The Great Willie Young Beyond Thunderdome: The Battle of Oakland

After sacking Baltimore, General Jim Schwartz led his troops on an exhausting overland trek to the West Coast, marauding through the heartland, burning and pillaging as they marched, like a Napoleonic army on PCP.  They would have returned to Detroit but the General received a phone call from the Mayor informing him that agents representing the War Crimes Tribunal had gathered outside of Castle Ford, awaiting the Lion army return, where they would have arrested several of the General’s best men for crimes against humanity, especially Private Fairley for his baby eating rampage.  The General asked the Mayor what they should do and the Mayor responded “Fuck if I know, Jim.  Go fuck up Oakland.  Those motherfuckers hid a goddamn vampire named Al for over a hundred years.  ‘Bout time they get what was comin’ to them.  Oh, and thanks for the pants, Jim.  You didn’t have to mail them first class, but fuck am I glad to have ‘em.  They a little tight in the dick region, Jimmy, but hell, good luck findin’ me a pair of pants that ain’t.”  And then he laughed and hung up the phone and so the General gathered his men and set off for Oakland.

It would be a hard fight.  The General was under no delusions there.  The Kingdom of Oakland was like a scene out of Mad Max.  Its people were said by some to all be vicious hooligans and reprobates, animals really, who feasted upon the corpses of their own dead and were rumored to drink the blood of their own children and howl at the moon, drunk on their own degeneracy, monsters devoid of morality, swept up in their own profane perversion of life.  Others said they were just typical Californians. 

But the General surveyed his army and knew that if any group of scum were capable of outdoing those vile Oaklanders when it came to the dark arts it was his group of warriors.  But tragedy struck somewhere around Iowa when agents representing the War Crimes Tribunal snuck into the camp, put a black bag over Lieutenant Delmas’ head and dragged him away like an animal, accusing him of being a voodoo priest and of violating no less than 168 different international health codes for what he did with those chickens and goats.  Incensed, the men wanted to go after Delmas, rescue him and butcher the War Crimes Tribunal but the General explained that that probably wouldn’t help their cause unless, of course, the War Crimes Tribunal were fans of irony.  This was lost on most of the men and a few of them took off after Delmas anyway.  This left the Lion army shorthanded and the men were never seen again.  It is rumored that they are currently being held in a detention camp somewhere in the Alps, but until The Great Willie Young returns either with more information, the rescued men themselves or the bloody pelts of their captors, no more can be said at this time.

And so after that unfortunate bout of attrition, the men kept up their brutal march.  Private Backus was tricked in Nebraska by a cruel farmer into making love to his prize sow and the resulting paternity suit bogged the army down for another several days.  While they were stuck in that depressing land, Lord Suh went AWOL.  A price was put on his head but Corporal Gun eventually found him in a Lincoln whorehouse, and was stunned to find that Lord Suh was attending to no less than 78 bastards he had spawned during his training days in the Nebraska wasteland.  Corporal Gun was a kind man beneath his gruff surface and rather than pistol whipping Lord Suh, as was the customary punishment for desertion, he merely gave each of the bastards ten dollars each out of the army’s petty cash and then escorted Lord Suh back to camp in leg irons.  Lord Suh then broke his chains, flipped a Chevrolet and punched a farmer’s wife before Corporal Gun soothed the rogue Lord with promises of both glory and blood in the coming Oakland campaign.

Once that was all sorted out, the army crossed the Rocky Mountains, losing several more men to an unfortunate bout with cannibalism.  When informed of their horrible act, the General was dumbfounded, saying only “But it’s the middle of summer, no one was trapped . . .”  The offending men were executed and flung from the top of Pike’s Peak.  This understandably shook the army’s morale, but still they soldiered on, stopping in Denver to run whores and sack that mountain hamlet.  Sergeant Tulloch even entertained the rest of the men by throwing a saddle on a conquered John Elway and riding him up and down the city’s main street while the Denver citizens watched from their cages, weeping and begging Tulloch to spare Elway’s life.  But then Elway threw a shoe, was hobbled, and Tulloch had no choice but to slit the poor beast’s throat in front of his own children. 

Afterward, the team made a concerted effort to keep it together until they reached Oakland.  Unfortunately, several of the men were set upon by Mormon zealots in the Utah desert and were converted to the faith.  They simply could not resist the promise of countless servile wives and the General had no choice but to watch with disgust as they settled down amongst the natives.  After that, the army had to pass through Las Vegas.  Naturally, ¾ of the men were lost either to social disease or to gambling debts, and by the time the Lion army stumbled out of the desert and into California, they had been badly reduced and the remaining men were both exhausted and disillusioned.

To make matters worse, at the border the army was set upon by agents of the War Crimes Tribunal, who had finally caught up with the army thanks to its repeated forays into degeneracy.  A sort of running battle was fought between the army and the Tribunal all the way to the Oakland borders.  There, amidst heavy fighting, several of the Lion army’s most promising officers were abducted by the Tribunal, including Lord Suh, Field Marshall Snake Stafford and half of what remained of the Lion army’s defensive perimeter. 

And so it was with that as the backdrop that a ragtag group of survivors, bloodied, exhausted and half naked, marched on the walls of Oakland.  The people of Oakland met the charge by flinging their own feces and the heads of their own pets at the army.  And still the men fought on.  By now The Great Willie Young had joined the army once again after spending time in China dealing with family business.  And with him leading the charge, the men broke through the Oakland walls and began to savage the people.  Private Fairley, who had somehow avoided the War Crimes Tribunal, was last seen riding the same police horse he had stolen in Baltimore – and my God, that horse had become something more akin to some sort of bear from hell by the time they reached Oakland, and it was even said that Private Fairley fed the animal a diet consisting of baby left-overs, various prisoners from the army’s previous campaigns, steroids and the prostitutes the army had broken, oh and apples because horses love apples – marauding through the streets, skewering children and eating them raw while their mothers wept horrified tears and cried out in terror.  The General has reportedly been mulling turning Private Fairley over to the War Crimes Tribunal himself because, goddamn man, enough is enough, but until they find the degenerate, there is little he can do.  Besides, Private Fairley could implicate the General in the grisly demise of John Harbaugh and so I’m afraid that they’re all in it together, for better or worse.

