Running Towards the Future

I have a tendency – hell, some would say that it is my whole thing here – to be melodramatic, to make everything an epic fight for our souls as fans. The other day, I wrote a whole post basically devoted to taking a hatchet to that sort of melodrama, which kind of leaves me in an odd place. Now I actually have to back that shit up. Now, instead of moaning about half a century of maddening failure, I have to focus on the here and the now, to allow this week’s game to exist in a sort of vacuum of meaning, not in terms of the season, but in terms of our entire journey as fans. That’s a hard thing for me to do. Hell, it might be impossible. After all, that journey is really what I’ve been writing about all this time. But in order to save my soul as a fan, I have to set fire to that and let it burn, lest I get sucked into the dumb waters of vicious screaming matches and dumb noise, drowned in a vile sewer of shit that just doesn’t fucking matter. The past and all that it means is always chasing us, always hunting us, and so like doomed animals, terrified and desperate, all that’s left for us to do is run, run, run, and there is nothing noble in running, nothing . . . honest. Scratch that. In a way, I suppose running is the most honest thing there is, the most naked and raw of all actions, indisguisable (my spellcheck is telling me that’s not a word, but fuck you spellcheck, I make my own words.) as anything other than cowardice. But I talked about all that the other day and so I won’t start gibbering on about that again. Too much anyway. (What’s that? Too late? Goddammit . . .)

Anyway, the point is that the honesty that is so pure in running is too ugly, too depressing and yet, how do we argue with something that inherently true? We don’t. Instead, we have to change those impulses that make us want to run. We have to change that . . . Fear.

I have written over and over (and over . . .) again about The Fear and you all know what it is. I won’t waste your time describing it you yet again. But the weird thing about The Fear is that it actually seems to increase in direct opposition to how well the season is going. If the Lions were 3-10 right now we’d all be bitching and moaning and setting fire to our pets and chugging drain cleaner before the gates of Hell, but we really wouldn’t be afraid, would we? No, we’d just be miserable and depressed. The Fear grabs a hold of your throat when you have something to lose and it squeezes and squeezes until your throat pops and you can’t breathe and pretty soon you are drowning in a pool of your own blood and bile, suffocating to death while you watch, eyes wide and stupid, while Ndamukong Suh stomps on a dude.

This is what we have to find a way to defeat or we’ll never, ever be happy. We’ll spend all of our time looking for things to be afraid of, complaining because Ndamukong Suh refuses to smile and beg our forgiveness for his perceived crimes against humanity. We’ll get angry every time . . . you know what, it’s all in yesterday’s post. Read that and then come back to me because otherwise I’m afraid I’ll end up gibbering on and repeating myself a billion times and falling into the same old trap I talked about there.

Okay . . . you still with me? Good. Anyway, The Fear has been such an integral part of our fan experience that without it – or at least without its power – it’s tough to even know what to write about. It’s freeing in a way but ironically, letting go of The Fear is also kind of terrifying. Which, I guess, just goes to show how much I am just putting on a brave face instead of truly rejecting its power, but what the hell, I’m just gibbering to myself at this point and if you have no idea what I’m talking about or where I’m going with this, don’t worry, neither do I.

I guess what I’m saying is that without all of that bullshit taking up space in my fractured brain, I’m left to focus on something that manages to be both incredibly wonderful and uniquely and infinitely more terrifying than The Fear of the past and that’s the promise and fragile beauty of the present. Right now the Lions are 8-5, heading into Oakland, and if they manage to leave with a win, they will be 9-5 and poised to grab hold of a Wild Card playoff spot that would give answer to so many of our desperate fan prayers, prayers spoken to the darkness of our own hearts in the silence of the impossible, thin whispers of Hope quivering, small and transitory, in a landscape bereft of meaning or purpose other than as a holding pen for the darkest confirmation of the horrible promises of The Fear, terrible thoughts which have eaten those fragile whispers like monstrous beasts. But now those whispers are louder, stronger, and now we can hear them actually escape our lips and now people are screaming them, and in the cacophonous roar of our hopes and dreams lies the truth, both terrifying and dangerously seductive, which is that the Lions are close and if they can just put together two more victories, they will be playing football with a chance to ring the bell at the top of the mountain and then scream into the void below, confirmation that we have made it, that we are here, and that we aren’t going anywhere.

