The Fool of the House of Spears

I’m not going to mince words here, which I understand is kind of a departure, and . . . oh shit, too late already, huh? Anyway, sorry. I should say instead that I won’t be too clever here because sometimes simplicity is what’s called for, a cold hard truth bomb that needs to be dropped on everybody before the terminal case of the stupids gets too out of hand. Clearly, I’ve already failed in my quest for simplicity and in the process set a new record for the earliest appearance of utter drivel but, hey, fuck it, strange and terrible times, these things happen, blah blah blah . . .

Shit, let’s just start over again, shall we? Okay. Here it goes: this Ndamukong Suh thing is fucking stupid.

There. I suppose I should probably elaborate, especially since all of you are probably nodding your head in agreement, allowing yourselves to believe that I’m referring to only those idiot souls you disagree with, but here’s the thing: in the wake of our man Suh stomping the shit out of a hapless Green Bay Packer, everyone has acted like a goddamn fool, on every side of the issue, from Suh to Sheriff Goodell to you, to me and everyone in between. This is because there are no winners here, only horrible, horrible losers and pea-brained fools and that is why this story sucks, sucks, sucks and will suck forever.

Let’s start with the man himself, Ndamukong Suh. What he did was fucking idiotic. Really, you don’t need to go much further than that. Understand this: I’m not upset about what he actually did. In the grand scheme of things, who cares? I’ve been stepped on before, kicked a few times, once or twice even in anger, and you know what? In the end, each time was kind of funny actually. I mean, who the fuck gets so mad that they actually kick someone? That’s some spastic five year old shit right there. If anything, for the actual offense, Ndamukong Suh deserves to get laughed at, not treated like Hannibal Lecter. I mean, come on, in a game which encourages grown men to bludgeon each other dozens of times every week, and in which 45 year old men end up wandering the street, drooling like decimated zombies because their brains have been turned to pudding thanks to said bludgeonings, a dude getting his arms or legs or whatever stomped on isn’t really a big deal. Shit, I’ve done what Ndamukong Suh did on Thanksgiving and nobody acted like I was some sort of monster. Instead, they just gave me a spanking, took away my Transformers and GI Joes and then sent me to my room to think about what I did. Granted, that was just last week and my landlord felt weird about spanking me but he and I both understood justice needed to be done.

Okay, enough of that. The point is, is that what Ndamukong Suh did was childish and stupid and in response he deserves to be mocked and called an idiot, not treated like the scourge of Western Civilization. If anything, he – and all of us – should just feel embarrassed. He didn’t act like Attila the Hun, he acted like Attila’s four year old nephew after he got his toy wooden horsey taken away.

But none of that really pisses me off or sends me into GOOD HEAVENS THE OUTRAGE territory. No, what pisses me off is that after I got done writing a whole piece about how the Lions should embrace their Bad Boy image and in which I made sure to state how important it was that the Lions did this in a smart controlled way, Ndamukong Suh went and did something profoundly stupid, something that fucked up the whole damn game, sapped the life from his own team and caused his own fans to wither in the face of their own shrieking souls, dying in the face of the memory of a million different Oh Man, The Lions moments, all of which were suddenly dragged kicking and screaming back to the forefront by Ndamukong Suh’s retarded stomp heard round the world.

Indeed. Had Ndamukong Suh waited until the end of the game and then curbstomped a Packer or two, I’d probably be cracking jokes and telling the people of Wisconsin to quit being so soft. But he didn’t. Instead, he did it at a crucial juncture in the game, following a key third down stop, which would have held the Packers to a field goal instead of a touchdown and which would have kept the Lions within striking distance. Instead, the Packers were given a first down inside the five yard line, Suh was throwing a hissy fit on the sideline and soon, the Lions were down by 14. Only a few plays later, Matthew Stafford threw an interception, and one play after that Aaron Rodgers stuck a dagger in our hearts with a long touchdown strike to James Jones. Ballgame. Thanks for coming. Don’t choke on your turkey.

Fuck you, Ndamukong Suh. Fuck you. That may sound overly harsh, but I’ve spent way too goddamn long watching my dudes do shit like this. The Packers weren’t intimidated or even angry about what Suh did. Instead, they just rolled their eyes and laughed at him, laughed at all of us, just like an entire nation did. Again. You want to know why the Lions are “The Lions” and all that horrible, horrible phrase means? Then watch that fucking play again. Feel the sheer, terrible stupidity of it. Kick ass like a man. Don’t throw a fit like a petulant little boy. Look, I’m a fan of Ndamukong Suh, a big fan, but I’m not going to ignore reality just to placate my fandom. That kind of fandom, which rejects all criticism, is fundamentally weak, fragile and afraid. It refuses to acknowledge truth because it can’t handle it. I’m a fan of Ndamukong Suh but in this case, Ndamukong Suh was a goddamn fool and I can say that because my fandom is strong enough to handle it.

