So that happened.

Yes, it was an amazing game. And yes, if Andy Reid really had any of the good-natured regular-guy humanity we attribute to him, neither Tyreek Hill nor Willie “Marvin” Gay would have been on that field. And Josh Allen might be this generation’s John Elway or Dan Marino. And Gabriel Davis is your new Lord and Savior.

No. I don’t want to talk about it.

But I will, because I got sympathy texts from around the globe as soon as my Most Glorious Bills lost the overtime coin toss and therefore the game.  And although most of them professed to “know how it feels”, one honest soul actually asked: what is it like to be a Bills fan?

What…is it like? As well ask what color is green, what makes water wet, or what it’s like to live in a universe with a gravitational constant of G. It just IS, and I don’t know any other way to be. Disappointment is simply baked into the pie.

Sure, I IMAGINED what it might feel like for the Bills to Win It All. But that’s almost an intellectual exercise in counterfactuals, a piece of speculative fiction wherein you change one key aspect of the world and try to capture all the strange consequences that would follow.  If Scott Norwood doesn’t pull it Wide Right, does 9/11 happen? Would the aliens have already made First Contact? Would I have had the self-confidence to make a move on [Name Redacted] when she grabbed my junk at Homecoming freshman year?

But what is it like, back here in the brutish realities of this foul Year of Our Lord, Two Thousand and Twenty-Two?

It’s like playing an old-school platform game from the early 1990s, back when game designers actively despised players and taunted them with the promise that if they got the angle juuuust right and the timing juuuust so and hit the jump button twice perfectly, they might be able to land on the cliff’s edge without falling to their doom and having to start the whole level over.

It’s like helping the pretty girl down the hall who flirts with you move all her furniture, despite knowing a date is Never Going to Happen.

It’s like being seven years old and knowing there’s a friendly, fluffy dog next door whose People are complete tools and they will not let you pet that puppy.

But sometimes you do, and that keeps Hope alive. Sometimes the puppy breaks the leash and comes over for a cuddle. Sometimes the pretty girl asks you out for coffee. Sometimes your thumb slips on the controller in just the right way and you find yourself perched in virgin digital territory.

And then the fire-breathing monkeys come. But that’s beside the point

George Carlin famously said “If you scratch a cynic, you’ll find a disappointed idealist.” But the next line is also important: “And the fire never goes out completely.”  If there is a better encapsulation of the Thinking Bills Fan, I have yet to find it.

Hell, that might be the essence of DFO: we are mean, dark, rage-filled monsters with hearts of goldish. The banner quote is often determined by how offensive the joke is as much as straight humor, a short-form Aristocrats! contest. But the love and support the members of this site give each other is deeply fucking magical to behold.

Anyway.

You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you might find you get what you need. Funny dancing British skeleton man said that. Wise words.

NFL NEWS:

-The GM Hot Stove League is…um…heating up!

The Bears have made a consensus Good Hire, much to the surprise of almost everyone. Ryan Poles, a former Boston College lineman who has spent the last 13 years in KC, was enticed to the position despite massive organizational dysfunction. It remains to be seen if he can assemble an offensive line stout enough to give Justin Fields enough time to drop back, make his reads, do his taxes, learn the oboe, complete his reads and throw the ball.

Poles was also one of two finalists for the Minnesota job. With him gone, the Vikings are finalizing terms with Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, currently with the Browns. Adofo-Mensah is an analytics nerd out of Princeton, so I think we can safely say “hello” to the new coach of the Minnesota Vikings:

-Some fucking bum in New Orleans decided to walk away, I guess? Sean Payton decided life without Drew Brees just wasn’t worth living, so he has “stepped down” as the Saints head coach after 15 years. He also tried to steal some Ted Lasso valor by giving staff baked goods. Probably moldy.

Payton leaves what the Take Industrial Complex euphemistically calls a “complicated legacy.” An entire generation has grown up in a world where the Aints are not a perennial laughingstock of the league, and that’s just Weird. Payton, you may recall, was suspended a full NFL season for his role in establishing and maintaining the bounty system that won them their Super Bowl.

In summary, fuck this guy, fuck Gayle Benson, fuck Mickey Loomis, and fuck FEMA. The residents of New Orleans should have been offered a new city after Katrina, like Milton Keynes or Canberra: purpose built somewhere above sea level and out of the way of hurricanes.

NON NFL PIRATE NEWS:

Holy fuck, the owners of a cruise ship kidnapped 700 people on the high seas!

The Crystal Symphony (pictured)

a 50,000-ton Finnish-built cruiseliner owned by a Hong Kong based conglomerate, was steaming toward the end of a two week cruise with 700 guests and crew on board. Then a federal judge ordered the ship seized for an unpaid $4.6 million fuel bill. The ship, which was headed to Miami, took a hard turn to the left (or “mizzenmast” in nautical terms) and pulled into Bimini in the Bahamas to avoid The Fuzz (or whatever they are called on the water). 350 passengers were eventually ferried the 50 miles to the US, throwing up the whole way. The cruise ship company and its holding company have ceased operations, with the C-Suite officers presumably flying to the Caribbean to start their lives as full-time pirates. And I say: kudos! In a world of NFTs and leveraged buyouts, it’s nice to see some good old fashioned personal plundering. None of this theft-by-deceit or squeezing money out of the common man through structural methodologies and faceless monopolism. Stand and deliver, I say!