And that, as I said, is as frightening as it is exciting because, hey, what if we don’t make it? And that’s a question that has nothing to do with the past. Well, not entirely anyway. For once, that is just a question asked about the here and the now. There is a certain sort of comfort in asking questions that only have vague answers, hidden whether good or bad in some distant future, some surreal wonderland of the mind that we don’t have to worry about in practical matters for a long time, which is what we are used to as Lions fans. But these are questions which will be answered, for good or bad, in the next couple of weeks. By Christmas morning, we will have a pretty good idea of whether or not those reckless whispers to our own hearts that we made so long ago will be made real or whether they will just be mere words, shoved back into the dusty closets of our minds.

I am getting a tad ridiculous here (a tad?) but here’s the point: we’ll know and we’ll know soon and that creates a unique kind of anxiety which is different from The Fear because at its core is wild, untamable Hope. And it is this Hope that has me a nervous wreck, bouncing of the walls of my own brain as I look down the road and see the finish line, and see, for the first time in a long time – maybe ever – that the path to that finish line is open and clear. All we have to do to get there is beat a Raiders team that seems to be falling completely apart, inspiring desperate ramblings about alcoholism from my Brown Buffalo Miguelito, and a Chargers team that has a long and hilariously ridiculous history of fucking up whenever the situation calls for it. Look, if all we have to do is beat a Raiders team on the verge of complete collapse and a team led by Norv Turner and a quarterback who always has a look on his face like he just ate a plateful of his own shit and then watched a horse cornhole his mother then goddammit, dudes and lady dudes, I think we’re actually going to do this.

A part of me just wants to breathe into a paper bag and gibber things like “But what if they don’t?” and “What if Suh eats a baby and then Sheriff Goodell has him lynched?” and “What if we’re attacked by Galactus and The Great Willie Young is still out with an injury and can’t stop him from destroying the earth before we get to watch the Lions play in an actual playoff game?” and so on and so on, but fuck all that. Now is the time to stare down that finish line with a smile forged in the hottest fires of our souls and to realize that, yes, dudes and lady dudes, this shit is happening.

Like I said, the Raiders are in full meltdown mode. They’ve been forced to turn to the decrepit arm of Carson Palmer, hoping beyond hope that he’d come back like a character in some shitty sports movie, dragging himself out of a bottle and the arms of a fresh whore so that he could find redemption and one last shot at glory. But this is not a movie. It’s real life and in this life Carson Palmer is just a broken down fuckup who won’t give you anything other than a couple of hilarious interceptions and a sad, withered smile as he realizes that his days as the Golden Boy are drowned in some Southern California hot tub along with the snarled pubic hair and shattered dreams of a USC coed and the lost career of Matt Leinart, never to return again. And you know who likes hilarious interceptions (and presumably pubic hair and USC coeds, although I’m not sure what that has to do with anything. Then again, in a perfect world, it would have something to do with everything.)? That’s right, Alphonso Smith and the Lions ball-hawking secondary.

And then there is Ndamukong Suh, the disgraced lord returning to claim what is rightfully his. You think he won’t be pissed off? You think he isn’t ready to channel all of the bullshit of the past few weeks into 60 minutes of pain? Carson Palmer, this world does not love you anymore, and all you are is a target, a human clay pigeon, floating listlessly in front of the shotgun mania of our man Suh and there will be nothing to protect you other than the embrace of oblivion.