And as for everyone else? Recognize the distinction between kicking ass like a man and throwing a fit like a little boy, okay? Suh didn’t behave like a badass who wasn’t going to take any of the Packers shit. He acted like a damn fool. Like I said, he didn’t intimidate the Packers. He didn’t scare them with his big bad self. Instead, he lashed out like a four year old, they laughed at him and then ripped out our hearts. That’s just that cold hard bitch known as Truth rearing her ugly, cruel head one more time.

And that brings me to everyone else. When things like this happen, whenever anything goes wrong, the whole world goes stupid and this is no exception. Right now, you have a host of Lions fans echoing the screaming banshee wails of the rest of the quiver-lipped public, demanding that Ndamukong Suh be drawn and quartered for his outrageous villainy. These people need to calm the fuck down. He stepped on a dude. That’s it. Laugh at him. Any other response is complete overkill, a maelstrom of dumb noise which just gets in the way of the real issue here, which is that the timing of Suh’s offense is what, well, causes the most offense. Again, I don’t really care that he stepped on a dude. So what? What I care about is the fact that he stepped on a dude when he should have known better. What I care about is that he invited all this nonsense with his willful indifference to the concept of responsibility – not to his opponent or the fans or to some grotesque caricature of morality, but to his team and to himself and to an idea that the Lions are a real, live football team and not just a collection of dysfunctional fuckups, which is, sadly, the way everyone sees them right now.

On the other hand, you have the LEAVE HIM ALONE HE DIDN’T DO ANYTHING WRONG crowd, which . . . come on. Ndamukong Suh is not being persecuted here. The dude fucked up. This is undeniable and to try to deny it makes you look desperate and hysterical. It’s a function of psychological martyrdom, of being so beaten over the years that the idea of personal responsibility is unfathomable. To admit that Ndamukong Suh was wrong is to admit a certain vulnerability, a vulnerability which requires emotional strength, strength which as fans we just don’t have. Instead, it’s easier – and necessary for too many of us – to cling to the ghost of an idea, to some terrible illusion, that we are being systematically fucked over and that anything and everything bad that happens to us is somehow the result of some bizarre witch hunt. Has Ndamukong Suh taken an unfair amount of heat since he stepped into the league? Absolutely. Has this affected how officials deal with him? Absolutely. But here’s the thing – he stomped on a dude. What do you want to hear? He stomped on a dude. That’s a pretty black and white thing, not open to much interpretation. Yeah, it’s kind of silly, and to genuinely treat it like it’s something that matters is vaguely stupid and reflective of a certain sort of dumb hysteria which infects the very idea of morality like some terrible rotting disease but that is a completely separate – and ultimately irrelevant – argument than the one which matters, which is this: Ndamukong Suh stomped on a dude on national television with everyone watching and that will always – always – get you thrown in football jail. Everything else is just dumb noise.

Which brings me to those morality policemen disguised as the mass media, who latched onto this story like dogs on a peanut butter covered bone. Screw them. It’s not at all surprising and in its banal predictability it is sort of soul crushing and depressing, but as soon as that stomp happened and Suh ended up on the sideline pitching a fit, you could practically feel the slobber dripping from their lips. They couldn’t wait to blather on and on and on about Adolf Suh or to openly speculate about how many games Ndamukong Hitler should be suspended for, which in turn shaped the soft little minds of millions and millions of idiot fans who then took to twitter with their own incessant nattering and pretty soon the whole world had reached a consensus – Pol Pot Suh had to be suspended for two games. Why two? Who knows? Such is the frustrating vagary of public opinion. I guess we should all just be thankful that they didn’t demand that Sheriff Goodell publically lynch him.

And that brings me to the Sheriff himself, that lackwitted coward with his tin star on his chest. It’s no secret that I’m, uh, not a fan of Sheriff Goodell. I think he’s a terrible commissioner, a man who somehow can’t keep people happy in a multi-billion dollar sports league, a dude who almost threatened to derail the most popular sports league – hell, the most popular entity – in America because Jerry Jones was whispering in his ear about how he needed more gold plated toilets in his Sodom and Gomorrah of a stadium. The man is an ineffectual nitwit. But worse than that is his arbitrary and tyrannical style of rule, a freewheeling desperate sort of style which tries to please everybody and ultimately pleases nobody, sucking the dick of public opinion while somehow simultaneously ignoring it. In the end, it’s little more than anarchy. When it comes to the integrity of the league, the good Sheriff doesn’t seem to give a shit. Make Jerry Jones and his ilk happy. That’s it. That’s all he seems to care about. When it comes to everything else, he’s like some degenerate Roman Emperor, leaving the fate of his gladiators in the hands of the fickle public. If they scream loud enough, he’ll change rules on the fly. He’ll fine people for wearing the wrong shoes. He’ll sentence someone else to death for a big hit and then turn around and sell video clips of that same big hit because he knows that people are insane and that they will gibber about player safety one minute and then demand blood the next. Sheriff Goodell is a shitty commissioner because there are no rules. There is no law. There is just dumb noise and it rules everything. And since the dumb noise decreed that Ndamukong Amin deserved a two game suspension, the commissioner gave him a two game suspension. There is no reason behind it, no real justification, just a shrug of the shoulders and a “Hey, why not?” kind of decision making that is both capricious and utterly maddening. And in the end, it could end up fucking the Lions and all of us. Random obliteration. And all that’s left is to either rage against the randomness of the universe itself or to pick meaningless fights which manage to give us something tangible to scream at, lest we face the terrible and ugly truth, that depressing and soul crushing truth, which is that these are indeed strange and terrible times and sometimes these things just happen.

