I’M GONNA kill the NCAA here after some more dust settles, because it’s a piece of shit and the exploding scandal in college basketball – which has seen indictments, arrests of assistant coaches and shoe company execs, and the firing of Hall of Fame Coach/Master Tactician and Motivator/All Around Sleazebag Rick Pitino at Louisville – looks as if it might have ramifications for years to come. We’ll deal with that soon as we have more time and the scandal further unfurls.
But let’s post something beautiful right now. We need more beauty in this life.
I’m in a literary mood today, and since I had college basketball on the brain, I thought I would pull out a college basketball poem, yes, poem, which is written in couplets, of course, because the 3-point shot hadn’t been invented in college basketball in the 1970s when it was penned. (Nowadays the stanzas would be tercets a third of the time.) This comes from a basketball anthology published in 1980 called Take it to the Hoop, which my dad gave to me in 1982 as a gift for my 13th birthday. It was my favorite book, a cherished book which was lost when a storage shed of mine got broken into. Getting another copy took forever, as the book went out of print years ago, and I finally got ahold of one last year in exchange for joining a library in Kansas and contributing to their fundraiser for building a new library, a cause which I wholeheartedly support.
I think about my dad a lot these days, because he has new challenges that we as a family will likely struggle to deal with and come to terms with. He introduced me to basketball: I went to my first game with in 1975, when I was six years old and Washington State defeated Jacksonville 82:77. (Go ahead and look it up. I told you that I remember everything.) But it was when he gave me this book about the game, and when I read this poem, that I realized I wanted to write, a realization of what would become a lifelong pursuit for which I’m grateful, even though I hate it a lot of the time.
And it’s a perfect poem for this blog, because the bad guys win in the end, and we’re left to learn to handle disappointment. Sounds almost perfect.
And the Long Beach State teams in the poem were coached by Jerry Tarkanian, whom I met once, as his daughter went to the same school as I and he came for a speaking engagement. He was always in the NCAA crosshairs for improprieties, and yet, in retrospect, and somewhat paradoxically, he was arguably the most honest coach the sport has ever seen, much more so than the sleazebags who are about to taken down by the feds.
-- -- --
The NCAA Mideast Regionals,
and Other Existential Setbacks
It was #1 ranked Indiana
against #2 ranked Marquette
and the announcer announced
that the Indiana coach Bobby Knight
had his office wall papered with uplifting slogans,
in particular one from general Patton
about having one goal and driving toward it
singlemindedly, and that people will try to stand between
you and your pinnacle, and the closer you come to it
the more furious shall be their resistance,
but in the hall of the Marquette coach, Al McGuire,
there are pictures of clowns
and he is reputed to have said,
“All of us in public life are clowns.”
I had also read an article about McGuire,
about how all his players are crazy about him
and how he’ll get pissed off and end up
wrestling with them on the locker room floor
and five minutes later all animosities are forgotten.
Once he told the reporters that one of his players
couldn’t throw the ball in Lake Michigan,
and the next day the player called his own press conference
and drove the press out to the lake
where he proceeded to toss a basketball
off the end of the pier. I also remembered
when he brought his team into the Long Beach Arena
back when he had our greatest team
and had never been beaten at home
and nobody in the top twenty (UCLA and USC most noticeably)
would schedule us even at their places
and no coach in his right mind
brought his kids to the Arena,
so naturally Long Beach beat Marquette
but it was a close game in which our guys
spent the whole night at the foul line,
and afterwards McGuire didn’t bitch
or temporize or alibi,
and so I now said,
“Right on, Al McGuire;
I hope you kick those goose-step Hoosiers’ asses,”
but he drew two technicals
and Marquette lost by nine big points.
– Gerald Locklin
“... everything is complicated by the presence of the opposing team.” – Jean-Paul Sartre
Wednesday, September 27, 2017
Wednesday, September 20, 2017
Soundtrack for a Nervous Breakdown
TODAY we are going to talk about losing something entirely different, which is my mind.
People keep asking me why I haven’t been posting blogs, or writing novels, or writing articles that I’m proud of, or whatnot. What follows is why. When this occurs, me getting anything done is pretty difficult.
Every now and then, I make it a point to write down everything that is going through my head during the day. I’ve been doing this now for 11 years. I don’t do it all the time, just when I start to completely go off the rails. Usually, I just think my way through it, but sometimes, it needs to be written down. In an effort to maintain openness and honesty, I’m going to take this particular day, which was yesterday, and share it with you.
This is unedited, save for removing some names where appropriate to do so, and makes no real sense, but in total, it makes perfect sense. [NOTE: I did, however, clean up some of the grammar, because I found myself annoyed with how incoherent my incoherence was.] If there are references in here to things I have written about on this blog, I will provide a link to provide some context. Also, when I do this sort of thing, I’m usually listening to music, and doing things like singing the lyrics and responding to the songs, so where that occurs, I’m inserting the songs, which came from a playlist of several thousand songs that was set to random.
Happy reading. It wasn’t happy writing.
- - -
3:49 a.m.: I woke up KC because I thought she was choking. She said “huh?” She was fine.
3:57 a.m.: Probably best that I’m awake. The argument is always the worst part of that dream. I was just about to start the Q&A, I asked for questions and she stood up, like always. Oh here we go, yeah, flash that fucking gun and tell me how you’re going to shoot me already. But then she’s waving the gun around, debating who to shoot and here comes the argument. No, don’t shoot her, you idiot, shoot me instead. You don’t even know her, and I’ve not seen her in a decade anyway, so I don’t know what she’s doing here in the first place. Just shoot me and get it over with. Fucking get it over with already you psychopath.
4:08 a.m.: Might as well go to the office today. I can catch the early shuttle and be there faster.
4:10 a.m.: The early shuttle means getting somewhere I don’t want to be faster. It’s got to be the goin’ and not the gettin’ there that’s good. I’ll work from home. 51 pages by Friday? No chance. No problem. No just no and that’s my final answer.
4:12 a.m.: I needed some music. Something African and soulful. Fuck yeah Bombino, shred that fucker.