And so Oakland began to burn, the same way that Baltimore had burned.  But in a cruel and shocking twist, it seemed that the people of Oakland had anticipated what was to come and had imported a secret weapon, a crackhead from Ohio named Pryor, a terrible beast who had been raised in the rust covered hellfires of that savage land.  That animal Pryor flummoxed the Lion army by slaughtering his own people and stacking their corpses in an impenetrable wall in the heart of the city.  And from atop this corpse wall, Pryor rained down his own radioactive feces on the Lion army, burning the men like acid.  The men wailed in pain and were forced to pull back while that ogre Pryor laughed and ordered more Oakland bodies stacked around the wall’s base.  The Oakland people wept with fear and recognized their terrible mistake – putting the city in the hands of an Ohio barbarian was worse than the worst fate that the Lion army could ever deal to them – and they tried to fight back by pulling the stake from the heart of the vampire Al Davis.

This bout of foolishness only worsened their plight as Vampire Al then began devouring the Oakland people who, savage as they were, were in way over their heads here.  This then pulled The Great Willie Young away from the terrible battle, as he was forced to engage Vampire Al in single combat.  With the Great One busy, the Lion army’s depleted reserves were slaughtered by Pryor’s vile counter-offensive.  Private Wendling was last seen, flesh burning from his body, trying valiantly to climb the corpse wall before Pryor unleashed a terrible weapon – a cluster bomb which when detonated released the stench of a million poop filled Ohio coolers.  The smell was overwhelming and powerful, a piece of dirty chemical warfare that would horrify even Saddam Hussein.  Both the Lion army’s reserves and the people of Oakland withered under the stink bomb, and as their flesh melted and their eyeballs burst, their brains cooked and their hearts seized, Pryor stood like a fell beast atop the corpse wall and laughed the laugh of the truly corrupt of spirit. 

Meanwhile, The Great Willie Young fought valiantly against Vampire Al Davis, slaying the beast over and over and over again.  And yet, whenever the monster fell, he would arise again and The Great Willie Young was forced to battle him all over again.  At one point, The Great One vomited when the monster’s rotting flesh peeled off of its body, revealing cankerous sores.  And yet he battled on for that is what heroes do and eventually he slay the terrible Vampire Al Davis, set the corpse of the beast on fire and then, in one last heroic act, gathered up the remains and dove deep into the Pacific Ocean, to deliver Vampire Al to the bottom of the Marianas Trench because he didn’t know what else to do and that is how they dealt with the evil robots at the end of Transformers. 

But without The Great Willie Young, the remains of the Lion army didn’t have a chance.  They fought valiantly that day and eventually Oakland and the surrounding Bay Area was left in ruins.  It is even said that the General stepped away from the battle and found Jim Harbaugh’s house and shit in his mailbox.  He knew that the battle was lost and figured, hey, why not?

With the General busy defiling the Harbaugh mailbox, Corporal Gun was left to organize the men into a fighting retreat.  The idea of surrender sickened him, especially to the likes of that Ohioan mercenary beast Pryor, but the Corporal loved his men and he couldn’t stand to hear their dying wails as they tried to climb the corpse wall only to be inundated with Pryor’s acidic hell-juices.  And so Corporal Gun ordered his men to fall back and with a grim smile, he stripped himself naked and charged the corpse wall himself.  He climbed and he climbed, gritting his teeth both against the stench and the damage wrought by Pryor’s acid-piss.  Miraculously he reached the top and there, it is said, was fought a mighty battle between good and evil.  The young Ohioan troll was said to know fear in that moment as he was beat about the head by the sword-hilt of the grizzled old Corporal.  They fought and they fought and they fought atop that terrible corpse wall as the sun sank and then rose again, although you wouldn’t be able to tell for the skies had been darkened by the smokefire and the chaos of war.  Eventually, the sky began to clear and the men pointed and cheered as The Great Willie Young appeared, blazing like a beacon fire, a bolt of heavenly lightning which vaporized all the hell-soot unleashed by Pryor.  Some even say that in that moment it was revealed that The Great Willie Young and the sun were one and the same, and that every time you enjoy a sunny day, you are merely enjoying the reflected joy of The Great Willie Young, who shines so that we may all might live, but that is still just a rumor.  Then again, the movement already has priests and a growing following and the worship of both the sun and The Great Willie Young has grown by 178% since I started writing this paragraph, so who knows?  By the time I am finished it just might be the official state religion, much like it was in Ancient Egypt.

Anyway, religious discussion aside, when The Great Willie Young appeared and the sky cleared and he shown upon the world again, it is said that Pryor burrowed beneath the corpse wall, insulating him from the light which burned his Ohioan flesh, and that he now lives, plotting his revenge from a small pocket in that very same wall, surrounded by the rotting flesh of thousands of dead Oaklanders.  Someday, the beast will have his reckoning, and someday The Great Willie Young will stand above him and pronounce his sentence as he dispenses his immortal justice but that day will have to wait, for when the General returned from defiling the Harbaugh mailbox, he wept at the state of his ragged army and issued an immediate pullback to Tijuana, where it is said the Lion army rests and whores and waits and whores and prepares and whores and plans its mighty comeback.  For there is much to be done – revenge against Pryor, a brutal battle with the War Crimes Tribunal (by the way, it is rumored that this mysterious Tribunal is none other than the creation of the Lion army’s sworn enemy, Sheriff Goodell, and that it is headed by none other than the Lizard Man Pereira, which makes his escape from the Battle of Baltimore all that more tragic.) and the upcoming campaign against the army of Buffalo, a meager force that nonetheless is said to be preparing to march on Detroit as we speak.  In fact, it is said that Mayor Bing has gone so far as to trade his new pair of pants in so he could afford to buy more minutes for his cell just so he could call the General and warn him of the new threat.  The Tragedy of the Mayor’s Pants knows no end it would seem.

And so the battle of Oakland ended in misery and heartache for all involved.  All of Northern California lies in ruins and half of the Lion army is either in custody or missing in action.  But the Lion army shall return and when it does, led by The Great Willie Young, the rest of the football world will pay for the actions of that degenerate Pryor, the War Crimes Tribunal and those tantalizing Mormons who led so many of our boys astray in the Utah desert, and when they do I shall be here, a humble chronicler of Truth, and I hope you will gather before me to hear more Tales of the great Lion Army and of The Great Willie Young.  Good night and Vaya Con Dios.