In the end, everyone has been debased by this stupid story. Ndamukong Suh looks like a thug to most and even those who reject that sort of simplistic reductionism see him as something akin to an emotionally unstable fool. This is a shitty, shitty thing. The fans look like fools too, either clinging to some hysterical and random notion of morality in the midst of a world built on violence or defending the equivalent of a four year old’s hissy fit. And the Sheriff and his NFL have once again displayed their ineptitude, their slavish devotion to laziness and a pimp’s greed getting in the way of ever addressing anything with any sort of common sense. And I have been debased by my own grief, both indignant and heartbroken, because one of my favorite players fucked up and fucked up in a way which was inexcusably stupid. Again, it has nothing to do with what he actually did, and everything to do with the horrible, horrible timing of it. I’m sad not because Ndamukong Suh stomped on a dude but because he stomped on a dude at the worst possible time. I’m sad because in doing so he revealed a fundamental, critical and possibly fatal flaw – in a game which is determined mainly by which dudes can best control and effectively channel their emotions, Ndamukong Suh has shown that he is either incapable or unwilling to do so. That’s why I’m sad. That’s why I’m pissed. Because for as talented as he is, what Ndamukong Suh did was what a loser does. What he did was what the Detroit Lions as a franchise have done for more than half a century now. He let himself get baited, like a dumb fish, and then he was hooked and the fisherman who got him was able to walk away laughing with his friends, while Suh flopped around on the hook and then died. That’s the reason I’m mad and that’s the only reason. Everything else is just dumb, meaningless noise.

The bottom line is this: Ndamukong Suh has been lost for two games – well, two and a half games if you count Thanksgiving and, hey, why not? – and it’s his own damn fault. He left his fate in the hands of an insane system and still he and far too many Lions fans are trying to play the martyr card. If the loss to the Packers proved one thing and one thing only, it’s this: the Lions need to grow the fuck up. This doesn’t mean that they need to become model citizens the Sheriff can be proud of. It means that they need to be in control of and responsible for their own emotions. I want them to be the ones who make the other team flip out. I want them to be the ones who mock and taunt and physically ruin the other team and throw them off of their games. On Thanksgiving, the only team that flipped out and the only team thrown off of its game was the Lions. On Thanksgiving, Ndamukong Suh wasn’t a Bad Boy, he was just a Boy. And that’s that.

The Greatest Thing Ever Made

I'm planning on writing something about this whole Ndamukong Suh hullabaloo soon, but for now, there is this:



I am in complete awe. There are just so many amazing things to talk about here, I don't even know where to begin. Feel free to break this shit down in the comments. This is the Zapruder Film for our generation. Or maybe it's closer to the Bible. I don't know.

The Unbearable

You’ll have to excuse the title of this post. For as creative a dude as I am (or at least I think I am) I’m appallingly bad at coming up with titles for these things. Part of it is, I just don’t care about the goddamn title, but for some reason this one just popped into my head before the game had even ended. It actually started as The Unbearable Shittiness of Being but then The Unbearable all by itself somehow seemed more poignant and apropos. Other contenders included Happiness is a Warm Gun and, perhaps the most eloquent of all, Shit: The Movie. Why am I discussing the titling process for my posts instead of the game? Well, shit, why would I actually want to talk about the game?

Indeed. In the wake of whatever the fuck that was, I lashed out on Twitter for a while and then decided to express my feelings as eloquently as I possibly could in the form of Nicolas Cage staggering through the streets, moaning like a fucking maniac. I suppose I could have written something last night but it was still Thanksgiving and I wasn’t feeling particularly thankful. And now that I’m sitting here and actually writing this, I’m not entirely sure where to begin.

I suppose I could start with my idiotic proclamation that I was feeling good about things and that win or lose I would be cool. In retrospect, this madness was a fool’s invitation to the football gods to strip me naked, lather me in honey and then tie me to a hill filled with mutant red ants with rabies and hatred for hearts. Still, I still hold to what I said, at least in theory, which is always the last bastion of the ruined man. Theoretically, I should have been fine, but reality understands better than I do the depth of my delusions and pathetic need to overcompensate for my terrible, terrible fears and, well . . . here we are. Had the Lions been simply blown out, run off the field from the word go, I think I could have handled it. I actually believe that. I would have sneered and probably acted the fool and then hooted my disdain for the world to hear, but there is a finality in something like that that is easier to accept than the shitstorm we were forced to endure on Thursday. Similarly, had the Lions lost in a close, thrilling game in which they fought the Packers toe to toe, I could have swallowed the enormity of my disappointment and taken modest solace in the fact that we had proved we belonged. Instead, neither thing really happened and in a weird way, the football gods decided to take the worst parts of both scenarios and roll them all into one maelstrom of misery. The Lions showed they could play with the Packers but they also showed they were miles away. They fought toe to toe and still kind of got blown out and rather than coming away feeling like the Lions are close or like they had just been beaten by an obviously superior team, I was left with the same old terrifying and soul crushing feeling which has plagued my fan soul for virtually its entire existence, and that’s that the Lions beat themselves – again – and that despite every fiber of my fan being screaming at me that things are different, the crushing and maddening realization was that on Thursday, in the biggest game of the year, no, no they were not.