4:20 a.m.: The chiropractor crucified me on Monday. “Oh how are you feeling?” “Oh I’m fine thanks.” “You know your back is something of a mess again.” Just adjust the vertebrae and stop calling me on my bullshit.
4:35 a.m.: Latin trash. I need that. Oh that song feels good.
4:40 a.m.: He spelled art wrong. He spelled it aart. Jesus Bastard Christ. “Cars that doubl has works of aart.” He also wrote the word Prrnion in the same paragraph. What could that possibly mean? How do you have a fucking job? Jesus.
4:50 a.m.: Interesting random choice, iTunes. Grant Hart just died the other day. I always thought of Hüsker Dü as the soundtrack for a nervous breakdown.
5:07 a.m.: I need to buy their new record.
5:12 a.m.: There are no photos for this article. Why are there no photos? Oh, right, because he LIED AT THE FUCKING BUDGET MEETING. Goddamn it. I’m going to fucking fire him tomorrow. Jesus Fuck, am I the only person who is paid to give a shit?
5:22 a.m.: This song also came up yesterday when I was walking in the fog and it was threatening to swallow me whole. Do it, Karl, you bitch. “Old man yells at fog!”
5:28 a.m.: Laura asks me “why didn’t you say that?” I say that if I had, it would have ruined everything. There are things you say, things you don’t say, and things you can’t ever say which wind up leaving you inconsolable. All you are left to do is to imagine the consequences, imagine the worst case scenarios, but also dream about the beauty of what could have come to pass ...
5:31 a.m.: I can taste opportunity near ...
5:39 a.m.: I found a nice house. €300,000.
5:45 a.m.: I’ll go to the office today and sort this mess out.
5:48 a.m.: No, no I won’t.
5:50 a.m.: I’m a dark star.
6:05 a.m.: Kevin is funny. He said “you’re going to the office today,” like any day that I show up at Royal Ground at 6:00 a.m. I felt bad the other day when I walked past him on the street, carrying a cup of coffee from another café. I’m such a coffee slut.
6:24 a.m.: Was that really necessary?
6:36 a.m.: Laura asks me “what if you said it now?” and I said that it wouldn’t mean a thing because the biggest problem with remembering everything is that no one else does, and when you point out something that someone said on a Tuesday a whole bunch of years ago, their response is to say, “I don’t remember that,” and you take it personally, because you made a metaphor out of it when it was nothing but a random utterance, the words having come to explode with meaning in my mind because I make meaning out of everything. Blue is just a color, goddamn it. Linen is a fabric, coffee a way of life.
6:55 a.m.: bang bang bang bang shoot me down bang bang shoot me down bang bang shoot me down bang bang shoot me down bang bang shoot me down bang bang shoot me down bang bang shoot me down bang bang bang bang
7:02 a.m.: Except the bullets don’t work any more, and neither do the drugs.
7:05 a.m.: Shit that’s loud. Who cares? I’m deaf anyway. I kill headsets faster than I kill brain cells with whiskey.
7:07 a.m.: The router conked out for the second time this morning and I thought about solving the problem of getting a new one by simply smashing that one to bits and necessitating its replacement, but if I’d done that, I would have mourned its loss.
7:11 a.m.: Fuck it I need to walk around the block and wage silent war against my right foot and ankle and knee and hip. All of this conspiratorial shit on the right side of my body needs to stop.
7:24 a.m.: Home of the motorloaf. What does that even mean?
7:35 a.m.: She brought flowers last night, flowers which were sitting in her lap before the shooting started and she ducked for cover. This sequence used to horrify me, before I realized that the aim is poor.
7:44 a.m.: I hate it when the walls start to move. Next thing I know, you’ll be sitting over there in the corner, asking me why it is I haven’t written to you in so long. My mind can make a mess out of an empty room. Shoulders hunch, neck contorts. I love that feeling of being able to differentiate every single vertebra in my neck by how much it hurts. Isn’t that just super. Get out of this fucking chair!
7:48 a.m.: That hurt.
7:56 a.m.: I get more things not accomplished before 9:00 a.m. than most people do all day. Fuck it, I’m going for another walk.
8:22 a.m.: Hmm, I appear to be having a crisis. It’s bad to go walking on a day like today, because there are always cars. There are always hills and always cars. This city was inherently a bad idea. And I hate that fucking building downtown that I can see from here. That’s the sort of arrogant building dictators build in places like Brazzaville and Azerbaijan. Salesforce can suck it.
But I have Norwegian technotrash so everything is okay.
8:30 a.m.: I just missed the last of the shuttles and I don’t give a fuck. I get more done at home than at the office anyway, and this way I won’t murder anyone.
8:43 a.m.: tell me now what I’m gonna do … all my desire to be with you … juste un peu d’amour … juste un peu d’amour … iTunes has decided to fuck with me today.
8:49 a.m.: I’m thinking about that burger again. Laura asked me about that burger, and I said I went to Burgermeister because I missed the train, and I ordered it with swiss cheese and jalapeños, no lettuce because lettuce is trash, with bacon and tomatoes and sautéed mushrooms and red onions – red fucking onions! My god they are so good, and when I quit smoking on the 2nd of October I’m going to eat so many fucking red onions and remember how good they taste just like the last time I actually quit smoking and stuck to it for any period of time. So I got extra red onions on that burger and smothered the fries with Tabasco and vinegar and smothered the burger with Worcs and with the green Tabasco, that jalapeño version, and it reminded me how good it was to be alive and actually make the choice to be alive – eat the damn burger because you know that you want to and stop not doing stuff like that – but that burger wasn’t made of gold dust or ferry dust, it was just a burger, which I said I wanted to eat and actually ate, and I also ordered a Trumer Pilsner which I wasn’t supposed to do, but the drugs don’t work anyway and who gives a fuck sometimes you need to break rules simply to break them and I reveled in the subversion.
8:55 a.m.: I would’ve shared my burger with you.
9:13 a.m.: I wish I could get high. The drugs don’t work.
9:19 a.m.: That was the worst sentence in the history of the English language or, at least, since the last time I read one of his articles.
9:28 a.m.: That other house I found was cheaper and had a better view of Mo’orea.
