no NFLuminati Index, or Neil

So hey folks, I don't feel like doing the NFLuminati Index. I mean I started doing it, but just ended up writing "fuck you" at the end of each blurb. The 49ers moved up to #1, which automatically seems weird since they got blown out on the road, but really there's no dominant for-real team this year. It's basically full-fledged NBA-style now, where we'll throw a bunch of kinda shiny shit into the playoffs and something will come out on top and we'll all pretend for a week that it's awesome and then it will fade completely from our memory just as quickly and we will have wasted all this time for essentially nothing. But I guess that's what being an NFL fan is all about.
Speaking of which, my prediction that an elaborate Failure Demon was at play with the Redskins, setting them up for a winner-takes-all Sunday Night showdown against the Cowboys has come true. I am afraid I predicted the future too correctly, and wish I had said they'd win 37 Super Bowls in a row and miraculously Robert Griffin III never aged and also made 7 sons who all played for the Redskins as well because they kept them hidden and not playing football publicly so that we could draft them all without anybody knowing about them, which started a whole thing where teams started doing speculative drafting like Freedom of Information requests, where they'd draft "Tom Brady's son between the ages of 17 and 24, should one exist" and things like that. But ultimately I am also shocked the Redskins did as well as they did so I am good.
Not sure what happened to Neil. I think he hates you all. He sent me a piece of driftwood with RIP TGWY #669. Not sure what all that means to be honest.
But a thing I am doing, I had previously asked Neil but he seems disinterested in contributing, but we will do some sort of Spirit Warrior thing here, not sure what exactly. If you guys would like to help suggest active players to include, please do so in the comments, or we can set up an hour next week where we do that shit inside the twitters. I've got a dude I went to school with who might help start writing shit here, but I'm not sure; you can never tell how people will be motivated. I might try to get him to jump on-board with the Spirit Warrior thing. But let me know how we proceed.
If anybody wants to do a guest column on any pro team whatsoever, let us know. We'd (meaning me) like this place to be more of a free-for-all. I mean, fuck it, it's the Internet right? Anybody can do anything, right?
Okay, I hope you assholes had a solid holiday whatever you celebrate, or just a chill ass end of the year if you don't celebrate shit.

A Farewell to Mongo, the Death of a Spirit Warrior

It is fitting that I am sitting down to write this only moments after my Detroit Tigers heinously blew a lead in the bottom of the 9^th to the Oakland A’s and possibly cost themselves their playoff series because the only thing I have on my mind at the moment is death and terrible things, just terrible, and in the heat of this madness I . . .

You know what?  To hell with all that.  This isn’t about death.  No.  This is about a celebration of life, of a life so thunderous that right at this moment there are great men cowering in Valhalla, wondering what in the hell just crashed against their walls.  “Jesus Christ, it’s Mongo . . .” one of them just said and then ducked behind a bar because you’re goddamn right that’s Mongo and he’s fuckin’ thirsty.

I hate it when famous people die.  Not because they die and it’s sad and blah blah blah but because everyone falls all over themselves to be the first to tweet RIP or talk about how sad they are and it always comes across as perfunctory gibberish, the sort of thing that I find distasteful and self-aggrandizing in the worst way, heinous braying that fills the silence that the void that is their brain fears so, so much.  And so when I see RIP Alex Karras it doesn’t mean a whole lot.  People would write RIP Carrot Top if they thought people would see it and then fake cry with them.  Fuck all that.  And fuck all that because, in this case it’s not enough.  It’s not nearly enough.  Alex Karras deserves more than that, more than your simpering worship of the public spectacle of faux grieving.  He deserves more than any of you can give.  He deserves more than I can give.  But all I have is this and so here goes.

“Alexander George "Alex" Karras (July 15, 1935 – October 10, 2012), nicknamed "The Mad Duck", was an American football player, professional wrestler, and actor.”

