Corporate NFL = Retarded

(I am no scientist but I can assure you there is a vagina near that tattoo somewhere)

So apparently some hot bitch was a reporter in the Giants locker room and Penthouse letters popped up in everybody's heads, so it - in the age of the internet - has become one of those non-issue issues that pop up and fizzle out in three days time. My main man Mr. 1000 Characters Clinton Portis now has a radio interview spot on D.C. sports talk radio shit, and had this to say about the hot bitch reporter in the locker room thing:

"You know man, I think you put women reporters in the locker room in positions to see guys walking around naked, and you sit in the locker room with 53 guys, and all of the sudden you see a nice woman in the locker room, I think men are gonna tend to turn and look and want to say something to that woman. For the woman, I think they make it so much that you can't interact and you can't be involved with athletes, you can't talk to these guys, you can't interact with these guys."

"And I mean,you put a woman and you give her a choice of 53 athletes, somebody got to be appealing to her. You know, somebody got to spark her interest, or she's gonna want somebody. I don't know what kind of woman won't, if you get to go and look at 53 men's packages. And you're just sitting here, saying 'Oh, none of this is attractive to me.' I know you're doing a job, but at the same time, the same way I'm gonna cut my eye if I see somebody worth talking to, I'm sure they do the same thing."

The NFL immediately responded with a PR statement saying his opinions do not represent the league and have no place in the NFL. "The comments are clearly inappropriate, offensive, and have no place in the NFL," is the exact words of NFL mouthpiece Greg Aiello.
Seriously, what the fuck? Is this what corporate NFL has come to? I mean, it's a billion dollar industry built on dudes butting heads and shortening their lifespan. Let's not act all high and mighty here. But beyond that, how is the above offensive at all? Find me a man alive who if he were in a room with 53 naked women would not find at least one attractive? Same goes for women, just probably not as animalistic as men (they are natural nurturers, we are natural fuckers). It's simple human sexuality. This is the crap that pisses me off about the modern world, that you are supposed to suppress your internal molecular reality and pretend you are somehow some God-like magical creature with complete control over your every emotion and desire. Really, all this is is science continuing with the dominion over the earth thing religion started. We may not be God-ordained special, but still, scientifically we are somehow superior to everything else and a beautiful woman can walk amongst 53 physically impressive naked men, and the very sexuality that has allowed us to even exist on this planet for all this time to get to a point where we have giant building where thousands of people pay highly valued pieces of paper or plastic (that is not supported by any gold or jeweled wealth or any tangible object, I should mention) to sit amongst each other and watch collections of well-trained men focused on one solitary game with a thick stack of odd rules and regulations. Without people wanting to fuck, which we all do (or if not, oh well, survival of the fittest), we would not have any of this.
And to pretend like what he said is the equivalent of saying, "Yeah, I think stabbing babies is an okay thing if that's how you were raised," or "I don't know, crack shouldn't be illegal in the NFL because it doesn't really hurt anybody except the user," it's ridiculous. Fuck you NFL. We are elevated animals, each and every one of us, and we all want to fuck, and if we don't it's because your goddamned HAARP beam has put too many Peyton Manning commercials directly inside our brains and we are confused on a molecular level.
Props to Clinton Portis for saying what he thought, what many people think, and I'm sad to see he was corporate bullied into apologizing yet again for speaking natural free-flowing thoughts. In the modern NFL world of commercial interests and brand positioning and image marketing, he is a bonafide living, breathing Man. God bless that wacky motherfucker.

The Home At The End Of The World

Well, here we are. But where is here, exactly? That's the question that's going to hang over this entire season and it's one that, frankly, I just can't answer. Not yet, anyway. One day - hopefully fairly soon - I think I'll be able to take a deep breath, smile and say "We're here" and we'll all know exactly where that is. But for now, "here" is a confusing purgatory, a place of both deep terror and almighty joy. The Fear and The Hope exist side by side here, and sometimes it's impossible to even distinguish between the two.

Just look at Matthew Stafford. Everyone is excited about Stafford. Everyone thinks that he's finally the answer to a half century old riddle. And yet, statistically he had an awful season. He threw way too many interceptions and his team only won two games. Stafford only played in 10 games and threw 20 interceptions. Extrapolated over a full sixteen game schedule that works out to 32 interceptions, a staggering number that should have us all reaching for the ol' Clorox cocktail.