9:39 a.m.: I have a headache. It must be a Tuesday.
9:45 a.m.: The train has left the station without me.
9:49 a.m.: Seriously, if you’re going to shoot people in public like this, at least shoot someone that you have a connection to. Don’t shoot some random chick from a decade ago whom you’ve never met. And don’t argue with me about her relevance. You don’t know how unimportant she was to me and apparently neither do I. I don’t know what she’s doing here, either.
10:09 a.m.: Mo’orea ...
10:14 a.m.: Why was I fixating on a burger all day yesterday? A burger on Monday, the 18th of September is no different than on any other day. What a dumb fucking thing to daydream about, to talk about. Maybe it’s because I can remember every moment of it: the layout of the room, the color of the seat on the other side of the table, the red onions. Oh man, all of it mattered at the time. None of it matters. I can’t believe I subject Laura to this shit.
10:22 a.m.: I don’t know where I’m going from here. This ain’t my revolution. You know, I should probably put on some more upbeat music.
Better. I need to buy that record. I think I have 44 records I need to buy.
10:33 a.m.: Editing this article wasn’t happening so I decided to work on a blog. But which blog? I have 10 of them here, 10 frickin files dating back to July, none of which are close to being done. Jesus Fucking Piece of Shit Bastard Fuck. I should finish the Hate Mail, because at least that one will be funny. Fuck I need to read this article.
10:37 a.m.: “marqued contrast.” I swear I am going to murder you …
10:44 a.m.: I wish it was Excellent Birds.
10:56 a.m.: What what what? What? What? I hate phone calls because all it ever is is what what what? Splat I felt my eardrum explode again, it is 40° outside and 100° inside and there is blood, 7-year-old blood, but also there is slime and why am I so jumpy about this? Fuck, that was over 40 years ago and I dwell on the stupidest fucking things sometimes.
11:09 a.m.: Empathy not sympathy. Learn to listen, learn to love them in your own way, even if it is not the way you wish to love them.
11:13 a.m.: The Qail? What are we, in Monterey or Mecca?
11:17 a.m.: Laura says, “the biggest regret is the empathy you never gave.”
11:20 a.m.: “... more events were held then any were else on the plant.” The plant? ANY WERE ELSE ON THE PLANT? I swear, I am going to assassinate him in the office tomorrow.
11:25 a.m.: Moving this to the soundtrack for Within. Within … where is that fucking draft, even though I can recite it from memory. “Melanie stands amid the rampoles.” “Stories all have to start somewhere, even the stories, such as this one, which will end really badly.” WHERE THE FUCK IS THAT FUCKING DRAFT? “Of course it will be a disaster.”
11:30 a.m.: I hope KC comes home soon.
11:45 a.m.: Thank god for some football. Football is a life saver sometimes. Never has that been said before about a 3rd round Carabao Cup match. Too bad Norwich are dross, but this team they’re playing, Brentford, are fuckall. Dross and fuckall. Amazing how I turn the Norwich game on and instantly become British again. We all had British accents by the time we left that island. that, and we were afraid to get in a car on the right side of the road.
11:55 a.m.: Goal Norwich, Vrančić with the penalty. I like typing Vrančić because it has cool hats on the C’s.
12:15 p.m.: Saved by the Brentford centre back, who blootered that penalty over the bar, over the stands, and somewhere into orbit. I pointed to the sky that one time, said “kick it up here” and the striker did just that. I’d already stopped two of his other penalties. Oh you fuckwit, I was so in your head. I stopped your ass so many times. I set a state record in that game, I had a black eye for the prom. Yeah so we lost but if we’d won, I wouldn’t have seemed so gallant and noble. Fuck I hadn’t thought of that game in 20 years. “Jerry’s ball! Jerry!” That was his name. Little prick. I punched him in the first game and the referee only gave me yellow, lecturing me about how just because Jerry was a piece of shit who just injured our fullback, it didn’t give me license to punch him. We turned it over in the midfield and there were eight of them in a row across the field coming at me and I felt like Custer, and Jerry was shouting “Jerry’s ball! Jerry!” and Windsor cleaned him out and should have been sent off for it but only got yellow, conceded the penalty and my oh my, did that ball ever fly fly away …
12:18 p.m.: But we lost, so who cares? But Jerry didn’t score. Winning the skirmish can be more important, so long as you don’t wind up getting killed during the war.
12:20 p.m.: Amazing how your present edits your past. In that memory, my 17-year-old self had a limp.
12:25 p.m.: Brentford are rubbish. I should go for a walk. No, don’t. Cars.
12:27 p.m.: A cheque for $3.82. Who sends a cheque for $3.82? I just ran through all of the scenarios, wondering how this amount came to be? Someone bought the book in a foreign country, ebooks perhaps? Several people somewhere on this planet want to read what I’ve written and let the stories become their own, let Inga and Mallory and Karen run rampant through their own imaginations instead of through mine, which is a good thing because those three are a handful. This should make me happy. Why doesn’t it? I can buy two cups of coffee from Kevin for that.
12:32 p.m.: Fuck the process.
12:40 p.m.: That last cigarette was godfuckingterrible but the next one will hopefully be better. The key to understanding the addiction of smoking is to know that it’s rooted in wishful thinking.
1:04 p.m.: Norwich is winning so easily that I’m bored.
1:08 p.m.: Process, patience, remember to breathe.
1:10 p.m.: I should probably do some actual work. I should probably also bash my skull with a cedar plank, since it would be less likely to make me scream.
1:18 p.m.: I’m supposed to write Nebraska. Is that right? I think it is. Mother fucking shit bitch. I only forget things which are meaningless to me in the bigger picture. That, and my keys.
1:20 p.m.: I’ll write that article after I go for a walk. Fog free, blue sky outside. I’ll walk and think about Nebraska. What the fuck do I write? Just use my time tested rules for both journalism and poetry: no mentioning 3:00 a.m., no using the words meat or pants, no more writing about Barcelona, bar fights in Brugge, or the jewelry mongers on the Ponte Vecchio, and slant rhyme whenever possible. And also make it swing, and taste good. I should be fine.
1:55 p.m.: It’s 834° outside and it feels almost sane.
