Just Stick Together

There is a moment in every Lions season when the wheels start to come off, and we’ve pretty much come to that moment, no? Quandre Diggs was sent to the mud, and Darius Slay isn’t happy, and for fuck’s sake, when does this become fun?

This week’s game against the Giants is less about beating them and more about how we take cover from the shitstorm of misery that is about to wash over us, but it’s okay because we’ve been swimming in these shitty waters for a long time now and it’s the only thing we know. At least if we drown, we’ll get to go to hell and burn for eternity.

I am not optimistic about this Lions team and neither are you. That’s okay. We are in this together and we are not like the others. At a certain point you have to know when a thing is finished, when it has reached the end of its life cycle and just needs to be thrown in the trash. Whether it’s your fandom, your marriage, or fuck, even your life, you have to know when something is finished and you have to figure out a way to become something else when it’s all over.

I don’t have any answers for you other than to tell you that I am here and that we are in this thing together, and we’ll get through it. I hope that some day things might be better for my Lions, and I know that I cannot just cut them out of my life because I’ve tried that and it doesn’t work. So what do you do when you are just eternally strapped to your own misery? I don’t know. Make a lot of jokes, do some drugs, talk to each other about it.

The Lions can probably beat the Giants this week and get back to something near even, but this is not a sound ship and we all know this. What do we do when the ship is sinking and the band is still playing? Keep calm, and try not to swallow your own tongue and just hope that someone picks you up while you’re floating.

Saquon Barkley is likely to run us into the mud this week, but Daniel Jones is probably in for some pain, and Matthew Stafford is the most adult like thing in the room now, and he’ll probably carry us to a win here as the band plays on and this ship sinks and you have to remember that love is a choice, only it isn’t really, it’s just a damnable thing, and it will fuck you up. But we are not like the others, and we wear scars that prove that we are alive, and we live and we suffer and we die, but it’s okay because I’ve got you and you’ve got me.

Tomorrow will bring something new and you have to make the best of what you can of things in this world which was not meant for you and I. Our job is to just to continue to try to survive here, and carve out little moments for ourselves, things that we can cherish and be proud of, things that matter, if not to ourselves then at least to someone else who sees it and thinks okay, there are others like me.

Life as a fan of these Detroit Lions is a constant struggle to find those moments to hang onto, to love and cherish and bring warmth to our idiot hearts, and they are fleeting but they are very real and we cannot abandon them to save a part of ourselves that was never really alive to begin with. The aching beauty of Barry Sanders career, or the sad song of St. Calvin Johnson are testimonies to these moments, beautiful arcs that we have shared together and will share again as we blunder into an unknowable future. We will have our little laughs, our comradery, and those little moments that remind ourselves that we are not alone and that we are not like the others and that’s okay.

It's already been a weird season, a trying season, and things will get worse before they get better again, but they will get better again, my friend, and when they do, we will know that we went through it together, that we have lived this ridiculous life together, bonded by our love for a football team and for our shared humanity. It will get better than this, and all these scars will look badass.

My first year chronicling what it feels like to be a Lions fan was that 0-16 season which stands as a perfect monument to how bad times can get. In the years since, I have written a lot of wild words, invented a mythological superhero, and found a ton of friends and warm thoughts along the way. I don’t have a lot of supporters or readers, but that’s okay because we are not like the others and we will have each other’s backs, bonded as brothers through a shared pain, a shared knowing of what it feels like to be a fan of the Detroit Lions, of what it feels like to be a human being in this fucked up world.

I love you all, and I thank you for all your kind words and support through these years, and nothing can take away from us this thing that we share together. If the Lions beat the Giants on Sunday I will be happy, but if they don’t, it’s really all okay because I know this ship is sinking and the band keeps playing and that’s just how these things turn out sometimes. We will find a mermaid and have lots of fucked up sex under the sea when it’s all over and we can be glad for it because we have earned it.