The Battle of Baltimore

[The following came to me in a fever dream, a dream which lasted an entire week, which, uh, explains why this is up so late.  Anyway, I fell asleep shortly after the Lions game against the Browns, and a week later I awoke, drenched in sweat, having felt like I aged 100 years.  Sure, I tweeted during that time and also communicated with a few of you via e-mail and even killed a man in a bar fight using only my mind but I am a versatile creature and these activities only required .0001% of my brain.  The majority of my brain however, was dialed into what was referred to me by my dream guide, a homely looking old Italian man who called himself Dirty Virge, as The Truth.  The visions shown to me were both exhilarating and terrifying, filled with blood, sweat, semen, dead bodies and even the sight of a naked Nick Fairley riding a horse through the streets of Baltimore, but I’m getting ahead of myself.  Anyway, when I awoke, I furiously tried to gather those stray visions into something coherent, and the result is this . . .]

Prologue:

Just before dusk in mid-August, General Jim Schwartz attended a meeting requested by the Mayor, Dave Bing.  The General thought the meeting was just a formality, the latest in a long line of celebratory fetes congratulating him for his heroic defense of the Michigan homeland from those vile Ohioan fiends, but when he arrived the General found the Mayor sitting behind his desk, head in hands underneath a single flickering lightbulb.  It was clear the old fool had been weeping and immediately the General steeled himself for the call of duty.

The Mayor released a ragged sigh when he saw the General enter his cramped, shadowy office and he motioned for the man who had saved his ass more than once to sit down across from him.  “Jim,” he told him, wiping away a stray tear, “we got a motherfuckin’ problem.”  The General just nodded his head.  When didn’t they have a problem?  “You hear about these motherfuckers from Baltimore, all callin’ themselves Murder City?  What, just ‘cause they get a fancy show on the HBO, they think they know thing one ‘bout Murder?” 

The General sighed.  So this was how it was going to be.  Baltimore was where he was from.  It was in his blood.  It was where he had learned to play human chess, where he learned to understand the value of a life.  But Detroit was his home now.  It had taken him in, had promoted him to the highest ranks, and had trusted him with her defense.  And besides, Baltimore may have taught him about the value of a life but Detroit taught The General all about the value of taking a life.  Yes, Baltimore was a hard land, but he knew his old friends were mere babies, clad and coddled in sheep’s wool compared to the steel men of Detroit.

“Jim, I know you tired.  I know you got men in and outta every whorehouse in the city, but goddammit, man, if we don’t stand up for ourselves, what the fuck we got left?”  The Mayor rose from his seat and pounded his desk.  It was then that The General noticed The Mayor wasn’t wearing any pants.

“I mean, goddammit Jimmy, all we got is our reputation.  And ain’t no soft-ass motherfucker from Baltimore gonna take that shit away from us.  Fuck Baltimore, Jimmy.  Fuck ‘em.”

The General tried not to look directly at the Mayor, especially since the man’s underwear was as ragged as the rest of him, and the General could already see the Mayor’s python trying to wriggle its way free.  “Uh, Mr. Mayor, you are aware you aren’t wearing any pants, right?”

The Mayor slammed a fist.  “You goddamn right I’m aware I ain’t got no motherfuckin’ drawers on!  And you know why I ain’t got no drawers, Jimmy?”

The General just shook his head.

“I ain’t got no motherfuckin’ drawers ‘cause I had to sell ‘em just to buy ammo to hunt down those motherfuckin’ coyotes been gettin’ into folks’ garbage on the edge of town!” the Mayor screamed.  “Now you tell me if we can afford to sit here and take the insults of those cocksuckers from Baltimore, Jimmy.  You tell me!”

The General couldn’t, and with that he knew what he had to do.  He gave the Mayor a curt nod and left the maniac to his own despair.  After leaving his office he placed a single phone call.  “Corporal Gun?  It’s the General.  Gather the boys.  Tell ‘em ‘We ride.’”

The Battle for Baltimore

The men staggered into Maryland, hung over and dripping with cheap sex.  Violence was in the air but then again, with this gang, violence was always in the air.  The men were in no condition for the serious fight which lay ahead – the General may not have belonged to Baltimore anymore but he harbored no illusions either, he knew Baltimore would bring the fight – and the General cursed himself for allowing the men to pillage the Ohio countryside on their march to Baltimore.  Sure it had been satisfying seeing the rust covered villages of Ohio burn under a hell sun and yeah, the men had made a fortune selling Ohio slaves to greedy Pennsylvanian pimps, but the men had had too much fun.  Hell, Private Fairley even ate a baby outside of Youngstown and then slapped the brat’s crying mother when she protested.  Sure, the “woman” looked more like a mutilated hill troll but baby eating was pushing things just a little too far.  The General knew he’d have to have a talk with Private Fairley.  He just hoped the degenerate understood English.

But whatever worries the General may have had about his men’s willingness to fight was obliterated when Baltimore sent a weird emissary doing a bizarre dance to the ranks to parley.  The man spoke in strange tongues and the men had no choice but to take it as an insult.  They grabbed the emissary and tarred and feathered him and sent him back to the city riding an ass backwards, gibbering about dirty birds.  The last thing the emissary said before he was lost to distance was “My General, the noble John Harbaugh, will hear of this madness!”

At that, General Schwartz’s ears pricked up and his blood began to surge through his body.  His pulse quickened and his dick grew hard, as it often did before the killing began.  Harbaugh.  Heh.  The General spit on the ground.  He knew the man.  Oh yes.  After all, Jim Harbaugh, the brother of this John Harbaugh, was the General’s mortal enemy.  No one could ever forget the two of them clashing in single combat before the gates of hell while their men cheered them on.  If it wasn’t for the intervention of The Great Willie Young, The General and the fiend Harbaugh, a turncoat who spurned his Michigan roots for the cheap sodomy and lurid hedonism of San Francisco, might have killed one another.  But now, just the name was enough to get the General’s juices flowing.  Harbaugh.  The General wanted blood.

