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.

Lost In The Void

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The team is 2-0, why do some fans need talked off the ledge?

Superman dat ho.

So despite the predictions that they wouldn't be able to win a game without Ben, the Steelers are 2-0 and several things are apparent:

• The defense is back, mainly Troy but also Aaron Smith returning to anchor the D-line
• They have zero offense without Ben, but like some famous ex fake fighter once said, IT DOESN'T MATTER. The Ravens won a goddamn Super Bowl with an all world defense and no offense, certainly the Steelers could win a game or two.
• No matter what, some people will always find something to bitch about.

They shut down one of the best running backs in the game, and all anyone can talk about on the local sports radio station is how they only got 26 yards in the passing game. Well what do you expect when the one mobile QB we have that isn't on dick suspension blows out his knee early in the game? When you're forced to put in a guy who's counting down to AARP eligibility you have to dial it down a notch.

Think of it this way, there's two games left before Ben comes back: Tampa and Baltimore. You would think that Tampa's the easiest of the first four games, and Baltimore has shown to be just as all-D and no-O as the Steelers only they don't have the excuse of not having their starting QB. After that, there's the bye and the remaining schedule (with Ben) includes such notables as Buffalo, Oakland (sorry Harpo), Carolina, and Cleveland twice. Unless real disaster strikes, it shouldn't be too hard to collect some wins in that group.

Maybe this is all Dennis Dixon's fault after all, if he didn't insist on changing his uniform number to 10 after Santonio left, then maybe people wouldn't be acting like the Steelers brought back Kordell Stewart.

In the end it won't matter. Leftwich will come back to play against his former team, then there will be another old fashioned defensive battle (at home) against Baltimore. After that, the mighty cocksman will return to reclaim his rightful throne and all will be right with the world.

The Desolation

"This isn't The Fear. It's the Desolation"

Those words were sent to me via e-mail by Scott aka Good Friend of the Blog and Frequent Commenter UpHere, yesterday during the game. They came after he asked me to get Raven Mack to find out the symptoms of an aneurysm. This was the first game of the year. A half hour before, optimism reigned supreme and The Hope was making sweet love to us and promising to buy us a giant diamond ring and to make us the happiest girl in the entire world.

And then Matthew Stafford was driven into the turf by Julius Peppers. It looked bad, and we all held our breath and then he stood up, his throwing arm was hanging limp by his side and, well . . . This isn't The Fear. It's the Desolation.

Why? It's such a simple question. It's one word, but it's laced with so much pathos, loaded with so much meaning and terrible emotion and spiked by decades of brutal and despicable history, that it has become a question of dread and such unbearable weight that the very act of asking it is a testament to failure and to the million little pieces of our shattered hearts and its mournful squeak is the dying echo of Hope.

Why? I don't know. Who does? I speak often of the Failure Demons and Fate and all manner of mystical forces that feel like they are perpetually lined up against us, but now, more than ever, doesn't that all feel true? Doesn't it feel like there has to be something brutal and mean and otherworldly that has devoted itself, for whatever reason, to just toying with Lions fans?

The last several years have been horrible, just one long apocalyptic struggle for survival. Being a fan shouldn't be this hard. It shouldn't require epic tests of faith and horrific manglings and desperate pleas to the heavens for mercy. I mean, at some point, you have to find happiness, don't you? You have to get lucky, to stumble upon something, anything, that can make you smile and say "Wow, this is alright." But we never get lucky, never stumble upon anything other than a banana peel laced with acid and malicious intent.

Once Matthew Stafford was drafted and Jim Schwartz was hired and Martin Mayhew announced to the world that he was competent, it felt like Lions fans all took one, huge deep breath, exhaled and said "Here we go." After so much pain, after so much brutal agony, after so many years of never getting what we want, we steeled ourselves for one last dive into that terrible breach. We allowed ourselves to believe in Hope once again even though Hope had spent years tricking us and abandoning us when we needed him the most.