Every day is a new exercise in audacious ridicule, spent trying to make sense of the present by putting together the wrecked pieces of the past in the hope that the future can somehow be something different. But don’t give up on me baby, because we have an ocean of time to get through this world together, you and I, and when things get bad we can turn to each other and talk about other stupid goofy things that we love, and when things are good we can help each other to get to where we want to be. I am just a dude who wants to lead his dudes into a world where we can find some sort of happiness for ourselves, and we’ll get there if we just stick together.

Lions 27 Giants 14

Gambling With Sanity Week Whatever the Fuck

In the wasteland that is our lives as fans of this idiot football, it becomes increasingly clear that I am the only person you can count on as I smoked Vegas with an 11-2 record last week. I am the top guy out here now, breaking thumbs and digging graves for any idiot who runs afoul of me. I have broken your NFL machine and now I am just rolling in all of the money that is due to me through my wizardry. But I am just a humble man, and if I could share it all with you I would, but I can’t because no one ever gives me the fucking money even when I am here slaving for you and guiding you to success, both professionally and at home and in the bedroom.  You are all stacks of money to me, and I will eat you all up, so just sit back, relax, and get fat with money thanks to my proven system to beat the fuckers who hold all the goddamn money.

Washington (+14) at Minnesota

Baby Jay Gruden is out in Washington, and he’ll probably have to slither to his father’s side in the Vegas desert which I have just told you I claimed as my own. This is not good for them because I will not have their kind stinking up my beautiful desert. Just bury old man Al Davis here and get the fuck out of town. Anyway, that is what’s going on with the Washington football team, named after a racial slur, and it’s no wonder they are pissing away this season at 1-6. Meanwhile, Kirk Cousins grows fat on the Failure Demons of others, and he is the sort of goon who is poisoning Washington the city, the capital, the concept of America itself. It’s no good man, no good at all. And in these blown out streets, with MAGA hats flying free in the breeze, it’s hard to see the good guys winning, and in this game there are no good guys, just a shitty football team that will be blown out by a goddamn fascist nightmare in Kirk Cousins. Fuck him, and fuck everything he represents. I will see him in hell.

Pick: Minnesota

Tampa Bay (+2.5) at Tennessee

The Titans have a shitty offense but a killer defense, and the Bucs have a bombs away offense but a shit defense, so this is certainly an interesting matchup that will probably come down to the Bucs offense against the Titans defense, and in that battle nothing good can come of it. It’s either back the crab leg thief Jameis Winston, who is also a suspected rapist, or get behind the white trash of Tennessee, who are just waiting to drag us all down into a hell from which there is no escape. In these strange and terrible times, it helps to keep calm and get your wits about you, and it also helps to say fuck the Bucs, and roll with Tennessee because we’re all just white trash shitheads stinking this planet up. Fuck everyone, especially ourselves.

Pick: Tennessee

LA Chargers (+5.5) at Chicago

Things haven’t exactly gone to plan for both of these teams as the Chargers flounder in the AFC West in a city that doesn’t give the slightest of shits about them, and the Bears sink into the morass of the NFC North, their defense on point, but another shitty offense and Trubisky meltdowns point to a bleak future. I don’t know what to tell you other than I’m sorry that we’re even in this mess to begin with. Nobody gets out of this alive, everybody dies, and the Chicago Bears are at least waiting there to maul you into infinite pain. I don’t know what awaits Philip Rivers here in Valhalla, but it is likely more painful than a bear mauling because that dude is cursed and nobody cares about his goddamn football team as coyotes stalk the streets of LA at night, howling at the edge of the world. There’s no place left to go other than the great ocean, and the great ocean doesn’t care bout you and this is where you die.

Pick: Chicago

Seattle (-3.5) at Atlanta

I don’t know what ghosts the Atlanta Falcons offended when they were up 28-3 on the Patriots and Tom Brady, ready to be crowned new kings over a dying emperor, but they surely must have fucked with the wrong spirits because they have eaten nothing but shit since that fateful moment. The Falcons are a doomed team, a cursed team, a team that offended the wrong Spirit Warriors here in Valhalla, and that is just a sad fact of life. I feel bad for my boys Adrian, the fake Larry King and my pal Andy, who just want their Falcons to get right with God, but there is no salvation to be found here. They fucked with the wrong ghosts and now they are doomed to suffer in a hell that no mortal man can comprehend. Say a prayer for your Falcon fan friends, and then wash your hands clean of them.