But then there's the Matthew Stafford of the Browns game, the Matthew Stafford who had the best game statistically by a rookie quarterback in the history of the NFL, the Matthew Stafford who lurched back onto the field after staggering off of it, his shoulder made of hamburger meat and defective fireworks, and threw the game winning touchdown before giving in to the pain, and above all, the Matthew Stafford who made us all feel a pure and inviolable sort of hope.

It's great to believe. It's great to have hope. But in that moment, we did more than believe, we did more than hope. Those are feelings that rely upon faith, in an idea, a feeling. They are not real things - their rewards exist in an unknown future, a future that we can write with our minds however we want, good or bad. Hope allows us to envision something that isn't real. But when that game ended, we didn't hope, we didn't believe. We knew.

Knowledge is predicated on evidence, on facts. For the first time, we could look at what Matthew Stafford did and we knew. This was no flight of fancy, no hope, no dream, no belief. This was knowledge, rooted in cold fact, hard and unwavering, and for that moment in time, we lived in that future of our dreams. It was a future made real, if only for an instant.

But it was only an instant, and the rest of the season saw Stafford take a brutal beating. He was never right after that game against Cleveland, and that knowledge became a memory. It was like we were allowed to be sucked forward in time for a moment, to live and breathe and know what it was like to live in that dreamland, to know that it could be real. And then we were sucked right back out again, and all we could do was watch it recede into the distance until it was just a dream again. But we remember. We were there. We knew.

And that's where we find ourselves as Lions fans on the brink of this new season. We still believe, we still hope and we still allow ourselves to dream, and that is all fortified with the knowledge that the unattainable, the imaginary world of our dreams, is real. We have that memory, we know it's out there and now we just have to find the way back.

But, unfortunately for us, we can't just search, carefree, unburdened by the world we live in now. Because the horrible pains of the past, the Failure Demons and the Marinellis and the Millens and the 0-16 Nazi Werewolves are still beating the holy hell out of us. We know that the future of our dreams exists because we were there for a glorious instant. But we also know that the world of chaos and pain of our nightmares exists because we have been there for a lot longer than just an instant. We know without a shadow of a doubt that that world is real.

The fact that we can even believe in that future of our dreams, that we can grab hold of that instant when we knew it was real, is a testament to both our native optimism and to our desperate desire for something more than this dark world of sadness and despair. There is no way that we should even believe in anything but that darkness anymore. There's no way that we should even be human. After what we have endured, we should all be wandering around naked in the streets, grunting and flinging shit at one another, cannibalizing one another in madness, utterly without reason or dignity. And yet, we somehow still dream. We somehow remember that there is such a thing as the light and that it is better than the darkness. And when that light shone through, when it pierced the black clouds which had been impenetrable for so long, we knew it. We knew what it was because we dreamed of it, because we believed in it. And even after the light disappeared, swallowed up again by the darkness, we knew it was there, somewhere.

The Fear and The Hope. They are opposites and yet they live side by side for us. One has owned us for decades. The other has sustained us, has kept us human, has kept us on the long path to the future of our dreams. We have no idea when we will finally get there and, honestly, we have no idea how to get there. All we know is that it is out there, somewhere and that it does exist. It is real, not because we want it to be, but because we were there.

I don't know where we are now. It is dark and it is cold and there are mean people with whips hurting us. There are Failure Demons flying all over the place, hooting and screaming, a terrible frenzy of evil that is impossible to ignore or avoid. And yet, there is a better world out there. We know this now. We don't just believe it, don't just hope for it. We know it.

At the end of the year, we will look at the season as a whole and it will still seem dark. The numbers won't be pretty and the final record will be dismal. But when you have lived in the dark for so long, there is more than one shade of black. Just like the legend that the Eskimos have dozens of words for snow, we have dozens of words for the darkness. The outside world just looks in and sees black. We see different colors, different shades of black. They are all black, and yet they are all different. The outside world might look in during this season and see nothing but black, but what we will see will be as different from black as black is from purple, as purple is from blue, as blue is from green, as green is from yellow, as yellow is from white.

And somewhere in there, somewhere deep inside our own universe, where only we can see the full color spectrum, there will be light. And when the season's over, it might be almost close enough to touch or it might be still so far away that it almost feels like a pale mockery of our dreams. We just don't know. But what we do know is that it is there, and that it points the way to the future of our dreams, to that land we once visited, to that world that was good, that was pure, that was everything we ever hoped it would be. And no matter how far away that light is, whether it's close or whether it seems a billion light years away, our eyes will be drawn to it and we'll stare into it and we'll dream some more and we'll remember that somewhere, there is a world where those dreams are made real. And one day, we'll call that place home.