Duality

Obviously, the big news this week was that Matthew Stafford signed an extension, which immediately was used as an opportunity by everyone to hoot and shout and fling poop at each other while a clown with an oversized gavel tried in vain to impose order on a world gone mad.  None of this is a surprise really, not when you consider that this is just the way we deal with everything now.  It doesn’t matter what it’s about – politics, sports, murder trials, jokes, commentary about jokes, jokes about jokes, asparagus, jokes about asparagus – we immediately retreat to intractable corners devoid of all nuance and start hurling abuse at one another and refuse to concede even the barest idea that there are reasonable points to be made somewhere in the vast cosmos that exist between us.

This is just the way of things, I’m afraid, in this, the age of the twitter screecher.  So of course when Matthew Stafford signed his extension you had one of two reactions – you either had the people who insist that he is the greatest thing to happen to Detroit and possibly even mankind and think we should all give him our first born in exchange for his flawless talents, and you had the group that refuses to ever believe that anything will ever get better and thinks Stafford is just another heretic without virtue who should be beaten about the head with socks filled with batteries, tied up in a burlap sack and dumped into the Detroit River while an elderly witch doctor reads from the Necronomicon and loudspeakers play old Ozzy Osbourne records backwards in order to appease the devil spirits.  In other words, it is just like every other goddamn thing we talk about now.

Even trying to discuss this in any sort of rational way feels sort of useless.  Nobody wants to hear this shit.  They just want to yell and scream and tear at their hair and beat their breasts and show everyone that THEY REALLY CARE AND HAVE OPINIONS THAT WE ALL NEED TO KNOW ABOUT but what the hell, I am a man who walks a different path, and attempting to speak True Things seems to be my destiny even if nobody can understand me because I’m speaking a different language.

Here’s the deal – Matthew Stafford getting that extension is probably a good thing.  I won’t say it’s definitely a good thing because if last year taught us anything it’s that we don’t know what in the fuck is going to happen for sure.  After all, last year at this time we thought that Stafford was just going to fly a fighter jet into the stadium every week, do some barrel roles, hang out with Maverick and Goose, shoot down Clay Matthews and Jared Allen over the Indian Ocean and then celebrate homoerotically with Val Kilmer.  Instead, he showed up looking like he just stumbled out of a Morrissey concert, never really got going at all and ended the season with a bunch of questions hanging over him.  That happened.  It did.  And to deny that in any sort of way is to make love to denial, which is the way of the shameful dude and lady dude and you are better than that.  Okay, maybe not, but goddammit, I am not going to let you get away with being lazy.

But the extension is still probably a good thing because for all the nails I chewed down to the nubs last season thanks to Stafford’s endless malaise (and by that, I don’t mean fingernails, I spent most games chewing on actual nails) he’s still got an absolute bazooka for an arm, his teammates seem to still have his back, he’s like 14 years old still and despite what we saw last season he is still the dude who ran onto the field against the Browns even though his shoulder had been eaten by wolves and was supported only by silly string, hope and adrenaline, and threw the game winning touchdown pass with no time left on the clock.  He is still that guy.  He is.  He is also the dude who led miraculous comeback after miraculous comeback in 2011, led the Lions to their first playoff berth since the Rutherford B. Hayes administration, threw for a gazillion yards and had me gibbering like an idiot about how I wouldn’t trade him for any player in the league. 

Some of you are nodding your head in agreement, saying YES NEIL FINALLY THAT IS WHAT I HAVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT while others are shaking your heads sadly and saying NO HE IS A BUTT FROM BUTT CITY AND BURN HIM BUUUUURRRRRNNNNNN HIMMMMMMMMM but you both need to shut the fuck up and pay attention because it’s not as simple as all that.  For everything that I just wrote in the above paragraph, for all that ridiculous, highly stylized rapturous praise, there are real reasons to worry too.

And that’s the problem.  You’re not allowed to do both at the same time.  At least not according to the Mob with their torches and pitchforks and pitchforks that shoot torches.  You either build monuments to an ideal or you take your pants off and start pissing and shitting all over everything.  Well even a monument builder has to defecate at some point or else he backs up, his system becomes poisoned and then he dies when his insides explode like a giant poop bomb because he has literally become full of shit. 

Matthew Stafford has problems.  Denying that isn’t going to do anyone any good.  As it stands now, you’re not allowed to criticize his mechanics without being labeled a Hater or an Idiot.  You’re just supposed to accept that he has an unorthodox delivery and it’s never, ever a problem because… reasons.  But the dude’s mechanics are shitty and they do cause problems.  I can say this because I have eyes, because I have watched his mechanics degenerate at times to the point where he is almost literally throwing the ball underhanded on every other throw, not because he has to out of necessity but because he’s gotten himself all fucked up.  I mean, there is a big difference between flipping the ball in a [note: I refuse to say the name of that one dude for fear that he will take it as an invitation to either make another comeback, or worse, send me dick pics but you know who I’m talking about, the infamous Dr. Bert Fever, number 4 in your program and number GO THE FUCK AWAY in your hearts… yeah, that dude] manner because you have a 900 pound out of control werewolf on steroids bearing down at you on a crucial third down and just aimlessly flipping the ball like you’re playing slow pitch softball simply because mechanics are for pussies.  Make plays, yes, but that means that you have to actually, you know, make plays when the situation demands it and Stafford’s mechanics were faulty enough that it hindered him from doing just that at critical times last year.

So, yeah, I think the mechanics thing is a legit thing to discuss.  Pretending it isn’t just because you’ve assigned yourself the label of Stafford Defender against the rampaging hordes of Stafford Haters doesn’t do anyone any good.  It’s okay to say “Look, he’s still my dude and I think in the end he’s gonna be fine but I sure hope he gets all this other bullshit straightened out because if not we might be in some trouble.”  That’s all I’m trying to say.

