The story is old - I KNOW But it goes on
That game felt like it was 148 hours long. Look, I love football - as evidenced by the billion words I have written about it over the past two years - but GOOD LORD, right now it just feels like I am strapped to a chair week after week with my eyelids held open by sadists while I watch death images scream across the scene. I am becoming dehumanized by the ruthless misery of it all and by the third quarter, I was ready to lope out onto the street, knuckles dragging, while I screamed at the moon and Baby Jesus wept.
The end of this season feels so pointless without Matthew Stafford, without Kevin Smith, without Brandon Pettigrew, without hope, and without reason. It is like watching a terrible foreign film where the characters all eat shit for two hours and then the main character hangs himself from his shower head while his girlfriend sits on the toilet, shaves her head and just stares at the camera and mouths the word why over and over and over again before the movie abruptly ends and a sad clown plays the violin before shooting himself. Horrible, just awful.
The sad desperation with which the Lions have played large chunks of the last two weeks just somehow makes it that much more intolerable. It is a futile effort, utterly without reward, and yet the defense is playing its ass off, hoping against hope that whatever turd is taking the snaps will somehow be able to put up more than six points. It is heartbreaking to watch, mean and cruel, and I wish I could say I was getting some satisfaction from it all, that there was some small solace in watching the team try so damn hard, but right now, it just feels like I am watching the tiniest, wimpiest ant standing up against the hordes of hell after the rest of the world has been overrun. It's a noble effort, but it still doesn't change the fact that the poor son of a bitch is just going to get squashed and that no one will ever remember him for his brave and foolish stand.
This is what this Season of Hope has come to, wild ranting and strange morose gibberish, depressed wails and tired pain. We have wandered so long - so damn long - in the wilderness of despair, and yet here we are, stranded there once again, while the vultures circle over head, and all we can do is keep staggering along, hoping that the end will come swiftly and without pain. But it never does. Instead, we just keep trudging along, beaten and wrecked, while we wait for the world to end.
JESUS. This has gotten out of hand, and I apologize. It's just so hard to watch these games, these terrible games, knowing that no matter how hard my dudes fight, in the end it won't be nearly enough because they have been mortally wounded. They are outgunned even on the best of days. Now, they just stagger into every gun fight naked, with only their broken fists and their bloody feet to kick and punch with while the other dude hauls out a cannon.
Our guns are gone, left in the wreckage of terrible battles that have been mostly lost. We can reload but we have to reach the end of this terrible road first. Unfortunately, there are dudes waiting with spiked paddles lining the road the rest of the way, waiting to savagely beat us as we crawl home.
This is a depressed post, ugly and disturbing, wild and stupid, filled with a billion different confused analogies and dumbfounding imagery, but this is what these times, strange and terrible as they are, drive even the best of us to. I haven't even discussed Drew Stanton, and you know what? I'm not going to. At least not today. In a couple of days, maybe, sure, why not? But for right now, I will not savage Ol' Plucky. His people have suffered enough, and there are days when the only grace you can give yourself is to be merciful to the wicked and the foolish, for they have suffered mightily too, and perhaps in the ugly void between the cacophony of rage that has wrecked so many of us and the bitter silence of terrible death, we can find common ground in our pain. There is no rest for the weary in these terrible days, no solace for the tortured. We are all stupid and dazed, and sometimes we even devolve into delusional grandeur and stupid hyperbole, as evidenced by the entirety of this whole Godforsaken post, and I don't even have a point anymore. And maybe this is appropriate, because neither does my football world.
But hey, Jason Hanson made both of his field goal attempts. That's something, right?
This post has been sponsored by the National Ennui Council and has been ghostwritten appropriately enough by the ghost of Ian Curtis after listening to 100 straight hours of Morrissey.
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