Okay, Let's Do This

It occurred to me a couple of days after the Lions beat the Vikings that I was almost hilariously too negative.  It was awful and I feel vaguely stupid about it but what the hell, this is the world we live in, and as Lions fans we’re all just lucky we don’t eat our own shoes and play with ourselves in front of the TV, laughing like Mongoloids and following the pretty colors like chemtrails that have rendered us too stupid to breathe without outside help.

The thing is, is that there are two ways, really, to watch this shit.  One is to focus on the Battle of Self, which makes me sound like a pretentious jackass, but hey, if the shoe fits.  Anyway, this is where I think I was driven as a fan.  I became so focused and so hyper-obsessed with the Lions problems that it was all I focused on.  Sure, there’s another team on the field and yeah, the Lions are beating the pants off of them and I think Christian Ponder just started crying, but goddammit, they are still dumb assholes and I don’t want them to be dumb assholes and why won’t they stop being dumb assholes?  That was where my head was at, and the first half of hilarious idiocy, in which every goddamn horrible cliché we and everyone else associates with the Lions, happened, it was all too easy to let that run away with my mood, and hide, where my skull was fingered by horrible Failure Demons, who sniffed my brains and cackled amongst themselves.

In all this madness, born of a lifetime of stupid angst and shameful suffering, I forgot that there is another, simpler way to watch the Lions – by, you know, just watching them and cheering when they win and booing when they lose.  In my Ahab like crusade in which I demanded that the Lions be a perfect football team, I forgot that there are lots of other teams and guess what?  Most of them are filled with dumb assholes too.  It is the Dumb Asshole League.  And in this league, the best that you can hope for is that your dumb assholes, loathsome as they may be, beat the shit out of the other dumb assholes and try not to embarrass you too much in the process.

And in that league, the Lions proved themselves the better assholes than the Vikings assholes.  In fact, they tore them brand new assholes and then shoved Christian Ponder inside of one and left him to die.  That was a dominant win, yo.  And no matter how much there are parts of that game that still eat at my football fan soul like some sort of miserable acid, I can’t pretend like that didn’t happen.  The Lions won and they won in a way that made it obvious that they were the better team.  To ask for more than that at this point might just be an exercise in masturbatory angst.

I don’t know, it’s tough.  You all know it.  It’s tough to escape those fucking demons, especially when they spent the better part of last season gnawing on our balls and laughing, the fiends.  Still, I don’t feel entirely good when it comes to the Battle of Self, that eternal struggle to overcome those demons and stop doing stupid shit like fumbling a field goal snap or Suhing your way back into the national conversation for aggravated ogrey.  Those things happened, and when they did, we all sneered with disgust and remembered all the ways this team has mashed our hearts into pulp.  To simply let that go would be unconscionably stupid and irresponsible. 

And so what we’re left with – what I’m left with, anyway – is, I think, a sort of cautious agreement to move forward with Hope in our hearts but with one eye cocked to the side in case this motherfucker decides to turn on us again.  I mean, really, it’s all we can do, right?  Right.

But even in that Battle of Self I talked about earlier, it was clear upon reflection that the Lions had made some gains, most notably in the play of Matthew Stafford, who, as I said after the game, even as I wallowed in my own haze of masturbatory angst and heroin mixed with drain cleaner (okay fine, it was actually angel dust mixed with drain cleaner, I am getting older and am more responsible and mature, after all) looked like he finally received the spiritual smelling salts. This was the old Matthew Stafford, the one who looked like the savior of the franchise not that long ago.  To say that this was an encouraging development and an important victory (albeit a victory that can quickly turn into a defeat again before we know it because that is just the maddening and ever-changeable nature of this beast) is to undersell it hilariously.  This was fucking crucial, and maybe the most crucial thing we needed to have happen to start the season, and it did.

