One Minute To Midnight

It’s March and there are only two things to really talk about when it comes to the Lions and the NFL: the upcoming draft and the league’s interminable labor issues. I don’t want to really talk about the draft until after it’s over because there is a ton of dumb noise about it out there and really it’s all meaningless until after the fact. Draft coverage and prognostication has become its own nerd industry and each year it has grown and grown and grown until finally, this year it just feels like a massive storm of absurd noise and I don’t really want to add my own senseless braying to that cacophony of buffoonery. That’s not to say that I don’t follow it – I do, the same way I slavishly follow all the bullshit peddled by the NFL factory throughout the year and of course it is sometimes interesting and I would be lying if I said that I didn’t get caught up in it from time to time, but really I’m just kind of sick of everyone trying to play amateur scout. Opinions are awesome and I like the nakedly enthusiastic opining of a fan, and I dig what Ty does over at The Lions in Winter. He accumulates information and then assembles it into something coherent and interesting. If more people were like that, I would be more inclined to join the discussion, but I don’t really want to get swept up into a debate with a bunch of nerdy faux robots who approach everything like they’re desperately trying to impress the junior scout for the Jacksonville Jaguars.

I mean, let’s face it, most football blogs – most sports blogs – are horrible things, absurd wastes of time which just parrot one another, written by people who have no appreciation for the art of writing. And since they are incapable of writing they fall back on playing amateur scout and firing off bland, stale opinions recycled from the braying jackasses on ESPN. It’s boring and it’s noisy and it’s worthless and it makes me actively not want to discuss certain things because by the time I get around to feeling like I have something worthwhile to say about the subject, the subject has already been beaten to death and then dragged around town behind a gunslinger’s horse while all the townspeople fire guns in the air and whoop and holler and ready the pine box. When I sit down to write something about actual football this time of year it sort of feels like I’m just a degenerate vulture, desperate to pick the bones of a long dead corpse.

In the past I have remedied this by delving into the drafts of yore and mining them for relevant information. I have broken down an entire decade’s worth of draft classes in an attempt to see how things went horribly, horribly wrong. I have discussed the many, many terrible busts who have caused us so many tears and I have even discussed those precious few Lions draftees who turned out to be pleasant surprises. I have done all of this which means that now I have nothing left to do but . . . this. This horrible, horrible bitchy post.

So . . . yeah, I guess that leaves draft coverage out. But that just means that all that’s left to talk about is labor issues, and, uh, I’d rather set myself on fire and then jump naked out of a plane into a garden filled with cacti and scorpions with giant talking Matt Millen heads than do that. I’ve already said my piece on the labor issues and I don’t want to beat that horse to death and then get caught defiling that poor horse’s corpse while all of you look on, horrified and ashamed.

And so . . . what then? I don’t know. You’ve got me. Maybe I should start taking requests. I don’t really feel like doing a Willie Young thing because, honestly? I feel like I have played that one to the bone. Maybe I will drag it out of mothballs every now and again, but I think I either need to just let it rest or reinvent the whole damn thing. Some of you are probably disappointed and just as many of you are probably saying to yourself “Finally!” I don’t blame you if you feel this way. That shit was weird and had no merit whatsoever beyond making me laugh, which, I’ll be honest, is my chief motivation when it comes to half the stuff I write.

Of course, this means that I will have to come up with something new and ridiculous to write about and I’m sure I will soon, but right now, I just don’t know. And as a result, you get this garbage, this nauseatingly meta bullshit which has become more and more the norm from me here. But that’s what happens in the great vacuum of February/March. In a couple of weeks, the draft will have taken place and then I will have a bunch of new players to talk about. Let’s not forget that this time last year, the Lions drafted a prince by the name of The Great Willie Young, so . . . yeah, I can find inspiration in the strangest of places, in the small cracks where no one else looks, like 7^th round draft picks. But there has to actually be, you know, small cracks to look into. Right now, there’s just . . . nothing. It’s either rant and rave about how the left tackle from Bumfuck U has arms that are too short to warrant a first round pick or wag my e-finger at Roger Goodell some more.