Pick: Seattle

NY Jets (+4) at Jacksonville

Pick: Your favorite Fred Durst moment

Philadelphia (+1.5) at Buffalo

Buffalo cruising along at 5-1 is pretty shocking, isn’t it? The Eagles at 3-4 is less a surprise as this is the sort of janky place the Eagles always find themselves in. It really is a hideous city, Philly, and who knows what foul bullshit goes through there to prop up their dirty birds. Then you have sweet innocent Buffalo, a dying town, a snowed in city with a bear of a defense and something sorta functional offensively. A lot of American history has gone down in between Philadelphia and Buffalo, a lot of wild and ridiculous shit that has led to where we are today. This is the heartbeat of America, and it is all fucked up and noisy, and that’s the way it’s always been. The Liberty Bell is cracked, which is a metaphor for our American existence, and the streets of Buffalo are always snowed in, which is another metaphor I suppose, one suggesting that we are suffocating in our own ridiculousness because this is a ridiculous country, peopled by folks the rest of the world didn’t want anything to do with, and in this stupid nation we have formed an idiotic identity which is somehow noble and heartbreaking at the same time. We are the unwanted, the unloved, the poor and the broken, and you can see it all in Philly or Buffalo or Detroit or any of these broken cities which reflect our own hideous hearts, broken and trembling under the eternal light of heaven. I don’t know what I’m babbling about either, but that is what being an American is all about, just fucking up and breaking shit until you stumble upon something beautiful. Is that something beautiful likely to be found in a football game between Philadelphia and Buffalo? Probably not, but this is where OJ ran before he became what he is today which is a dude who hangs out on twitter like the rest of us, including our dunce of a president, in this surreal nightmare we have made for ourselves. OJ and Donald and all of us, and this is the essence of America and fuck it, let’s ride this goddamn bomb like Slim Pickens all the way down to the dark heart of it all.

Pick: Buffalo

Cincinnati (+9) at LA Rams

The Rams are scuffling a bit, but the Bengals have surrendered the season already, so fuck them and fuck all of us I suppose. Somewhere in LA tonight, something bad is happening, and also in LA tonight there is magic being made, and here on the edge of the world, in the place where everyone rolls down to, running from the past to a future and an ocean that promises to take all the pain away, there is the aching need of America. The faces are more brown than white around here now, which is a good thing, a return to what was once the natural way of things before the pink fascists took over, and LA is an idea that speaks to the entirety of who we are as Americans. It is the essence of us, the place where all of our dreams can come true, the place where we can finally stop moving after being thrown out of every other corner of the earth, and it is all blonde hair and muscles and big titties here in Paradise City, but we all know that it’s a jungle too and you’re gonna die. And the Bengals know this and they have already conceded it, and now all that’s left is to listen to the sound of those damn coyotes howling, singing the news that the forests are all burning and it is a wildfire of a future, a wildfire that is our hearts and a wildfire that is the essence of America.

Pick: LA Rams

Arizona (+7.5) at New Orleans

Arizona is surviving if not thriving with Kyler Murray pulling the trigger for them. And now they take their plastic desert existence into the heart of Louisiana, into good ol’ New Orleans where my boy Heinie resides, and where they have taken to Teddy Bridgewater as Drew Brees rots on the sidelines, injured and half forgotten already. This is the future of our great idiot country, two black quarterbacks representing two disparate points of view on how life should be lived, one repping the plasticized falseness of the New Americanism found in the Phoenix desert. But this Phoenix will not rise, it will just stay dead, poisoning the world for everyone else. Meanwhile, New Orleans is thriving behind Teddy Bridgewater, a city alive with the hopes and dreams of real ass people who want to live real ass lives. I am descended from the dudes who founded the lovely city of New Orleans, and it makes me happy whenever this Spirit Warrior of a city rises up and shows everyone that America doesn’t have to be so plastic or depressing or blown out at the edge of the world. It just needs to breathe and party and let the good times roll. We’re all gonna be alright, we just have to love each other and maybe flash some titties now and again.