Aside from that, the offensive line actually performed miracles we hadn’t seen since Jesus turned water into wine and sprang Barry Sanders for monster gains almost 2,000 years ago.  Reggie Bush was awesome, but he wasn’t out there just scrambling for his life.  No, he received terrific blocking, and you’ll forgive me for not mentioning it after the game because I had forgotten what it looked like.  Even better than the blocking at the line, though, was the downfield blocking he received on screens, which is one of those little things that is actually a big thing, which is exactly what this team has struggled so infuriatingly with in the Jim Schwartz era.  Look, things aren’t perfect, but to say they’re not obviously better is again just an exercise in wallowing in the masturbatory angst of Fear and its many awful subsidiaries.

I don’t do 180’s.  I just don’t.  I think it’s embarrassing, but the more I write this the more I realize that goddammit, I think I’m actually excited about this team.  I haven’t even mentioned how well DeAndre Levy played, or how well the defense bottled up Adrian Peterson outside of that one Oh Holy Shit Not Again Why Does This Sort Of Thing Happen To Us run of his in the first quarter.

But that’s the thing we need to remember too.  That run did happen.  And so did all of that other ridiculous bullshit that happened in the first half, and I’m past the point of praying for miracles and hoping against hope that somehow all of that stops happening at some point.  It won’t, and that sucks, and that’s what still threatens to drag this whole thing right back down to hell.

I hate it when fans are negative no matter what happens, and I kinda fell into that place, but I hate it when fans are positive no matter what happens too.  It’s dumb, that sort of binary “They’re either going to the Super Bowl or they should be dismantled and sold for parts and turned into toilet paper” outlook that too many people have.  It’s dumb and it will poison you as a fan and everything you will say will just be dumb noise when governed by it.  And so we have to learn, somehow, to take the bad with the good, and accept that there are certain maddening things about this team that aren’t going to change.  But they also have a chance to be *gulp* good, or at least good enough to beat the shit out of teams like the Vikings, which is something they couldn’t manage last season.

This team looked closer to the team I saw at the end of 2010, only with more firepower.  And no, I didn’t make a mistake.  I meant 2010, not 2011.  To me, that’s when this team was playing their best football, during that mini-streak at the end of 2010 that got us so excited.  But here’s the thing, like I said, this is still a team of dumb assholes, and while they can get away with that shit against a team like the Vikings, they won’t be able to against, say, the 49ers.  And that sucks.  That means this team has a ceiling, and while we can always hope for the best, I’m not going to do the whole Dream Big thing, in which I envision a scenario in which this team becomes the Team of My Heart and sets a new standard for the rest of the Dumb Asshole League to follow.  It’s just not going to happen, because there are just too many shitty things that they’re never gonna change.

That doesn’t mean that I haven’t already found myself getting irrationally hopeful.  For fuck’s sake, it was only two days after the game – and only two days after I wrote a piece that was the football writing version of Morrissey singing a song written by Ian Curtis while cutting himself – that I found myself looking at the schedule and getting excited because I saw a plausible road map to 10 or 11 wins, and not even one of those “Well, if this happens…” dream fests, but one of those things where based on how they played in week one, I looked and genuinely they should be able to win 10 or 11 games because they seem better than that many teams on their schedule.  It was ridiculous, and I tweeted about it.  Almost immediately I was met with fans of other teams and well-wishers telling me I was making a huge mistake, but what the hell, what is fandom if not one huge mistake?

I’m going in with this team, which probably sounds hysterically stupid given all that junkie metaphor bullshit I wrote last week, but I don’t give a shit.  It feels good to get excited, and more than that it feels good to get excited without having to manufacture it.  This feels real to me, and really that’s the first time I’ve genuinely felt that in a while – maybe even back to early in 2011 if I’m being honest with myself.  I know – I don’t think, I know – that this team will break my heart because they are still a team of dumb assholes who do dumb asshole things.  I mean, Ndamukong Suh is still out there cutting promos to the cops about what a badass he is and threatening cable guys with pellet guns, and it’s pretty clear that on some critical level, he just doesn’t get it and probably never will.  I think that I’m finally allowing myself to make some sort of peace with that, to let it go and just enjoy the good things that are there while shaking my head at Denial Artists who want to pretend that he is some sort of persecuted warrior poet, and that’s a good thing, no matter how much of a permanent shadow it leaves on my fan heart.  That sounds sort of depressing, and it is, but shit, at least it’s real.