And really, that’s all that probably needs to be said. I don’t like it either, and I bristle at that Same Ol’ Lions crap, but the truth is a cold, hard bitch and she is mean and she doesn’t like any of us. That much is abundantly clear. Yes, the Lions are 7-4 and yes they are a much more talented team than they have been in a long time and yes, the future still looks bright, but at the end of the game there was no escaping that cold, cruel bitch and she was whispering in our ears, cackling evilly, telling us that our Lions were still a bunch of goddamn idiots and that, in the end, they would just fuck us and themselves while the rest of the world laughed, then sighed, then laughed again and then went back to gnawing on turkey bones and the withered husks of our shattered dreams.

I am getting a little carried away here and I have careened into a darker, more hopeless realm than I meant to, and I don’t want to give the impression that I have given up or anything like that, it’s just . . . shit, man, you know? I mean, goddamn. I suppose we should have seen this coming. After all, the world is clearly not made for us, but the tragic nature of Hope is that it survives all reason and that it thrives in those corners of the human heart which are inexplicably untouched by the weight of the past and then they grow and they grow and they grow and they invade the mind and they twist around the past and smother it until all that’s left is a sort of giddy, deranged fantasy, a Kingdom of the Heart in which reality is something to be conquered rather than accepted, in which Hope rules all and the nightmares of the past are just some dumb bedtime story that we tell ourselves, empty tales which only serve to make the present feel even brighter, to make Hope seem that much more powerful.

Towards the end of last season, I yammered on repeatedly about the Symmetry of Fate, about how in retrospect everything makes a strange sort of sense and I was right. If nothing else, I was right about that. But my fatal mistake, made in my deluded glee, was in making the assumption that Fate was on our side and that this symmetry existed in order to reward us at the end of the hard, terrible road out of hell. But Fate and its symmetry do not hold to fanciful notions of what should be. Instead, Fate and its symmetry hold to the immutable laws of nature, and there is no law more immutable than this: the Lions will fuck up and they will be fucked and when this orgy of fucking occurs, we will all be left crying bitter tears and remembering just why it is that we hold our fragile hearts behind bullet proof glass most of the time.

How else do you explain the simple cruelty of allowing us to watch our team fight toe to toe – no, to stomp on the toes – of the vaunted Packers, to watch them march down the field over and over and over again only to come away with nothing? Nothing! How else do you explain that we were allowed to creep as far as we possibly could to the edge of Hope and Salvation only to have that edge crumble away while we fell into the familiar oblivion of the Abyss? The Symmetry of Fate may seem cruel, but it really isn’t. It is merely indifferent. The cruelty comes in our own capacity for self-delusion. That is our fatal flaw and that is the tragedy of our kind. Our biggest mistake was in not recognizing that the Symmetry of Fate simply exists in order to point the way to the inevitable, to set the stage for the clarity of inevitability. The Symmetry of Fate does not exist for our benefit or for our ruin but rather so that we cannot miss simple and unavoidable truths, and again, the simple unavoidable truth is that the Lions lost to the Packers because, well, they are the Lions.

You all know what I mean when I say that, and that is a terrible truth to have to face, and yet, here we are. The Lions lost because they were dumb, because they behaved like a gang of idiot fuck-ups, foolish urchins with no understanding of that hidden world that exists between talent and victory. The Packers won because they are a team that understands these things. The Lions lost because they do not. It is that simple, and the simplicity of this truth only serves to underscore just how massive it truly is. The Lions didn’t only lose, by the end of that game it felt like they were a million miles away from where they need to be, because in the end, talent just gets you an invite to the dance. But if you can’t do the dance when you get there, well . . . what’s the point? And right now, the Lions not only can’t do the dance, they don’t even seem to understand the basic steps involved in that dance. And what’s even worse than that, is that they seem to be in complete denial that this is the case. Instead, they want to claim that they can dance with anyone and then the music starts and they start spazzing out like Elaine did in the one Seinfeld episode and then they poop themselves.

I was holding it together all the way through the first half. And I think the Lions were too. They at least recognized the beat and their talent was enough to keep them from making fools out of themselves, but they still were lost when it came to the intricate steps, when it came to the simple execution that separates the real dancers from those poor fools left standing around sipping punch and occasionally bobbing their heads like fools at inappropriate times.

Look, I’m not sure how I got started on this dance metaphor. I don’t particularly like it but that’s fine because as a Lions fan I don’t particularly like anything right now. Everything that there is to like – all that talent, the swagger, the excitement that comes with wild-eyed youth – feels meaningless in the face of that one simple truth – that when it comes to the things that truly matter, to the things that make a good football team actually good, the Lions simply don’t have a fucking clue.