Even last year, when Stafford got hurt, we took another deep breath and said "That's okay. This is all for the future. All for the future. The future." We repeated that like a mantra: The future, the future, the future. And we gibbered on about Hope and smiled at one another and looked for rainbows in the sky and light way off in the distance and convinced ourselves and each other that it was all leading up to something glorious and amazing and, well, worth it all. We did this with wide, panicked eyes, with desperation bubbling just under the surface and we did this because we had to, because what other choice did we have?

And maybe all that is true, and maybe that future really does exist, and maybe we'll get there, but when Matthew Stafford went down and then got back up missing crucial parts of his shoulder anatomy, all of that evaporated in an instant. All the faith, all the good will, all the talk of the future and all the patience was sucked away and all that was left was The Desolation. All that was left was the feeling that it was all pointless and utterly without meaning or anything good or decent or worth caring about. All that was left was the familiar pain and the familiar idea of rank failure and we knew in that moment that nothing had changed.

I spent the whole post after the game talking about how hard we fought and in that we must take comfort. We must do this because, for now, it's all we have left. The reports on Stafford's injury are hazy, with words like Separated Shoulder and Shoulder Sprain and Oh God Why being thrown about along with numbers like 6-8 weeks and 4 weeks to who fucking knows how many weeks tossed in for good measure.

We have had it with meaningless football. We have had it with the idea that at some point in some nebulous, undefined future that the world will brighten and we will smile and have success. We have had it with the pain, with the agony, with the self destructive knowledge and acceptance of losing. We have had it with just rolling over and saying "Well, this is just the way it is."

At some point, you have to plant your flag in the dirt, even if that dirt looks more like shit, and turn around and say "Fuck it, today I'm going to fight." That's what the Lions did on Sunday and that's what we must hold on to right now.

Of course, all that is much easier when you get a fair shake. It becomes much tougher when a referee decides, just for the hell of it, to interpret a ridiculous, Byzantine rule in the most ridiculous way possible at the most critical time possible in the most cruel and fucked up manner possible. I mean, who does that? Who sees an obvious touchdown and then thinks to himself "Well hmmm, there is a way that I can take that away . . ." I mean, come on.

Could the ref have interpreted the rule the way he did? Yes. But that's because the rule is so ambiguous and so ridiculous that he could have interpreted it any way that he wanted to. He chose to interpret it in the cruel and awful way that we saw. And that leads us back to that deceptively simple and terrible question: Why?

Why indeed. What is it about the Detroit Lions that causes a referee to look at Calvin Johnson catching a miracle touchdown pass to give us long suffering fans our first road win in a billion years after having watched our franchise Quarterback get obliterated and decide "Well, fuck it, I'm going to say that's not a touchdown." What is it?

We could ask ourselves that question until we went completely insane trying to answer it. All that's important is that it happened, and somehow, someway, we have to move on from it, just like we have had to somehow, someway move on from every other infernal and horrible thing that has happened to us as Lions fans.

UpHere sent me that e-mail I mentioned at the beginning of this post during the game. Later, he sent me more e-mails asking if Jim Schwartz was going to get swallowed by a whale. When the Calvin touchdown fiasco occurred he sent me another e-mail that said "And there's your whale." Yes, that's how it feels to be a Lions fan, like the whole thing is just some biblical test of faith. And then, in the end you end up getting swallowed by a whale.

It's a hard thing to have to endure. It's perverse that it was only yesterday morning that we all felt so full of hope and joy and excitement and that today I'm having to write the sentence "It's a hard thing to endure." Yet again.

But here we are and for now, at least, we have some idea where here is. It's familiar, it's cold, it's hard, it's mean and we absolutely hate it. But we are used to such things, terrible as they are and we will survive to see another day. All we can do is stare at the Failure Demon who has captured us in his dungeon once again and then try to punch him in the face. The future is once again just a hazy idea, a half forgotten dream and we have to put it out of our minds. We're here and we have to fight for what's in front of us, for today and for ourselves. We deserve so much better than this, so much more, and I'm sick of waiting around for it. I want to win. Not for tomorrow, not for the future, but for right now, for today. I want to win one game just to win that game. I want to say to hell with that question. Fuck why. I just want to be happy now.

