my Football Metaphysics book

For the past two months, I have been working diligently and deliriously on this preview of the upcoming NFL season, built off the Spiritual Warrior philosophy that has secretly been fermenting at the Armchair Linebacker site, and it sort of spiraled out of control into this book – Football Metaphysics for Enlightened Degenerates. On the surface, the book is very simply a preview of the upcoming season, with in-depth coverage of important players, games, and trends for all 32 teams. But anyone who is familiar with my Raven Mack styles knows that it’s also so much more than that (or less than that, depending on your outlook). The subject matter is not the only subject matter, as football and the players who play the game are used as a springboard for all sorts of philosophical meanderings, and I can honestly say to you that this book, if read even partially, will make you explode in “WTF?!?!” laughter. Seriously. There is nothing covering pro football that is anything like this preview manual, and for the price of a fauntleroy cup of coffee, you will be entertained for hours and hours and hours. Again, that is no lie. This shit is as thick as a Hemingway novel, but with all the gonzo insanities of a Hunter S. Thompson/Oscar Zeta Acosta tract, except it’s neither. It’s me – Raven Mack aka Raven McMillian aka 1000 Feathers aka The Confederate Mack aka Dr. Lounge aka the guy who wrote a ridiculously insane preview for an NFL season and is telling you that you will enjoy it but you probably are hemming and hawing and like “whatever, I’m just gonna go look at some other dumb crap on Facebook” when you should be loading this into your favorite robot device and turning on, zooming in, and cropping out.

FOOTBALL METAPHYSICS FOR ENLIGHTENED DEGENERATES at Amazon
FOOTBALL METAPHYSICS FOR ENLIGHTENED DEGENERATES at Smashwords

Amazon will have the necessary apps to make it work on all your devices of time waste, not just a kindle. There are versions available that work for your kindles and nooks and crannies and Sonybots and tabloids and even your iPads and iPhones (with the Stanza app), but you can even get a pdf at the Smashwords link and look at it on your computer or print to old-fashioned rolling papyrus if you’d like to put a fat binder clip on it and leave it on the peach crate by the toilet. It’s a good 140-pages printed out single-spaced in 10-point font though, so there’s no lack of content. Aside from a long-winded overview of the project where I explain how the NFL has only about ten years at most of actual awesomeness left in it, for each and every team, I cover the following items: an overview of the team, pertinent data regarding last season and this one, most important games, each team’s individual trendsetter and spirit warrior, the coach/QB situation, their team elders, and scrappy Rudy, and assorted other player info, which includes but is not limited to historical information on the team and the city they are located in. Additionally, you’ll get psychic analysis as to the metaphysical force of each team in relation to the NFL’s entire history, as well as the past decade, and I’ve deduced not only each team’s best case scenario, but have a solid finger on what will go down this coming season.
And yet, even if you don’t like football, even if you are a woman who thinks pro football is the dumbest crap that ever existed, you will find immense joy in this offering of mine. This is because of my traditional Rojonekku style of writing, which is designed as a decoy, where beautiful life truths are buried in what looks to be just some dumb football shit. If we revealed the truths about the society around us out and in the open, those who monitor our interactions would stifle the real talk. That’s why I affectionately call it “nonsense gibberish” because it is akin to speaking in tongues that the devils don’t understand, like when I was a little boy in a snake-handling Pentecostal church in rural Rice, Virginia. This Rojonekku style is a lol-heavy sugar-coating on deep spiritual truths, so that we can feel like we are moving in a better direction as a group, without being some super-serious asshole about it. You know what is serious business? Nothing, because business is a joke and money is an abstraction and how can you expect me to take an abstraction seriously when it can’t bite or burn me? Wait, I’m getting sidetracked here…
This Football Metaphysic for Enlightened Degenerates is also my first offering from the Workingman Books collective press chaos factory doohickey/donthickey thing that I have chopped together in the crock pot of various co-conspirators minds, and it is fermenting away as we speak, into something that will give us greater gut intuition to enjoy the world around us, and be healthier on the inside, where are brain funks and chest clenches are. That is the hope. And this is the first offering, and I hope that you will support it, and that you will find it abundant in bringing you joy and spirit inside a dark and crooked world.

Jahvid Best

 Jahvid Best's brain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Knows?

I have no idea what’s going to happen in the game against the Cowboys on Sunday. None. I was talking to UpHere the other day and he mentioned that it felt like a game that the Lions could either win by 30 or lose by 30 and he’s absolutely right. Who fucking knows anymore? I have no expectations, no real hopes or dreams, just a morbid curiosity to see what will happen next.

This game will be telling, I think. Even more so than the Bills game. In hindsight, we should have known what was going to happen in that game. The Lions were utterly wrecked emotionally in the Jets game and they were starting the one armed man at quarterback. I actually feel kinda bad for Buffalo that they weren’t able to beat the Lions by 30. What happened was sadly inevitable, but I’m not sure it tells us much other than that the Lions were viciously hung-over following that brutal and cruel Jets game. Shit, these things happen, you know? Especially to us.