That is the opening line to Alex Karras’ Wikipedia profile and goddammit, now that’s a man who lived a life.  Any time you earn the nickname that begins with the phrase “The Mad” you’ve done something either incredibly right or something terribly, terribly wrong.  You have stomped on the earth and left a footprint that terrifies mortal men to the point that when they speak of you, they whisper and tremble like faithless men, speaking of madness because men fear and label an energy so potent that they can’t express it as anything other than madness.  A T-Rex is madness to them.  A grizzly bear tearing through their homes and then their intestines is madness to them.  A fucking wild man punching out a horse and beating the holy hell out of simpering quarterbacks is madness to them.  Alex Karras is madness.  And goddammit, I’m sad that he has taken that madness and departed from our realm.

Most people probably know Alex Karras best as an actor.  Actually, most people probably know Alex Karras best for punching out a fucking horse, for being Mongo and everything that means.  All by itself that’s a hell of a legacy.  But Alex Karras was much more than that.  Back in his day, Alex Karras was a goddamn animal on the football field, a wild man who was basically the prototype for Ndamukong Suh.  He was a disruptive force for the Lions for over a decade and was named to the NFL’s all decade team for the 1960’s.  The man could fucking play.

He was an All-Pro and yes, he was Mongo, but in between he lived the life of a true Spirit Warrior.  If ACLB had a Hall of Fame, Mongo would be a first ballot shoe-in alongside dudes like Ken Stabler, John Riggins and Jack Tatum.  Before he even played a down in the NFL, knowing full well that he was going to make a bunch of money playing football, Karras said the hell with it and decided to become a pro-wrestler.  Now this was back in the days when that meant something.  Back then, pro wrestlers would get their eyeballs popped out of their head, laugh about it, then smoke some cigars and get in a bar fight with angry fans.  And Alex Karras did this because why the fuck not?  That’s the type of man he was.  He was Mongo from birth to death and everything in between. 

In his early days with the Lions he was Bobby Layne’s partner in crime. Now in case you don’t know, Bobby Layne was sort of the proto-Stabler, a drunken degenerate from Texas who constantly got himself in all kinds of shit.  But he had Alex Karras there to back him up, and Karras did.  Not many men can walk the fire with someone like Bobby Layne but Mongo did and that says a hell of a lot about the dude right there.  Seriously, I can just picture Bobby Layne and Alex Karras strolling into a bar in some shitkicker town and getting shitfaced drunk while a bunch of rednecks sit around thinking up ways to beat them down.  And I can picture Bobby Layne being a cocky asshole, talking shit and getting everyone all riled up and I can picture Alex Karras beating some redneck ass, half-drunk while Bobby cackles and tries to fuck all their girlfriends.  It’s a perfect picture, a legendary picture and I cherish it.

Look, I kind of wanted to write an eloquent farewell here but it’s not really going like I planned.  Instead, this is rough and vaguely offensive, full of cursing, spit and the sort of thing you won’t find in a New York Times obituary but you know what?  That’s kind of appropriate.  Everyone tries to whitewash the world when someone dies and people smile and genuflect before an altar of good taste but real life, or at least a life lived well, is grimy and rude and filled with violence and the thunderous echoes of a heart that beats not for posterity but for a Truth that can only be found through living and goddammit, Alex Karras lived.

In 1963 Karras was suspended by that era’s version of Sheriff Goodell for betting on football, and more specifically for betting on football at a sports bar that he owned.  When they initially cracked down on him they tried to get him to sell the place but rather than sell his bar, rather than sell a piece of himself just to placate their need for control he told them to fuck off and threatened to retire.  When they suspended him for an entire year he didn’t whine, he didn’t beg them for forgiveness or for reinstatement.  Instead he took the year and went and wrestled.  Naturally.  Exiled, he spent that year fighting dudes like Dick the Bruiser while colorless wretches played football for their power-mad masters.  When he did return, it was under his own terms.  In one of his first games back, the ref asked him to call the pregame coin toss and Karras, like a boss told the dude “I’m sorry sir, I’m not permitted to gamble.”