2:13 p.m.: Can the dead really dance? I guess I’m about to find out. They certainly cannot shoot worth a goddamn.
2:15 p.m.: I should tell KC I need her to come home.
2:16 p.m.: But how to make all of it funny? Comedy = tragedy + time. Laura said, “the humor finds you. You even make jury duty funny. You can make anything funny, including this.” I say, “if I pull this off it will the best thing I ever do, but people will hate me for it,” and Laura says, “that would never have stopped you before.”
2:20 p.m.: I keep grabbing at my forehead.
2:31 p.m.: This song was banned in China. I should aspire to be banned from foreign nations, instead of being banned from grocery stores in Yelm. I should go back there, walk through the front door and just stand there, see if they remember me and throw me out. That would require me being memorable. I’d remember them, and I bet some of those dumb hillbillies are still working there 20 years onward, because what the fuck else do you do in Yelm and what is a Yelm in the first place?
2:33 p.m.: I did a lot of bad things. We all contribute to our own demise.
2:36 p.m.: Oh put the fucking gun away. Only cowards carry guns. That time you pulled the chef’s knife on me was much more effective, except that it was so dull it couldn’t cut butter, but I was high then and I acted like I was scared. No, I wasn’t high, because the drugs didn’t work then, either. Christ I must be a mess today if I’m thinking about chef’s knives and Yelms. I’d much rather be thinking about Mo’orea or burgers.
2:39 p.m.: That part of my body is not supposed to hurt. The others I can live with at this point. I’ll right this article later. And write it while I’m at it. And probably writhe. I need to move around.
2:46 p.m.: The poor guy’s life goal is to make it from one bus stop to the next so that he can sit down and remove his prosthetic leg. He has a black cowboy hat and doesn’t remember me whenever he sees me. He asked me for a cigarette, just like he always does. How can you not give the man a cigarette in that circumstance?
2:53 p.m.: I should probably eat something. I haven’t eaten since Sunday. I forgot. Pfft. Bull fucking shit I forgot. I never forget anything. When I forget something, it’s a deliberate act and conscious choice.
2:56 p.m.: You know, I should put on some happier music.
That’s better.
3:01 p.m.: She yelled at waiters. She also yelled at a bank clerk once. And she insulted my boss that one time as well. No, that was two times. “I hope you know you’re employing a thief.” “I hope you know I’m employing a thief who is married to a bitch.” Bless you Diss for the diss. She also yelled at a psychologist, who said, “you know, people don’t act this way.” Why is all of this so fresh all of a sudden? This is all old news. Who gives a shit when there is so goddamn much to fret about in the present?
3:03 p.m.: My hand has this slight quiver to it today.
3:05 p.m.: I have to get something done before SF95, even though I probably shouldn’t go to club because I can’t concentrate for more than 20 seconds on anything. I remember when I used scrabble to focus. Those were the days. Scrabble was more fun when I was simply bad at it, instead of being terrible like I am now.
3:15 p.m.: “One car that drew a lot of attention was 1965 Ferrari 330 GT 2-2 Shooting Brake – another words a station wagon.” Another words? ANOTHER WORDS? FUCK YOU YOU GODDAMN PIECE OF SLIME.
3:19 p.m.: In Denmark, you can get sued for even thinking about this song.
3:22 p.m.: I say to Laura, “I wish I could have healthy addictions.” She says to me, “I’ve seen you with those before and it isn’t good.” I say, “they would be healthy if they weren’t so stupid.”
3:25 p.m.: It’s this weird sort of thing, in that you decide the time has come to touch that abyss, and it all comes at you so fast. It’s sort of beautiful and you cannot write it all down fast enough. You’re going 1000 mph and it’s like you’re watching a film of yourself in real time, in real motion, except that the reel is a little bit off and so, instead, you’re aware that you’re watching a film which is slightly, ever so slightly, different than reality even though it’s the exact same image. All of the details which are slightly off are what you then go back and write down.
3:28 p.m.: And it’s not an accident, either. It’s a decision. You say, “you know what? Fuck it. I’m going off that deep end and seeing where I come out,” and you touch that abyss, you touch that fire and it absolutely wrecks you. I’ve got no idea how anyone survives this. This is why she stands amid the rampoles – that row of dead trees charred and blackened after the wildfire has burned up the hillside. Feel the fire, feel it burning you alive and burning through the countryside. But I do think this explains my ability to wander amid the densest wettest fog along the Pacific Coast and western front in sandals and short pants and never feel cold. I’m burning up in here. In my ennui and angst, I went and did something stupid recently and jumped into that abyss once again. Now I’m on fire and I’ve got metaphors everywhere. Jesus, you imbecile, you know this never ends well. All in the interest of beauty. There is beauty in the breakdown.
3:30 p.m.: I hope KC comes home soon.
3:33 p.m.: Breathe. No, fuck that. Water.
3:37 p.m.: Fuck Nebraska. I’ll write that later. It is later. Goddamn.
3:39 p.m.: There are probably 10 songs on this laptop which I never skip through and this is one of them because it captures either my mood or the mood I want to have.
3:43 p.m.:
(This space has purposely been left blank.)
3:53 p.m.: I’m going to take as a sign and symbol and gospel that the random placement of a dice song followed by a song that mentions the Queen of Spades means that I should go back to writing the gambling book, because that’s how this stuff works. Symbols mean what you want them to mean and you wind up looking at disgusting sludge in the bottom of your teacup in search of meaning. I was reading that first draft of Queen of Diamonds again. It wasn’t bad except for the parts that sucked. Take out all the bad parts and the parts no one wants to read and it should be good. Carrie has potential to be an amazing character. All you need to write a novel is two years, a plot you know how ends, a great leading lady, a good therapist, and strong drink.
3:56 p.m.: Laura helps me piece together all of the stuff I tried to forget but never could which now comes back to me in bits and pieces and shards. There are compartments and there are categories – stuff to forget, stuff to remember every single detail right down to how much I tipped at the restaurant on the bill, and somewhere in between. It’s fun to shock her with being so calm about it all. “She said she’d put the cat to sleep. Meh, whatever,” or “We’d be driving down I-25 and she’d just let go of the steering wheel and let it veer nearly into the ditch. That was odd.” The stuff I want to forget gets in the way of the stuff I’ll never forget, like burgers on a Monday evening, which is all pointless anyway, since the other person doesn’t, or persons don’t, remember it. What do you do with a headful of useless crap? WHISKEY! THAT’S WHAT YOU DO!