I still don’t know whether the Lions will make the playoffs or whether they’ll melt down again and shit their pants while Jim Schwartz gets fired for slugging a ref or for breaking into the Harbaugh compound with a crossbow.  I don’t know, but fuck it, I’m willing to hope, and that means something.  It really does.  The Lions should beat the Cardinals on Sunday, and should beat them rather convincingly, and that’s something that feels good to say again, and more importantly, to mean.  I mean that, the Lions should beat the Cardinals.  I’m not going to do the usual blogger analysis to explain why because that’s not really what I do here.  I’m just going to throw it out there and feel good about it.  And if you’ve followed me for any length of time, then you know that means something.  It means I believe in something again.  Even if it’s not quite what I wanted so desperately to believe in, and even if it’s not something that will somehow make all of the bullshit I’ve experienced as a fan alright, it’s still something.  It’s still something.  And for now, that’s enough.

I Don't Know

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indeed.

Hey, maybe...

I’ve been wondering what I was going to write here as the season gets set to start, and I’ve gotta be honest with you, there was a real – a very real – possibility that I wasn’t going to write anything.  I’ve already gibbered on about my disdain for the Lions this year, but I’ve also reached sort of a crisis point when it comes to my relationship with the NFL in general.  This is nothing particularly new.  I have always grumbled under my breath about the Leviathan that is the NFL, its Necronomicon rulebook and the Lizard Men and evil wizards who run the whole damn thing.  And I hope that I’ve made clear how much I absolutely despise all the talk radio stupidity that has always hung around at the fringes of the NFL culture.  My problem, I think, is that the talk radio hooha has stopped hanging around the fringes and become the culture.  Tebow, Tebow, blah blah blah and yeah, that is a prime example, but it’s just one example, and the problem is that even the people who complain about Tebow or the Saga of Sexy Rexy and Handsome Mark in New York seem like they secretly can’t get enough of it.

It’s all just a wall of hideous, dumb noise, farting dogs in a beer commercial turned up as loud as it can go to try to be heard amongst the incessant hooting of the screamathons on ESPN and Twitter and the NFL Network and Fox Sports One and Fox and NBC and… well, everywhere.  And that’s the problem.  It has penetrated the larger culture so completely that there is nowhere to go to escape it and as a result you end up feeling like some dipshit in A Clockwork Orange, strapped into your seat with your eyelids peeled open until you find yourself hee-hawing about Peyton Manning and listening to Herm Edwards’ opinions on things as if they mean anything more than those of the homeless crack addict who keeps shitting on your doorstep. 

So, it’s hard for me to even pay attention to this shit anymore.  I hate the NFL.  Just absolutely fucking hate it.  I can’t state it any more plainly than that.  And I hate its fans.  So there.  This probably means that I hate you too, but what the hell, this is a blog about the Lions, self-loathing and vicious cannibalism are just a part of the deal. 

And yet, here I am, writing about the Lions because in the end I can’t not.  I’m both an egomaniac and a hopeless addict and even though my arms are filled with open sores, my hair has all fallen out and I get no pleasure from this anymore, here I am, shooting up one more time because something inside me is making me do it.  If you don’t want to witness my sad destruction, then I don’t blame you.  Feel free to move on.  This is not going to be pretty.

You see, the thing is, is that no matter how much I’ve always sort of hated the NFL, and no matter how bad the Lions have almost always been, I have still managed to tell myself “Hey, maybe…”  That phrase has sort of come to define the fanbase as a whole.  “Hey, maybe…”  It’s the only thing that has kept us going through the years, the only thing that has managed to fend off the utter blackness of the abyss, the terrible talons of the Failure Demons, the icy black death grip of The Fear.  “Hey, maybe…” 

I started writing about the Lions on the precipice of 0-16, and both before that season and during I felt like some sort of hell-born version of Patrick Henry, all riding through the streets on a horse made of fire and dread, screaming “The Demons are coming!  The Demons are coming!”  while everyone else was busy trying to talk themselves into the playoffs.  It turns out I was right, terribly, terribly right, but it wasn’t as horrible as it could have been, both because I had already steeled myself for it and because it meant that finally the Lions would be forced to fucking do something about it.  It meant that Matt Millen would finally be exiled to the Phantom Zone (or ABC, same thing I guess), Rod Marinelli’s goofy bullshit could finally be exposed as the ridiculous pap that it was, and that a sort of ritual burning and cleansing would have to take place for the first time in half a century.  In short, it felt like a junkie finally forced to confront his own sniveling cowardice and failure.  2008 was our intervention.