Pick: New Orleans

Oakland (+6.5) at Houston

The Raiders are stumbling along even though they have one of the league’s worst defenses and it is only a matter of time before it all goes bad and Harpo is lighting Mark Davis’ wig on fire and graves are being dug in the Vegas desert in anticipation for the horror show that is the Raiders coming to town. Once they hit that city, it’s going to be an orgy of trash. The spirit of Kenny Stabler looks down at all of this and wants in on the action, but Vegas is too fucked up even for him and so he has to just hang out on the Gulf fishing with The Great Willie Young, Spirit Warriors together forever. This is all going to end badly for the Raiders and the wheels will come tumbling off sooner rather than later and assorted Grudens and Davises will just be so much pinatas in the night, waiting to be broken open and gorged on by vampires in the desert, the place where the American Nightmare died. This is bat country, and a bad country, and here everybody dies.

Pick: Houston

Carolina (+6.5) at San Francisco

Carolina is surviving without Cam Newton, leaning on Christian McCaffrey to make everything alright with a surprise top 5 offense. The 49ers, meanwhile, are undefeated thanks to a nasty defense and a strong running game, and it is a miracle that they have finally come out of the weeds that entangled them post Harbaugh.  It is crazy that Cam Newton isn’t really a factor here, and it sucks because the NFL and the world needs crazy people like Cam Newton, Ric Flair devotees who just want to fuck the world and maybe eat a little ass on the side. The boring nerds over in the Silicon Valley will cheer for their 49ers, who will always be a team frozen in time around Joe Montana and Jerry Rice and Steve Young and Ronnie Lott and Roger Craig and all the dudes who made the 49ers the team of the gods once upon a time. This is a different sort of California cool, one that will dust you and snort you like the finest cocaine, which is something that Ric Flair knows a lot about, and so it is fitting that the Carolina Panthers, with their Ric Flair essence accompanying them make their way to the left coast where the rides last all night long and where there are a bunch of Chinese people just waiting to be explored by Slick Ric’s big dick. I don’t know how long he can hold out or how long San Francisco can take him before the whole thing falls apart, but what the hell, let’s all just get buck naked and fuck.

Pick: San Francisco

Denver (+5) at Indianapolis

Denver continues to struggle along under the leadership of favorite son John Elway, while the Colts continue to try to recover from Andrew Luck abandoning them on the eve of this new season of NFL football. The Colts are doing alright, as Frank Reich has the offense mostly on track behind Jacoby Brissett, but the Broncos are not doing alright and it is only a matter of time before John Elway gets run out of that mile high city, thrown down the mountains that once claimed the Donner Party which we all know and remember from our Oregon Trail schooldays. Wait, they had the Donner Party in that game, didn’t they? Just me? Okay, fine. But what’s important to remember is that those people ate each other and John Elway is about to be eaten alive by his own. Meanwhile, the people of Indiana are the epicenter of the MAGA movement, a hideous state filled with Klansmen and shit people too wrong for even Ohio. Indiana is the worst place in the whole fucking world, a nasty piece of business that should just be dynamited and turned into a sixth great lake. What does any of this have to do with football? Who fucking cares, man. There is something more important at stake here. We’re fighting for our souls in this godforsaken country, and Indiana is the front line in that fight. I hate it and you should too, but it still has a better football team than the one John Elway has put together.