3:59 p.m.: Whiskey of the Week. Whiskey of the day. Whiskey of the hour. In about 18 minutes or so, my back will stop hurting.
4:04 p.m.: That may be the most logical song I’ve heard all day.
4:15 p.m.: I hope KC comes home soon.
4:18 p.m.: I’m not usually this needy, or this angry. Or am I?
4:24 p.m.: If I do something great and it’s too late, and he doesn’t remember, then what was the point? Perhaps that’s where the urgency comes from, to make moments that feel like memories before memories are impossible for him to form.
4:27 p.m.: I should call.
4:30 p.m.: No, I should write Nebraska, because it was due a week ago, and if I’m going to maim and assassinate people at the office, I’ll have to also blame myself for missing the deadline. Fuck, I hate being management sometimes.
4:32 p.m.: My feet are on the floor, I had my eyes closed and I smiled. It was weird.
4:35 p.m.: KC’s coming home soon, right?
4:38 p.m.: “I’ve been doing a lot of reading about depression and trying to learn how to deal with people like you.” And I’ve learned ‘how to deal with’ people like you by dumping your ignorant ass.
4:41 p.m.: GET SOMETHING DONE GODDAMNIT ANYTHING!
5:36 p.m.: That there was some bad writing. But it is done and I managed to concentrate for long enough to vomit on a page. Sometimes, it is all that you can hope for.
5:38 p.m.: Laura reminds me that I always tell her that I remember to laugh because the joke is on them.
5:45 p.m.: What would I go back to?
5:50 p.m.: Okay, I figured it all out. The problem is that she’s like my ex-wife. I’ve been dwelling on this now for a little while. Yes, she’s like a psychopath with BPD, right down to the ability to masquerade as being empathic, or at least flip the switch here and there and fake it for the purposes of her profession. No, that’s not it. They can feel what you need so long as they’re the ones deciding to give it to you. It’s fake empathy, a power trip. These sorts of people are fucking toxic and fucking dangerous. Interacting with one of these type of people recently has reminded me of this fact and sent me down this fucking rathole, which is why I’m all screwed up in the head right now. You know that type of person when you see them. But … but … but … you can’t say that aloud. You can’t say that’s a psychopath and it will only end in tears. You can’t say he’s a narcissist and it will lead to disappointment. You can’t say these things even though you’re right. Who gives a fuck about being right? I’d rather be wrong for once. I’ve spent the past 16 years wishing I was wrong and lamenting that I’m not wrong about other people and politics and whatnot. Christ, I’m not even bright and I can see this. All of this stuff should be FUCKING OBVIOUS to anyone with an IQ higher than a mollusk.
5:55 p.m.: Fuck off and stay dead Tam, you fucking psychopath.
6:10 p.m.: KC is bringing me a sandwich. This day might not be a total loss.
- - -
As nervous breakdowns go, this one was slightly more awful than the norm, but nothing that I can’t get past.
So, take this day here, and do this every single day. Do this all day, every day, inside your head, while you’re multitasking and carrying on with the quotidian torpor and banality of evil that is day-to-day existence. Do this EVERY FUCKING DAY for the rest of your life, because if you don’t talk your way through it in your head, you’ll probably drop dead.
Welcome to my life. Sorry if I get a bit distracted.
And when some prick says something malignantly ignorant and stupid such as this, I get really annoyed.
And if you, my good reader, are someone who does suffer from a form of mental illness of some sort, get help. Seek help. And if you don’t suffer from that, and you know someone who does, practice empathy and not sympathy with them. Listen to them, learn from them, and love them in your own way.
And sometimes, all that you need is a really good sandwich:
KC knows what to say, even if it means saying nothing at all.
People keep asking me why I haven’t been posting blogs, or writing novels, or writing articles that I’m proud of, or whatnot. What follows is why. When this occurs, me getting anything done is pretty difficult.
Every now and then, I make it a point to write down everything that is going through my head during the day. I’ve been doing this now for 11 years. I don’t do it all the time, just when I start to completely go off the rails. Usually, I just think my way through it, but sometimes, it needs to be written down. In an effort to maintain openness and honesty, I’m going to take this particular day, which was yesterday, and share it with you.
This is unedited, save for removing some names where appropriate to do so, and makes no real sense, but in total, it makes perfect sense. [NOTE: I did, however, clean up some of the grammar, because I found myself annoyed with how incoherent my incoherence was.] If there are references in here to things I have written about on this blog, I will provide a link to provide some context. Also, when I do this sort of thing, I’m usually listening to music, and doing things like singing the lyrics and responding to the songs, so where that occurs, I’m inserting the songs, which came from a playlist of several thousand songs that was set to random.
Happy reading. It wasn’t happy writing.
- - -
3:49 a.m.: I woke up KC because I thought she was choking. She said “huh?” She was fine.
3:57 a.m.: Probably best that I’m awake. The argument is always the worst part of that dream. I was just about to start the Q&A, I asked for questions and she stood up, like always. Oh here we go, yeah, flash that fucking gun and tell me how you’re going to shoot me already. But then she’s waving the gun around, debating who to shoot and here comes the argument. No, don’t shoot her, you idiot, shoot me instead. You don’t even know her, and I’ve not seen her in a decade anyway, so I don’t know what she’s doing here in the first place. Just shoot me and get it over with. Fucking get it over with already you psychopath.
4:08 a.m.: Might as well go to the office today. I can catch the early shuttle and be there faster.
4:10 a.m.: The early shuttle means getting somewhere I don’t want to be faster. It’s got to be the goin’ and not the gettin’ there that’s good. I’ll work from home. 51 pages by Friday? No chance. No problem. No just no and that’s my final answer.
4:12 a.m.: I needed some music. Something African and soulful. Fuck yeah Bombino, shred that fucker.