The sad fact is that we live in a world in which people even feel the need to spend several days arguing with strangers via their robot surrogates about the details of what amounts to an accounting decision.  We are all trifling idiots, gossipy fools bitching about Sheila’s new hairdo at the nail salon.  I mean, what’s the alternative?  Do you seriously just want to wash your hands of Stafford and say LET’S JUST MOVE ON because, uh… it’s a little more difficult than that.  No.  The thing we should be talking about is how does this coaching staff make Stafford better?  What can they do to fix the legitimate problems?  How can they maximize his obvious talents while minimizing his weaknesses?  Of course, in the end, there’s nothing we can do about any of that either but at least that cuts to the real heart of the issue instead of dancing around it with nonsensical bitching and moaning about Stafford himself.  After all, we have seen that he is capable of being The Dude.  Anyone who’s denying that, who is falling all over themselves to point out his record against good teams, is being willfully dishonest.   Because the Lions are still kind of a shitty team – they are, don’t fucking lie to yourself here, they finished 4-12 last year – and shitty teams don’t win football games regardless of who the quarterback is.  The games that they have won – and especially the games they won in 2011 – were won in large part due to the fact that Stafford put the team on his back (with a little help from St. Calvin but everyone needs a friend)  and carried them to victory.  Pretending that those didn’t happen is yet another lie in service to the Dark Lord of Preconceived Belief.

Of course, then you get into a sort of chicken or the egg argument about whether the Lions were shitty despite Stafford or because of him and then it’s all just people yelling and screaming some more and look, we’re never gonna change anyone’s mind so why do we bother?  Fuck if I know.  I suppose it’s because we’re fans and that’s just what we do, and it’s necessary to do these things if only because it’s necessary to express our own feelings , to vent, to somebody, anybody.  There is a feeling of dumb accomplishment in gibbering like a mad person simply for its own sake, in saying GODDAMMIT HERE IS WHAT I THINK if only to keep your own brain from cannibalizing itself.  I suppose that’s all I’m doing here, and if someone else sees this and it makes them feel like they’re understood just a little bit better, or that they can rest their own brains a little bit because these idiot words somehow closely match their own ephemeral feelings better than anything else, then so be it.  So be it.  That’s the point and that’s why we do this.

That is kind of a weird tangent to go off on, unfocused and badly in need of an editor, but Talk Hard is all about taking the editor out back and blowing his brains out.  Talk Hard is about weird digressions and meandering journeys like this one because sometimes that’s the only way to figure all this shit out – by taking a walkabout of your own brain and your own soul.

And maybe that’s what last season was for Matthew Stafford – a necessary walkabout, a journey through his own brain, his own soul, his own flaws.  Maybe he needed to fuck up and make all sorts of dumb mistakes because it is the only way he’ll ever be able to come to terms with them, to fix them.  Maybe that’s what last season as a whole was about for this Lions team.  Maybe they needed that, to realize that they had to be better, that they couldn’t make all the dumb mistakes they had been making all along and then rely on miracle comebacks, on Stafford’s bazooka arm or St. Calvin’s heavenly ways to bail them out when the time came.  Or maybe not.  I don’t fucking know.

But I guess that’s kind of the whole point.  None of us fucking know.  And in the absence of that, you work with what you do know, which takes me back to the whole “What would you do differently?” question I asked before I got sidetracked with my own walkabout.  For as many questions as we have about Stafford – and it’s okay to have them, that is kind of the whole point here – we would be fools to not want to take the time to try to answer them.  After all, that is our best hope here, isn’t it?  Most of the dismay I see in the Lions fanbase seems to be a reactionary Ode to Fear, arising out of last year’s demolition of unrealistic fantasies.  What we desperately wanted to happen – and let’s be honest, in the wake of all we have been through “desperately wanted” and “desperately needed” have become pretty much the same thing – didn’t happen and so in order to protect ourselves, we have become reactionary and just decided to give up on the whole thing.  Which… fine.  If you want to give up, then I guess I don’t blame you.  Give up.  Go away.  Leave.  It’s a perfectly understandable position to take.  But that means you need to actually leave and shut the fuck up about the Lions because it’s none of your goddamn business anymore.  I respect your position here, respect mine by actually, you know, sticking to it.

But if you are still talking about this then guess what?  You’re still invested in this whole thing which means you owe it to yourself to be smarter than just saying “Fuck it…” which seems to be the default response to that question of what you would do differently.  Because if you don’t sign Stafford to that extension you are basically signaling that you’re done with him, that you have no faith and that you’re planning on moving on, which, uh, the last time I checked isn’t exactly the best way to deal with a QB whose head probably needs to get right.  A dude who needs to rebuild his confidence a little bit probably isn’t going to be helped much by telling him he fucking sucks and needs to pack up his shit and wait to be escorted out of the building by a security guard in some ambiguous yet all too near future.  I mean, it’s not like he’s Mark Sanchez.

And if you do feel like that’s the best route to go, then what?  Then what do you do?  Do you just blow it all up again and hope to get lucky with yet another rookie QB even though the Lions track record when it comes to rookie QB’s looks a lot like Spinal Tap’s record when it comes to drummers?  Do you look for a free agent off the scrap heap?  I mean… what?  Good quarterbacks are incredibly hard to find.  Elite quarterbacks are nearly impossible.  It requires a blend of luck and skill that even the best coaches and franchises struggle with.  Right now, we have a good quarterback – whatever your quibbles with Stafford’s mechanics, his head or anything else, the numbers alone qualify him as “good” – and we were lucky that his ship crossed with ours in the night because he’s an elite talent.  Now comes the skill part of that mixture.  Now comes the part where you have to take that elite talent and the luck we had in even getting him in the front door in the first place, and refining and building that into something better, into something truly elite.  That will take hard work on his part, on the coaches’ part and then some more luck when it comes to chemistry and all that intangible faerie shit that no one can really control. 

