Prologue 1

Part One.

“I’ve Got The Motor City Blues...” Captain Zapped, “Motor City Breakdown”

“That’s the end of week ten of the National Football League’s one hundred and fiftieth season, and the Detroit Lions have just been officially eliminated from play-off contention, losing to the Monterey Sun-Kings by a score of 21 to 3. According to the Hemp-Ford family spokesperson the Lions still have a one-in-a-billion chance to make the playoffs next year. In other news, President-for-Life Barron Trump announced that he would nominate a strict constitutionalist for the vacant 13th Supreme Court seat. Senator Malia Obama-Cortez, leader of the Black Separatist Socialist-Democrats has already stated her party’s opposition to the judge, whomever it may be.” I clicked off my Virtual Reality input with a deep and heavy sigh. Nothing changes.

Fun bar fact – what is the only original-era NFL team that has NEVER been to the Super Bowl? The only team to win one play-off game in the last seventy-five years? The team that has only had six division championships in the last one hundred years? That’s right, my beloved and bedamned Detroit Lions.

My Great Grandfather, grandparents, father and now me have all rooted for the Lions. A badge of hopeless honor among pro-sports fans. The consecutive and cumulative curses for on and off-field futility by a host of former lions’ players, coaches and executives have taken a toll on me. My father died earlier this year, still hoping that this was the year the Lions broke through and brough home the Lombardi-Belichick trophy. Hell, he was cremated while wearing his vintage 1994 Johnnie Morton official replica home jersey. His death broke my heart and I believe the Lions broke his.

God-damn the Fords! The ineptest, in-bred bunch of low-IQ one percenters this side of the English monarchy. If there was a good, bad or disastrous decision to be made, a Ford or Ford derivative would always choose the latter. The patriarch Henry Ford himself told the world out-loud that he greatly admired Adolf Hitler and that he hadn’t gone far enough to rid the world of the sub-species, unlike his personal friend, Joseph Stalin. Henry even named his youngest son after the both of them, Adolph Joseph Ford. Old Henry’s descendants thinking, or lack thereof, wasn’t any better.

Henry’s second son William’s oldest son purchased the Detroit Lions Football Club in 1963. Forty years with William Clay Ford II as the owner accomplished absolutely nothing good for the Lions or the city of Detroit except his own eventual death. Handed the keys to the team, ownership by a succession of Ford family members kept the Lions at or near the bottom of the standings, pretty-much year after fucking year. When they did manage on a rare occasion to make it to the playoffs - they lost. These guys are so despised by the league, the only committee chair they have held in the last fifty years is that of the now defunct Kapernick Social Justice Scholarship Committee. What a joke. On us. The fans.

I miss my dad. If only ... Would it have been too damn difficult to have won one Championship in my dad’s or granddads entire life? My dad sacrificed so much time and effort he could have otherwise spent replacing my mother; by providing the best tutors, sending me to the best private segregated schools, and then ensuring I stayed focused during my years of studies culminating in dual doctorates in from the University of Michigan. Go Blue! Beat State, fuck Ohio and that team down South!

The only shared entertainment we had and the only thing we could talk about – the Detroit Lions. For some reason, dad didn’t care for the Tigers, Wings, Ninjas, Sparks, Madmen or Pistons growing up, just the Lions. I could follow the ups and downs of the other sports teams and my beloved Wolverines, and parse their stats like that expatriate South African guy extrapolating on Einstein’s theory of everything, but dad wasn’t interested. OK, that’s a thought ... Eon Muskox, richest and smartest guy ever. Granddad supposedly met him on a launch pad once. Glad he invested early and often in any company leveraging the Muskox portfolio.