I had no idea what I was going to write about when I sat down to do this and a thousand words later, I still don’t. This post is useless and absurd and has no meaning other than to explain a few of the inner workings of my own weird, fractured mind. It hasn’t been interesting, it hasn’t been funny and I sort of feel like a man just vomiting up drivel, horrified that he can’t stop it. Because I didn’t know what to write about, I decided to sit down and just write and see where I ended up. Sometimes, that serves me well and I end up twisting things in a fun and interesting direction, like a guitar soloist just fucking around until he hits on something electric and beautiful and then wrestles with it until he has tamed it and made it his own. And sometimes you get . . . this. Whatever this is anyway.

I suppose I’m glad that I got some of the bitching out of my system. I didn’t mean to shit on anybody and if you’re feeling offended or worried that I was talking about you when I was spitting venom at amateur scouts, don’t be. I am just a horse’s ass. Fuck me. Do what you do and don’t feel bad about it. I just want people to be honest and cut the bullshit. I think that’s probably the one thing everyone who writes here for Armchair Linebacker is proud of. There’s no pretense here, just brutal truth bombs. Sure, sometimes it might not be the truth but it is always our truth. We don’t write shit we think other people want to hear. We just write what we want to hear, what we hear in our own hearts. We are translators of our own diseased and fucked up minds. Some days we are poet kings and other days we are absurd fools, shitting on ourselves shamefully. Today, I just happen to be shitting on myself. So be it.

Trust me, I really want to write something interesting about the Lions instead of this senseless drivel. I do. More than you know. I am restless and I am hungry for something – anything – that I can tear into like a, well, like a lion. It’s just that all the stories that are there now – all the angles, all the themes – are stale as hell. I have beaten this shit to death over the last few years and the only way forward is, well, forward. Burn the past. Burn those terrible boats that brought us to this strange shore. Burn them and then stand there and watch them burn. Watch the only thing familiar go up in flames so that you have no choice but to move forward. And then when it’s gone, set your jaw, stare at the far horizon and roar at the future, strange as it may seem. I will live or die with the Detroit Lions of today and tomorrow, not the Detroit Lions of the past.

That will be both more easy than it sounds and more difficult. It should be easy to leave such a rancid past behind but there is also a strange sort of comfort in it. There are no expectations in that past, nothing but a numbed sort of acceptance of misery. You don’t have to worry about failure when failure is your default state. And for me, personally, there is comfort in the familiarity of that past. It is a readymade storyline, something to draw upon whenever I need something to write about. The themes are familiar – haunting and terrible, but familiar – and I am so familiar with them that I can call upon them almost at will and dance with them and play with them and produce something gorgeous or profound. That is not bragging. I know it sounds like it, but it’s really actually quite sad. I am so familiar with the pain of the past, so in tune with it, that I can interpret it like no one else can. I am a mouthpiece of the Failure Demons.

And so leaving all of that behind is not only exhilarating, it’s a little bit scary. Both as a fan and for me, personally, as a writer. From now on, everything is new and unfamiliar. I have nothing to draw upon but the immediacy of my own experiences as a fan. There will be no time to put things in context. Something will happen and then I will write about it, using only my own muddled feelings and confused mental state as my guide map. I don’t know this story. Not yet. I am excited as hell to write about it, both because it’s something new and interesting and because it’s something that will hopefully challenge me as a writer.

It is the height of egotism to declare that I am the voice of Lions fandom and yet that is how I approach all of this. Beneath all the weird bullshit, that is the beating heart of what I do here. I take it upon myself to translate the story, to explain the themes, to let everyone know what it feels like to be a Lions fan, what it means, what it is. Like I said, that is incredibly egotistical, but that’s the only way I know how to do this. That’s what I bring to the table. I am not someone who is going to break down stats – although I sometimes do this if only to provide a construct for my own unique brand of bullshit – and I’m not a news guy. I’m the voice of the damned crying out in the wilderness for comfort and understanding.

That is all completely ridiculous and utterly absurd and I sound like a complete jackass right now. I understand this, but it’s the only way I know how to do this. And now that the story has changed, I have to be able to keep up with it while it evolves. I can’t get stuck repeating the same dull themes, the same extinct ideas which are fossilized and stuck in a past to which no one can ever return. If I do that, I just become an archeologist or a paleontologist (By the way, when I was 4, my parents asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I told them I wanted to be a paleontologist. They were expecting me to say a policeman or a fireman or some lame shit like that, but I suppose that even at that age I was anti-authority, and besides I loved dinosaurs and so paleontology was where it was AT.) I would cease to be relevant as a Lions writer. And yeah, yeah, I understand that the phrase “relevant as a Lions writer” is in itself laughable and worthy of scorn and derision, but fuck it, you know what I mean.