All of that is out of our control as fans.  We can’t really make things better, but we can add to the general dysfunction by being assholes about this.  We can sure as hell fuck up the chemistry and the mixture by treating Stafford like a hot piece of shit we found flaming on our front porch.  How the fuck is any of that going to help?  It’s kind of like having a really nice car that needs some work.  Somehow we lucked into a Ferrari that just needs a bit of tune up.  But in the minds of a lot of fans, tune ups are fucking hard and fuck that, let’s just leave it on the side of the road and then go used car hunting where maybe we can find a usable Chevy Malibu or something.  How in the fuck does that make sense?  You impatient dicks.

Of course, we can’t wait forever and at some point you do have to know when that car just can’t be fixed.  That’s what this season is all about.  And there might be something to be said for waiting until we see what happens this season to offer the extension.  I get that and it makes a certain sort of sense.  But then you also have to remember that these dudes are human beings and that from a psychological standpoint an extension vs. no extension might make all the difference in the world to someone like Stafford.  It’s a calculated risk but one that I think the team had to make.  Besides, it probably helps the team to know now what they’re looking at down the road instead of leaving it all up in the air and letting it become a distraction as the season goes on.  And hey, let’s face it, if Stafford does rebound then chances are good that this will eventually look like a bargain.  If he doesn’t… well, then the team is fucked anyway and we’re right back to rebuilding and salary cap issues are unlikely to be of any real import. 

Look, I don’t know what to expect this season.  I don’t.  I have no illusions but I will not revel in The Fear like a pig in its own shit either.  And similarly, I don’t know whether or not Matthew Stafford will take that next step.  But neither do any of you, and so anyone declaring that this news is either The Best News Ever or Worse Than the Holocaust should probably sit the next few plays out.  Stafford is talented but flawed, or flawed but talented depending on your point of view.  The key – as it is with all things – is recognizing that “but” is the important word in that sentence.  As long as he’s either just “Talented” or “Flawed” in your mind, you are living in a shitty place, a dangerous place, and you will end up being ruled by The Fear.  He is both and recognizing that bit of truth with him – and this team as a whole – is the key to moving forward without turning into a goddamn fool who nobody wants to listen to.  I like Stafford but I’m worried and I’m worried but I still like Stafford.  I just took 3,000 words to get to that singular point, but what the hell, at least I got there which is more than I can say for a lot of you.

Stronger in the Broken Places

You watch the NFL and you start to make silent compacts with your own sense of morality.  You tell yourself it’s okay that dudes get crippled and end up finger-painting in a home while nurses spoon feed them apple sauce and they coo like babies at age 48 because they make millions of dollars and blah, blah, blah . . .

I’ve written about this before and I’m not much interested in analyzing those little shell games we play with ourselves to keep from vomiting into a bucket at the realization that we’re little more than assholes in togas sitting in the stands at the Coliseum giving the thumbs down gesture while Ray Lewis or whoever screams “Are you not entertained?” and then does that stupid bird dance before cutting a dude’s head off at midfield.  What I’m interested in talking about is the weird way those mental gymnastics have contorted our own sense of appreciation for what these dudes go through physically on a day to day basis.  I’m not talking the sort of life-altering mashed potato brain injuries that are all the rage these days.  I’m talking the subtle deterioration of the physical shell itself.  Because for as much as we’ve learned to mourn at the altar of brain injuries and appropriately tear our hair and beat our breasts for the lost brains of a generation of young men, we have become if anything even harder and more savage and demanding when it comes to other sorts of injuries.

I’m thinking particularly of Louis Delmas.  We all love Louis – or at least the idea of Louis – but the lack of actual Louis other than as a perpetually injured avatar for What Could Be But What Isn’t has driven most fans to bitter sniping.  Whether it’s blaming him for the audacity of trying to deal with his body falling apart or bitching him out because they think he’s stealing money somehow or shaking their heads in righteous indignation because he dares to get frustrated when he doesn’t have the answers to the same questions every reporter has been asking him seemingly since some hydrogen atoms fucked around and formed the sun, fans are all over his ass morning, noon and night.

This sucks because, trust me, no one is more pissed or frustrated by this sad state of affairs than Louis Delmas himself.  It’s a brutal league.  In some sense, every player knows that before they even suit up.  But for as much as we make a compact with our own sense of morality, these dudes do it a million times more.  They’re forced to live in at least some form of denial just to avoid weeping into their Cheerios every morning at the inevitability of their all too early physical destruction.  It’s not like they can just tell themselves “Hey, fuck it, I’ll die at 55 after pulling a gun in traffic because my brain doesn’t work but lol what the hell . . .”  No, they have to pretend just like we pretend and so when their bodies don’t cooperate it very likely comes as a shock to them.

And when it does, it’s got to be an impossible thing to deal with because all their lives their bodies have been the one thing that’s set them apart from everybody else.  These guys aren’t just decent athletes.  These guys are phenomenal athletes.  Their bodies are instruments of their singular will.  They have spent their entire lives telling their body what to do and then watching as the body carried out its orders.  It’s not something you can really understand unless you are athletic yourself.  And when that day comes when you keep barking out orders to your body only to have it laugh at you and say “Fuck you, buddy, I’m going home,” it’s absolutely awful.  You’ve lost not just an important part of who you are but perhaps the defining part of who you are.  Your body no longer works right and when you have spent your entire life running faster than a speeding bullet and jumping higher than the highest mountains, all while laughing and building your life around it, it’s got to be devastating.  Nobody wants to see Superman in a wheelchair, and no one less so than Superman himself.

I have at least a small bit of understanding when it comes to this issue.  I’m a pretty good athlete.  Not great, but good enough.  I’ve played lots of different sports, and been pretty good at most of them.  I understand my body’s movements, have always had excellent muscle control, and all that horseshit, and when my body is behaving itself I can kick all sorts of ass.  (While I’m bragging like a horse’s ass, I am also an excellent dancer with a terrific sense of rhythm and invented the Moonwalk when I was a baby.  Okay fine, that might be a slight exaggeration.)  I don’t say this so you’ll think I’m a jerk who enjoys blowing himself in print – although that’s probably true – but so I can set up the flipside.  You see, when I was a kid my feet and hands started to bother me and my friendly neighborhood doctor said something to the effect of “Well son, I’m afraid you have arthritis.  It’s a hereditary thing and you can probably take medication that will make you feel like shit but really, you’re fucked.  Here, have a sucker.”