Meanwhile, the Raiders are still probably going to be without Darren McFadden, and while Michael Bush is a good enough runner to not embarrass anyone, asking him to somehow resurrect the Raiders all by himself all while trying to run through a horde of angry Suhs is probably asking too much. In the end, all the Raiders have is Bush and the sun-dried cracked statue that is Carson Palmer. Sure, they have a couple of receivers, most notably rookie Denarius Moore, who could do some damage, but since most of the game will probably be spent watching Suh and his posse tear down the statue that is Carson Palmer like revolutionaries tearing down the statue of some decrepit old dictator, they can feel free to run all day long because without the ball in their hands, it really doesn’t matter.

But what of the Raiders defense? Well, here’s the thing: Rolando McClain is the heart of this Raiders defense. He’s a damn fine football player. When he’s not beating the shit out of childhood friends and firing guns in the air like a goddamn Iraqi freedom fighter, that is. The bad news is that somehow after being literally arrested for multiple counts of degeneracy, McClain has managed to avoid the tinfoil badge wrath of Sheriff Goodell. He played the past couple of weeks and played pretty well. The good news is that nobody else on the Raiders defense did and if there’s one team we don’t have to worry about the refs babying, it’s the Raiders. If there’s a team out there the Sheriff and his posse hate more than the Lions right now, it’s McClain and the Raiders. It’s possible that there might be in excess of 20 total penalties in this game. That will be annoying. The good news, however, is that the Raiders will probably be the team that gets the majority of them. Good. Fuck them. I’ll look forward to seeing another team get dragged down to hell by a yellow demon filled with BB’s or corn or whatever the fuck they stuff those things with so they don’t flutter in the wind like scarves being thrown by broken-hearted lovers.

The past two weeks, the Raiders defense has looked like shit. They gave up 46 to the Packers last week, which is somewhat understandable, but they gave up 34 to the Dolphins the week before and the Dolphins would have trouble scoring 34 points on a gang of witless and blind cripples. They are a ragged team that has lost its way and as much as I admire the Raiders for their history of pissing off people like the despicable Sheriff, they are in our way and so fuck them. I will salute their corpses on the way out of town.

This is it. The time we have whispered about is here. It is now. And in this place and in this time is the promise of that one thing we’ve longed for above all else: freedom. The freedom to let the past die, the freedom to believe, the freedom to live in the moment and forget everything but that wide-eyed dash to the finish line, freedom to run with a smile on our faces and joy in our hearts. Because the Lions are 8-5 and after this week they will be 9-5 and then the Chargers will come to town and then the Lions will be 10-5 and then . . . well, welcome to the future, where the past is just a word and anything and everything is possible.

Lions win.

Predicted Final Score: Lions 38, Raiders 21

Escaping the Prison of the Past

Let my people go!

At some point I feel like I stopped writing about the Lions and my own experience as a fan and started writing about Lions fans in general. I’m not entirely happy with this. I’m not entirely sure why or when it happened but I suspect it has something to do with how tightly we are collectively wound as a fanbase right now. All I know is that I kind of want it to stop. So, naturally, my way of doing this, lunatic that I am, is to write about it some more. Commence vicious groaning.

We are tightly wound largely because for the first time in a long time this season feels like it has real, meaningful stakes. It’s not just a farcical circus, like those terrible Millen years, years in which we could all just sit back, shake our heads, cry on each other’s shoulders and universally agree that everyone and everything was awful and should be burned at the stake. And it doesn’t feel like a prelude to something else, something better, like the last couple of years have been. No. This year, it feels like it matters. I’ve written a bit about this before. If this goes wrong, then . . . well, we’ll all be in the streets punching each other in the dongs and lady dongs, heaving pitchforks at dazed security guards outside of Ford Field and gibbering about Occupying the Ford Family. We can’t even deal with the idea that this could fail. Forget about the reality.