4:20 a.m.: The chiropractor crucified me on Monday. “Oh how are you feeling?” “Oh I’m fine thanks.” “You know your back is something of a mess again.” Just adjust the vertebrae and stop calling me on my bullshit.
4:35 a.m.: Latin trash. I need that. Oh that song feels good.
4:40 a.m.: He spelled art wrong. He spelled it aart. Jesus Bastard Christ. “Cars that doubl has works of aart.” He also wrote the word Prrnion in the same paragraph. What could that possibly mean? How do you have a fucking job? Jesus.
4:50 a.m.: Interesting random choice, iTunes. Grant Hart just died the other day. I always thought of Hüsker Dü as the soundtrack for a nervous breakdown.
5:07 a.m.: I need to buy their new record.
5:12 a.m.: There are no photos for this article. Why are there no photos? Oh, right, because he LIED AT THE FUCKING BUDGET MEETING. Goddamn it. I’m going to fucking fire him tomorrow. Jesus Fuck, am I the only person who is paid to give a shit?
5:22 a.m.: This song also came up yesterday when I was walking in the fog and it was threatening to swallow me whole. Do it, Karl, you bitch. “Old man yells at fog!”
5:28 a.m.: Laura asks me “why didn’t you say that?” I say that if I had, it would have ruined everything. There are things you say, things you don’t say, and things you can’t ever say which wind up leaving you inconsolable. All you are left to do is to imagine the consequences, imagine the worst case scenarios, but also dream about the beauty of what could have come to pass ...
5:31 a.m.: I can taste opportunity near ...
5:39 a.m.: I found a nice house. €300,000.
5:45 a.m.: I’ll go to the office today and sort this mess out.
5:48 a.m.: No, no I won’t.
5:50 a.m.: I’m a dark star.
6:05 a.m.: Kevin is funny. He said “you’re going to the office today,” like any day that I show up at Royal Ground at 6:00 a.m. I felt bad the other day when I walked past him on the street, carrying a cup of coffee from another café. I’m such a coffee slut.
6:24 a.m.: Was that really necessary?
6:36 a.m.: Laura asks me “what if you said it now?” and I said that it wouldn’t mean a thing because the biggest problem with remembering everything is that no one else does, and when you point out something that someone said on a Tuesday a whole bunch of years ago, their response is to say, “I don’t remember that,” and you take it personally, because you made a metaphor out of it when it was nothing but a random utterance, the words having come to explode with meaning in my mind because I make meaning out of everything. Blue is just a color, goddamn it. Linen is a fabric, coffee a way of life.
6:55 a.m.: bang bang bang bang shoot me down bang bang shoot me down bang bang shoot me down bang bang shoot me down bang bang shoot me down bang bang shoot me down bang bang shoot me down bang bang bang bang
7:02 a.m.: Except the bullets don’t work any more, and neither do the drugs.
7:05 a.m.: Shit that’s loud. Who cares? I’m deaf anyway. I kill headsets faster than I kill brain cells with whiskey.
7:07 a.m.: The router conked out for the second time this morning and I thought about solving the problem of getting a new one by simply smashing that one to bits and necessitating its replacement, but if I’d done that, I would have mourned its loss.
7:11 a.m.: Fuck it I need to walk around the block and wage silent war against my right foot and ankle and knee and hip. All of this conspiratorial shit on the right side of my body needs to stop.
7:24 a.m.: Home of the motorloaf. What does that even mean?
7:35 a.m.: She brought flowers last night, flowers which were sitting in her lap before the shooting started and she ducked for cover. This sequence used to horrify me, before I realized that the aim is poor.
7:44 a.m.: I hate it when the walls start to move. Next thing I know, you’ll be sitting over there in the corner, asking me why it is I haven’t written to you in so long. My mind can make a mess out of an empty room. Shoulders hunch, neck contorts. I love that feeling of being able to differentiate every single vertebra in my neck by how much it hurts. Isn’t that just super. Get out of this fucking chair!
7:48 a.m.: That hurt.
7:56 a.m.: I get more things not accomplished before 9:00 a.m. than most people do all day. Fuck it, I’m going for another walk.
8:22 a.m.: Hmm, I appear to be having a crisis. It’s bad to go walking on a day like today, because there are always cars. There are always hills and always cars. This city was inherently a bad idea. And I hate that fucking building downtown that I can see from here. That’s the sort of arrogant building dictators build in places like Brazzaville and Azerbaijan. Salesforce can suck it.
But I have Norwegian technotrash so everything is okay.
8:30 a.m.: I just missed the last of the shuttles and I don’t give a fuck. I get more done at home than at the office anyway, and this way I won’t murder anyone.
8:43 a.m.: tell me now what I’m gonna do … all my desire to be with you … juste un peu d’amour … juste un peu d’amour … iTunes has decided to fuck with me today.
8:49 a.m.: I’m thinking about that burger again. Laura asked me about that burger, and I said I went to Burgermeister because I missed the train, and I ordered it with swiss cheese and jalapeños, no lettuce because lettuce is trash, with bacon and tomatoes and sautéed mushrooms and red onions – red fucking onions! My god they are so good, and when I quit smoking on the 2nd of October I’m going to eat so many fucking red onions and remember how good they taste just like the last time I actually quit smoking and stuck to it for any period of time. So I got extra red onions on that burger and smothered the fries with Tabasco and vinegar and smothered the burger with Worcs and with the green Tabasco, that jalapeño version, and it reminded me how good it was to be alive and actually make the choice to be alive – eat the damn burger because you know that you want to and stop not doing stuff like that – but that burger wasn’t made of gold dust or ferry dust, it was just a burger, which I said I wanted to eat and actually ate, and I also ordered a Trumer Pilsner which I wasn’t supposed to do, but the drugs don’t work anyway and who gives a fuck sometimes you need to break rules simply to break them and I reveled in the subversion.
8:55 a.m.: I would’ve shared my burger with you.
9:13 a.m.: I wish I could get high. The drugs don’t work.
9:19 a.m.: That was the worst sentence in the history of the English language or, at least, since the last time I read one of his articles.