And so he appealed to the men, men who were already alive with their own bloodlust following the emissary’s fateful visit.  The General explained to them that Baltimore was out to take something away from them.  It was out to take their pride.  It was out to take their women and fuck their mothers.  At this, Lord Suh broke from the ranks and made a single mad charge on the walls of Baltimore.  He was riddled with arrows but yet he kept charging until finally he was lost behind the walls.  Even the General was shocked and for a moment the men fell silent before Snake Stafford, the team’s Field Marshall, sauntered from his tent.  The Snake was always cool, always calm, and although he enjoyed the fruits of his labor perhaps even more than the others, he was also more refined, and by that I mean he preferred to fuck his women one at a time, in the comfort of his own tent rather than out in the open, rolling around in the blood of the fallen and the guts of slain horses like some of the men preferred.  Of course, this always meant that there was a line a mile long outside of Snake’s tent, which is how he earned the nickname, as the line often snaked its way through the entire camp.  Still, the Field Marshall was a young man of boundless energy and he commanded the respect of the entire army.  And so when he appeared, the men all grew silent and listened.  “Well boys,” he said “I don’t know about you, but I’m not about to leave one of our own behind those walls.  Let’s say we go and give Lord Suh a helping hand.”  And with that, the men all roared and charged en masse.

The fighting was indeed fierce that day.  At first the effects of the men’s hangover was a problem, as Baltimore sent a wave of crackheads at them, each one buzzing like a disease ridden mosquito, offering to suck the dick of any Lion who would give them a thin silver piece.  And a few of the men, still drunk on sex, succumbed.  Private Logan, a little man, had his penis bitten right off by such a fiendish Baltimore crackhead, and the site of him screaming as blood poured from his groin was enough to make the men buckle down.  The fields ran red with the blood of Baltimore crackheads that day, and as punishment for such a vile offensive, Field Marshall Snake Stafford called upon his friend, a demigod from another realm simply known as St. Calvin to ride down from the heavens aboard a sixteen foot tall horse, and assail the city walls with him.  The two of them, along with their young apprentice, Private Titus, singlehandedly breached the Baltimore defenses and opened the way for the rest of the army to sack the city.  What followed was sheer mayhem.

The Baltimore General, Harbaugh, hid like a coward in the bowels of the city once he heard that General Schwartz was coming for him, and he sent wave after wave of his best men – degenerates and freaks all – to try to chop down General Schwartz and his army.  But one by one, the Baltimore defenders were mutilated.  Their own Field Marshall, an inept coward by the name of Flacco, pissed himself and tried to hide but was caught  and beheaded by Private Fairley, who in his frenzy of bloodlust, stripped himself of all clothing and then stole a police horse and rode through the city, naked, howling and butchering every man, woman and child he saw.  A toddler tried to run from him but its stubby legs couldn’t move fast enough and Private Fairley speared the tyke and held him up like a rabbit on a spit, gibbering and frothing at the mouth about having found that night’s dinner.  The site terrified and unnerved the people of Baltimore, who immediately sued for peace. 

But the General knew that he had to send a message.  Sure, he didn’t enjoy destroying his own hometown, but he had a duty to perform and it was time to end this Harbaugh nonsense once and for all.  And so the General ordered his men to raze the city, and surrounded by a few of his most brutal and merciless troops, he entered the city.  A part of him wanted to weep, as the smell of burning flesh and the sound of terrified wailing met him when he passed the city gates, but he rejected that part of him as the soft bleating of a child.  He then hardened his heart and ordered his men to kill every last living thing that crossed their path.  And so they did.

And still the cowards of Baltimore wept and offered surrender.  The Lion army laughed and forced the cowards to do unspeakable things.  They made Lieutenant Lewis, a man of great notoriety who had once knifed a man in the streets of Miami just for looking at him, march through the streets naked with his penis tucked between his legs.  They then poured boiling water on him and placed him in a catapult.  They then flung him to the tower in which General Harbaugh was hiding and laughed as he made a sickening splat against the walls.  That was but one of the atrocities committed on that dreadful day, but what is a simple atrocity compared to the slight of a city’s pride?  Baltimore dared to bow up to mighty Detroit and now it suffered the consequences. 

As the city burned and its people wept and died, its cowardly General Harbaugh called for a full retreat, hoping to barricade himself and his best men behind impenetrable walls.  But General Schwartz had other ideas, and it was then that he called on his best man, his secret weapon, the legendary one himself, The Great Willie Young, who was currently splitting time between observing the battle and fighting The Battle of Lepanto in a different time and place (don’t question the ability of The Great Willie Young to exist simultaneously in more than one place and time.)  The Great Willie Young excused himself from The Battle of Lepanto for a moment and appeared like a bolt of lightning on the Baltimore horizon.  The people – or what was left of them anyway – dropped to their knees and prostrated themselves before his magnificence.  The only holdout was one lone stubborn old lady, who spat in the direction of the great one and vowed to never give into him.  It turned out that she was the great, great, great granddaughter of a man named Beauregard, who The Great Willie Young had once crushed during his time in the Louisiana Bayou.  The Great Willie Young recognized the scent of her foul blood immediately and charged the retreating Baltimore line.  He destroyed them effortlessly, disemboweling the weak-willed fools, and then strangled them each with their own intestines.  The old lady pissed herself but still she refused to bow to the great one.  She was 95 years old and her grandchildren were watching, but The Great Willie Young booted that old bitch in the stomach and then laughed as she fell to the ground, vomiting.  He then slapped the grandchildren around, caged them with a rabid gopher and then dropped the lot of them into the Baltimore Harbor.  This was no time and no place for mercy, for they carried an evil seed and above all, The Great Willie Young was a force of pure good.

And so the city of Baltimore fell.  The men later found Lord Suh ensconced in a whorehouse, covered in blood, being pleasured by no less than eight different ladies who he immediately made his wives, as was his right according to Leviticus.  He had thousands of wives across the country and he would never see these harlots again but they sucked a mean dick and that was enough for him to grant them his protection.  The men laughed when they found the Lord Suh and spent the rest of the night with him and his whores. 