But the time for wandering on the sidelines humming Morrissey songs has ended. The season goes on, just as it always does, and you can’t just sit in your room in your fluffy pink bathrobe writing in your diary with the unicorn stickers on it and slitting your wrists and trying to overdose on those mysterious pills you found in your parents’ medicine cabinet that turn out to be your mom’s hormone pills or your dad’s boner pills. Teenagers! Amirite?

Ahem. Anyway, the point is, is that the Lions have to pull their shit together. Someone needs to ride up and down the sideline on a horse all game long and slap them in their dumb, placid faces with a dueling glove in order to get them fired up. Someone needs to stand on the Cowboys sideline with a huge placard showing them fucking the wives of all the Lions players in order to get their rage going. Someone needs to inject the team with horse steroids at the pregame meal. Someone needs to give them miniature shotguns that they can use during the game. – actually, that one is a bad idea since they would just turn it on themselves as soon as things started looking down. But someone has to do something to get these assholes moving in the right direction. I know losing sucks, and I know these dudes are just professional athletes playing for a paycheck and don’t really give a fuck either way so long as they get paid and then can go home and drown a gaggle of hookers in their hot tub and pee on a desperate stripper or two but shit, man, just . . . shit.

I know that’s not very eloquent, but I don’t care. I am too irritated for eloquence. It’s one thing to lose. It’s another to just say fuck it and embrace Lions Disease and to just lay on the field like Albert Haynesworth and shit yourself and wait for someone to show up to wash you with a rag on a stick like you’re some sort of obese, retarded zoo animal. If you lose because you’re no damn good, I can still at least respect that. It hurts my soul, but I can respect it. I can still get behind that shit. But if you lose because you become every miserable ass stereotype of a Detroit Lions player that there is, well then fuck that. I will get unruly and everyone will hate you and in our hearts and minds you will be dumped in the garbage bin of life next to Roy Williams.

And that’s why this game against the Cowboys will be telling. If the Lions come out and play hard, play like they actually give a fuck about being there, like they are still moving towards something – hell, anything, even if it’s just the promise of a ham sandwich after the game if they win – then I can get behind that shit and feel (relatively) good about where things are heading. But if they go out and wander around like God just shot their dog again and play like they’d rather be cleaning up Artie Lange’s bathroom after a 72 hour coke and whiskey binge, then shit, I’m gonna be pissed, you know? And not pissed in that “Awww, damn, I really wish we could get a win, but hey, things are comin’ along” way that I have been pissed throughout the last year and a half but pissed in that “Hey, fuck this bullshit, you thought me talking about Hope was wild, wait ‘til you get a load of this freaky shit” pissed.

So, yeah, even if this game feels meaningless, like some sort of cruel contest played in a dystopian future for the amusement of some terrible hell god, in reality this game might mean more than any other that’s been played this season. Look, I know that is hyperbolic as hell, and isn’t even remotely true on some levels, but on the level that I care about right now – the level upon which this team’s heart and character and grit and all that cheesy bullshit live – it’s very, very true.

We will learn a lot about our team this week, for good or for bad. I have this sinking feeling in my gut, a gnawing, clawing terrible feeling of dread that it will be bad. I hate this feeling but I don’t know if it’s real. I don’t know if this is because this is what is likely to happen or if I am just succumbing to The Fear again, the result of too many miserable ass seasons and a history of epic emotional torture which has robbed me of my senses and my ability to discern what is real and what are just malevolent devil spirits playing havoc on my poor, withered soul. I don’t know. I just don’t. All I can do is sit down on Sunday, hold my breath and hope for the best.

Obviously, the Lions are more than capable of winning this game. It was only a couple of weeks ago that everyone was all excited about how this team was playing and about where they were headed, and shit, at least some of that still has to be there, right? At least some of that has to be real, has to be concrete, has to be something that no one can take away from the Lions no matter how embarrassingly they lose or how heartbroken we all become. This is still the same team that whipped the shit out of the Rams a few weeks back.

Shaun Hill should be better this week with an extra week of practice and an extra week to give his poor, murdered arm a chance to be resurrected. He’ll be facing a Cowboys pass defense which has been a big bag of shit this season. Mike Jenkins, the Cowboys starting cornerback, has been particularly awful, and he’ll be the dude trying to cover St. Calvin, so if the Lions don’t utterly shit the bed emotionally, they should be able to have a lot of success there.

Forget about running the ball. Fuck it. That shit isn’t going to work the rest of the year so the Lions might as well just accept life as a passing team. Hopefully Hill will be sharper this week with the extra time to heal and practice, which will allow him to target Brandon Pettigrew and Tony Scheffler on short, safe routes that will take the place of the running game. Get that working and then find St. Calvin deep or Nate Burleson running over the middle after the Cowboys move their safeties up to account for Pettigrew and Scheffler. That should be the offensive game plan. Will it? The fuck if I know.