After that, Karras developed a reputation for being sort of a pain in the ass, and why wouldn’t he?  The league he killed himself for, the brutal sport that was stealing parts of his brain, had already shown that it would banish him if he didn’t bow down and worship and suckle at the teats of the millionaire assholes who ran the whole damn thing (Sound familiar?).  He feuded with his coaches and eventually used the threat of jumping to the AFL to leverage a seven year deal for himself.  But every time a coach feuded with Karras it was the coach who was sent packing.  Bot George Wilson and Harry Gilmer tried to tame Mongo and both were told to get the hell out of town.  Eventually, Karras finished his career with his old friend and teammate Chuck Schmidt as the head coach.  People will knock Karras for this, call him a coach killer and all that, but the truth is that Alex Karras was a Spirit Warrior and people don’t understand how to deal with Spirit Warriors.  Spirit Warriors only respect other Spirit Warriors and Alex Karras could only thrive so long as a fellow Spirit Warrior like Chuck Schmidt was the man in charge.  Those other dudes tried to control Karras, tried to mold him, tried to make him theirs but you can’t own a Spirit Warrior.  You can’t tame a force of nature and Alex Karras was a force of nature.

After suffering a knee injury, Karras retired and turned his attention to Hollywood.  He caught the eye of Mel Brooks and pretty soon he was farting around a campfire and punching out horses in Blazing Saddles.  During the same time, he did commentary for Monday Night Football.  Not everybody knows this but Karras is actually the one who came up with Otis Sistrunk’s infamous “University of Mars.”  Sistrunk never played college football and so Karras joked that he played for “The University of Mars.”  It stuck and became part of Sistrunk’s legend, but it really belonged to Karras.

A few years later he popped up as the redneck sheriff in Porky’s, likely drawing on personal experience dealing with redneck sheriffs and even played a closeted gay bodyguard named “Squash” in Victor, Victoria.  And he did this because he was a goddamn man and he didn’t give a shit if people made gay jokes.  He was Alex Karras.  He was Mongo.  He was a Spirit Warrior, a force of nature and forces of nature are pansexual.

Okay, I am getting a little carried away here but I can’t help it.  Alex Karras had more life inside of him than an entire city’s worth of people.  He lived because he could do nothing less.  He was a giant, a huge man both literally and figuratively.  He punched out a fucking horse and people laughed and believed he could do that because he was Alex Karras.  He played a gay dude back when people treated gay dudes like dog fuckers or something and nobody said shit because, again, he was Alex Karras.

He then cruised through middle-age with a cushy gig playing the adoptive father of Webster, which is kind of fucking weird when you think about it but again, he was Alex Karras.  By the way, his hot wife on the show, Susan Clark, was also his wife in real life.  I’m not sure whether he also adopted a midget in real life before selling him to Michael Jackson but let’s not speculate about such ugly things, okay?

Famous people die every day.  Athletes are everywhere.  People worship them, people fetishize them and at the end of the day they usually turn out to be just like everyone else, living quiet lives, boring lives, soulless lives and hey, that’s fine.  There is an easiness to that sort of life that I won’t begrudge anybody.  But some people are meant for more than that.  Some people have no choice but to live.  Everything and everyone they touch is affected by them.  They don’t try to be like that, they just are.  Crazy shit happens to them, monumental shit happens to them, and it happens to them because they don’t live in the moment, the moment lives in them.  They are the moment.  They are what everyone else stands around and watches.  They make the world go while everyone else just spins around on it, day after day, year after year.  They seem like they are always in the middle of the wild roar that is a well-lived life because they are the one’s generating that wild roar.  It comes from their soul, from that unfathomable place that most men hide from.  They are the rare beasts, prototypes, one in a million.  Alex Karras was of this tribe, this Spirit Warrior tribe, and everyone who ever knew him, who ever watched him, followed him, knows that this is true.  It’s why Bobby Layne, himself a Spirit Warrior and human hurricane, picked Karras out of the crowd and took him under his wing.  As they say, real recognizes real.

George Plimpton is famous for being both a huge dork and for writing Paper Lion, his behind the scenes look at being an NFL player.  While he was writing this and hanging around with the Detroit Lions, he knew and had access to the entire team.  Out of all the players, out of all the giant personalities which make up an NFL locker room Plimpton gravitated towards Alex Karras.  Karras’ presence was so strong, so immediate, so compelling that Plimpton couldn’t stop writing about him.  His 1973 book Mad Ducks and Bears was about Karras.  He simply could not be ignored.  His presence commanded attention, it caused a great writer to become almost obsessed with him, to chase after him, after that wild Spirit Warrior personality, like Ahab chasing his whale.