The point to all this ridiculous self-serving gibberish is that if I want to survive as a writer and chronicler of the peculiar condition that is Lions fandom, then I have to keep moving forward. That’s why there haven’t been any season reviews or anything like that from me. I’m waiting and I’m watching and I’ll be ready when the story starts anew. It’s just that, right now, it’s just sort of sitting there, hanging in some weird purgatory, which means that this is where we are too – hanging in some weird purgatory, waiting for the gates of paradise to swing open and let us run inside.

I know this whole thing has come off as egotistical, self-serving and overly serious and I don’t really like that, but it’s something that I feel needed to be said. When I say that I want to stay relevant as a writer, even I cringe at that shit. I am just a jackass braying on the net like everyone else. There is nothing really all that relevant here and I don’t want anyone to think that I take myself or any of this shit too seriously. When I say that, I mean it within its proper context, and by that I mean that everything I just wrote is how I remain relevant as a writer to myself. I know in the grand scheme of things that it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to anything or anyone, but these are things inside of me that I need to say and the only way I can say them is if I have some sort of compass guiding me, or in other words, some sort of self-relevancy. I know I’m not explaining this well at all, and I don’t blame you if you are confused or annoyed right now. All this Voice of the Lions Fan bullshit is just that – bullshit. It’s just that this is how I feel like I must approach things in order to not get sucked under the massive rancid pool of dirty shit-water that is both Lions fandom and my own tendency to go wild when I write. It’s a focus point. That’s all. Besides, anyone who thinks that I take this shit too seriously really, really hasn’t been paying attention.

Goddamn. I ended up getting 2,500 words out of nothing here which – even for me – is both impressive and utterly ridiculous. Anyway, I’m beyond excited for the season – or at least the preseason and by that I mean the post draft world – to start. Because that’s when the new story starts and that’s when all sorts of new themes and ideas will emerge, like brand new notes on the first morning of the world, just waiting to be harnessed and played. I know, I know, I’m getting ridiculous again, but that’s how I feel. I’m excited as both a fan and a writer. I can’t wait to feel all these new feelings and I can’t wait to attempt to describe them. And yes, I know that I am just setting myself up for something both monstrous and comical, a gigantic letdown that could completely crush my fan spirit, but to hell with all that cynical bullshit. It is 11:59 PM. It is one minute to midnight and the start of a brand new day and a brand new world and I am excited. I just can’t wait for it to get here and right now that one minute feels like it is taking one year.

In that sense, maybe that is actually the most powerful thing I could have written about the NFL’s labor issues without actually writing about them if that makes any sense at all. It’s one minute to midnight and if those motherfuckers stretch that one minute out any further than it already is, then I might go completely insane and I have no idea what kind of weird and terrible shit I will come up with in the absence of the world that I have been waiting for all this time. Because in some ways, this new season, this new world, is something that I have been waiting all of my life as a fan for. This is my time. This is our time, the dawn of a brand new and glorious day, filled with brand new colors, brighter and more brilliant than any we have seen before, alive with sounds and smells and sensations that will leave us breathless and stupid, our own dumb grins keeping us company as we wander and explore our new world. And fuck anyone who tries to take that away from us. It’s one minute to midnight and I can see the future. It’s almost here. Almost, almost, almost . . .

State Of The Blog

I got this, motherfuckers

I originally planned to stick to the normal schedule for this week before throttling things down here, but when I sat down to write my breakdown of my predictions for the Vikings game, I just couldn’t do it. The season is over and that fucking thing has turned into an eleven billion word monster every week and, well . . . I am burned right the fuck out. So, sorry for the lack of posts so far this week. Hopefully, you understand. If not, well, goddamn, I don’t know what to tell you. I figure I’ve written, like, two or three novels worth of gibberish this season. I’m not even exaggerating. It’s been insane. I could be putting that time towards a different purpose, like writing an actual novel, or breeding genetically engineered mutant super goats for a goat fighting ring or fighting my demons with flamethrowers and fire water or engineering mutant super goats to fight my demons for me. Preferably with flame throwers. Anyway, it’s not like I’m finished or anything. I just need some time to get, uh, un-fried. Un-fried? Jesus. You see how fried I am? Un-fried. Good Lord.