Being a stupid kid, I brushed this off and figured it was just something that would catch up to me in some ambiguous future.  My body still mostly behaved and everything was cool.  Of course, I would joke with my friends that I would probably end up in a wheelchair by the time I was 30 – both because of the doctor’s grim prognosis and because I lived like an utter hedonist jackass who would run through a brick wall just because it was there – and we would all laugh because the truth was that it seemed remote and distant.  Sure, sometimes my arthritis would creep up on me and my doctor and family were always after me to take drugs to postpone the inevitable but they weren’t the sort of drugs I was interested in at the time and besides, I didn’t want that stigma, that one that hangs over your head like a big neon sign flashing the word BROKEN over and over again for all the world to see.

And so I tried to outrun it, tried to make my body behave through sheer force of will.  Today, I am just past 30 and I’m not anywhere close to being in a wheelchair.  But I also hurt every morning when I get up, my hands and feet fucking hate me pretty regularly, I have to think long and hard before I decide to do something so simple as take a long walk on the beach for fear that by morning I’ll feel like an 85 year old man and so it goes.  So it goes.  It is what it is and it’s something I have to live with, both because it was in my genetic gift basket and because I lived like a fool for way too long.  The thing is, is that no matter how much I tell myself that it’s something I simply have to live with, there are some days that it hurts so bad that I literally scream like an idiot and start trying to make deals with devils to give me my body back.  To everyone looking on, I seem fine.  I hide it pretty well, mostly because I’m vain, but there are times when I just want to tell everyone to fuck off and then separate myself from my body and slam it against a bunch of jagged rocks.

So, yeah, I get what Louis Delmas is going through – at least a little bit.  I can’t imagine how horrifying it must be to have that happen when your body is literally the one thing that gets you paid.  To know what you’re capable of, to feel it, to think it, but then for your body to fail you when you try to execute – and not just fail you because of age but fail you before your time was supposed to be up – is a horrible, horrible feeling.  I’ll never bash Louis Delmas for having to deal with all this bullshit because he spends plenty of time bashing himself.  Trust me. 

This all feels overly confessional and I’m tempted to just delete all of this nonsense because this is not something I really like to talk about, and I’ll probably never mention it again after this.  You do it and people start looking at you like you’re somehow less than what you used to be – and in a sense, you are.  Some people scoff at you and act like it’s all in your head and that if you just tried harder everything would be cool, and some people pity you and act like you’re made of glass.  Both reactions suck, and I guarantee you that some of you reading this will have your perceptions of me altered by this.  You’ll say they won’t, but they will.  They will.  They just do.  I don’t want you to think of me as some feeble cripple because I’m not.  Like I said, I can still do everything I’ve always done, it just takes a little more thought and planning now.  I seem perfectly normal and can hang with everyone on the court or on the field still, it’s just that when I need that extra gear that I always had, everything sort of malfunctions now and there are days when I just have to shrug and say “I can’t go.”  It’s a pain in the ass.  I’m still an excellent dancer though.

The point is, is that’s what Louis Delmas has to go through every day.  His body has told him to fuck off but he’s not ready to fuck off.  Inside, he still feels the same as he always did and there are moments, glorious moments, when he can run flat out and nothing will hurt and those are the best days.  But there are days when he’ll wake up and he can’t seem to do anything without a limp or without feeling like a tiny little demon is gnawing at him with teeth made of fire, hatred and swords.  When that happens, it’s impossible really come to terms with any of it, because those good days prove to you that you’ve still got it and it feels so good that even the idea of walking away from it seems ludicrous.  You’re not a broken down old man, you’re just a dude who has some bad days, and as long as there are more good than bad you can hold your breath and hope like hell that every day will be a good one.  That’s what Louis Delmas deals with.  He knows he can still go, his coaches know he can still go, and his doctors know he can still go.  They all just have to hope like hell that tomorrow will be one of those days and not one of the little demons with fire sword teeth days.

And on top of that, he knows that the moment that those days outnumber the good ones, the moment the Lions have to tell him “Sorry bro, but you’re just not reliable anymore” he not only has to eat the humiliation of that moment, the feelings of failure that come along with it and the horror that comes from knowing that you are no longer irrevocably in control of your own physical destiny, he has to try to come to terms with the fact that it also means that his career is over, his life’s work finished.  And then what?  And then what?  He gets to sit home feeling like a broken failure, haggling with the team he once called his family over worker’s comp like poor Zack Follett while fans treat him like some sort of malingerer and talk shit about him all over the internet. 

So yeah, sometimes that will make a dude a little ornery.

Nobody wants to be healthier than Louis Delmas.  Nobody wants to be able to run on that field and launch himself like a missile at some poor fool more than Louis Delmas.  Nobody wants to look a reporter in the eye more than Louis Delmas, smile and say “I feel good, bro.  I feel good.”  Trust me.

Everybody Knows

Hi.

That's as good a place as any to start, I suppose.  You might know me, you might not.  If you're a long-suffering Lions fan who does know who I am, then it's probably from my previous incarnation at Armchair Linebacker, where I said a bunch of wild and crazy shit that seemed to both move people and speak to their wounded idiot fan hearts.  If you don't know me, well . . . the best way I can sum this whole thing up is that while I was at Armchair Linebacker, I basically became the Lions blogger version of Hard Harry from Pump Up the Volume, which is a completely ridiculous movie that nonetheless is much beloved and seems vaguely important.  It's about a disaffected teenager played by Christian Slater, who sits at a microphone and says all manner of vile and offensive shit and somehow finds himself the voice of an entire legion of fuck-ups, reprobates and the otherwise put-upon youth of America.  Jesus, I sound kind of full of myself here, don't I?