But the General still was not satisfied.  He broke down the doors of Harbaugh’s stronghold and found the so-called man in there, whimpering, surrounded by a scaly advisor, a hunched man who spoke with a forked tongue which flicked back and forth, betraying his lizard man roots.  The General became furious for he knew right away who this inhuman monster was – it was none other than Sheriff Goodell’s hatchet man, that lizard son of a bitch known only as Pereira.  The Sheriff and Pereira had long had it out for General Schwartz and his men and so it came as no surprise that they would be behind this fiendish villainy.  After all, the Harbaugh men were too simple.  And so the General ordered the men he had with him to chase the Lizard Man Pereira down and bring him to justice but the fiend managed to wriggle free and it is said that a man – or a humanoid of some form – fitting his description could be seen slithering from the Baltimore sewers, accompanied by a sycophant named Brennaman, the Sheriff’s Minister of Propaganda.  These were ill-tidings to be sure, but they belong to another story which will be told in full at a later time.

But for now, the General stood alone before the quivering Harbaugh, who offered to suck the General’s dick but the General just slapped him senseless.  It was then that Private Fairley burst through the doors, naked, astride that terrible horse, a horse which, let me tell you, had seen some fuckin’ things in the short time since it had been abducted by Fairley.  A half-eaten child rested on the end of a spear and General Schwartz made a mental note to get the Private some help when they returned home.  But for now, the General was glad to have his most degenerate soldier with him.  He looked at Private Fairley, who just stared back with wild eyes and then he pointed at the quivering Harbaugh.  Private Fairley smiled a sick, fucked up smile and climbed from his horse.   He stood over Harbaugh and said, simply, “Now we gonna have us some fun.” 

The General nodded, satisfied, and turned away.  He didn’t need to witness this.  To know that it was done was enough.  After, he would return for Harbaugh’s head, which he would place in a burlap sack and mail to his brother, his mortal enemy, as a message that General Schwartz and his Lions weren’t fucking around and that soon, those San Francisco sodomites would get their reckoning.  But for now, Baltimore was conquered, and that was enough.  The General would give the men leave to pillage the city for another day or two and then they’d make the march back home.  He only hoped that when he arrived that Mayor Bing had found some new pants. 

“Wait . . .” the General said, before Fairley could get to it.  Private Fairley turned around with a grunt.  Harbaugh looked up, tears in his eyes and began thanking the General for his mercy, but General Schwartz just smiled.  He turned to Fairley and said, “Make sure you leave me his pants.  I know a man in need of a good pair of slacks.”  And with that, my fever dream and the Battle of Baltimore came to an end.  May God have mercy on all of our souls.

The Adventures of The Great Willie Young: The Battle of Castle Ford

 Invaders from Ohio

The chronicles will say that the Detroit Lions lost to the Cleveland Browns on the tenth of August in the Year Of Our Lord 2012 (27 AW (After Willie) ) and history will claim it as a mere footnote, a quiet preseason game, the first of the year, a mere prelude to the Lions magical Super Bowl winning season of 2012, but as usual history is full of shit (not about the Super Bowl part – hopefully anyway) and the chronicles will be written by heretics and vicious sex freaks who spend all their time furiously jacking off to grotesque porn and beating each other with wooden paddles in steamy saunas, wearing masks and worshipping goat gods with monstrous erections, and who therefore miss the subtle buds of truth which flower, fragile yet perfect, in the cracks of time.  And so, as usual, it falls upon me, a lone prophet, drowning in an ocean of the obscene and the false, to swim to the surface and deliver unto you all the Truth.  Though a delicate bud, a crushed flower smelling of regret and what might have been, a single pedal shall be plucked from the . . .

[At this point, Neil’s friends staged an intervention for him and took away his ether and urged him to get on with it.  One of them even slapped him, the vicious cur, and told him to stick to the facts and stop gibbering about flowers.  Neil wept and reached for the ether and upon finding it empty burned the building down.  After a month in rehab (don’t ask how a month went by when the game just ended or you will melt your own brain), he returned, eyes wide, shining with the Truth, and proceeded to tell this tale, the tale of how The Great Willie Young saved the city of Detroit, the state of Michigan and all of its noble inhabitants.  No . . . he found the ether again!  Goddammit, someone tackle him!  Someone . . .]

The peoples of Michigan and Ohio have always hated one another.  This is an undeniable truth.  They have fought wars and they have viciously slandered one another whenever the mood takes them, and it takes them often.  But after more than a century and a half of rancor and bloodshed, one beautiful being decided it was time for a Great Reckoning, and this . . . this is his tale.

An ugly haze drifted across Lake Erie and with it came a terrible stench.  It sickened the people of Michigan and as they vomited they wept for they knew that terrible beasts approached.  The scent was unmistakable, the smell of failure, rust and feces, the smell of Ohio.

Mayor Bing put down his crack-pipe and made a frantic phone call to his top general, a weary and underappreciated military genius, tasked with leading a group of soldiers who spent their down-time getting shitfaced and wandering in and out of the city’s jails.  This general went by the singular name Schwartz and when he received the phone call from the Mayor, he was able to interpret the Mayor’s cracked gibberish and rushed to the window of the Lake Erie fortress he was tasked with defending.  His jaw set and a grim hatred took his heart as he witnessed the boats sailing through the haze, adorned with shit-stained banners depicting scenes from Ohio’s history – a man pooping in a cooler in a parking lot, a shameful looking chap furtively masturbating in a library, and several others too grotesque to describe here.  As the ships neared, General Schwartz peered through the haze and sneered with disgust.  Already he could see the vile charlatans, the cousin fuckers and the obscene orc-like beasts that passed for women in Ohio as they cavorted and mated like beasts under the sun.  It was too late to stop them from landing but by God, General Schwartz would not let them defile the land and the people he was charged with protecting.

Immediately, the General rallied his troops, dragging some out of taverns and whorehouses.  They were half-drunk to a man and smelled of cheap sex and old blood.  The soldier named Suh was found shirtless, pissing on a corpse so badly mauled that the only thing that identified it was a cheap tin badge that read “Sheriff Goo . . .”  Schwartz wasn’t interested in Sheriff Goo though.  He knew his boys specialized in rough trade but when it came time to fight, they were always ready.  Songs would never be sung about them in church but that was appropriate in some strange and savage way because the things that they did were not fit for a house of God.  They were bedeviled men, vagrants and reprobates whose existence allowed the sheep who lived behind their walls to roam the fields safely and freely.  No, their deeds and names would never be sung about in church but this was best, for their deeds were decidedly unholy.  But when the earth finally opens up and takes us all, God and these men will have a grand reckoning and they will stand before Him and they will say “We existed because we had to.  We were the righteous sword of Truth, and we tread in the dark places your beloved would not.  We slayed the forces of evil, not for you nor for your flock but for the sheer joy of it.  We belong to neither heaven nor hell but to Detroit, to Michigan and if that is enough, then so be it.  If it is not, then so be it.”