That’s why we’re wound so tight. And that’s why we’ve already begun turning on each other like vicious, feral animals even though, all things considered, the world of the Detroit Lions is a pretty sunny place right now. Sure, the candy and blowjobs machine might be acting up a bit, but things are still good and we need to remember that. It’s kind of frightening how quickly people can become spoiled, how quickly they can forget that not long ago a win – any win – was cause for wild celebration and joy in our hearts. Now, a win isn’t good enough. Now, we have to win the right way. I include myself in this. Following the Lions win over the Vikings on Sunday, I wrote a long, emoish piece stained with tears of blood and my own shame and then some people yelled at me, and hey, you know what? For the most part, they were right. I’ve gotten caught up in that tightly wound psycho circus which has affected everything this season. We’re all a little nuts and I might be the craziest one of all.

Still, I’m not going to deny my feelings. I mean, that’s part of the story right now. Things are crazy. We’re irrational, completely capable of putting things in their proper perspective and if I felt unhappy following the Vikings game, then that’s what I had to write about. Whether those feelings were appropriate or not is kind of irrelevant. That was just . . . truth. It was a statement about where we are collectively as a fanbase right now as much as it was a statement about the Lions as a team. Despite how good things have gone this season – at least on a big picture comparative scale, in which this season looks like the Garden of Eden compared to the fucking Hellraiser Pit of the Damned most of our seasons have looked like – we’re not in a good place as fans. I wish it wasn’t true, but it is, and, well, here we are.

I’m not sure if I really remember a season that has felt this contentious, this . . . angry. People are flipping out about every little thing. If it isn’t the play on the field, it’s the team’s reputation in the media. If it isn’t Matthew Stafford’s smile (or lack thereof) it’s Ndamukong Suh’s cantankerous intransigence. If it isn’t lashing out at the media, it’s lashing out at each other. Over every tiny little thing. Everybody who isn’t exactly like you is bullshit. Their opinion is part of a systemic poison that needs to be eradicated from the fanbase before the team can move forward. You have dudes running around on Twitter conducting Pogroms, ethering whole segments of the fanbase simply because they aren’t happy enough or are too happy or who boo at the wrong time or whatever. Everybody is carrying on like a goddamn angry Nazi. I’m not excluding myself from this either.

We’re just wound way, way too tightly. I saw this all coming. I did. I have talked about it off and on for a while now, but still . . . goddamn, we have become completely ridiculous. Today, everyone is collapsing onto their fainting couches because they didn’t like what Ndamukong Suh said – or didn’t say – during a radio interview. Yesterday, people were frothing at the mouth and damning each other to hell for feeling nervous at the end of the Vikings game. Before that, people were whipping themselves and each other, both bemoaning their own “betrayal” as fans by their “thuggish” team and pissing on others for saying the exact same things. We are a miserable bunch, vicious and mean, and nobody seems like they’re happy these days. Which is a shame, because, hey, this team is probably headed for the playoffs dudes and lady dudes. The fucking playoffs! Again, perspective. Perspective.

Negativity and criticism by themselves aren’t bad things. I think this is one of the things that we all need to learn and understand if we are going to move forward without completely melting down and viciously tearing each other apart. If the Lions don’t play well, it’s okay to say so. We don’t have to white knuckle it the whole time, terrified that something bad is going to happen because, hey, something bad will always happen. That’s life. To deny that is to deny reality and to deny reality is to embrace foolish insanity and ultimately, despair. Hey, look, I get it. After years of misery, after years of flailing around in the shit pits of hell, we all want Paradise. Shit, we think we’re entitled to it and anything that doesn’t jibe with that White Picket Fence picture of Paradise we all have in our minds is immediately set upon by the pack and viciously torn apart. Anything and anyone that mars that picture is immediately rejected and condemned as an Enemy of the People.