After all that brutality, after all that pain, after we had fallen prey to The Desolation, UpHere sent me one more e-mail that said "Fuck all of them. I'm counting that as a win. We are 1-0 and I don't give a fuck what the NFL says." He said the same thing here in the comment section after my last post. The world had taken the biggest shit on us and in the face of all of that, there was still that spark of defiance. Indeed. Fuck all of them. We are 1-0 and I don't give a fuck what the NFL says.

How Cruel

Roughly 29:30 minutes into the game between the Lions and the Bears today, God caught us in a rear naked choke and his chorus of angels screamed TAP TAP TAAAAAAAAAAP! And then, the whistle blew, saving us just before we passed out and somehow, someway, we were still alive.

Yes, we were alive but mortally wounded, beaten senseless and left bloody and stupid, gibbering incoherently to ourselves, Hope having fled the building like he just robbed the fucking place. We could have just laid there and died. After all, we were already dead, finished before we even got a chance to live. But for some reason, we kept fighting, kept repeating the word PRIDE over and over and over and over again.

And somehow we weren't dead yet. We took furious punch after furious punch and we were still there. And then we started to move forward, inch by bloody inch. Hope was miles out of town by then, but fuck him. We were doing this for ourselves, for here, for now. Then a Failure Demon dug his way out of hell and tripped Calvin Johnson as he streaked down the sidelines.

There we were again, laying beaten, bloody, utterly exhausted but again we decided to crawl forward. Fuck everyone else. Fuck hope. Fuck the world. It was just us. We were already dead but maybe we could still live for a few brief moments, maybe we could make the world see us before our hearts stopped beating.

We had no offense, no counter. We were being pummeled and all we could do was offer up the occasional limp wristed slap in response. And yet, we were not beaten. Not yet. Dead but not beaten.

And then Lance Briggs' body was possessed by the devil himself and he devoured Shaun Hill's soul. We were just a mass of blood and guts and pride. Finished.

But as we were punched in the face, we looked up and through the blood, through the mess of failure, through a mask of red death, we smiled and we spit a bloody defiant gob in Fate's face and our heart kept beating.

At one point, early in the fourth quarter, the FOX crew flashed a graphic memorializing crew members that had recently passed away. It occurred to me that they should have added the concept of Hope to their memorial. It was gone. We had none. It didn't matter.

It didn't matter because we weren't playing for Hope, weren't staying alive for some glorious future. We were staying alive for the moment. We were staying alive for ourselves because fuck fate, fuck the universe, fuck 50 plus years of losing, fuck 0-16, fuck Matt Millen, fuck Rod Marinelli, fuck yesterday, fuck tomorrow. Today. That was all we had left and by God we were going to live until we died.

And then our neck was broken. Indeed. After somehow staying alive, after refusing to die, fate grabbed us by the throat and squeezed until all the bones in our neck cracked and splintered. There was nothing left but a heart beat and a tiny little voice in our brains saying "You will get up, motherfucker, and you will fight."

Somehow, someway, we did. Somehow, someway, we got to our feet, even though we couldn't feel those feet, couldn't feel our arms or our legs. We couldn't feel anything, but we could feel our pride and we could feel the moment and we weren't dead yet.

And somehow we fought, threw punch after punch after punch and Fate trembled before us and then fell and we laughed and we screamed and we cried and the Rocky music started playing and then something infernal stepped in, something foul, something claiming to be a referee, something claiming to speak for justice, and that wretched beast told us that it never happened, that Fate never fell before us and Fate just smiled and spit in our face and then we were caught in that terrible rear naked choke again and we struggled and we fought and although we were already dead we thought "How cruel." How cruel that it had come to this. How cruel that we had fought for ourselves, finally and without any aspiration other than our own sense of pride, our own desire to live in the moment, to be happy for only a whisper before the lights went out. How cruel. And then, everything faded and the world stopped. But we never tapped. We never tapped.