It’s hard to get clean.  It’s hard to rise above your demons, go to rehab and kick that fucking devil once and for all.  But the Lions did – or at least they tried, and with that came a sense of optimism, of “Hey, maybe…” in perhaps its strongest iteration since I’ve been a fan.  This wasn’t about trying to be a functioning junkie, which is sort of what the Barry Sanders years felt like, this was about finally getting clean and cleansing ourselves of all that bad shit, that bad energy that had followed us around for so goddamn long.  It was the moment we as fans had all been yearning for, either consciously or subconsciously.  It was the moment and the subconscious yearning that rested at the heart of “Hey, maybe…” 

And so that’s what 2009 and the first half of 2010 were for us.  They were rehab, slow, painful, but filled with Hope and signs of promise.  Once it all finally came together, once we felt strong enough to stand on our own without that fucking disease rotting our hearts and our souls, “Hey, maybe…” would cease to be a promise and become a reality.  And so it seemed to, as the Lions finally turned a corner at the end of 2010.  They just looked different.  They were stronger, more confident, making their way without their shitty Failure addiction tainting everything.  And suddenly Hope seemed like a real thing, not some far off wish and “Hey, maybe…” became “Fuck yeah, let’s do this.”

2011 started off even stronger, with the Lions looking like dominating ass kickers.  The high point came in that Monday Night full on beatdown of the Bears in Ford Field.  Our boys had finally kicked, and now they were young and strong and healthy for the first time in our lives, and while that dread specter of Failure still hung ambiguously somewhere around us, it seemed like it was getting further and further away, a cloud of black smoke that had finally thinned and was now promising to be blown into a harmless sort of haze by a blazing sun of Hope.

But then some signs started to appear.  Familiar signs.  Our boys were waking up late, bleary eyed.  They seemed itchy, twitchy, in that all too familiar way that made our hearts sink.  But we ignored it because we so desperately wanted to believe, so desperately needed to believe.  After all, they were still winning – for the most part anyway.  They were functioning, holding down a good job, passing as respectable citizens.  Even when their boss started calling us and saying “Yo, I caught your boy talking with some shady dudes behind the dumpster our back,” we laughed it off as the ravings of a paranoid asshole.  And then when he kept calling, telling us that our boy had weird bruises on his arms and he seemed spaced out and even pulled a knife on a customer, we got mad, our own denial causing us to cuss him out and tell him that he was just persecuting our boy for past sins.

But deep in our heart, I think we knew.  We knew that he was a fucking junkie and that rehab didn’t take like we hoped it would.  But still, he hadn’t crashed and maybe – just maybe – this time would be different.  “Hey, maybe…”

And then we found him naked, sitting in a pool of his own urine, a needle dangling from his arm, as 2012 began in an all too familiar way.  We slapped him around, tossed him in the shower and screamed at him that we weren’t gonna put up with this shit anymore.  And he tried.  We all tried.  We all kept on hoping and believing that this was just a sad relapse, that these sorts of things are inevitable, that we all knew that there would be bumps in the road, setbacks to be overcome, and new and better days to be fought for.  Just stop using, we said, quit using Failure, remember the lessons, remember what you learned from 2008, remember the rehab.  Remember.  Please.  For the love of God, remember.

But the Lions didn’t remember.  And maybe they didn’t even care.  All we know is that as 2012 went on, it became clear that our boy was just a fucking junkie.  He lost his job again, his arms scabbed over and we even caught him blowing a Harbaugh in an alley.  We wept and we cried and we slammed our fists against the wall until they bled, but… Jesus Christ, not again.  We can’t do this again.