Indeed, these men answered the General’s call, just as they always did.  They arrived missing clothes and teeth, armed with spiked clubs and their own fists.  Corporal Gun wandered shirtless amongst his pack, whipping them and calling them dogs.  They grumbled and spit at him but deep down they loved the old Corporal, who had whored and killed with the best back in his day, and they slowly all fell in line, stacked like spiked iron behind the walls of Castle Ford, waiting for the heathen hordes of Ohioans to crash against those walls.  They knew from experience that those beasts would do everything from fling shit to the bodies of their own dead – that is when they weren’t eating or fucking them – in an effort to penetrate the noble walls of Castle Ford.  They knew that some of them would lope towards the walls on all fours, like degenerate beasts and would howl and snarl as they threw their idiot bodies against the fortress, dying by the thousands while still more piled in behind them, disgusting wretches with no appreciation for life.  They knew this and yet they looked out over the approaching mass with grim smiles on their faces and bloodlust in their hearts.  Fuck Ohio.  That was their rallying cry and the men knew it well.

But on that day, the beasts from Ohio brought with them a secret weapon, a terrible weapon too awful for a mortal man to face and live to tell about it.  They brought with them great tankards filled with the sludge collected from the Cuyahoga River, and attached to these tankards were great hoses, hoses wielded by the giant ugly vicious trolls they called their cheerleaders.  These vile beasts, more animal than woman, each grabbed hold of a hose, and moving like syphilitic elephants with a bad case of the gout, they approached the walls of Castle Ford, their thick leathery hide seemingly unaffected by the arrows fired at them from the battlements high above.  And with a mighty roar they stopped, aimed their hoses and began spraying the sludge from the Cuyahoga – less water than a collection of shit, urine, spit, motor oil, acid and failure – over the walls.  The men known as Lions did their best to fight back but soon found themselves vomiting.  These were hard men, men who had seen – and done – the nastiest of nasty shit, but this was too much for even them.  To the people of Ohio, this water was as pristine as the water they drank – when they weren’t drinking each other’s semen and sweat anyway – but to the noble people of Michigan, this was worse than the worst sewage and it was only a matter of time before the Lions were reeling under the stench of the filthy Brown onslaught.

In the Ohioan camp that day was a warrior, an old man who had failed in every other endeavor in life, a villain known simply as Weeden.  He was a vicious and terrible beast, who ate the flesh of his fellow man and fornicated with livestock, which was enough to earn him adoration and worship from the vile scum with which he kept company.  Yes, the Ohioans declared such a pig their savior and carried him around on a giant litter, from which he shit and pissed all over everyone he passed.  The litter was carried by a horde of slaves harvested from the hills of Kentucky to the south, simple men who couldn’t comprehend in their hearts the sort of evil the Ohioans visited upon them when they conquered them years before.  They lived in perpetual misery and were barely human anymore.  They just trudged, day after day, year after year, carrying Weeden’s litter.  Their minds were gone and they were as oxen, beasts which Weeden violated on moonless nights, terrible nights which caused all of nature to shudder.

These slaves carried Weeden behind the trolls with their hoses filled with poop and despair and when they arrived at the walls of Castle Ford, Weeden disembarked and just for fun, cruelly ran his sword through the nearest Kentucky slave.  He then laughed as a horde of Ohioan scum descended upon the fallen body like vultures, tearing at it with their teeth.  He stared at the walls of Castle Ford and felt a sick surge of satisfaction as he listened to the cries of anguish, as the noble Lions tried to keep from drowning in the fell waters of the Cuyahoga which had poisoned their land.

Behind the walls the men reeled and General Schwartz turned to his friend, a noble warrior clothed in gold, his armor shining so brightly that even the angels averted their eyes when he strode in their presence, and he said “Willie, we need you.  We need you more than we’ve ever needed anything.  You are our only hope, our savior.”  The warrior known as Willie merely nodded, put down his fishing pole and picked up his flaming sword, a sword which was said to have been forged in heaven itself.

The gates of Castle Ford opened and Weeden laughed a monstrous laugh, horrible and profane.  The men behind the walls reeled and covered their ears.  Weeden staggered forward like an ogre from some horrifying and ugly nightmare, assuming that Castle Ford was capitulating, but he was wrong.  Oh, was he ever wrong.

For from behind those gates, when all seemed lost, strode The Great Willie Young, hero of a thousand battles, subject of a thousand epics, savior of a thousand ages.  He shone like the sun and before him the Ohioan hordes disintegrated into the vast nothingness which is at the core of their being, and he strode valiantly to Weeden and pimp slapped that motherfucker.  Weeden cried out in agony, and fell to his knees.  The Great Willie Young then took his flaming sword and lopped Weeden’s grotesque head from his body. 

And with that the Ohioans fled in fear from the battle, back to their homes where they made love to shame and to their pets and family members.  History will record that they won the battle, for Castle Ford was invaded by their foul sludge and was overrun by their beasts and hill-trolls, and it’s been estimated that it will take 50 years and hundreds of trillions of dollars just to get the place clean again, but they were driven from the land, and they will not come back again, for they now know that amongst those brave warriors known as Lions lives The Great Willie Young. 

After the battle, The Great Willie Young led the Lions to the border separating heaven from hell, also known as the Michigan/Ohio border, where he placed the head of the monster Weeden on a pike, a warning to all those fell beasts that they will get more of the same should they ever cross into his land again.  Upon mounting the head on the pike, The Great Willie Young turned to the men – and to the thousands upon thousands of grateful Michigan residents who had followed them on the journey (it’s said that the women who followed the Lions in this celebratory train walked bowlegged for months afterward and that several babies of unusual size and hue were later born, including several with a deep love for fishing) The Great Willie Young turned and he said the following:

“My people, my friends, I have journeyed far, from the ends of the earth to the ends of time.  I have fought pirates, Vikings, Nazis, hippies, Indians, old Chinese mystics, Rex Ryan and all manner of dangerous and fell beasts.  I have fished off of the shoulder of Orion, laughed in the face of a supernova and even entered a few black holes if you know what I mean, but nowhere and in no time have I ever encountered such a villainous horde of scum as these wretched Ohioans.  Let this severed head be both a warning to them and a reminder to all of you that as long as there is breath in my body, as long as the earth turns and the sun rises, as long as the stars shine and existence, uh, exists, I will be here, guarding you and haunting them, for I am The Great Willie Young and you, the people of Detroit, the citizens of Michigan, from Sturgis in the South to Copper Harbor in the great North – with the exception of those filthy Packer fans up there – are all my people and together we shall create a golden age, one in which every man has a steak on the table, a whore in the bedroom and a goddamn mustang in his garage and every woman has, well, they have me.  Sure, this all sounds like a paternalistic nightmare for you women but I am not here to argue social philosophy with you, I am simply here to guide you into a golden age of the human spirit, into the age . . . of the Lion.”