Wait, wait, before you strain something rolling your eyes, let me clear this up.  I don't think I'm the voice of some sort of disenfranchised subgroup of Lions fans.  I'm barely fit to represent a band of crippled werewolves with brains rotted by syphilis.  The similarity comes from this: I say shit other people won't say.  I say the shit a lot of people are thinking but just can't quite seem to put in words.  Or at least that is my reputation.  I am not suffering from delusions of grandeur here, that is actually a thing many, many people have said to me.  But like Hard Harry, I am probably too fucked up and too weird and I offend too many people to really stand as a figure of mainstream respect and adoration.  Most Lions fans don't have a fucking clue who I am and the majority of those who do probably think I'm a weird fuck-up and they're probably not wrong.  I am crass and the metaphorical FCC of public opinion will chase me down and have me locked away just like the real FCC did to Hard Harry at the end of Pump Up the Volume.  (Uh . . . spoiler alert.)

But fuck all that, I'm not here to grovel at anyone's feet.  I am here to say the shit nobody else will say.  I am here to say the shit that needs to be said.  I am here to Talk Hard.

I've decided to lead each post with Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows" just like Hard Harry did each of his shows in the movie.  Why?  Well first of all, I am embarrassingly unoriginal and shockingly corny, and second, and most importantly, because goddammit it fits.

After all, just listen to the lyrics.  Is there anything that better sums up the plight of the Lions fan these days than that? 


Everybody knows that the dice are loaded.
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed. 
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died.


Indeed.

Look, before you pop the cap on the ol' drain cleaner smoothie, let me explain.  I realize that is impossibly bleak and awful and oh god there is a hyena chewing out my insides but here's the thing: we dared to dream and dream big in the primordial ooze of a new world following the supernova like explosion of the old world we call 0-16 (shiver) and for a while things seemed like they might work out.  The air was blue, the grass was green and I was working the happy metaphor crank like a compulsive masturbator.  But then the Lions went 4-12 last year, Matthew Stafford suffered a weird season long malaise which casts some doubt on whether or not he's got the mental skillz to match up with his considerable physical skillz, Ndamukong Suh became Hannibal Lecter in the eyes of the rest of the world and was seen starring in those whacky Taiwanese news recreations of famous train wrecks (look, anytime you're keeping company with Tiger Woods' Boner Follies and Charlie Sheen, you know things have gotten entirely too fucked up), Titus Young went crazy and tried to fight everybody from Louis Delmas to the cops to his own sanity, Titus was subsequently thrown off the team and out of polite society, the Lions drafted a 25 year old hipster from Africa who's barely played football in his life to be their new star pass rusher on defense - which is only the most important position in Gunther Cunningham's defensive scheme - Jason Hanson committed seppuku rather than suffer one more year of this madness, people started wearing paper bags on their heads again and a giant Matt Millen head appears in my dreams every couple of days and taunts me for a while before its giant maw opens and Rod Marinelli staggers out naked, wearing only a diaper and starts screaming at me about pad level before I wake up in a cold sweat and realize that things have taken a very, very bad turn.

Everybody knows the good guys lost.

Okay, so now what?  That's just the thing. We all know this is doomed because that is humanity's default state.  Doomed.  The good guys lose, the war gets lost and in the end we are all just violent savages, hateful wretches who should probably get blown out of a volcano into the waiting arms of an angry sun god.  But the fragile beauty of humanity lies in its ability to move forward in the face of doom, to always strive for something, anything better than the savagery which will undo us before the end.  We are a people forever in search of a utopia that does not exist, a people determined to create a sort of heaven on earth because that's the only way to deal with the madness of reality.  Man is not defined by his failure but by his reaction to it.  Man is a doomed creature who refuses to acknowledge that he is doomed.  Man is bent and beaten but he is not broken.  Man smiles a bloody smile and gets on with the business of living.

And so it is with Lions fans.  We know the score.  We're not dumb.  Mildly delusional, sure, but we're not stupid.  We get it.  The dice are loaded.  We're fucked.  But the restless and indefatigable nature of our souls keeps us going, keeps us moving forward.  Towards what, we have no idea, but that's the tragic beauty of humanity - we always leave room for the beauty of possibility, for the idea that salvation might lie just over that next hill - or in this case, the next game or the next season - no matter how unlikely it may seem.  We are a people who have always gazed at the stars at night, wondered what was up there, what was out there, not because we feared it, but because we believed innately in the possibility of the unknown.  We gaze into the night because we yearn for that twinkle, for that glimmer of Hope.

We believe in Calvin Johnson.  He is our North Star, guiding us, keeping us true and safe.  We see possibility sprinkled in the constellations we have named Suh or Ansah, Fairley and Young.  We see a comet named Bush, streaking through the sky and we wish upon it, close our eyes and dream of a better world.

Okay, even I can admit this is getting too fucking corny but I am not ashamed to admit that I can be disgustingly sentimental.  For all my bluster and foul-mouthed goonery deep down I am just a wide-eyed fool who wants to be happy.  I keep my heart open to possibility even if that means it gets broken over and over again. 

Everybody knows the boat is leaking, and everybody knows that the captain lied, but I'm gonna stand on the bow of this goddamn ship anyway and I'm going to stare out over the horizon, because Fear is just a word and Possibility is what defines us.  Go Lions.

 

The Bejeweled Demon

It came in the mail.  I didn’t know what it was but it was wrapped in a weathered box and was marked with words in several foreign languages, including some foreboding African ones that had their “t’s” crossed with machetes.  I was reluctant to let the damn thing in my home, especially since it was radiating a weird energy and there were bloody footprints leading away from it.  I could only presume that they came from the mailman, who had limped away after some titanic struggle with whatever was in this terrible box.  But I looked at the return address and saw the familiar and reassuring name of my good friend, Raven Mack.  So despite my misgivings I brought the package inside and opened it, cutting it open with a chainsaw because that’s just how I do.