At the half, the Lions were only down 7-0. The defense was playing out of its head and had the Lions offense just been able to do those things that matter, those things that make all the difference in the world, they would have gone into the half with a nice lead and with everyone in America raving about them. Instead, they were down 7-0 and the only thing people could talk about was their mistakes, and then there was Nickelback, some corporate rock monstrosity that would embarrass even other corporate rock monstrosities, the sort of band a group of insurance salesmen hire to play their company picnic, standing in the middle of our field, warbling some bland, meaningless bullshit and what should have felt like a triumphant day felt more like the waiting room to hell.

And then the second half started and the Packers moved the ball. It was inevitable and we all knew it, and it just made those mistakes from the first half feel all the more painful, all the more relevant, all the more symbolic of some terrible turning, of the slow and tortured revealing of the Symmetry of that bastard Fate. But then the Lions held on 3^rd and goal and it seemed, if only for a moment, that the Lions were going to fight Fate, that they were going to stand and go to war with their own identity, their own being, simply because we had collectively had enough and the time for change was now. And then Ndamukong Suh stomped on a dude like a petulant child and then that resistance, that fight we have been fighting for so goddamn long now, collapsed and the world burned. Reality, with its horrid and cruel and cold face, rushed through and what was once true is still true and that’s that.

I love the Lions Bad Boy image. I wrote a whole piece about it. But what Ndamukong Suh did was just dumb, and worse than that it cemented his image for the rest of his career. He’s the dirty player who stomped on a Packer on national TV on Thanksgiving and that’s just the way it is. Like it or not, fair or not, that’s the way that everyone will see him. Like all the rest of us, like his team, he’s been waging a war against the inevitable, fighting against Fate, against his very nature, warring with reality in an effort to overcome, to be better than what others think, to win on his own terms, not beholden to anything but himself and his teammates and his coaches. And then in the most critical moment of all, he failed and he failed egregiously and he failed in a way that renders everything that came before, all the hard work and every inch that he and his team and we as fans have had to fight to get over the last couple of years, utterly meaningless.

I like Ndamukong Suh. He is of my tribe. But he fucked up and he fucked up at the worst possible time. That’s not an opinion. That’s just truth and as I said, Truth is a cold, hard bitch. I probably have a whole piece in me about what went down with Suh and I suspect I’ll write that at some point next week. For now, though, I kinda just want to spend the weekend not thinking about the Lions at all, which is a depressing sentiment to be sure, but a necessary and undeniable one. I suspect – no, I know – that I’ll regroup and that I’ll suck it up and plaster a manic smile on my face and start to believe in Hope once again. After all, I have already spent some time earlier today looking at what the Lions need to do to ensure a playoff berth so it’s not like I’ve abandoned all hope. But for now, I just want to acknowledge the devastation of reality, and face the simple and immutable truth which I have been fighting like a madman for the better part of the last two years, which is that right now, the Detroit Lions are, indeed, the Detroit Lions and everything that everyone believes that that means. And that sucks, man. That sucks.

2011 All ACLB Team Defensive Tackles

RAVEN: HALOTI NGATA & NDAMUKONG SUH
I like to pretend that the NFL is still old school sometimes. In my mind, this old school mentality does not just cover the basic philosophies of play, but the whole thing. I pretend there's only like 24 teams and the players barely make any money, and some of them have to wrestle professionally in the off-season, and occasionally become so good at that fake fighting world that they leave the NFL to live in Florida and work nine days a week, in order to drive a Cadillac driven by a midget named Little Havana, and have sex with the same 37 women as much as they want. Professional wrestling is just like the NFL in that it's become stupid and glossy and designed for the bright lights of television instead of the real dudes of dark bars. That's just how it is. Once something gets a whiff of money, it forgets its foundation, and abandons it, profits for as long as it can, until either it crumbles from the strain of what it has become, or only closeted gays actually like it. As I write this, there is no labor deal in place, and the NFL might shut down or some shit, and that's a real test for it, because it could be headed to what professional wrestling is - something that only closeted gay actually enjoy. Or retards. Regular dudes will move on if it gets too much bullshittier though.
But in pretending it's an old school game like that, who else would I pick for my DTs than Haloti Ngata and Ndamukong Suh, since one is a behemoth brown-skinned man with remarkable athleticism for a 350 pound man, who has a scary islander name, and the other is a behemoth dark-skinned man with even more remarkable athleticism for a 330-pound man, who has a scary jungle name? They are perfect to not only play football, but ride with me to Texas to put on stereotypical jungle motif bathing suits, walk around barefoot, and beat up on the good ole boy white guys that the wrestling fans all love and adore. We would bludgeon and bloody them in all sorts of nefarious ways, biting their foreheads into a pulp, and I would wear a tuxedo with lots of frilliness to it, and probably carry a stainless steel briefcase as well. We would make thousands and thousands of dollars in the off-season, and have to sneak our way out of arena back doors so the local yokel doofus fans did not try to beat us with tire irons on our way out of town. We would drink two cases of beer between the three of us on long road trips to the next shithole town, where we'd all call our wives, talk about how everything was kinda chill, we missed them, and then we'd go get breakfast at the Huddle House and have our way with the doe-eyed sorta Rican girl working the red eye shift once she got off work at 10 am. That's old school football motherfuckers. That's how you play the game.