Alex Karras was a wild man, a wild heart, an untamable heart.  He threw himself wholly, body, mind and soul against the great rocky fortress of the unknown, crashing headlong into that place where most men fear to tread.  He broke down the walls of that fortress and he roared and the universe heard him.  Eventually that universe made him pay for making it listen to him, for making it know him, the way it does to all who stand up before it and force it to pay attention.  It ripped away his mind and his body.  It gave him dementia and heart disease and cancer before it finally shut his kidneys down.  Most men hide from the universe and try to live forever and in doing so they crumble into nothingness.  The universe never knows them and so they are as they were – nothing.  But the universe knew Alex Karras.  It knew him and it burned him alive.  Its heat scorched him but in doing so it left an imprint on the rest of the world that will never fade away.  It will always be there for all to see and as long as the universe lives on, Alex Karras will be there, in its heart, in its memory, and the universe will remember because he made it remember.  He is the Mad Duck, he is Mongo, he is Bobby Layne’s drinking buddy, he is a pro wrestler, he is Webster’s father, he is an All-Pro defensive lineman, he is George Plimpton’s muse, he is a Detroit Lion, he is Alex Karras.  Forever.

Farewell, Mongo.

NFL ACLB PREVIEWS - #2: GREEN BAY PACKERS

PERTINENT DATA: 10-6 last year, earning an NFC wild card berth, won at the Eagles in wild card round, won at the Falcons in the divisional round, and won at the Bears in the NFC Championship, culminating in beating the Steelers in Super Bowl XLV, which I watched from a hospital emergency room while high on morphine; 7 to 1 odds to win Super Bowl XLVI.
BEST CASE SCENARIO (Raven): Friends, even though it was not too long ago that I felt this way about Aaron Rodgers, after what he did to my youngest sister, the past year has changed my tune entirely. In fact, the past year has changed a lot of things. I quit drinking late last year, completely, coming from a long line of alcoholics (my mother is actually passed out drunk in the next room right now... no fibbing), and not wanting to perpetuate that in my own life. Unfortunately, my body apparently was used to the alcohol intake so it rebelled against me and I had an exploded interior that had to be surgically operated upon the end of January. Of course, me being a person who has never gone to the doctor, and doesn't trust them, and is a practicing metascientist of the highest order, with a herbalist ol' lady who keeps my mind right with wild lettuce tinctures and yarrow spray to defend against governmental wi-fi attacks on my freedom mentality, I did not do well after surgery (or they planted something in me), which caused massive surgical infections and muscle abscesses and all types of mean and nasty shit that is still affecting nine months later. (I will not get into my beliefs of how this may have been a plan to have anti biotics kills off my natural gut intuition that I've built up over a lifetime, but I am fighting back with pro biotic yogurt herb smoothies; eleuthero root powder got my mind right as fuck lately, except I call it Lucifer Foot Powder, because that sounds more metal.) But after the initial surgical infection (after the surgery), they put a drain and plug inside my gut, which because of the type of bacteria that had polluted me, caused the infection to explode tenfold, because the closed environment was the perfect breeding ground. Ultimately, this led to them basically going old school, slicing open my gut muscle so that there was a hole I could stick almost 2/3 of my pinkie finger inside of at first, and let me lay in a bed for three months, immobile, without use of my core gut muscles very much, in a painkiller stupor, being cursed by terrible dreams and writing delirium poetry that I mailed to friends in Australia to leave scattered around rural areas. (Most of it is around Sydney from what I understand, in case you were wanting to seek it out.) But I did not come to tell the ultimate story; I came to tell about the day I went back to the ER for the third time with that second surgical infection when they decided the best course of action was to slice me open and let me heal the old-fashioned way - as slowly as my body saw fit on its own. Because that day was Super Bowl Sunday, and we went into the hospital ER mid-afternoon, and let me tell you, the ER is packed on most Sundays, but a Super Bowl Sunday, shit was jumping. I laid in pain on a gurney in the hallway for a few hours, but a nice nurse lady seemed to take to me, and she dosed me up right smartly with codeine. Eventually I got placed into one of those ER holding rooms where it's actually like four spots separated by curtains and you can hear the guy in the next curtain stall complaining