9:28 a.m.: That other house I found was cheaper and had a better view of Mo’orea.
9:39 a.m.: I have a headache. It must be a Tuesday.
9:45 a.m.: The train has left the station without me.
9:49 a.m.: Seriously, if you’re going to shoot people in public like this, at least shoot someone that you have a connection to. Don’t shoot some random chick from a decade ago whom you’ve never met. And don’t argue with me about her relevance. You don’t know how unimportant she was to me and apparently neither do I. I don’t know what she’s doing here, either.
10:09 a.m.: Mo’orea ...
10:14 a.m.: Why was I fixating on a burger all day yesterday? A burger on Monday, the 18th of September is no different than on any other day. What a dumb fucking thing to daydream about, to talk about. Maybe it’s because I can remember every moment of it: the layout of the room, the color of the seat on the other side of the table, the red onions. Oh man, all of it mattered at the time. None of it matters. I can’t believe I subject Laura to this shit.
10:22 a.m.: I don’t know where I’m going from here. This ain’t my revolution. You know, I should probably put on some more upbeat music.
Better. I need to buy that record. I think I have 44 records I need to buy.
10:33 a.m.: Editing this article wasn’t happening so I decided to work on a blog. But which blog? I have 10 of them here, 10 frickin files dating back to July, none of which are close to being done. Jesus Fucking Piece of Shit Bastard Fuck. I should finish the Hate Mail, because at least that one will be funny. Fuck I need to read this article.
10:37 a.m.: “marqued contrast.” I swear I am going to murder you …
10:44 a.m.: I wish it was Excellent Birds.
10:56 a.m.: What what what? What? What? I hate phone calls because all it ever is is what what what? Splat I felt my eardrum explode again, it is 40° outside and 100° inside and there is blood, 7-year-old blood, but also there is slime and why am I so jumpy about this? Fuck, that was over 40 years ago and I dwell on the stupidest fucking things sometimes.
11:09 a.m.: Empathy not sympathy. Learn to listen, learn to love them in your own way, even if it is not the way you wish to love them.
11:13 a.m.: The Qail? What are we, in Monterey or Mecca?
11:17 a.m.: Laura says, “the biggest regret is the empathy you never gave.”
11:20 a.m.: “... more events were held then any were else on the plant.” The plant? ANY WERE ELSE ON THE PLANT? I swear, I am going to assassinate him in the office tomorrow.
11:25 a.m.: Moving this to the soundtrack for Within. Within … where is that fucking draft, even though I can recite it from memory. “Melanie stands amid the rampoles.” “Stories all have to start somewhere, even the stories, such as this one, which will end really badly.” WHERE THE FUCK IS THAT FUCKING DRAFT? “Of course it will be a disaster.”
11:30 a.m.: I hope KC comes home soon.
11:45 a.m.: Thank god for some football. Football is a life saver sometimes. Never has that been said before about a 3rd round Carabao Cup match. Too bad Norwich are dross, but this team they’re playing, Brentford, are fuckall. Dross and fuckall. Amazing how I turn the Norwich game on and instantly become British again. We all had British accents by the time we left that island. that, and we were afraid to get in a car on the right side of the road.
11:55 a.m.: Goal Norwich, Vrančić with the penalty. I like typing Vrančić because it has cool hats on the C’s.
12:15 p.m.: Saved by the Brentford centre back, who blootered that penalty over the bar, over the stands, and somewhere into orbit. I pointed to the sky that one time, said “kick it up here” and the striker did just that. I’d already stopped two of his other penalties. Oh you fuckwit, I was so in your head. I stopped your ass so many times. I set a state record in that game, I had a black eye for the prom. Yeah so we lost but if we’d won, I wouldn’t have seemed so gallant and noble. Fuck I hadn’t thought of that game in 20 years. “Jerry’s ball! Jerry!” That was his name. Little prick. I punched him in the first game and the referee only gave me yellow, lecturing me about how just because Jerry was a piece of shit who just injured our fullback, it didn’t give me license to punch him. We turned it over in the midfield and there were eight of them in a row across the field coming at me and I felt like Custer, and Jerry was shouting “Jerry’s ball! Jerry!” and Windsor cleaned him out and should have been sent off for it but only got yellow, conceded the penalty and my oh my, did that ball ever fly fly away …
12:18 p.m.: But we lost, so who cares? But Jerry didn’t score. Winning the skirmish can be more important, so long as you don’t wind up getting killed during the war.
12:20 p.m.: Amazing how your present edits your past. In that memory, my 17-year-old self had a limp.
12:25 p.m.: Brentford are rubbish. I should go for a walk. No, don’t. Cars.
12:27 p.m.: A cheque for $3.82. Who sends a cheque for $3.82? I just ran through all of the scenarios, wondering how this amount came to be? Someone bought the book in a foreign country, ebooks perhaps? Several people somewhere on this planet want to read what I’ve written and let the stories become their own, let Inga and Mallory and Karen run rampant through their own imaginations instead of through mine, which is a good thing because those three are a handful. This should make me happy. Why doesn’t it? I can buy two cups of coffee from Kevin for that.
12:32 p.m.: Fuck the process.
12:40 p.m.: That last cigarette was godfuckingterrible but the next one will hopefully be better. The key to understanding the addiction of smoking is to know that it’s rooted in wishful thinking.
1:04 p.m.: Norwich is winning so easily that I’m bored.
1:08 p.m.: Process, patience, remember to breathe.
1:10 p.m.: I should probably do some actual work. I should probably also bash my skull with a cedar plank, since it would be less likely to make me scream.
1:18 p.m.: I’m supposed to write Nebraska. Is that right? I think it is. Mother fucking shit bitch. I only forget things which are meaningless to me in the bigger picture. That, and my keys.
1:20 p.m.: I’ll write that article after I go for a walk. Fog free, blue sky outside. I’ll walk and think about Nebraska. What the fuck do I write? Just use my time tested rules for both journalism and poetry: no mentioning 3:00 a.m., no using the words meat or pants, no more writing about Barcelona, bar fights in Brugge, or the jewelry mongers on the Ponte Vecchio, and slant rhyme whenever possible. And also make it swing, and taste good. I should be fine.