NEIL: NDAMUKONG SUH & KYLE WILLIAMS
I haven’t done anything for this for almost two weeks while Raven grows all restless and tears his shirt off Ron Simmons style, and I don’t blame him but this shit isn’t my fault. It’s been a trying time. I am writing this from an underground bunker in an undisclosed location after a daring escape from the fascists who were holding me against my will. I won’t relate the details of my escape because they are horrible, horrible, horrible and they cause violent memories and obscene thoughts and then I have to live with the thought that a man may have died and I remember him twitching and I remember thinking better you than me, friend . . . but that is yesterday’s business, savage and strange as it is, and we are here, today.
Still, that doesn’t explain why I have been so silent, but I had to get my mind right. I had to recover from the heinous atrocities committed against me in the name of mental health and science, possibly on the orders of an advance team sent by the squid people. I don’t know. I’m investigating. What I do know is that it has been a long, arduous process, and my mysterious teacher, the man who took me in, an old man named Kuno, hasn’t let me do anything during this time period other than meditate and practice a strange combination of Krav Maga, Sambo and Drunken Boxing that he invented. It is a nameless art but he assures me that it will leave me prepared for the day the squid people come to take me or at least in case my fascist oppressors find me, in which case Kuno says that he won’t be able to help me because he has warrants and he doesn’t need that shit.
In any case, this forced period of meditation and training has forced me to reevaluate my priorities when it comes to this team. Thankfully, my beliefs are still in line with my old feelings, but now they are sharpened into something definite. There are goals here. This isn’t just about representing a blog. No. This is about the future of the human race. That’s the overriding goal that cannot be forgotten. Therefore, I can only select men who I believe have the right kind of mental and physical makeup to fight to the bitter end against the rampaging horde of squidmen. I have already explained this part, so I won’t dwell on it. But the second factor that has come into focus as a result of my trials and tribulations is more important to me on a personal level. You see, I need to pick players who I know would stick with me when the shit goes down. I need guys who will huddle with me in the terrible places, who will plot and plan, deprived of air and reality in this bunker, face to face with their own madness and who will not only survive but flourish. I need men who will serve as my personal bodyguards when it comes time to rampage through the countryside, beating on the skulls of my enemies and gnawing on the bones of the wicked. I can’t have civilized gentlemen who just want to buy fine art and look at their stock portfolios all day. Fuck no. I need warriors and I think that I have them.
Ndamukong Suh is an obvious pick here. There isn’t that much I can say about this noble warrior that I haven’t said already. He has already stoked the fires of my heart as a member of the Detroit Lions football club and I am one hundred percent sure that he will only get better and better. He is young and he is supernaturally gifted. He has no time for the squidman and he will sack that degenerate motherfucker and rip his ugly tentacles off. But aside from that, I can trust a man like Ndamukong Suh. He is the Lord of the House of Spears, and a man like that understands concepts like honor and loyalty. I can feel safe with him at my side. I may be equipped with the teachings of Master Kuno but as he has taught me, I will know I am successful when I do not have to fight. That’s what I have Lord Ndamukong for. He is a natural born warrior and they are rare beasts in this world. He only knows one thing and that is victory. He would not let the squidmen win. He understands these things. And, perhaps more importantly, he would not let the fascists take me again. His strength is not in the power of his arms, mighty as they are, but in the power of his warrior spirit. After all, a lot of men are strong. Albert Haynesworth is strong. But Albert Haynesworth would offer to suck the dick of the Chief Squidman to get out of fighting and he would sell me to the fascists for a bag of old hamburgers. Fuck him. No, it takes a special kind of man to stand with me in these strange and terrible times, and there is no man more special than Ndamukong Suh. This is a team, and therefore every man is valuable, but in my own heart, no man is more valuable than the Lord of the House of Spears. He is precious to me and I know that when I die many years from now, in some shithole cantina in the Mexican desert, he will still stand above my body and he will fight off the evil dogs who howl for my flesh and he will bear my body to the mountaintop from which it will ascend in a beam of pure light back to the heavens from whence it came. I trust him and him alone in this task and that is why he is on this team.
I was able to communicate with Raven following my escape, which was a welcome relief since my captors had blocked our telepathic communication through the use of an ultra-high frequency sound wave, which corrupted any and all messages that came from behind those terrible walls, which meant that I had to resort to begging for the occasional phone call, which I knew was fruitless because Raven is too smart to reveal anything of any importance through such insecure channels. He said nothing and I don’t blame him. He did the right thing. But after I escaped, I managed to contact him once again, and I have since kept him abreast of the situation. He explained to me that he thought it was odd that I chose Haloti Ngata at defensive end since he is a defensive tackle. I explained myself and we cleared that shit up, but now I’m going to explain it to all of you so there is no confusion.
It’s important to me both to have the premier warriors and to have a sense of versatility if we are to slay the squid people. Therefore, I believe that a man like Haloti Ngata is absolutely necessary and since he is nominally a defensive end in the Ravens 3-4 offense, I decided it would be a perfect opportunity to add him to the team there. That way, I can roll out a giant defensive line if I so choose with Suh, Ngata and Kyle Williams, with The Great Willie Young destroying worlds coming off the edge and a bunch of kamikaze linebackers raising hell behind them. OR . . . or, I can slide Haloti Ngata inside with Suh and Kyle Williams in a three man front or even The Great Willie Young, who can play anywhere he damn well wants, and then throw an extra linebacker on the field. This will make even more sense when I reveal my linebackers. Versatility is key because you never know what those heathen squid motherfuckers are gonna pull out.
So, I guess the only question left to answer is why Kyle Williams? Well, I’ll tell you. I don’t know that much about Kyle Williams. What I do know is this: he was awesome this past season, maybe the best defensive tackle in the entire league and he did it playing in Buffalo. That tells me a lot. The Bills are a terrible team, just awful, and it takes a special sort of man to excel in that environment. Plus, Buffalo itself is akin to hell. It is cold and gray and evil and depressed and there is nothing to do there but drink antifreeze and wait for your spirit horse to arrive. It would be easy for a man to degenerate into nothingness in a place like that, to perhaps become a witless junky, sucking dicks in back alleys for some rotten crank or turning on your friends and compatriots in order to gather the means to escape and leave them all behind. But not Kyle Williams. Hell no.
Kyle Williams rose like a fire beast from the hell slums of Buffalo and refused to be conquered. Instead, he has flourished. He has fought like a champion despite the odds and he has won himself a place in my heart because of it. He will likely never win in Buffalo but that hasn’t stopped him. He does not fight for glory or for cheap championship trophies and gaudy pimp rings. No, he fights because what else is there? He fights because he must, because it is the only way for him to quench that river of fire which runs through his warrior veins. The only way he can look in the mirror every morning is if he knows he goes out there and takes a blood axe to the skulls of his enemies. He fights for himself and for his pathetic friends. He knows there is no victory and yet he keeps coming forward, forward, forward. His future is dark and miserable and is rank with the stench of grim death but yet he faces it like a man, with eyes wide open and a heart full of thunder. How could I not have him with me in these strange and terrible times? I don’t know a damn thing about him other than those two things - that he is awesome and he is awesome even though he has been exiled to Buffalo - but those are enough for me.