Defensively, the Lions have the ability to shut the Cowboys down. Tony Romo is dead after having one too many pins stuck in his voodoo doll by Jessica Simpson or one of the other painted whores he spurned in his role as America’s Cocksman. I apologize for the senseless misogyny on display there, but I just like the term “painted whores” for some reason, probably because I am just jealous because society would look down on a man like me leaving the house covered in garish makeup. Wait . . . did I just say that out loud?

Ahem. Anyway, Romo is out which means that our old friend Jon Kitna is in, and hey, fuck him, you know? That may be cruel and harsh and unfair and hey, He’s A Good Man, but I was soured on Good Men during those loathsome Marinelli years and also by that sweet talking man who promised me the world and then left me in a bathtub full of ice missing my kidneys and with a baby in my belly. Ricky Dale, you gotta little one out there, you sonofabitch! Don’t think you kin jus’ live the high life while me and yer baby boy are tryin’ to get by with no help from anyone but the lady from the welfare office and the nice old broad next door who watches the baby for free when I’m tryin’ to scare up some business in the alley behind the Costco. Even yer mama sent the baby a card on his birthday, and damn, I don’t gotta tell you that the five bucks she sent went to some good use. That was some good ass crank, and . . . I, uh . . . I have no idea what just happened there. I blacked out for a moment and when I awoke all that gibberish was on my computer screen. Frankly, I blame the Four Loko. For everything.

Okay, so where was I before whatever the hell that was happened? Oh yeah, Jon Kitna. Kitna can throw the ball around the field – we know this – but he is also a damn fool who will throw a billion interceptions. We really know this. The Lions defensive backs have shown a propensity for picking off passes at crucial times, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is what swings the game in the Lions favor.

Of course, the Cowboys passing attack and Kitna are helped by the fact that Miles Austin is running around out there, making plays and kicking ass like he doesn’t understand that his team is a collection of worthless turds just out for a paycheck. We could use a dude like him, but he belongs to the Cowboys and the people of Dallas and not to us and that is that. And by “belongs to” I don’t mean in a slavey kind of way because that shit is wrong even though there are probably a lot of Cowboys fans who are legit racists who would be cool with that sort of thing.

But the Cowboys also have that cocksucker Roy Williams running around out there, and that may be a harsh adjective to throw out there, but for some reason Roy Williams is the living, breathing avatar of the term Lions Disease and so fuck him. We saw him waste away before our very eyes here in Detroit until he became a petulant black hole of loserdom who infected everything else around him and eventually caused our entire world to collapse. It’s good to see he’s turned things around in Dallas and infected them with his winning spirit, eh? Eh??? If I had a sarcasm button on my keyboard I would be mashing that fucking thing until my fingers bled.

But really, Roy Williams has helped to suck the life out of that team and that should only help us on Sunday, so, uh, thanks Roy. If indeed the story of our season is completely damned at the hands of Kitna and Williams, then . . . then . . . I don’t even know what in the fuck, you know? I just had a horrible chill travel up my spine, and unless it is the syphilis fucking with me again, I do believe that is because I cannot even imagine how terrible it would be to have what is left of my heart ripped out and stomped on by the successful teaming of Kitna and Roy Williams. Fuck that. That is too terrible to even contemplate. It is horrible and rage inducing. I kind of want to punch myself in the face for even thinking of it. Goddamn, just . . . Goddamn, you know? Still, I am a Lions fan, and I can already hear Fate laughing at me, and thus, this is probably the most likely outcome. If you’ll excuse me I need to go cryogenically freeze my tears so that I never forget them and why they exist.

Realistically, the Lions should be able to stop the Cowboys running game, largely because like the Lions, the Cowboys running game has basically ceased to exist this season, which is puzzling given that they have three very capable and talented backs in Marion Barber, Felix Jones and Tashard Choice. Who the fuck knows what it is wrong in Dallas? They finally harpooned Wade Phillips and then stripped him of his blubber which is now being used to power their new Megachurch of a stadium. Seriously, Jerry Jones is just sitting in the basement, half naked, laughing maniacally and shoveling piles of Wade Phillips’ blubber into a huge furnace. How else do you think they get that heretical scoreboard to work? That thing is so big it is an affront to God, the sort of thing that would cause The Big Dude In The Sky to split open the earth and swallow up Edward G. Robinson while Moses looks on all self-righteous as shit from the mountain top. Shit, maybe that explains the Cowboys problems this year. Who knows?

In any event, the Lions should be able to beat the Cowboys in just about every phase of the game. But, history is a horrible hell bitch, and history just laughed like a goddamn fiend when I wrote that last sentence. Like I said earlier, I don’t know what will happen. I don’t have a fucking clue. The Lions could win by 30 and everything will feel like it’s okay and we’re back on track and hey, look, a rainbow! Or the Lions could lose by 30 and then it’s Thunderdome time and I’m wearing the skin of a hobo and riding naked through the desert on a motorcycle made of bones and fueled by hatred. I just don’t know and neither do any of you. So, no predictions this week. I’m just going to sit down on Sunday with an open heart and hope that somehow it is not torn completely out of my chest by those assholes we know as History and Fate.