So here’s how things are going to look. I’m going to finish writing this post, which is sort of a half assed random thoughts deal, and then I’m going to say fuck it and avoid writing anything about the Lions for a week. And then when I return, I’ll do something once or twice a week. There is a lot of Season in Review sort of shit for me to do and that will be schizophrenic as all hell, so, uh . . . yeah, look for that. It should be fun. Like I said, I originally wanted to do a prediction breakdown post, but that just isn’t going to happen. The season is over and by the time I got to it, it would be irrelevant and stupid and would make me hate everything and then I would throw a giant hissy fit – not unlike this post – and then you’d turn on the TV and see something about me jogging through the streets, pantsless, screaming gibberish at old people and small dogs, crying and bellowing the name Willie Young until some dudes with butterfly nets and giant batons showed up to beat me senseless and drag me away to the nut house or hell or Narnia or who the fuck knows where and you don’t want that, do you? No, and so fuck that post. I also planned on doing an uber-melodramatic post tying the whole season together, sort of an epic version of my post-game posts, but I kinda feel like I just spent the last month doing just that, you know? The story is over and it would just be a pointless exercise in piledriving a dead horse to continue gibbering on about it, you know? That’s not to say I won’t talk about this past season at all. Like I said, there is a lot of Season in Review sort of shit to do and in the end, all that should end up comprehensively covering the whole damn thing. I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to do but, well . . . yeah. As you can see, I am having trouble even finishing sentences. I feel listless and completely uncreative and when creativity and energy are what I kinda build this whole thing around, uh, that’s a problem, you know?

This is a vomitous post, completely self-indulgent and whiney, but fuck it, that’s what blogs were created for, right? Then again, you don’t care about any of this shit and so I apologize and I’ll just move on in a minute. But first, a bit more on what to expect: Like I said, I plan on not doing anything Lions related for a week, and then when I come back, hopefully I’ll be recharged and then I can knock out the Season in Review stuff in a way that isn’t rushed and awful and lazy as hell. After that, well, there is always something happening and whenever the spirit moves me, I’ll write something so check back here at least a couple of times every week throughout the off-season. Things will ramp-up around late-March/early-April when everyone starts gibbering about the Draft and, well, that always leads to a lot of fresh posting. It’s an oasis in the desert of the offseason and every year, even those who were burnt to a crisp by the previous season seem to get their energy back for a month or two. It’s always a good time, full of a twitchy, junky like energy and filled with fresh Hope, and then when that all slows to a crawl, I will breakdown all the draft picks – remember, this is where the birth of The Great Willie Young thing happened last year, so you never know what in the fuck I am going to come with – and then when that’s all over, summer should be upon us and free agents and camp and holdouts – oh Jesus, let’s not forget me diving headfirst into the Ndamukong Suh riots last summer – and then the season will be here and, well, fuck, there we’ll be.

So . . . yeah. There will be some good and worthwhile stuff to read from me throughout the offseason. It just won’t come every day. Of course, the other glorious dudes who write for Armchair Linebacker will likely have stuff of their own up from time to time and if you haven’t been reading their shit, you should be because it is awesome. It was a fun season here. A lot of you reading this found the site this season and, hey, thanks for sticking with it. I loved that the comments section sprang to life and that we developed our own little community of doomed souls here and I hope that it will be even better next year. For the small handful of you that have been here from the beginning, well . . . goddamn, this shit’s been crazy, hasn’t it? I can’t even fathom the amount of shit, whether it’s been weird or dumb or sublime, that I’ve written about the Lions over the last few years. It’s both stupid and ridiculous and proves that if nothing else, I am a damn fool and that there is something seriously wrong with me. But I also like to think that from time to time, I manage to write something that no one else can write or make you laugh really hard or, hell, on rare occasions even make you think, and when I do, it feels like I imagine it feels for a musician to hit a perfect note. It’s a jolt of energy, a genuine rush and it makes me want to keep on doing this. That is a ridiculous thing to say about a football blog, but fuck it, I don’t care. Anyway, you are all my dudes and lady dudes and we will inherit the earth before it is all over – or at least what’s left of it anyway.