I’ll never forget what I saw.  It appeared to be some sort of bejeweled demon with the hilt of a mighty blade sticking out of it.  I pulled on the blade but it would not come free.  I cursed and slapped at the thing and my palms immediately felt hot, as if they had been burned by the demon.  Afraid that I had angered it, I threw a towel over its head and retreated to the dark, where I nursed some banana beer and wondered why Raven had sent me such a thing.  And then, I saw it.

In the wreckage of the box lay a shredded note.  I staggered over to it, half-drunk on banana beer and I did my best to reassemble it.  Even then, it wasn’t easy to read, as it appeared that it had been written in blood and the words were smeared by either tears or old semen.  I couldn’t be sure.  But I could make out the following:

“ . . . been too much for my family to bear . . . sixteen deaths . . . mutilated goats . . . I fought for hours but it just kept coming . . . to you in the hopes that you can figure out how to defeat it . . . look to the tipi . . . it is coming, it is coming . . . no!  NO!!!”

Shaken, I nervously eyed the demon with the towel over its head.  The words seemed like nonsense.  Maybe Raven had taken up drinking again.  Maybe he had finally lost it at work and was now driving railroad spikes into the sunken eyes of the decapitated skulls of his coworkers and fortifying his compound with their bones.  Who knows?  But I trusted the man.  We had simply been through too many Spirit Wars together not to and so I decided that I had to learn as much about this bejeweled demon and the blade that it so curiously housed. 

I took to my archives, gathered from years of painstaking research and field work in the darkest corners of both the world and the human heart.  I ran my fingers along my beloved books containing the myths and legends of that great human protector, The Great Willie Young, books that took up two whole walls of my makeshift study.  I pored through them all night, looking for answers, but even The Great Willie Young never seemed to encounter this strangely bejeweled demon.  The hairs on my neck began to stand up as I remembered old legends about aliens come to eviscerate the local cattle.  A man had found his dog walking bowlegged with a ruptured anus one morning and had blamed it on shape-shifting greys.  No, get a hold of yourself damn it, I thought, downing what was left of my stock of banana beer.  You’re too drunk and you cannot figure this out in this state.

That night I couldn’t sleep and I found myself picturing the face of that monstrous demon.  Goddammit, what was it?  Was it really a demon?  No, don’t be preposterous.  The skull of a fallen grey?  No, that would be even more absurd?  A turtle perhaps?  Yes, a giant turtle.  That was it.  That had to be it.  I convinced myself that this was all there was to this fiend and I huddled under my covers and drifted off into a dreamless sleep.

I awoke with a start.  How long had I been out?  An hour?  Two?  It was still dark but there was an ominous . . . presence I suppose is the only word for it, and I crept out of bed with a monstrous erection.  Don’t ask why.  These things just happen.  I crept out of my room and into the hall where an eerie glow illuminated the walls.  Bloody handprints reached up and up and up, finally dying near the ceiling as if some poor creature had been literally climbing the walls in desperate fear.  My pulse quickened and, in an instinctive crouch, I moved down the hall, naked, eyes wide, my adrenaline keeping my erection firm and at the ready in case of . . . in case of . . . god only knows but as the Boy Scouts say, always be prepared.

The glow increased in intensity with each step and when I emerged from the hallway I discovered the bejeweled demon, glowing with an intensity that I fear may have permanently damaged my retinae.  Whenever I close my eyes, I can still see it, leering at me from within that awful glow.  Terrible, terrible, terrible . . .

The towel I had thrown over it was smoldering in the corner, more ash than towel really, and the corpse of a giant elk was crucified on my wall.  I am not one to panic, but in that moment I am not ashamed to admit that I lost it a bit.  I ran from my home, screaming and was intercepted by a concerned neighbor who said “Neil, you’re naked again.  Why don’t you let me get you back to bed.” 

I cuffed him with a brutal right hand, shattering his ear-drums and screamed something unintelligible at him.  Poor Doug.  An 89 year old man does not deserve such things.  But these were desperate times and I simply could not tolerate his inanity.  There was a goddamn demon on the loose.

I huddled behind a makeshift shed behind Doug’s house.  I could see his wife peering at me from behind the blinds, phone in hand.  The harridan was calling 911, I was sure of it.  I wanted to stop her but I figured the site of a naked man with a beard on both his face and his junk would send her into a panic and I didn’t need a SWAT team chasing me through the night along with that horrible bejeweled demon.  But wait, maybe that was exactly what I needed.  If I could turn their firepower against this vondruke perhaps I could escape this night with my life and my sanity after all.  And so I did the only thing I could do.  I leapt from behind the shed and ran at the old lady.  I feared for a moment that she would suffer a heart attack.  She was 102 years old after all, a lusty cougar who had seduced young Douglas back when he was on the cusp of retirement and she a desperate widow who had pissed away her previous husband’s life insurance and had been . . . indiscreet with her social security money, buying the finest hams and showering a young Filipino gigolo named Manuel with gifts.  She had targeted Doug and his union pension, probably for several years, and I know she wished the man dead so she could collect on his benefits and so I decided that if the shock of seeing me rushing at her home, naked with crazed fear in my eyes caused her to drop dead of a heart attack then so be it, at least Douglas would be free.  I didn’t feel particularly good about it but tough decisions had to be made.