TOMORROW: Linebackers

The Random Thoughts Of A Degenerate Mind

Awww, no, come on, Drew, that shit was played out months ago.

WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?

After Drew Stanton scored a rushing touchdown early in the game against the Bears, he did what appeared to be The Dougie, but since he is a white boy whose previous dance experience probably consists of occasionally nodding his head while he tries to look cool or holding up a drunk sorority girl on the verge of passing out or sitting on his hands while a stripper grinds on him, it didn’t quite work out and ended up looking like The Dougie’s lamer, more uptight cousin, The Douglas.

I guess poor Drew felt like he needed to do something after he scored. I mean, after all, it’s not like the dude is going to get too many chances in his life to make a fool out of himself on television. Well, at least not in the endzone. But it’s generally frowned upon to break into dance after getting sacked or throwing an interception or rolling out into oblivion against the Jets, so this was one of the few chances Ol’ Plucky would ever have to show how he celebrates when something good actually happens. Poor, Drew. I can only imagine that his teammates just laughed at him. Actually, I can imagine him doing that at the club and I can imagine his teammates laughing at him then and then telling him that he should do it in a game after he scores a touchdown while attempting to stifle their laughter. I mean, I doubt they ever thought that it would actually happen, so why not have a little fun with Ol’ Plucky?

Still, it’s better than whatever the fuck that stupid Rollin’ dance was that Daunte Culpepper always used to do after a touchdown. I wonder if Daunte still does that in the UFL? I bet he does. I have a feeling that Daunte will do that shit when he is 55 years old and playing touch football in the backyard with his family.

And at least Drew didn’t attempt to do The Carlton a la Alphonso Smith. That would have been funny as fuck for all the wrong reasons, but Alphonso killed that fucking thing. No one should ever attempt to do it again. It is his now. Sorry, dude who played Carlton. Speaking of that dude, though, I wonder how many times he gets stopped by people who just want him to do The Carlton. How old is he, anyway? Hang on, let me look this shit up. (And yeah, this post has already given new meaning to the term “random”. Shit, just writing it makes me feel like I need Ritalin. I can’t imagine how disorienting reading it must be. Hey look, a bird!)

Okay. Alfonso Ribeiro, the dude who played Carlton, is 39 years old. And I bet that when he is 60, he will be signing autographs and some dipshit white dude will be all “Hey, man, do The Carlton” and they’ll giggle and Alfonso will just sort of grit his teeth before forcing a plastic, manic grin on his face and with all the hate he can muster he will do a furious version of The Carlton and then he’ll go home and cry and drink a shitload of Vodka and take a bunch of Tylenol because he fucked up his hip doing the dance again and then he’ll call Will Smith a bunch of times and just breathe into the phone while Will sternly says “Alfonso, is this you again, man? C’mon, man, this is the 40^th time this week.” And then Alfonso will hang up and visit the grave of the fat dude who played Uncle Phil (heart attack, obviously) and under a cold, pale moon, he will silently weep and do The Carlton one last time. Or at least until some random dude on the street demands he does it again.