But our true enemy is delusion. Our true enemy is our inability to deal with reality. The Lions are a good team. They’re not a great team. They’re not a bad team. Really, good team might be overstating it a bit right now. They’re an okay team. They’re not the team that started 5-0 this season. But they’re not the team that’s gone 3-5 since then either. They’re a 10-6 team and that’s damn near miraculous given that only three years ago they were a 0-16 team. You know what? I take it back. The Lions are a good team. 10-6 teams by definition are good teams. Me saying they were just “okay” was just another example of me falling into that trap I just talked about. I got caught up in my own fanciful notions of what good actually means and because reality didn’t exactly match my pie in the sky expectations, I shit on that reality. It’s shameful as hell, but hey, I just did it and I can’t deny that.

But while that is shameful and vaguely pathetic, what is just as bad, if not worse, are the people who have that pie in the sky expectation and then completely discard reality when it doesn’t match that vision. These are the people who refuse to ever admit that anything is less than perfect. These are the people who publicly shame anyone who has the temerity to act like this team is anything other than the ’72 Dolphins. These are people who are clinging to their own self-delusions so fiercely that they are incapable of dealing with the real world in any meaningful or sane way.

Look, we’re all nuts. We’re Lions fans. That shit goes with the territory. It just seems like everything has become too focused on proving who’s more nuts or on arguing whose brand of nuttery is more authentic or more correct. Here’s a hint for you: none of us are. We’re all fucking lunatics, gibbering about paradise from the perspective of the perpetually damned. Of course our visions are all skewed. Of course they are all warped and cracked. We are all inmates of a wild asylum, hooting and making strange noises and flipping out while we bounce off the padded walls. We are all madmen and madwomen, driven insane by half a century of absurd failure.

In the end, the only thing we can trust is our gut instinct, that initial pang of either joy or misery that comes when we’re watching the game. Everything else is irrelevant, just dumb noise. Everything else beyond that is rationalization, an attempt to reconcile our feelings with the grand visions of our wounded brains. If anything, we have to stop trying to constantly put things into perspective. I know that sounds weird and completely contradictory to everything I have said so far, but honestly, that shit is just getting in the way. The big picture – our big picture – is so fractured, so warped, so filled with the dying echoes of a million terrible Failure Demons, that any attempt to make sense out of it is inherently doomed to fail. All we can do is try to accept now for what it is and stop savaging it – and each other – for what it isn’t. Some of us are almost looking for reasons to worry, to bitch, to complain, and that’s because we’re scared our dreams might not come true after all and that the past won’t somehow be answered by the promise of the future. And some of us refuse to ever acknowledge that there’s anything at all to worry about, to bitch about, to complain about, and that’s because we’re scared our dreams might not come true after all and that the past won’t somehow be answered by the promise of the future. In the end, we’re all coming from the same place. Whether it’s in bitching about Ndamukong Suh or in complaining because things aren’t good enough fast enough or whether it’s in denying that there’s ever anything wrong or in saying that anyone who doesn’t gush and rave like a schoolgirl about this team is a shitty fan, the root cause is the same, and that root cause is this: we’re all, every one of us, desperately trying to run from the horror of the past.

And so here’s the answer – at least I think: fuck the past. The only thing we can do is to try to let it stay there, in the past, and to accept this season for what it is. We have to stop making everything that happens about the past. It’s not fair to ourselves, to each other or to our favorite team. There is just too much weight there, too much pressure, too much insane noise, for it to ever be answered properly. If we continue to frame everything in terms of the past, like the present and the future are both nothing more than the answer to that past, then we’re all doomed to failure because in the end, that answer will be nothing more than a mirror and whatever is left of our sanity will just crumble into dust and be blown into the deepest pits of hell if we end up staring back at the reflection of our own cruel and savage past.

This season is this season. Next season is next season. And all the seasons that have come before are meaningless. That is a powerful statement to make but I think that it’s true. The past is just a prison of the mind and of the heart and of the soul. And I’m ready to escape.