Jesus. This post has been incredibly self-indulgent and I apologize. I didn’t really mean for this to get so far out of hand. I really didn’t. I just wanted to write a quick little State of the Blog preamble before talking about a few random stories from the world of the Detroit Lions, but shit, I should know better than that by now, shouldn’t I? Then again, so should you. We both know that when I get moving in a particular direction it is hard for me to slam on the brakes. I am a runaway train from hell, painted with all the colors of the rainbow, on fire and playing heavy metal at a billion decibels as I race through the countryside, scaring farm animals, small children and the elderly. It’s highly likely that I will just go off the rails and run straight through a barn at some point or crash into the sea, but goddamn, behind me I will leave a trail of dazed shell-shocked destruction, with trees burning and people gaping wide eyed on their knees, bleeding from their ears and their brains.

Right. Fuck all that weird noise. Anyway, like Gen. MacArthur or Gov. Terminator or Jesus, I will be back. Keep checking the blog for updates because I promise you that I will have some good shit up. Just give me a week to get recharged and then we can all adjust to the new pace together and we’ll have a shitload of fun and maybe we can even trick . . . er, I mean convince, more brave souls to join us on our crazy train. Deal? Alright. I’ll see you in a week. (Well, a week and a half . . . and, you know what? Let’s say closer to two weeks. Okay, and I’m out.)

This Post is Meta as All Hell

Before I do anything, I should apologize for having not posted anything here in the last two weeks. That is the longest I've gone without writing something Lions related in the two years I've been doing this, which is a sad and terrifying statement now that I see it in front of me. The truth is, is that I was feeling a bit burned out. I love writing about the Lions - when there is something to write about. But there is nothing going on right now. I mean it. There is jack and shit to write about right now. I think it seemed more interesting last year because everything was new, Matthew Stafford was a rookie, we were coming off of 0-16 and everyone was desperate to see how things would shake out. This year, it is just the usual pap about players being hungry and quotes about how people are going to be surprised and blah blah blah.

Frankly, I think twitter has started to get to me. The mind numbing repetition of boring ass quotes and anecdotes has caused a sort of resentful fuck this attitude in me. I don't want to write about this shit because I'm sick of hearing about it. That doesn't mean that I don't like writing about the Lions, because God help me, for some fucked up reason I do. It just means that I don't want to get dragged into writing a bunch of stupid empty bullshit because there's nothing else to write about. I could have probably written another "And that's why I'm a fan, folks" posts, but fuck, I can't just whip those out assembly line style or else they just end up fake and processed. The reason I enjoy writing those kind of posts from time to time is because I feel like the things said in them are worth being said, not because I have nothing else to write about. I also have a Tim Toone breakdown to do, but following that weird piece of business with Willie Young, I have no idea how to approach that shit. I mean, I think I need to play this one fairly straight. The Willie Young thing should stand on its own, you know? The only problem with that is I'm just not all that interested in doing a straight breakdown of Tim Toone.

That's the thing. I'm not interested in reporting/breaking the news. That's Sean at Pride of Detroit's thing. I'm not even that interested in doing analytical work. Ty at The Lions in Winter does that better than anyone else writing about the Lions.(Yeah, yeah, I know, get a room.) I'm still not sure exactly what it is that I do, but I don't want to become a slave to convention. I don't want to fall in line and start writing about the Lions the same way everyone else does. I mean, why bother? If I can't bring something original to the table, then I should just stay the fuck out of it all together. The good news, I think, is that I do bring something original and fun and compelling to the table. It might not be all that reputable and people might think of me as the drunken asshole of an uncle of the Lions family or the half-mad cousin who lives in the attic and nobody talks about, but to hell with all that. Basically, I don't want to do this just because I feel like I'm compelled to do it by anything other than my own desire to write and I don't want to write about certain things just because I'm supposed to write about them. I want to write about what interests me, and only when I think I have something worth saying.