Except most Lions fans have sort of drifted into that land of denial again, that codependent enabling poisonous bullshit where they just pretend like maybe it will all just go away and that nobody really has a problem.  And so they give Jim Schwartz a thumbs up for being a good coach, a good sponsor, a good rehab counselor, the man who taught our boy the life lessons he needed to kick for good.  And they’re still telling everyone that they think ol’ Jimmy will rescue our boy, that he’ll keep him clean even though we’ve seen him constantly rubbing his nose whenever he comes over, his eyes darting around surreptitiously.  Hell, we’ve even seen him handing little baggies to our boy, but we’ve turned a blind eye even as they’ve slipped away into his room together for hours at a time, stumbling out only when they need more junk.  We’ve called up Mr. Mayhew, the rehab facility’s founder and asked him what to do even though we know that he’s a former addict too.  He just tells us to be cool and trust in the program even though we’ve heard rumors that he’s now running whores out of the back office and keeps a gun in his desk because he supposedly has a hit out on him for an incident with a dealer involving a missing briefcase and a dead mule. 

And so we just keep sitting here, hopelessly watching our junkie team slip slide away into oblivion again, only this time there’s no hope of rehab, no hope that he’ll get clean and find his way eventually, because deep down, he’s  a fucking junkie.  It’s in his nature and, well, that’s that.  It’s a horrible realization, maddening and soul crushing and so in a sense I don’t blame people for giving in to denial, for pretending that everything is going to be alright because, uh, magic I guess.  It’s what they’ve gotta do to keep on keepin’ on.

But me, I can’t do it.  I can’t pretend.  It’s both my gift and my curse.  All I see is a fucking junkie, and a part of me – a big part of me – thinks we’d be better off if I just put a pillow over his face and ended it all right here.  But I can’t because he’s my boy and I love him.  And so I just sort of sit here in total horror and watch as he sinks into complete and utter destruction again, and all that’s left for me is to sit here and indulge myself in embarrassing fantasies in which he somehow sees the light, in which about six thousand different things all miraculously happen at once, in which he decides to get clean, his sponsor Jimmy cuts out all his bullshit and helps him out and in which Mayhew finally tells the whores to get lost and somehow sorts things out with the Failure dealer who’s got a hit out on him.  It’s all I have left, just dull, stupid fantasies.  And in this reality, “Hey, maybe…” isn’t something to hang onto, it’s a cruel, vicious joke, a punchline mocking me and all of us.  I sit here, and I think about it.  I think about “Hey, maybe…” and I just sort of sneer and hate everyone who says it like it means anything.  And yet, in fleeting moments, in those quiet times when I’m just left alone with myself, the naked Fear and my own native, idiot Hope, I find myself wondering, if only for a fraction of a second, “Hey, maybe…” and meaning it.

All of that is a morose and godawful preamble to this, the first game of the season, in which the Lions face the Vikings.  They could win and if they do, people living in denial will ratchet up their shrill airhorn voices and start gibbering like idiots about the Super Bowl and god only knows what else.  And they could lose, and if they do, blah blah blah, it’s all so much noise and I hate it all.  There is really no honest way to predict how this thing goes.  It’s possible that our boy pulls his shit together enough to appear somewhat functional, maybe sneak a 10 win season in there and inspire some sort of vague hope that he can sort of shuffle along, living with the disease well enough that he can fool most people and we can pretend that everything is okay.  It’s also possible that he bottoms out again and ends up shitting himself in the middle of the supermarket while buying cold medicine to make meth in the basement.  Really, he could be a 10 win functioning junkie, or he could be a 3 win supermarket meth pants shitter. 

In the end, I suppose I’ll split the difference and say that he ends up a 6-10 junkie who occasionally gives us fleeting yet false hope that he’ll get his shit together again one day, but who spends most of his time shooting up with Jimmy in his room and stealing the good silverware to help Mayhew pay off his debts and dodge the hitmen.  I won’t predict what will happen against the Vikings because I honestly can’t.  All I can do is drag myself in front of the TV, my insides frozen with a sort of numbed horror and watch, all while a little voice inside of me tries to push through that frozen wasteland and whisper “Hey, maybe…”