Your Lucky Day in Hell

To be honest, it’s hard to know how to feel right now. Happy because the Lions won? Pissed off because both the offense and defense looked like shit for much of the game, including the entire second half? Relieved because for once we weren’t the team on the ass end of an epic ref buggering? Kinda depressed because, well, we needed to be on the giving end for a change in order to beat the fucking Vikings? All of the above? I don’t know. I just don’t fucking know. A part of me wants to be a homer and just celebrate the fact that the Lions won the damn game, and really, any other reaction at this point, given where we’ve come from, is kind of ridiculous and vaguely shameful, but there is the other part of me that spent large chunks of that game shooting laser beams out of my eyeballs and speaking in tongues, my face melting like I just looked inside the fucking Ark of the Covenant. This was not a good game. Anyone telling you that it was is either desperate to convince themselves that it was out of some need to believe in a thing called love or is outright delusional. I’m sorry to be so harsh, but . . . yeah.

The Lions won by six points. There were moments in that game when it felt like the Lions should win by 60. Yet, they only won by six. And they only won by six because they were outgained by almost 150 yards and, more specifically, they were outgained by almost 150 yards because they said fuck it and did all of the dumb little mental things which have driven me nuts all year. This is a talented football team, a damn beastly football team. It is not a sound football team. It apparently views containment as some sort of Communist plot or something, it refuses to wrap up when it tackles and it makes a million little mistakes throughout the course of the game that somehow add up to the point that they almost erase a five turnover advantage. This is not a good thing.

But still, the Lions won and the Lions won because they are an undeniably better team than the Vikings. This struck me early on – the Lions can beat bad teams now even when they are playing like shit. This is a radical departure from the normal order of things and somewhere Charles Darwin’s brain just exploded (Well, actually, his brain is rotten and crawling with maggots somewhere but honestly that’s not that different from the brains of most living people, so . . .) The Lions can fuck around and do all of the little things wrong and get away with it – mostly, anyway – against a team like the Vikings. That’s an undeniable sign of progress.

But there’s a big difference between actually winning a game like that and deserving to win like that. If we were Vikings fans, we’d probably all be howling now like we were following that atrocity in Chicago during Week 1 last year. The Lions got away with one. They survived this debacle because the refs are worthless and incompetent and so be it. But it doesn’t really leave me with a satisfied taste in my mouth, you know?

The Lions should have killed the Vikings, just fucking mauled them, but they didn’t. Not really, anyway. The Vikings mauled themselves and the Lions were there to laugh about it and dance in the endzone. In between, the Lions offense farted around and gave away drives and the defense let the Vikings slug their way down the field. The Vikings were so bad that the Lions were gifted with five turnovers and dropped three or four more gimme interceptions. And yet the Vikings almost won the fucking game. Think about THAT.

Indeed. And that’s where I am right now – happy and relieved that my team got the win in the end but kind of sad and mildly pissed off by how they got there. The truth is, is that neither team deserved to win this game. This game was a weary and ragged sigh of relief followed by a shake of the head and a shrug of the shoulders, not a leap off your couch and pump your fist and taunt the losers kind of win. I mean, okay, maybe some of you did that anyway, but you know what I mean, right? When this game ended, I actually felt a vague sense of disgust for the whole goddamn thing and then while I was watching highlights of the other games, I had to keep reminding myself that the Lions actually won. For instance, I saw that the Falcons came back to beat the Panthers and I remember thinking “Shit, they just went a game up on us,” before I remembered that the Lions actually won. It was fucking weird. It was ugly enough that even though the Lions won, it felt like they kinda lost. I’m not sure if that’s a sign of progress or of my own ungrateful need for more. Maybe both, but fuck it, I’m rambling again.