about pain, hoping to get painkillers, and them saying, "Sir, you don't have symptoms, and last time you pointed to your other shoulder," and it just goes on and on. That actually happened that night, but worked in my favor, as next to that degenerate, I was a godsend of a patient. So every time the nurse would come around and ask me what my pain was, I'd say, "Like an 8 or 9" which is probably true, on a 10 point scale, but I'm a pretty tough dude, so can tolerate bullshit like pain. Except in that situation, why bother? So my ol' lady cuts on the little TV hanging overhead, and the nurse keeps saying they will get a bed for me upstairs because I'm going to have to be in there for like five days or so (that's a sucky thing to hear), and I was pretty bummed by that reality, and also really in a lot of pain, and also really into watching the Super Bowl.
I guess at this point I should mention the previous Super Bowl we had a snowstorm about four days previous that knocked out power to my entire part of the state of Virginia, so we had lived in the dark for four days before the Super Bowl, no power that day (not until two days after) and had been in the habit of melting giant stock pots of snow on our woodstove for water. No shit. I had planned on cooking barbecue chicken and cole slaw for Super Bowl food and letting the kids watch the commercials, which we usually always mute in our household, and let the kids make up words for them, to take away the evil dual-sensory overloading power of marketing onslaughts from TV. So I dragged our grill through the two feet of snow right beside the back door, and cooked chicken and made cole slaw and we ate by candlelight, but the batteries in the radio were dying, plus once it went dark, the AM station carrying the football went fuzzy. At that point I went out to my truck and opened all the windows and stood in the snow drinking beer laying in the back of the truck while listening to the Saints beat the Colts.
So after that previous Super Bowl, I had been pretty stoked to watch the next Super Bowl (which was the last Super Bowl), except now I was in the fucking hospital, in an ER, with a babbling homeless asshole on the other side of a curtain, and it honestly felt like a thousand little demon ticks inside my body stabbing me with scissors internally. So every time the nurse came around and asked about pain, I was ready for a shot of codeine. And for whatever reason, she accommodated me, to my heart's desire. It was seriously the most fucked up I've been since spending about a month smoking opium with a friend in high school. Once the Super Bowl proper started, I was in a deep cloud, not even able to lift my head off the pillow, but sort of just tilted myself sideways to watch the little TV screen. This was regular codeine moments. And when the nurse would give me a fresh shot, I could feel it splash through my body and my head would crumble back into the pillow, and even though I was just laying there, I could feel the mist on my breath blow up into the air and splash all across my face. I could feel the wind patterns change around my face like those isobar graphs on good weather reports and shit, floating around the room. And through this, I watched the Packers/Steelers Super Bowl.
Unfortunately, I had just gotten a shot of codeine about ten minutes before halftime, which meant I had to endure the Black Eyed Peas in that hyper-aware state, and I saw them for the reptilian cyborg creations of far more wealthy men than you or I will ever hope to be. We could live the most productive lives of our lives for seven generations and not attain the power level of the men whose fingers I could see pulling the strings of those Black Eyed Peas on that stage, from a fake future full of false chlamydian promises to poison our now with Babylonian babble. Seriously.
So inside my head, I was seeing these manipulations taking place - and make no mistake about it, the NFL is a key cog in the World Illuminati, and a very important social engineering tool. I have discussed this with Neil many times, that how we are writing at Truths and Realities here, trying to scratch away at the internet's football website self-importance and pretending you know something someone else doesn't, I'm not quite sure we are really helping anything, or we may just be assisting marching our viking spirit warrior compadres in this Earth fight straight into the confining shackles of giving a fuck about things like Wild Card Berths and Third Round Draft Picks. But it is what feels right, so we do it.
Anyways, all of these terrible realities were staring me right into my soul, skipping the face and the eyeballs which normally can only see what is visible, and staring me straight into my soul, saying, "Raven, This is what Is, and you cannot fight it enough to stop it from infiltrating You." And the goddamned Black Eyed Peas was cyber-thumping behind this staredown into my soul, and I was feeling codeine-y, but also feeling very afraid - afraid of that reality, afraid of what these little bacteria stabbing pains really came from, whether I had been implanted with a silent weapon for a quiet war, what the fuck was going on, WHAT THE FUCK WAS GOING ON!