When she saw me coming, she dropped the phone.  But I knew that eventually she would gather what was left of her dusty wits and place that call and so I kept on running, and I ran and I ran and I ran until I could run no more, until finally the panic had passed and I could think clearly, rationally.  I remembered the note.  What had Raven said?  Something about a tipi?  I imagined him sitting inside his own tipi, hard at work on his zine and then I imagined that bejeweled beast attacking him, perhaps ruffling his papers around, messing them up so they were out of order, just to be a dick, and I became angry.  That foul fiend.  And so I made the decision to creep back to my home.  I had to hide in the bushes while a patrol car crept by, shining a flashlight down my drive.  One car.  One goddamned car.  That was all they could send?  I cursed under my breath and knew that I was on my own.  I felt bad for involving Doug and his old (old as dirt) lady in this affair but it couldn’t be helped.  Besides, they had both seen worse.  He was a Korean War veteran and even worse they had been my neighbors for six long terrifying years.  The things they had seen, the depravities and crimes against humanity . . . awful, awful.  Once, Doug told me that he sometimes wished he was back in Korea, fighting the Slopes.  I admonished him for his appalling racial insensitivity but he told me “Goddammit, Neil, at least them mongrels have a shred of decency.  They’ll just bayonet you in the balls.  You on the other hand . . . goddammit, son, don’t think me and the wife haven’t heard the screams coming from your place.”  He then shuddered and we never spoke of it again.  Yes, they probably thought this was just another Tuesday.  At least I wasn’t asking to borrow a shovel and a bag of lime again.

I waited out the patrol car and then I slipped down my drive.  It was freezing out but my adrenaline kept me safe, kept me moving.  The soles of my feet were raw, bleeding, and I knew that I would be in pain the next day but goddammit, I had work to do just to see the next day.  There were no guarantees, not with this demon running around, and so I resolved to do anything, destroy anything, myself included, if it meant preserving the world for just one more day.  After all, if nothing else, I am a hero.

My entire home was aglow at this point.  In restrospect, the sight was hauntingly beautiful, eerie like the Northern Lights shining over the fresh kill of a polar bear and when I think of it I am sometimes brought to tears.  But on that night it was just terrifying.  There was no beauty to the moment and I closed my eyes and barreled right through my front door.  Almost immediately I was set upon by tiny little demons, each with that terrible bejeweled head.  They clawed at me and bit my legs.  I howled in pain and squashed several of them but each time I did more sprung up to take their place.  I grabbed the giant horns of the crucified elk and I swung like Tarzan into my kitchen where I tossed a handful of the horrible miniature demons in the microwave and hit START.  The damn thing sparked and then blew up and yet they did not die.  Desperate, I lunged for the bejeweled statue, knocking it to the floor.  It was then that I saw that the hilt of the blade seemed loose.  I reached for it and I pulled.  It still wouldn’t give.  Damn it, I thought, how am I supposed to beat this thing?  I pressed myself against a wall and as I held the swarming miniature demons at bay with desperate kicks and wild punches, I said a silent prayer to The Great Willie Young.  And in that moment, a strange calm came about me and I knew that if I tried again the blade would come free.  I reached out, I pulled and sure enough, the blade slid free.  The air rushed with a sort of hissing noise and I could hear an awful scream, as if some terrible fell beast had been wounded in another dimension. 

The blade itself appeared to be fairly ordinary, a little rusted, dull around the edge, but it glowed red with the hot fire of The Great Willie Young himself and so I felt confident as I began to hack at the terrible little demons assaulting me in my own home.  And one by one, they died at the edge of this holy relic, this blade that was infused with the immortal power of The Great Willie Young himself.  And yet, there were too many of them.  I am but a simple man, and it wasn’t long before my arms tired and the swinging of the blade came slower and slower.  And still they came, in the thousands, the millions.  The floor of my home was an ocean of their dark blood and I swam through it – don’t ask me to recount the memory of that experience for it is too horrible to even imagine – the holy blade clutched in my teeth, the demon statue under one arm.  I do not know why I grabbed it.  I suppose that I knew that if I didn’t find a way to defeat it that no one would and I would not be responsible for the world ending.  And so I grabbed it and I swam and I swam and I swam through that viscous muck until I spilled out of my front door. 

It was then that I heard the barking of the police dogs, and saw the helicopters with their giant lights shining down on me.  I saw Doug and his extremely old lady huddled on their front lawn, a blanket wrapped around them while paramedics saw to their various maladies and I cursed the old woman.  But it was half-hearted.  I couldn’t blame her.  And besides, I had bigger issues to deal with.  And so, naked, covered in the blood and viscera of countless slain miniature demons, I ran through the woods behind my home, glowing statue in hand and blood-soaked blade in my mouth.  It tasted of . . . death, and with each demon drop that slid down my throat on that terrible night I could hear the savage wails of billions of tormented souls.  But still, with tears in my eyes and madness in my heart, I ran on.   I could hear the dogs yapping and snarling as they chased after me, and I could hear the terrible whir of the helicopters above as they searched and every once in a while I would hear the crack of a gun and would almost feel the bullet whiz past me but still I eluded them.

But as I ran, I got the sickening feeling that I wasn’t alone.  I had yet to look back, such was my desperation to flee that terrible place, but I decided that I had to, if only to achieve a sense of closure, and when I did I saw the horrifying sight of countless miniature demons chasing after me.  But they were keeping their distance and when I stopped to look back at them, they stopped too, and they leered at me with terrible, toothy grins, devilish grins and I screamed at them “Back, you fell beasts!  You unholy monsters!  You have plagued me long enough!  Long enough!”  But the demons just laughed at me.  Angry, and not knowing what else to do, I held the bejeweled statue in front of me.  And one by one, the demons knelt.  I cried with sudden relief and held the statue before me.  I could hear the dogs getting closer and I wondered if perhaps I could somehow turn this to my advantage.  It was clear that these demons worshipped the statue.  They seemed to revere it as some sort of great mother from which they had all sprung.  I had no desire to make deals with such evil but these were desperate times and hey, fuck the police.

And so I began to scream at the demons, ordering them to set up a defensive perimeter.  But again, they just laughed at me and it soon became clear that their “fealty” was little more than a disgusting attempt to mock me.  After all, why would demons revere anything but themselves?  And even then, is not a demon merely the ultimate manifestation of self-loathing?  No, if anything, they hated themselves and their “mother.”  Realizing this, I tossed the bejeweled demon statue to the ground.  The little hellions all screeched with anger and began to chase me again.  Oops.