And with that the crowd roared its approval.  The men were satisfied, the women realized they had vaginas and thus all the power, and the Ohioans were left to try to refill the now dry river bed of the Cuyahoga and my god, you do not want to know what fluids they used.  But most of all, the Detroit Lions were happy because they knew that they were still the Detroit Lions, and that meant something amazing now, while the Cleveland Browns were still the Cleveland Browns and all the sorrow that that meant, and besides they still had Suh, they had Matthew Stafford (seriously, can we get him a nickname?), they had St. Calvin, they had General Schwartz and most importantly, they still had The Great Willie Young, and who gives a shit about the result of a goddamn preseason game?  In the end, I think we can all agree on one thing: fuck Ohio.  Amen.

Jahvid Best

 Jahvid Best's brain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resurrection

Well . . . I’m back.

I considered writing just those three simple words, posting them and then seeing what happens but let’s face it, brevity is not my strong suit and besides, I figured I owed y’all at least a little explanation of where I’m at inside this strange place known as my brain, so let’s just start at the point where we left off and see how this thing goes, okay?  Okay.  (Oh, a quick note before we get on with it: this post will be embarrassingly self-indulgent, self-obsessed and any other word or phrase that starts with “self” you can think of.  Forgive me, please.  Just know that I’m aware of it and it’s making me cringe just thinking about it.  It is, I fear, unfortunately necessary and so if you can handle all that bullshit, come with me, my crazy friends.)

So, anyway, yeah, I quit.  I quit because I was burned out and because I had begun to approach this whole writing about the Lions thing with a sense of ponderous dread.  That is, of course, an overstatement but hey, have you met me? 

It wasn’t so much the writing as it was the expectations.  And when I say expectations, I don’t mean any expectations that anyone had for me but the ones I had for myself.  A little secret: I am a terrifying perfectionist.  I know it may not seem like it, but I am.  This doesn’t necessarily manifest itself in aesthetic ways.  I mean, I’m not sitting around wringing my hands because a picture doesn’t format properly or anything.  I don’t give a fuck about that stuff – obviously.   I’m a perfectionist in that I’m constantly reaching for some unattainable idea floating around in my head.  I hear thunderous music in there, beautiful, epic shit and it’s damn near impossible to try to capture it the way that I want to, to translate it so that you can all experience the vivid grandeur of my inner monologue.  I know that sounds ridiculous but again, have you met me?

Anyway, so . . . yeah.  I walked away.  I walked away before I started to hate it, started to resent my own obsessive need to be perfect.  It had gotten harder and harder for me to write simply because the better I get, the better I want to be and forgive me for saying it but I got pretty goddamn good.  Well, the thing is, is that pretty goddamn good wasn’t good enough for me and so I kept pushing myself and pushing myself until pretty soon the simplest things felt like rolling a goddamn boulder uphill.  I constantly felt like I was trying to harness lightning, to lasso it and then ride it through the night sky, and that shit will burn you right the fuck up.

On top of that, I wasn’t sure what to say anymore.  I hadn’t lost the narrative or anything.  It’s just that it, well, it changed a little bit and I wasn’t sure if I was the dude to write about it anymore.  The Lions were actually – gasp! – a good football team and somehow my style didn’t seem like it was quite right anymore.  But if I’m honest with myself, that was just me rationalizing my own need to walk away for a while.  The story had changed but it wasn’t over.  It isn’t over. 

I recognized all that pretty quickly and I’ll tell you another little secret: within, like, two weeks after I put the Gone Fishin’ sign on the site I knew I was going to come back.  Eventually, anyway.  I wasn’t quite sure when and I wasn’t even quite sure where, but I knew I couldn’t just sit back and not do this anymore.  The story wasn’t done yet and neither was I.

Of course, I felt like a dumb asshole.  I mean, I made this goddamn production out of saying “Fuck it, I’m out,” and everybody said a bunch of nice shit to me and so I felt like a dickhead.  Of course, there were dudes who told me I was just going to pull a Favre come August and well, it’s August and I guess I better start wearing Wranglers from now on.  I mean, shit, I don’t want to be Favre.  That is an ugly thing to say, despicable and gross but here we are.  I’ll do my best to refrain from sending you all pics of my dick while I lounge around naked in Crocs but all bets are off if the Lions season goes south.  I’m just saying, no promises.  If the Lions start the season 2-8 you might start getting some strange texts.  Of course, the rampant pill addiction goes without saying and I’m also hated by the entire state of Wisconsin but that’s because of an incident involving a dairy cow, an angry badger, a bottle of nitroglycerine, a shaved werewolf, a ruined police cruiser, a missing platoon from the National Guard and nine of the Milwaukee Bucks along with two assistant coaches and a keg filled with Southern Comfort.  I can’t say anymore thanks to the court order, but . . . wait, what the fuck was I talking about?

Oh yeah, shamefully and predictably coming back like Brett Favre.  Unlike Dr. Bert Fever, I am fully aware that this makes me look like a dickhead.  I admit it.  I’m a dick.  I fucking suck for doing this.  But I did it and we all must make our peace with that.

