. I was emotionally invested and suddenly, I was a soccer fan because the World Cup had effectively acted as the same construct for the US National Team as the NFL does for the Lions. Even after the Lions lose – or whoever your team might be – we keep watching because we become interested and invested in everything else that is happening in that league. It was the same way with the World Cup.

But then it ended and . . . shit. Back to square one. But instead of trying to force myself to get behind some shitty MLS team that I didn’t care about only to fade away within a couple of weeks or months, I decided I didn’t want to let it go. I wanted the real thing. I wanted to be invested year round – at least on some level. For me, my primary team will always be the US National Team because that’s what hooked me in the first place. It’s kind of a weird thing because the US National Team only plays games of consequence every four years. Everything in between is just a prelude to the real event, an exhibition game meant to remind everyone involved that eventually the games will matter once again. I love that. It makes everything feel grandiose and important. But I also don’t want to sit around for another four years waiting to care again. Sure, sure, I follow what’s happening with the team in the interim, but it’s not all that different from what I’m doing now with the Lions. It’s the offseason and I’m just hunting down news and speculating. Imagine doing that for four fucking years.

So, obviously, I need something else, something for the vast wilderness which exists in between meaningful national games (or matches or dilidyhoos or whatever the fuck the soccer fetishists demand they be called). Realizing this, I announced my intention to start rooting for an English Premier League team. (Yeah, I know the proper term is “club”, but, well . . . fuck off.) Why? Because, honestly, that seems to be the closest league that I can identify with culturally that plays at an elite level. I mean, they speak English. That may be a shockingly simplistic thing to say, vaguely xenophobic and definitely stupid, but fuck it, who cares? It’s true. It’s important to me to actually be able to, you know, follow what the fuck is happening. It doesn’t do me any good to have to read blogs via Google Translator, which would probably give me shit like this “Pierre ball net through the day won was time the next gotten they will be,” you know?

The world has shrunk in such a way that it is now possible to follow pretty much anything if you want to badly enough. I want to, but I also want to actually feel something of a connection. I don’t want to just randomly pick some team and then watch them like a curious anthropologist. I have done enough of that when it comes to soccer. I just want something simple and understandable and relatable. It might make me a terrible person if I feel like that is more achievable via an EPL team rather than some Italian team or some team from the Somali Pirates League, but I don’t give a shit. Anything else would be pretentions and far, far too precious. I mean, I would just look like a jackass (a bigger jackass anyway) if I pretended to have an emotional stake in the success or failure of some random Hungarian club. It just wouldn’t work and I would be instantly suspicious of anyone who says that it could. They are fucking lying, if not to others than at least to themselves.

It is vaguely ridiculous to be talking about shit like that when here I am trying to explain my newfound allegiance to a particular EPL club. (Yeah, it’s not exactly a secret since I have been yammering on about it on twitter and other places so chances are you already know who I ended up picking, but leave me the conceit of suspense here, alright?) After all, I am not English. I am an American. Yet, there is enough natural flow between the land of Shakespeare and my homeland that there is a cultural affinity, you know? I watch some British TV shows. They watch some American shows. We watch each other’s movies and we can have a conversation in the street without it looking like a conversation between a baboon and a donkey. (Those are some hilarious conversations, though, let me tell you . . .) We understand each other better than we understand most other people. On some level, we are in this fucked up thing called life on Earth together, inextricably linked and bound in a way that most cultures aren’t. We are Western Civilization and all that means to the both of us. It’s just the way it is. So be it. There isn’t any real use arguing about it.

And so, with all that in my mind, it came time to pick an actual club. I wanted an organic reason. I didn’t want to just pick some random club and start following them. I wanted to feel it first. And so I originally broached the subject to a collection of fellow psychotics and terrible people I like to think of as e-bros, who are fairly well versed in my various eccentricities and degeneracies and right away I was pointed in the direction of Liverpool. This was intriguing because the dude who pointed me in this direction is actually a fairly recent convert to the Church of the Lions. He is an all-around awesome dude who sometimes comments here as “Hill Heeb”, and he has loved Liverpool in that same Bound by DNA way that I love the Lions. Therefore, it seemed like kind of a natural fit, but I didn’t want to just jump into things. After all, I didn’t want to be one of those dudes who supports the best teams just because they’re the best. That shit is odious. I didn’t want to end up rooting for the EPL version of the Cowboys, you know? And the thing about Liverpool is, well, they kind of have that reputation.