Pick: Indianapolis

Cleveland (+11) at New England

Man, make it stop for my dude Baker Mayfield who has seen his Spirit Warrior insides crushed in the horror show of Cleveland Browns football. And now he has to be fed to the goddamn machine that is the New England Patriots who are first in the league in offense and first in the league on defense, all piloted by a team of sociopaths too cruel and evil to understand. The American Psycho quarterback and the bedraggled serial killer coach are on another level. They have conquered the NFL time and again, and will continue doing so as long as the machine keeps humming along. Tom Brady is ageless, a vampire god who has obliterated the essence of anything human inside of him in order to win and win and win and win and never stop winning. Bill Belichick is a savage beast with no love in his heart who feeds puppies into the machine and drinks their blood and stares with cold dead eyes upon all of America. This is patriotism at its finest, at its basest cutthroat level of existence. There is nothing good to be found here. Just pure carnage of the soul, a great reaping, a harvesting of everything good and true, processed and sent through the machine to become the Patriot Way. Baker Mayfield is a fly that has been caught in that machine’s web, but the sick thing is that the killer spiders here don’t even need to feed on him. They can just toy with him, break him, and then discard him for Gisele and her she beasts to devour when it is all done. This is America, pal, and it is looking at you with a rictus grin and it will eat your heart and your soul and everything good about you.

Pick: New England

Green Bay (+4) at Kansas City

Poor Patrick Mahomes has been broken, ruined by NFL football like every other golden god before him. And now the devil comes calling and the devil gets what he wants from the broken people of the Kansas and Missouri way of living. Aaron Rodgers has his Packers atop the NFC North yet again, and the Chiefs are at a crossroads with their precious Mahomes ruined, and this is a savage situation and there will be blood and the devil will bathe in that blood and he will continue to stalk this earth breaking us one by one in his eternal war with God. What can Matt Moore or Kyle Shurmur do against such a beast, such an inevitability that is the devil, this hell made real on earth? Nothing. That is what, and so they will suffer like we all suffer and the devil will roam free on our hearts and in our souls and in our minds all across America, this accursed country of Failure Demons and the wretched, the unwanted, the detritus of all other cultures. This is the devil’s playground and we are his favorites because we are vile and ruined, and this is where the devil makes his stand and this is where God and Jesus will not walk. This is the devil’s playground and everybody dies here and we are all in hell and that’s just the way that it is.

Pick: Green Bay

Miami (+16) at Pittsburgh

The Steelers season was ruined when the rapist Ben Roethlisberger went down for the count. And the Dolphins season was ruined when they decided to field a team this year. It hasn’t gone well for Josh Rosen or for Ryan Fitzpatrick, who should just take his Harvard degree and get drunk with the ghost of Kenny Stabler and The Great Willie Young as they fish their days away. I don’t know what else to say here other than the Dolphins are straight fucked and probably aren’t getting up from the canvas any time soon. They are damn near last in almost everything and are probably playing for a lottery ticket now, just like so much of us are in this ridiculous country. We are all just one scratch off away from getting the hell out of this place, but until then we’re doomed to suffer here like the Dolphins, who can’t even win when a rapist goes down. That is life in America in 2019, and I am Neil, and I am out.

Pick: Pittsburgh

Fuck It

In the outhouse that is our lives as fans of the Detroit Lions, we have to make certain choices to save our fraying sanity, and that’s what I did on Sunday as I spent the day with my dad instead of watching this decrepit team. As one who so often makes poor choices, it was nice to make a good choice for a change, as I celebrated the day of my birth by getting a new bicycle like I was six years old instead of watching the Lions get Cousined as their 6-0 dreams slip into a 2-3-1 morass from which they will never escape and we have been here before, my dudes and lady dudes.

So, anyway, my new bike is pretty cool. It is a Mongoose Torment for whatever that is worth, I am not really an expert in these things as a bike is a bike is a bike to me, I guess, but it is nice to have a new one that I can make poor choices with and eventually get jacked for by local hooligans who will leave me crying for my daddy. It is certainly much cooler than whatever befell the Lions against the Vikings on Sunday. Like I said, I didn’t watch the game. I did watch highlights which were presented as sort of a narrative of the game, so I got the essence of the whole ordeal, which is that once again we find ourselves being crushed beneath the wheel that is being a fan of these Detroit Lions. It is all that we know and I guess at least it means I don’t have to pretend to like Matt Patricia and Bob Quinn.