Okay, that's a lot of bullshit, but I think the air needs to be cleared from time to time if we are to have a healthy relationship. The good news(or bad news depending on your point of view)is that soon, things will ramp up and I will start writing more and more about the Lions. During the actual season, I plan(probably somewhat ambitiously and insanely but what the hell) to have something up here every day of the week. I almost pulled that off last season, but I would usually fall a day or two short every week. But fuck it, if it's not there, it's not there. I think that, this season, I'll have enough to talk about and enough original and regular features that I can make it work. Hell, I'm hoping and praying that Willie Young makes the team so I can do a weekly serial following his adventures through time.

This has been meta as all hell, but like I said, sometimes these things need to be discussed. Just as an aside, even if I don't put up anything new for a couple of days(or weeks I suppose)here, I'm still around. I post on twitter. You can follow me there. My user name is armchairlb. Sometimes it's about football. Other times it's about weird nonsense, which shouldn't be all that surprising. I have noticed that I tend to go on weird runs that span anywhere from 5-10 tweets(Jesus . . . tweets. I feel like a fucking goon writing that word, but this is what society has come to.) Anyway, follow me and we will conquer that world together.

I also get paid real, legitimate currency to write regularly for heavy.com, so you can check me out there. I have several articles up each week there, about a variety of subjects. Seriously, I have written about everything from Brian Cushing getting nailed for being, well, Brian Cushing to shit about Betty White to stories about British Parliament to stuff about the Continental/United merger. They are all vaguely ridiculous, all pretty funny, and, well, basically everything you would expect an article written by me to be.

Okay, okay, okay. I didn't mean for this to turn into a public attempt at self fellatio and if you are annoyed, I don't blame you. I hate self promotion. I'm not comfortable with it and I'm not good at it. Unfortunately, for a blogger this is not a good thing. I much prefer to just put my shit out there and let it speak for itself. So when I do hype my shit, it often ends up coming out in a vomitous fountain of drivel rather than as anything smooth and/or relevant. I just close my eyes and start bellowing. It's unseemly and I apologize.

On to slightly more relevant shit. As I said before, the season is fast approaching. Keeping with the meta nature of this post, I though I would take this time to ask anyone reading to please feel free to e-mail me if you want to write for this here site. There is no reward, monetary or otherwise as we are a tiny little thing. We are a gang of heathens, a small pirate ship floating along, scaring the hell out of proper folk, raising hell and having a good time as we careen towards oblivion. If you would like to be a part of that, hit me up at neilabfree@gmail.com. I'm pretty much open to anything. I mean, obviously we don't want ten people all writing about the same team, but a duplicate here and there isn't going to hurt anything.

We're pretty laid back here, despite all appearances to the contrary. I mean, I'm not sure if we need another dude ranting and raving about the Lions, but what the hell, you know? I'm not territorial and if you can bring something different to the table that you think people might want to read, then shit, say something. Of course, if you are a fan of a team that is not covered by anyone here then fuck, send me an e-mail ASAP. I don't care if you just want to post the occasional paragraph bitching about or celebrating your team. It doesn't need to be some grandiose expression of your fandom or whatever. It just needs to be words about your favorite team. That's it. Say how you feel. Don't worry about what anyone else is doing and just do your thing.

Well shit. I originally set out to write about the Lions in this post and never quite got there, did I? But there were some things that needed to be said, some air to be cleared and some site business to attend to and I'm glad we got that out of the way. The Tim Toone breakdown, whatever I decide to do with it, should be coming soon, and then I'll probably come up with a couple of different things, some quick top five type posts that I kinda want to do(My 5 favorite Lions seasons, 5 favorite players, etc.), and then the season will be upon us and there will be a flurry of bullshit every day.

If you take away anything from this mess of a post, I suppose it is that I want this upcoming season to be a fucking blast, and part of that is getting more people to holler about shit. So, yeah, if you want to write about your favorite team, e-mail me at neilabfree@gmail.com. Hell, e-mail me if you just want to tell me that I suck. I don't care. This whole thing is about community and about getting each other through our own tortured relationships with our teams. E-mail me, comment on the posts, write your own damn posts. Armchair Linebacker is a pretty laid back place. We're just dudes who like football and like writing about that football from time to time. Join us.