I originally planned to do something completely new, and for a couple of different reasons.  I figured I’d start my own shitty blog, maybe even post anonymously just for shits and giggles.  I didn’t know what the fuck I was going to do exactly but I had it in my head that it would be different.  To give you an idea of how long I’ve known I was going to do this I started laying the groundwork back in, like, late May, only a few weeks after I burned this fucker to the ground.  I even signed up for an account at Pride of Detroit, took the name My Blue Heaven and planned on posting there until I started a new blog of the same name.  That lasted a couple of weeks and then all the Lions started getting arrested for everything from impersonating Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit to pistol whipping hookers to cannibalism.  Predictably, the Lions blogosphere went stupid and I realized that I’d rather be forced to dine upon my own genitals after they were eaten by a syphilitic pig with dulled teeth and then shit out onto a dinner plate then to hang around and have endless debates on whether or not the Lions should cut the water boy who was caught jacking off in a utility closet.  It made me realize that the whole reason I started doing this was as an antidote to that sort of inane hillbilly gibberish and so I haven’t been back in a while.  This is not an assault on all you fine readers who do frequent Pride of Detroit.  It’s a fine website, filled with useful information and fine news updates.  I just didn’t want to get sucked into a vortex of white noise, in which people bitched about things just because there was nothing else to talk about.  Shit, I’ll probably still comment once in a while but let’s face it, mostly I just want to make jokes and I’m pretty sure Sean doesn’t like me much anyway.

So . . . anyway, I changed gears a little bit.  I changed my Twitter name to “Neil, Couer de Lion” with the aim of eventually starting a blog of the same name, minus the Neil part anyway.  This was my plan up until a couple of weeks ago.  Why that?  Well, like I said, I had a couple of different reasons.  First, I felt like a dipshit for setting Armchair Linebacker on fire and then watching it burn and I felt like if I was going to do something new, I needed to respect the Viking Funeral that Raven and I gave it.  It would have felt disrespectful to go back on all of that – especially since Armchair Linebacker was from the beginning Raven’s baby – and to feebly try to leech off of whatever magic we had made before, sifting through the ashes for the bones of the dead like some sort of ghoul.  It just didn’t feel right to do that all on my own.

Second, like I said, it felt like one story had ended and it only felt right for me to open a new book if I was going to start telling a new story.  It just made sense to me.  It felt right, decent, the honest thing to do.

But then I sat down and I wrote the intro to Raven’s Armchair Linebacker Football Preview e-book (out soon.  Buy it or I will hunt you down and will eat your soul and I can totally do that because I am a fully trained and licensed soul-eater.  I took the tests at the local community college and everything.)  and while I was writing it, I went from referring to what Armchair Linebacker was to talking about what Armchair Linebacker is.  I thought to myself hmmm, that probably means something.  At the time, I concluded that it meant that the spirit of Armchair Linebacker would live on through Raven and through me even if the body had been decapitated and set on fire.  But in retrospect, I realize that it meant that it was still alive because the fire was still alive inside of me and I wasn’t fucking done yet.

Still, I didn’t act on it because, well, refer to the whole sifting through ashes I don’t want to be a ghoul gibberish I went on about earlier.  But then a funny thing happened – Raven decided that he wasn’t done either and he posted something new on the site, reactivated it and suddenly I didn’t have any good reason not to come back.  This was his baby and if he was down for keeping it going, well shit, that was good enough for me.  And now that I’ve thought about it more, there’s no way I could have done it without doing it right here.  This is my home.  This is Armchair Linebacker.  This is a community of wild souls, of spirit warriors too weird to live anywhere else.  This is a website made of fire and insanity, and its walls have been specially engineered to handle the heat of my soul.  I can burn here, like a goddamn fire angel, I can burn.  I can explode like a supernova and this place can handle it because it knows me and I know it.  This is home, this is where the fire spirits play, and goddammit, this is where I will play.

Of course, if I’m going to do this, I’m going to have to do it my way so I don’t just get burned out again two months from now and start hating it.  First of all, I’m only planning on writing, like, twice a week.  I’ll do a pregame and a postgame and that’s about it.  And the postgame shit might not even go up some weeks until Tuesday or Wednesday.  I’m going to be lazy as hell with this thing because it’s the only way I’ll be able to keep it in perspective and not get eaten alive by my own perfectionism.  Sometimes, I might write more, sometimes I might even write less.  I don’t know.  And that’s the way I want to keep it.  I don’t know.  All I know is that I want to keep doing this.  I want to write about the Lions because I fucking have to.  If I don’t, I get this weird sort of anxious feeling.  Besides, I am too much of a raging egotist.  I can’t stand the idea of not being the one to try to tell the story.  I can’t stand the idea that there are others out there doing it who aren’t me.  Sure, they do a good job and I like them and we get along great, but I can’t handle the idea that my voice won’t be heard anymore.  I can’t handle the idea that this strange community of fans will go on without me saying “Hey, here’s the deal . . .”  I can’t handle the idea that the last several years of rambling screeds and wild gibberish will count for nothing.  I can’t handle the idea that everything I’ve already done, that the totality of the soul of my fandom that I have poured out and tried to shape like some insane wizard will mean nothing because I didn’t have the fucking balls to finish it. 

Like I said, this shit will be lazy as hell and probably not as regular as you might like but that’s just the way it is.  I’m not going to be writing about anything other than the Lions here.  I’ll leave the broader NFL stuff to Raven.  I just want my little corner of the world back.  I’m not going to come anywhere close to the one new piece every day that I insanely did a couple of years ago.  Hell, I probably won’t even match the output of last season, when I was running on fumes and my own stubborn will.  But I will tell the story.  I will reach into the heart of Lions fandom and I will smear that blood all over the goddamn place.  I will touch our collective soul and I will do my best to translate the music that lives in there.  I will stand up and I will sing the song of Lions fandom for the world and I will tell them all what it means, what it feels like, to be a Lions fan.  And I will do this because I don’t have a choice.  I will do this because I am a Lions fan by birth, a Lions fan by some twisted quirk of fate, and I am a Lions fan until the day I die.  I will live in the madness because that is my role.  Fuck, I am coming dangerously close to sounding like Batman gibbering about being the hero Gotham needs and so I’ll just stop this nonsense before I get too out of hand.  I know, I know, too fucking late.  The last thing I’ll say is this: I thought I was burned out, but I am made of stardust and stars are made of fire and I am a fire spirit and fire spirits never burn out.  They just get hotter and hotter until one day they shine for the whole world to see and so I will sit in this house of fire and I will burn, and I will shine as a beacon of Lions fandom.  Always.

And so here I am.  Always.  I’m back, motherfuckers.