I just want to ride my bike and not have to think about the ways this goddamn team has abused me over the years, but it really isn’t them so much as a confluence of factors, like shoddy officiating or devils making pacts with Failure Demons or the whole NFL fascist stink of it all poisoning anything that could ever be good about any of it. Even if the Lions do win and do the unthinkable like winning the Super Bowl, it all ends in a bloated night of capitalist greed in the form of grotesque advertisements spread out over a monolithic nightmare of a night capped off by an agent of hell like Roger Goodell handing over a trophy to an old lady whose family once supported Hitler and a Patriot Way which involves being characters in a Bret Easton Ellis novel, and the whole thing is just gross and unpleasant and lol that’s the best case dream scenario.

Of course, we’ll never live to even get that Orwellian nightmare of a “dream”, and so it is back to the mud and being shit upon by cows who are then slaughtered by the world to consume. We are just waste for the universe, and it is pointless to pretend otherwise.

I will be damned, though, if I am to give any credit to the Kirk Cousins of the world for their part in our eternal suffering. He is an abomination, an affront to man and common decency and I will not have it. And yet, it is dudes like him who thrive in this corrupt wasteland of the soul. And it is dudes like me who are doomed to suffer, martyred heroes left wailing in the afterbirth of existence. So fuck Kirk Cousins and fuck the Vikings and fuck Sundays spent caring about any of this when there are new bicycles to be had and days with the old dad who will not die and who we have forgiven for a myriad of tragedies over the years such as abandonment and general emotional chaos.

Forgiveness is a good thing, but it is tough to forgive anyone involved with the constant Lions of it all that has got us crucified here as fans, sacrifices to a God for a world that doesn’t deserve it, hanging here as Roman guards stab at us and our own people jeer and throw shit at our hanging bodies. This is life as a fan of the Detroit Lions and after a few days we will arise again to play out the whole tragicomic ordeal once again.

So, I don’t know what else to tell you other than it is good to forgive your dad and to spend the day with him and get new bicycles like a six year old. And it is bad to waste time and thought on these Detroit Lions and the myriad Failure Demons that accompany them and the Fascist Overlords of the NFL who oversee our spiritual torment and hellish torture, our Sisyphean existence, a nightmare of a reality too bleak to ever contemplate without going utterly mad.

I don’t know who to blame anymore other than ourselves for ever pretending it could be anything different, but we have been here before and we will be here again because we are too goddamn dumb and stubborn to save ourselves from this madness. All we have to do is turn away and it is new bicycles for everyone. But we won’t and that’s our fault and fuck it, we get what we deserve I guess.

It would be nice to believe that it could be different, that we would somehow win out and get to win a Super Bowl stripped of its soul taking greed, but that is a world that doesn’t exist except as a fantasy and it is pointless to waste time and energy hoping for it. And so we have to accept that tainted dream as the best we can hope for, pretend that our souls are not being fed through a killing machine and get fucked up and scream pointless obscenities at the field or at our TV as we waste emotional energy on this whole farce. But that is what we do because we are fans of the Detroit Lions and what the fuck, at least it beats being fans of Kirk Cousins and his ilk, or the devil himself and his cheesehead cohort.

So, I leave you with that to think about as we stare out like Fitzgeraldian characters towards a future that only promises more of the same, too dumb to understand that we can just turn away from it all if we want, but we won’t because there is always a Daisy to be chased and this is just what it means to be human, a tragic thing, an eternal figure who will never know any better or who will never accept anything less than a constant pining for something more, for something better than we ever deserved as upjumped idiots in love with the idea of love itself. It as all we have as fans of these Detroit Lions, and fuck it, it could be worse I guess. I mean, I don’t see how, but fuck it. Yes, that’s all I have for you. Fuck it. I'm gonna ride my new bike.