And so I dithered and prevaricated (That phrase “dithered and prevaricated” was used over and over and over again in a book I recently read about the War of the Roses, to the point that it became funny and I swore I would steal it. Therefore, this is an in-joke that makes sense to exactly one person – me, and I apologize for making you read this horseshit parenthetical.) and I took the question to twitter. Right away, I heard from my good buddy Ty, who said that he was being pushed towards a particular club too, and wouldn’t you know it, that club was Liverpool. Quickly, I was bombarded by reader and Lions fan djdobbo, yet another Lions/Liverpool fan, who seduced me with stories about new hotshot Liverpool star Andy Carroll’s utter drunken degeneracy. Ty then chimed in with a little factoid that seemed to point to the whole thing being fate: it seems that he was in possession of a Liverpool hat and on the inside of said hat was a tag that said “Made in Detroit.” And just like that, my search was over. Both Ty and I committed like top college prospects to Liverpool.

That whole explanation might be stupefying and ridiculous but that’s the way it happened. That was the way it had to happen: weirdly and organically. Aside from the hat, I feel that it is fate that Liverpool was virtually the only name that was thrown my way during my search. I heard it over and over and over again. You can judge me for this, but I don’t care. I am not bandwagoning my way onto anything. I chose Liverpool because I feel like Liverpool chose me. It’s that simple.

Of course, after the fact I was denounced by my boy Joe but I expected such things. I knew there would be repercussions to throwing my support behind Liverpool, with its rich tradition and its legion of fans. But to hell with all that, I want to support a club that actually has a chance every once in a while, you know? I don’t need to suffer for the sins of some poor ass club that will never do a damn thing. I am already a Lions fan, for fuck’s sake. No one should ever judge me for this. Besides, my boy Joe? He’s a Yankees fan. Yeah, I know!

The very next day, I feel like I was given a sign that everything was as it should be when Liverpool beat Manchester United, who are basically the Cowboys/Yankees/Galactic Empire all rolled up into one hateable club. Fuck yeah. Of course, I immediately took credit for the win, but inside I felt like it was another weird sign that this was the way it was supposed to be. I also found out that one of Liverpool’s best players is Luis Suarez, who you may remember as the Uruguayan dude who fucked over Ghana in the semi-finals of the World Cup by batting the ball away from the goal line with his hand in the final moments. Everybody shit on him, but fuck it, he did whatever it took. Fuck sportsmanship. That’s my kind of dude. Also, it turns out that he is kinda awesome and he might already be my favorite player in the world, although I have also fallen in love with Andy Carroll but that’s more because of his off the field exploits.

Anyway, so there you have it. I am now a fan of the Liverpool Football Club (Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m already being assimilated and brainwashed into using their terminology, but what can I say? These are strange and terrible times and these things happen.) What does any of this have to do with the Lions? Fuck if I know. But it does have to do with the nature of fandom and being a Lions fan requires you to either be completely oblivious to such a thing so that it doesn’t destroy your soul or to be overly introspective so that you can explain the horror of it all to yourself so that it doesn’t, well, destroy your soul. So I feel like being a Lions fan put me in a unique position to understand what I was looking for so that when it found me I could embrace it. That is kind of a weird sentiment, tinged with a vaguely bullshit Zen philosophy, but it’s true. I couldn’t just pick a team. I had to let a team pick me, but I had to be open to it. And being a Lions fan allowed me to understand how to attune my fan energies in the best way so that this would happen. No, I swear I’m not high as fuck right now.

Fandom is a weird thing. When it’s true, it’s something that can’t really be explained. There are no good reasons for being a fan of a particular team. It’s just something that is. I needed to understand that if I was going to accept my fandom of any other team or club or whatever the fuck you want to call it. Being a fan of the Detroit Lions made that possible. In a weird way, I was drawn in more than one way to Liverpool by my fandom of the Lions. Some might say that this is just a fabricated excuse, meaningless and stupid. I would just say that that is just the nature of fandom. Fate, complete bullshit, call it what you want. I don’t give a shit. I’m a fan of the Lions and consequently I am a fan of the Liverpool Football Club. Go Reds.