The point is this – the Lions won but they didn’t look like the team that they need to be if they want to take the next step in their evolution as a team. Maybe that’s my own impatience seeping in, but really, can you blame me? Still, while it’s nice to be able to beat up on the shitty teams, it would be even nicer to honestly beat them up without feeling like we just robbed them blind. I don’t mind slapping the shit out of the cripple in the wheelchair. I am not above such things. But it’s kind of unseemly to try to beat up that cripple only to have him swat us away and maybe ram us with his chair a few times, forcing us to retreat, and then to watch that cripple fall out of the wheelchair all by himself before running up and kicking him and acting like we just beat his ass. We didn’t. He just fell out of the goddamn chair and he and I both know that if he had working legs he would have whipped our ass.

Fortunately for us, the Vikings don’t have working legs. And so they’re the ones lying on the ground, whimpering and bitching at anyone who will listen about how unfair the world is and while it feels good – damn good – to not be the ones on the ground for a change, it’s not something that I’m reveling in either, you know? I’m just relieved and vaguely embarrassed.

I’m not sure where I’m going with all this but that’s because I still haven’t completely wrapped my head around this game. I’m sure someone will come in here and tell me I’m a bad fan for not appreciating what I have now, but hey, I’m just trying to be honest here, both with you and with myself. There is a big part of me – a giant part – which understands that my team is 8-5 and that is a miraculous light year or two or 1,000 away from where we were and this has me overjoyed. Don’t let that get away from you. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t be honest with ourselves either and recognize that, hey, this game was ugly as fuck.

There are obvious extenuating circumstances – the loss of both Suh and Nick Fairley crippled the line depth and the losses of Chris Houston and Louis Delmas critically weakened the back end of the defense – and we shouldn’t lose sight of that either. I mean, this was not the Lions at Maximum Warp Drive Fuck The World Here We Come capacity. But here’s the thing – the team that was out on that field should have been able to slap around the fucking Vikings and, well, they didn’t.

Yeah, you can frame the game a bunch of different ways. You can say that the Lions led 21-0 and that the Vikings had to scramble at the end to make it close. You can even say that the Lions let up after getting out to such a big lead, but such framings ignore what actually happened. The Vikings moved the ball on the Lions defense and the Lions offense failed to do so with anything even approaching consistency against the Vikings defense. The Lions were there to pounce on the Vikings mistakes and there is something to be said for that, but that just meant that the Lions should have won by 36. Instead they won by 6.

But again, they won and that can’t be ignored and again, I’m rambling, and going in circles, but that is because this is what my brain is doing right now. I’m confused. The Lions looked like shit. They did. You could argue this but you wouldn’t be right. Matthew Stafford was okay – not great, but okay – but the Lions offense as a whole couldn’t find a rhythm. If the Lions would have played a half-decent team today they would have lost by double digits. I don’t think this is all that outrageous, or even arguable to be honest with you. Had they played the Falcons again or the 49ers, they would have gotten their asses kicked. Again, there are some extenuating circumstances, but fuck extenuating circumstances. Right now, the Lions are not a good football team and if it makes me a bad fan to admit that to myself then so be it.

I apologize. That is more passive aggressive than I wanted it to be. I’m just in a confused place right now. Well, not really. I know how I feel. The problem is that, right now, there is a big difference between how I actually feel and how I think I’m supposed to feel. Hell, maybe that doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know. But it makes sense to me and in this strange and fucked up world, that’s something, you know?

This has all been a rambling mess and I apologize. Sometimes these things just don’t go like you want them to, which, I suppose, is a fitting metaphor in itself for what went down today. There is no flow to this piece. None at all. Just like there wasn’t any flow to today’s game. Again, I suppose that’s appropriate. I could try to fix it but that would be dishonest of me and wouldn’t do any of us any favors at all. It is what it is and it is up to us all to come to terms with that.