And from that haze came that rugged face - Aaron Rodgers - who played football in a way that was clear even through the haze. Understand my haze was not lifted, obviously, as I was pumping full of codeine plus the oxycodones I had taken secretly while waiting to get a curtain stall in the hallway, so everything was hazy. But Rodgers was so clear, so confident, he knew what was going on in that game, and in this game. He knew it was bullshit, the Black Eyed Peas, and he knew that the spectacle of the Super Bowl was complete and utter crap. He knew he was making money for those fingers above hand over fist, and only getting little pork chop bone scraps out of it, and yet people would condemn and hate him for being a millionaire somewhere down the road in the future. I could see in Aaron Rodgers face, he knew all of this. And yet he focused on the simple desire in his mind - to handle his job, which he had somehow ended up in, perhaps through luck, perhaps through chance, perhaps through some planning. He got there however he got there, but he had to handle his job, his calling at that moment. And it was then I realized me and Aaron Rodgers were exactly alike. It was the same reason I sent poetry carvings to Australia, and the same reason me and Neil write our semi-coherent babble about football on an internet that doesn't know us from a fourth-rate Grantland hack, nor care about us enough to splash past our site more than by chance. And yet we do it. And yet Aaron Rodgers does it. And yet you are here reading this. We are spirit warriors in a great fight, and although we don't even know what the fuck we are fighting, and often times we are killing ourselves because the fingers above that pull the strings position us to do so, and we lack the clear picture through all the haze to even see it like that, we are spirit warriors. And we can focus on that one task, regardless of whether in the grand scheme of things it is good or bad or makes sense or not, and we can handle that task unlike any other motherfucker ever could. Because we are spirit warriors. And let me tell you this about Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers - if you have a spirit warrior - a True Mother Fucking Real Life Spirit Warrior at the helm of what you are trying to do? You will not lose. Even if they do not repeat as Super Bowl champions this year, they will not have lost. Trust me.
WORST CASE SCENARIO (Neil): Fuck the Packers. Fuck. The. Packers. I have spent the last 20 years hating them with a fury normally seen only in mutant bees, coked up werewolves and women. Which is why it’s strange that, today, now that they are on top of the world and are the kings who we must drag kicking and screaming and bleeding off of the mountain, I actually . . . respect the Packers. Indeed. That is a strange thing to say. It’s a strange feeling to feel. I admit this. But the simple fact is that I actually like a lot of the Packers players. This includes Charles Woodson, who I have already explained is my favorite player in any sport ever. That sort of heresy could end up getting me tied to a stake and then set on fire in front of Ford Field, but fuck it, I am a man who speaks his mind, even if his mind is not in complete concert or harmony with the minds of his fellow tribesmen. Still . . . fuck the Packers. As much as I respect them – hell, as much as I outright like some of them – they are still the enemy and I will wish with all of my heart for my boys to slit their throats and then drink their blood in front of their weeping and wailing families. I don’t necessarily want to see bad things happen to Greg Jennings but if I have to sup upon his mother’s tears while his body floats down the River Styx in order to obtain entrance into my personal Kingdom of Heaven then so be it. These are strange and terrible times, after all, and they necessitate cruel and unsavory acts. You know what? I have overstated my respect for the Packers. Fuck them and fuck Aaron Rodgers. I don’t like them much after all. I still love Charles Woodson but I fear he is clouding my head with his sweet song. The rest of them can sup upon the glorious refuse of my anus. I apologize. That was an ugly thing to say and an even uglier thing to make you all picture, but this is the NFL goddammit and my Lions are on the precipice of something that I have always dreamed of and they have to go through the Packers to get there. No mercy. Sorry, Chuck, but if that means your back must be broken in front of the gates of hell while St. Calvin tap dances all over your wicked bones then so be it. This is just the