There is a downpour of rain so thick and grey you feel like you are gazing at the flesh of skin left dead in a basement for a month. You take just one cold hard look in the mirror and you see a monster gazing with sadness back at your sullen, sunken face. It doesn’t matter the time of day or the moment at hand. The sun is up, the sun is down. It rains or it pours. Your toe is stubbed and fat while your hair looks usually great.
Or maybe your toe isn’t stubbed but you look like shit instead.
I would like to think that the defeated reaction to an introspective gaze inward this is not surprising or alarming or maybe even that far off. It happens to all of us. Some days are better than others and most of the time it seems like the percentage point favors the positive thinking within each of us. Bad days happen. Pointing this out is not an attempt to be discourteous, disrespectful or even dishonest. I know full well that I’m the only one somehow rigged to feel doubt, anxiety and the kinds of stress that gives me that refined ability to glance downward with a mouth so tight it might crumble into a fine powdery dust at my feet before me.
Right now is about that time.
Sure, there are happy times, great times, and a lot of possibility and rewarding moments that all help form the arc of our lives. Hopefully most folks are somewhere on the “non-monstrosity” side of things, because the news my friends, is not good.
This site hosting fee is $14.99 annually. It offers you, the tender reader, with five months of angry, repetitive commentary and a storyline that never changes. It doesn’t. It’s a barrage of total shit. It’s a bunch of angry Winnipeg Blue Bomber fans using a keyboard for a punching bag. We mope, we write, we watch as many lives games as humanly possible with our season tickets and we watch, listen and share this collective experience. It’s some bizarre and almost ridiculous commitment to a sports team that on days like this, doesn’t make a lick of sense.
There is a madness here of course but I feel like hiding behind people who know about madness better than I. There are people who have seen hard times and had hard years and it’s tough to compare realities. Our grandfathers will recall the lean years of the late 60’s/early 70’s. Folks who remember those days have never seen the kind of thing that masquerades as a professional CFL team in 2015. Or 2014. Or beyond, year after year and decade after decade. Its apples and oranges to compare two decades like this of course, but the pain is real. Franchise QB Drew Willy is gone for the next 6-8 games and with a record of 3 and 4 on the year to date going into tonight’s match against the Toronto Argonauts, you’ll have to excuse me while I evaluate whether or not this blog needs to waste another penny of the $14.99 paid every year to toon in for another week of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers Comedy show.
I wonder what 1971 offensive additions Mack Herron and Jim Thorpe would do if they were in town, having smoked a pack between them on a colossally unappealing flight from Toronto on Air Canada after an impressive All Canadian season receiving balls for the Argos. With the 60’s coming to an end, Winnipeg was the sort of overflowing toilet that no one really wanted to look at, with a disappointing 10-37-1 record in three years during which the team failed to make the playoffs. Yeesh. Terrible.
But these were a couple of trash-talking goons who partied. Thorpe was 6’1” and 195 pounds and Herron came in 5’5” and 180 pounds. To the delight of depressed Winnipeggers, these two found a way to light it up, catching 70 passes for more than an average of 1200 yards each in two straight years. Real solid numbers. Real exciting football. It happened.
After being released by the team and later convicted of drug charges, I’m sure that Thorpe spent most of his time in prison writing to Herron, also in prison, about how to make an offensive line work. I think between them, they knew the answer. It happens. I think between all those late night knife fights, the all day long use of shocking language and the non-stop rails of cocaine longer than any beer snake this city will ever see, lay a truth that propelled the early 70’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers back into being competitive.
I have no idea what that Winnipeg looking competitive really looks like either. We have a coaching staff that insists we’re on the brink of making the system work. We have been screwing around with a formula for failure longer than us lowly fans have been writing for this angry blog.
Today, it feels like we have been doing this for way too long.
I’ve heard people nearly bursting into tears on the post-game show on CJOB to Bob Irving and Doug Brown about it. So far this year, a 3-3 was good enough for people to cling onto some wild fantasy after rebounding from one of the three major blow-outs that has embarrassed me to no end. Listening to Irving comfort people in distress has been hard on my heart. But no one knows who else to turn to anymore as QB’s continue to be thrown into the meat grinder by an offense sitting on their thumbs waiting for a paycheck.
If any of us are going to last the rest of the year, we are going to have to understand what the hell Herron and Thorpe were talking about through a hazy, psychedelic freak out that made them impact players for this team. Currently we have a roster of dullards and spoiled, no good draft picks without so much as a personality between them. People could argue that Herron and Thorpe were terrible human beings on account of those all night shakers, freak-outs and pill parties, but on top of the drugs, illicit sex and bottle of bottle of the strongest hooch in town, they delivered more than their fair share of the mail. Role models or not, they got it done. The current day fiasco involves jerks not fit to appear in a Chicken Chef commercial let alone a starting lineup.
I get the impression that whatever offensive schemes offensive coordinator Marcel Bellefeuille is cooking up couldn’t be any less twisted, unbalanced and drug-induced as the worst benders Thorpe and Herron survived.
And yet here we are again. About to watch a lonely corpse covered in dried, crispy blackened blood completely marched into a road apple in a sun-baked empty field where it will rot until the end of October.
This is a moment to look into the mirror and see that god-awful, sad and dejected monster looking back at you. It’s an affront to all that is right and proper, staring right back into an abyss of horror, into blank eyeballs blacker, deeper and deader than ever before.
These are the worst of days. I suppose they are the most indifferent of days as well. These are days when you are thankful that you’re only paying $14.99 a year instead of the horrible, horrible alternative of having to pay to sit in stands and watch it all unfold like organs from a small animal hit on the highway by an 18-wheeler.Â
