UpHere Gets Stuck In a Horror Movie

When Neil invited me to post here I was equal parts flattered and terrified. We’ll keep them short to limit the initial pants shitting:

There’s point about ten minutes in to every horror movie where every fiber of your being is screaming “What the fuck is wrong with you people? Get out of the freaking house already”. They’ve already ignored the dude with clumps of hair missing while he sharpens a scythe in their new backyard and convinced themselves that the reddish brown stain around the basement drain is paint. They don’t leave though and you never really get over the sheer stupidity of it. But here’s the thing. After driving to Buffalo this weekend, I saw the same thing from the other side. Right in the middle of the movie, with every sign of impending disaster directly in front of me, and I sat there like a dumb animal in the freezing rain watching it unfold. Never left the house. Like everything truly horrible (my alcoholism for instance), it all happened in degrees, step by step with a million small, bad decisions - none of them big enough by themselves to make you flee - that just slowly built up into a giant shitpile of an afternoon.

In hindsight its perfectly obvious. The weather was right out of Central Casting - dark clouds, a number of them in the shape of Dick Stockton’s disoriented, meth-addled face, seemingly 20 feet above our heads. The ride to the stadium through an abandoned industrial wasteland familiar to anyone living in Dresden in 1945, provided another source of miserable foreshadowing and the fact that it was in Buffalo, a city the local Chamber of Commerce proudly announces is the nation’s 10th most desirable to live in with a population between 292,645 and 292,680, completed the ambience.

The big one, though, the true harbinger of death and the clue we never should have missed, was last week's loss to the Jets. Almost from the beginning it looked like half the team would really rather have been somewhere else, the dentist maybe, and I'll give them enough credit to believe that this isn't normal. It had to be the result of a massive hangover from the previous week. Its like that guy at the office, the one in the mailroom or some other ass end of the company who decides he’s come up with a “Big Idea”, one he demands to present to the executive committee only to shit his pants during the meeting or find out the whole plan is massively misguided. For the next three months, that guy doesn’t have the motivation to get coffee. For the Lions, beating the Jets was their “Big Idea” and Sunday, they had the same body language and energy level you might see in any prison camp. They barely talked to each other, never mind the pumped up, chest-beating screaming you’d expect. After the Bills scored their second touchdown, the Lions looked like nothing but bunch of dudes just trying to get through a bad day at the office.

As Neil mentioned in the comments, we did have really good seats, three rows from the field close to the fifty - the picture at the top was taken with my phone and, a true badass, I didn't even get the expressed written consent of the NFL before posting it. We bought the tickets online Thursday - you might be surprised to hear this but ticket demand for the Lions/Bills tilt was not up there with the Zeppelin reunion tour - and we did see some cool things you don’t see on television. In the first quarter, Suh had to squat in front of the Gatorade stand to take leak while some peasants in team jackets held towels up. I’ve thanked God every hour from that moment to this that I did not get a good view of that equipment since it probably looked like a partially -melted clarinet and I’d have to shove knitting needles into my eyes to try and get the image out. Logan is one curly-toed pair of shoes away from Oompa Loompahood. Jim Schwartz’s axe murderer face is much, much more terrifying from 15 yards away. And, no matter how many times you hear about what an unbelievable physical specimen he is, nothing can prepare you to see Calvin Johnson close up because he’s a different species.

I can’t really talk about the football end of things because to be honest you can’t see fuck all from that low in the stands. The scoreboard only showed replays when the Bills made plays so that held no interest. If you’re asking how I feel about the whole thing, I can’t really tell you much there either. Its already Wednesday and I still have the same stunned, soft-edged depression as Sunday night. Come Sunday though, the Stafford throwback jersey will come out and the Lions game will be on the tv because that’s what you do when something really really shitty happens; you go through the motions until the day the sun comes out again and maybe that day is Sunday.