way it is, noble friendo. With all that said, let’s take a look at the worst case scenario for these shitheels. The one player who was proven to be absolutely critical to the Packers success last season was Aaron Rodgers. It seemed like everyone else got hurt but the Pack just kept rolling on because Aaron Rodgers had harvested the soul of a Terminator prior to the season and he wasn’t going to be denied. (Don’t ask me if Terminators have souls because that could turn into a 5,000 word essay that would both horrify and alarm you and would force myself to drink a gallon of drain cleaner once I realized the terrible implications involved in the soulless pursuit of such an answer. Just thinking about it depresses me. One day, thousands of years from now, some alien squidman would blow some dust of an old printout and see those words written on them and he would know that that was the moment when humanity ceased to have any meaning or any worth in this fucked up universe. The meaninglessness of both that question and the answer are making me think dark thoughts, ugly and savage, so let’s just move on, okay?) But . . . Aaron Rodgers also was proven to be fragile himself, suffering from concussions (I won’t say for certain that those concussions came as a result of Raven Mack and me jumping him in an alley and beating the shit out of him with baseball bats and kicking in his temple with steel toed boots for what he did to Raven’s sister all those years ago, but I won’t say they weren’t either. If you don’t know the story . . . well, fuck, Raven, link that shit when you post this, okay? Also, you’re goddamn right that I’m talking directly to Raven and discussing site business within the context of this post. If that shit just blew your mind, I apologize.) and those concussions knocked him out of a couple of games, and when they did, the Packers suddenly looked very, very average. So . . . the worst case scenario, I think, for the Packers involves Aaron Rodgers getting concussed, missing most of the season and then finishing, like, 7-9 while the Lions steal the division and piss on their mortal dreams. This is also the best case scenario. If you ask me, anyway. And since I’m writing this, I’m going to go ahead and assume that I did just ask myself that, and wait . . . am I talking to myself again? Does my self-projection have a soul? Does that make the other me a Terminator too? Oh God, what does it all mean???
PLAYER TO PULL FOR (Raven): I have spoken of Aaron Rodgers redemption in my heart enough already, so let me just say that also while I was in hospital emergency room codeine stupor, seeing B.J. Raji's fat ass jive step to a Super Bowl TD was about the most amazing thing I had ever seen in a thousand years, which was only about seven minutes in normal human time. (Codeine is amazing, yet really hard to get as an illegal street drug.) So yes, B.J. Raji is a dude you can be cool with.
PLAYER TO HATE MOST (Neil): Hate that soulless replicant posing as me that I keep talking to. That motherfucker tried to steal my soul! Help! Raven, meet me at the Moroccan café where we saw that guy do that thing with that whore from Tripoli. We need to figure out how to handle this other me. Also, A.J. Hawk is a guy who sucks. Hate him. Oh, and Aaron Rodgers too, that fiend.
BEST NAME ON TEAM: Usually I would remark upon the name Jermichael Finley, but the Packers opening day roster has a guy named Shaky Smithson on it, which sounds like somebody you'd get drunk with while hiding from the law in an Appalachian holler.
IN A PERFECT WORLD (Neil): He’s after me. I can feel his presence in the room with me right now. He has my memories, my eyes, my nose, my face. He is bearing down on me, and . . . oh . . . oh God! No! I am fighting him with everything I have, but . . . but . . . hello, everyone. Everything is good, everything is calm. It is me, Neil. This is going to be a crackerjack season, boy I tell you. Whoo-whee! Help! I just wrested back control from the other me but I don’t know how long I can hold it so I say to you all . . . don’t trust anything I write from now on because it’s not me. It’s him. It’s . . . it’s . . . I’m just joking, everybody. There is only one Neil. You can trust me. This is, after all, a perfect world and these are wonderful times. And in these perfect times, the Green Bay Packers are the best football team in the world, and . . . no, you know what? I can’t even pretend to write that. It kills my soul. Or was it his soul? Is this me or is this him? I guess we’ll never know. I suppose, in the end, all you can do is trust me. Wait...
PROGNOSIS (Raven): This will be a year of parity for the NFL, and the Packers will only get to 11-5 in the regular season, which will be enough to win the NFC North, and they will go on to win the Super Bowl as well, as the riverside sticks told me, and it makes sense, because you cannot stop a Spirit Warrior.