But since there is already no flow to this goddamn thing, I guess maybe I’ll just take this moment to say something we all can agree on: fuck you, Jared Allen. Just . . . fuck you, buddy. I understand that he’s basically doing the pro wrestling equivalent of jawjacking with the fans outside of the ring and strutting in front of retards so that they’ll boo him, and hey, he got me, but still, all that said, fuck him. Your team is 2-11, your old coach basically called you a soft bitch in the press and your fake bullshit is transparent and ridiculous. Once again, I turn to the words of my good friend Raven Mack, who had this to say about Jared Allen once upon a time, during one of our many insanity induced bouts of hysterical rambling (I think it was when we were doing our Armchair Linebacker All-Pro Team over the summer, but who can say for sure?):

“Jared Allen puts on this image of being a crazy redneck weirdo dude, and you would think he'd be the obvious choice for a team like this. But I don't know, something doesn't jibe with that dude. It all seems very contrived, like he's a cast member on MTV's Real World Minneapolis or something, not a for-real crazy ass redneck type who would tattoo a giant catfish eating a naked woman on his forearm saying BOTTOM FEEDER in old English letters. He does purposely choose the number 69, which is a sign that maybe he's for-real, but I don't know. I just don't trust those beady eyes of his. They're not beady in a "let's push the couch in front of the door because we've been up for four days and I'm pretty sure I hear the cops outside because those motherfuckers know about that girl in Henderson City last month" type beady eyes that make sense because you've been there; it's that shifty beady eyes of a guy who buys canning jars at Target to have a "moonshine party" where you really are just drinking vodka or gin, the beady little eyes of a used car dealer, not a meth dealer. Meth dealers do not lie to you - in fact, they are brutally honest. Used car dealers are fucking scum, even the good ones you went to high school with. So that's why I chose John Abraham, because we don't need a guy like Jared Allen around.”

And there you have it.

But I’m not finished. Oh no. An extra special helping of Fuck You to that asshole Thom Brennaman. First of all . . . “Thom”??? It’s either Tom or Thomas. Thom makes it sound like your parents had a lisp and confused the doctors. Okay, that cheap shot out of the way, fuck you, Thom, for sounding oh so eager to get on your Joe Buck deluxe model high horse and sermonize about the Lions and their fiendish, ghoulish thug ways. When the Lions were called for a lame personal foul following an interception in the third quarter, when Christian Ponder got bounced around, Thom practically came on air. It was ridiculous. The motherfucker probably had his pants around his ankles, sweat dripping from his forehead, an ugly erection in one hand, his other hand grasping for Brian Billick’s throat (I’m making an educated guess and assuming that Thom Brennaman is into breath play. Why not?), his voice all husky and filled with smoky sex and half-mad lust when he rasped “Finaaaaaaaaaalllllly” like he had been waiting all that time in the booth just for the opportunity to bust a moral nut in outrage. Fuck him. People like him are part of the problem. They make it harder for the Lions to get taken seriously or to be treated fairly by the officials. He is so obsessed with perpetuating a storyline that he lets it override everything else happening. The Lions jump offsides once and the motherfucker is carrying on like they just got caught taking a hatchet to Sheriff Goodell’s poor old mother. You could practically see him shaking his head, all paternalistic and dickish. It was shameful and it made the game a shittier experience for me, the fan. Fuck him and fuck everyone like him.

Okay, where was I before I jumped into cursing people out? I don’t know. All I can think is that the Lions were good, bad, lucky, unlucky and everything in between today. This game was both awesome and it really, really sucked. What do you say after that? How do you try to make sense out of it without just making a dumb mess? Well, if this shitty post is any indication, you don’t. Instead, you just do what I did after the game and you just sort of shake your head, you shrug and you move on. The Lions won. It wasn’t particularly satisfying to watch, but they won. This is a good thing. I suppose satisfaction will have to wait, but what the hell, we’re used to waiting. Blah blah blah . . . fuck it. I don’t know what to say. Fuck it. I suppose that’s all you can say. At least we didn’t lose. And hopefully, next week we’ll get both a win and blessed satisfaction. Until then . . . Jesus, this post sucks. Wait, am I still on the goddamn air? What do you mean I can’t say goddamn on the air? This is bullsh . . .