Realizing my error, I turned and ran, blade in hand, and yet no matter how close they came, the demons never seemed to catch me.  I was nearing the river and I realized with sickening dread that they were penning me in, playing with me, waiting for me to reach the river where they would no doubt consume both me and my soul. 

But still I ran.  After all, what more was there left for me to do?  In the absence of Hope man must still find something to cling to, and the rawest and most basic thing that any of us has left is the animal instinct to simply survive, even if it is but for an extended moment, one more moment to think, to feel, to know, to experience the feel of a blade of grass on the feet, the gentle breath of a cool breeze, the laughter of a river as it rushes by.  I ran and I lived, without Hope, but with the desire to simply exist for one more moment compelling me forward, forward, forward . . .

And it was then that I was saved, as a host of River People sprang from the mud and the reeds surrounding the river and threw themselves at the tiny demons.  I saw the haunting death in one of their faces, the face of a man who knows he is giving the ultimate sacrifice for something greater than himself – for life itself and the possibility that lies at its fragile little heart.  I looked at him and he looked at me and just before he was swarmed by an army of those tiny monsters he said to me “Go!  Live!  And never forget that we River People saved you and saved you for a mighty cause, the cause of Truth!  Spread this Truth to the world and remember us, not as vagrants or mongrels but as men, the last free men there are!”  And then, the last free man died, swarmed by hundreds, thousands, of the hellions, who ate his flesh and left him nothing more than a quivering mass of red bones.  I will never forget the sight of it as long as I live.

But thanks to him and his people I did get to live, as I dove beneath the frigid waters of the river and swam to the safety of a small wooded isle.  Weeping for the heroic sacrifice of those brave men and women of the River, I crawled, blade in hand to a clearing, where I lay sobbing, naked and terrified.  Up above, the police helicopters still tried to track me but the island repelled their efforts and hid me in its embrace.  And yet, after a time, I could hear the sounds of something – millions of things – swimming.  Horrified, I peered out across the waters of the river only to see in the moonlight those horrible hellions swimming slowly toward me.  A mass of them in the middle carried on their backs that horrible bejeweled statue, glowing with its hellish light, and I collapsed on the ground and screamed at the sky, asking what I had done to deserve such a monstrous fate.  I thought back to my friend Raven and I wondered how he had escaped, how he had found a way to rid himself of these demons.  Perhaps he hadn’t.  Perhaps he had just bought himself much needed time, or maybe he had found a way after all.  Yes.  What did he say?  Look to the tipi?  Yes, that was it.  Perhaps . . . yes!  Yes, it made sense.  After all, he had often spoken with me of the sacred nature of his tipi, ranted and raved to me about it being a sanctuary from the evils of the world.  I always thought he was just being hyperbolic or metaphorical and then we would do another line of crank and forget about the whole thing while we fought crime using advanced forms of karate until the sun came up and we shook hands and went back to our homes.  But what if he wasn’t being metaphorical?  What if it were all true?

I breathlessly asked myself this as I watched them slowly doggy-paddle across the river.  Either they weren’t very good swimmers or they were toying with me, the bastards.  On the other hand, it was possible that the sanctifying power of the river itself was slowing them down.  Who knows?  Whatever the case, their slow approach gave me time.  And with this time I used the holy blade, wrested from the prison of the demon, to fashion for myself a crude tipi.  It wasn’t much, but it was enough.  Or so I hoped anyway.

When I was finished, I stood naked, still covered in demon blood, in the middle of the tipi.  The blood sizzled and seemed to scream and although it burned and left me permanently scarred, a hideous mangled man who will be forever wrecked and wasted physically, a blight in the eyes of “normal” men, destined to be little more than a local legend, a folk tale told around campfires to scare children, I love each and every scar, for it is a reminder that I fought the good fight and so long as I am alive, the world shall know peace.

And it will know peace because on that night those hellions stormed the isle, like terrible little soldiers storming Normandy and for a while I simply watched as they threw themselves against my tipi and were repelled by its holy powers.  But yet they still kept coming and kept coming and kept coming and it wasn’t long before I realized that they would never stop, no matter how hopeless their attempts.  I knew that as a mortal man this would eventually drive me insane and I feared what I would do in that insane state.  Would I give in to these monsters?  The thought was too horrible to contemplate and so I did what I had to do and I leapt out, blade in hand and I slew scores of them, hundreds of them, thousands, so that the isle’s ground was dyed with their black blood.  It is horrible and where they died I fear no new trees will ever grow.  But it had to be done.  The island and the river that feeds it and the river people that are its guardians understand.  I fought for what had to be hours with the little demons.  The sun rose in the sky and it fell again.  Occasionally, I would still hear the distant barking of a dog or the whir of a copter’s blades but they could not find me and so I ignored them as I fought.  Seven times the sun rose and seven times it fell before finally I wrested the bejeweled demon statue from the clutches of those monsters and dragged it with me, fighting my way back to my tipi, an effort which itself took another several days.  Finally, exhausted, I collapsed inside of my tipi and as I did the statue finally ceased to glow and with a terrible shriek I will never forget all the little demons shriveled and died, crumbled to dust and were blown away by a cold and merciless wind.

And so now here I sit, inside of my tipi on this deserted island in the middle of the river, naked and cold.  But I am sustained by the solemnity of my office, by my duty, for I am the guardian of the bejeweled demon statue, like that old ass knight who guards the Holy Grail, and it has fallen to me to protect it, to keep it safe and imprisoned in this holy sanctuary.  I am just thankful that the island has Wi-Fi.

I didn’t ask for this duty, nor do I take any special pride in it, and on some nights I weep for my lost humanity, for all the people I might have known, the things I might have done, the places I might have seen, but still, I do it because no one else can.  Perhaps this makes me a hero, or perhaps this just makes me a man.  Who is to say?  All I know is that it’s been a hell of a month and at least now I don’t have to watch the Lions play.