Perhaps The Carlton can only be done by dudes named Alphonso. Who knows? All I do know is that Drew Stanton should never attempt to do The Dougie again. Then again, I don’t think the world is ready to see him do “The Lap Dance Recipient” so . . . yeah. The good news is that Drew might not ever score another touchdown ever again, which means we’ll never have to find out what he has planned. So we’ve got that going for us.

I KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THAT IS AND IT’S NOT A PERSONAL FOUL

Today, Ndamukong Suh was fined by Roger Goodell for, uh, pushing Jay Cutler to the ground while Cutler was running with the ball. In some circles that is known as “tackling”, which is an obscure method used to ensure that a runner is downed.

Fuck. I mean, just . . . fuck. I don’t get why everyone slobbers all over Roger Goodell. The dude should just walk around with a tiny tin badge on his jacket and a miniature cowboy hat because that motherfucker thinks he’s the sheriff. He’s fining everybody for everything. Shit, I’m pretty sure he just fined me for writing this. Does he just sit in his office, blindfolded, with a handful of darts that he just tosses at a board labeled with random names and dollar amounts? “Oh shit, Suh, and . . . $15,000! Good job, Roger, you’re the Commish! No, fuck that, you’re the Sheriff! Yeah, fuck you, Dad!”

And then I imagine his toady, Mike Pereira, slithering into his office, all hunched over, rubbing his hands together like some vile degenerate, licking his lizard lips in anticipation and I imagine Goodell maybe throwing a couple of darts at him just for fun and then demanding that Pereira gather the rest of the SS and make their rounds for the day. I can then imagine Pereira, surrounded by a gang of German thugs, limping (yeah, he’s acquired a limp now, and oh yeah, he carries a cane because, why not?) into the offices at Ford Field while everyone scurries and hides under the floorboards. And I can imagine him cackling at a terrified secretary, and then looking at his “special list”, licking his lizard lips once more and croaking “Bring me Suh,” and then loading poor Ndamukong onto a train bound for a special NFL reeducation camp.

Then again, I suppose this is what The House of Spears gets for daring to lay hands on another player or for, uh, playing defense. Everyone knows that the proper thing to do in that situation is to just yell at Cutler for a while and hope that he somehow breaks his will to the point that Cutler suffers from a brutal sense of ennui and just collapses to the turf. Then again, the lights would probably just go out in the stadium before they suddenly came back on and Mike Pereira would be standing there, cackling and flicking his lizard tongue in all directions while horrified fans and coaches all bull rushed the exits. He would point a bony and evil finger in Suh’s direction and tell him that Lord Goodell has fined him $50,000 and ordered him to attend “reeducation camp” for using “foul and unnecessary” language.

Yes, somehow this has morphed from Roger Goodell, Hillbilly Sheriff into Mike Pereira, Nazi into Mike Pereira, Mystical Evil Jedi. I should probably just quit before this gets completely out of hand. Wait, you mean that happened paragraphs ago? What’s a little harmless Nazi/Holocaust joke between friends?

GOODNIGHT, SWEET PRINCE

Today came the sad news that Alphonso Smith, keeper of The Carlton flame, passed away in his sleep from a – and this is a technical term – fucked up shoulder. Well, of course he did. I imagine the football gods were going over their list and one of them saw Smith’s name, nudged one of his compatriots and was all “Oh shit, Bill, I think we missed one.” One finger point and one bolt of lightning later and Alphonso’s shoulder was cleaved in twain.

Lately, poor Alphonso has become a bit of a joke. The whole world watched him utterly implode on Thanksgiving and all my dudes and lady dudes who aren’t Lions fans were asking me “So, how much do you hate Alphonso Smith right now?” after that game, or some variation of that question, and all I could say was “Eh, not so much.” I mean, how could I? This season, he’s managed to be that rare beast, that dude the Lions have not had for a half decade – a cornerback capable of making a play. For one glorious stretch this season, it felt like he picked off a pass every game and turned the momentum in the Lions favor. And let’s not forget The Carlton, which was maybe the highlight of the entire season.

I’m sad that Alphonso Smith is hurt, just like it made me sad when he revealed that he couldn’t tackle a quadriplegic drunk with an inner ear disorder missing his wheelchair. When he fucked up so egregiously against the Patriots, I wasn’t filled with that sense of “Hey, fuck this guy” that everyone would expect. No, I found that I had developed a deep affection for Alphonso Smith and it made me sad to see him struggle so mightily. Sure, he stopped making plays a few weeks ago, and sure, he’s been a complete liability as far as tackling goes, but fuck it, this season is lost anyway, and I would rather root for a bunch of dudes who I actively like rather than for a replacement dude who’s thrust onto the field simply because there is no one else, you know? So, get well, Alphonso. May you live to do The Carlton another day. Vaya con dios, sweet prince. Vaya con dios.