1:55 p.m.: It’s 834° outside and it feels almost sane.
2:13 p.m.: Can the dead really dance? I guess I’m about to find out. They certainly cannot shoot worth a goddamn.
2:15 p.m.: I should tell KC I need her to come home.
2:16 p.m.: But how to make all of it funny? Comedy = tragedy + time. Laura said, “the humor finds you. You even make jury duty funny. You can make anything funny, including this.” I say, “if I pull this off it will the best thing I ever do, but people will hate me for it,” and Laura says, “that would never have stopped you before.”
2:20 p.m.: I keep grabbing at my forehead.
2:31 p.m.: This song was banned in China. I should aspire to be banned from foreign nations, instead of being banned from grocery stores in Yelm. I should go back there, walk through the front door and just stand there, see if they remember me and throw me out. That would require me being memorable. I’d remember them, and I bet some of those dumb hillbillies are still working there 20 years onward, because what the fuck else do you do in Yelm and what is a Yelm in the first place?
2:33 p.m.: I did a lot of bad things. We all contribute to our own demise.
2:36 p.m.: Oh put the fucking gun away. Only cowards carry guns. That time you pulled the chef’s knife on me was much more effective, except that it was so dull it couldn’t cut butter, but I was high then and I acted like I was scared. No, I wasn’t high, because the drugs didn’t work then, either. Christ I must be a mess today if I’m thinking about chef’s knives and Yelms. I’d much rather be thinking about Mo’orea or burgers.
2:39 p.m.: That part of my body is not supposed to hurt. The others I can live with at this point. I’ll right this article later. And write it while I’m at it. And probably writhe. I need to move around.
2:46 p.m.: The poor guy’s life goal is to make it from one bus stop to the next so that he can sit down and remove his prosthetic leg. He has a black cowboy hat and doesn’t remember me whenever he sees me. He asked me for a cigarette, just like he always does. How can you not give the man a cigarette in that circumstance?
2:53 p.m.: I should probably eat something. I haven’t eaten since Sunday. I forgot. Pfft. Bull fucking shit I forgot. I never forget anything. When I forget something, it’s a deliberate act and conscious choice.
2:56 p.m.: You know, I should put on some happier music.
That’s better.
3:01 p.m.: She yelled at waiters. She also yelled at a bank clerk once. And she insulted my boss that one time as well. No, that was two times. “I hope you know you’re employing a thief.” “I hope you know I’m employing a thief who is married to a bitch.” Bless you Diss for the diss. She also yelled at a psychologist, who said, “you know, people don’t act this way.” Why is all of this so fresh all of a sudden? This is all old news. Who gives a shit when there is so goddamn much to fret about in the present?
3:03 p.m.: My hand has this slight quiver to it today.
3:05 p.m.: I have to get something done before SF95, even though I probably shouldn’t go to club because I can’t concentrate for more than 20 seconds on anything. I remember when I used scrabble to focus. Those were the days. Scrabble was more fun when I was simply bad at it, instead of being terrible like I am now.
3:15 p.m.: “One car that drew a lot of attention was 1965 Ferrari 330 GT 2-2 Shooting Brake – another words a station wagon.” Another words? ANOTHER WORDS? FUCK YOU YOU GODDAMN PIECE OF SLIME.
3:19 p.m.: In Denmark, you can get sued for even thinking about this song.
3:22 p.m.: I say to Laura, “I wish I could have healthy addictions.” She says to me, “I’ve seen you with those before and it isn’t good.” I say, “they would be healthy if they weren’t so stupid.”
3:25 p.m.: It’s this weird sort of thing, in that you decide the time has come to touch that abyss, and it all comes at you so fast. It’s sort of beautiful and you cannot write it all down fast enough. You’re going 1000 mph and it’s like you’re watching a film of yourself in real time, in real motion, except that the reel is a little bit off and so, instead, you’re aware that you’re watching a film which is slightly, ever so slightly, different than reality even though it’s the exact same image. All of the details which are slightly off are what you then go back and write down.
3:28 p.m.: And it’s not an accident, either. It’s a decision. You say, “you know what? Fuck it. I’m going off that deep end and seeing where I come out,” and you touch that abyss, you touch that fire and it absolutely wrecks you. I’ve got no idea how anyone survives this. This is why she stands amid the rampoles – that row of dead trees charred and blackened after the wildfire has burned up the hillside. Feel the fire, feel it burning you alive and burning through the countryside. But I do think this explains my ability to wander amid the densest wettest fog along the Pacific Coast and western front in sandals and short pants and never feel cold. I’m burning up in here. In my ennui and angst, I went and did something stupid recently and jumped into that abyss once again. Now I’m on fire and I’ve got metaphors everywhere. Jesus, you imbecile, you know this never ends well. All in the interest of beauty. There is beauty in the breakdown.
3:30 p.m.: I hope KC comes home soon.
3:33 p.m.: Breathe. No, fuck that. Water.
3:37 p.m.: Fuck Nebraska. I’ll write that later. It is later. Goddamn.
3:39 p.m.: There are probably 10 songs on this laptop which I never skip through and this is one of them because it captures either my mood or the mood I want to have.
3:43 p.m.:
(This space has purposely been left blank.)
3:53 p.m.: I’m going to take as a sign and symbol and gospel that the random placement of a dice song followed by a song that mentions the Queen of Spades means that I should go back to writing the gambling book, because that’s how this stuff works. Symbols mean what you want them to mean and you wind up looking at disgusting sludge in the bottom of your teacup in search of meaning. I was reading that first draft of Queen of Diamonds again. It wasn’t bad except for the parts that sucked. Take out all the bad parts and the parts no one wants to read and it should be good. Carrie has potential to be an amazing character. All you need to write a novel is two years, a plot you know how ends, a great leading lady, a good therapist, and strong drink.
3:56 p.m.: Laura helps me piece together all of the stuff I tried to forget but never could which now comes back to me in bits and pieces and shards. There are compartments and there are categories – stuff to forget, stuff to remember every single detail right down to how much I tipped at the restaurant on the bill, and somewhere in between. It’s fun to shock her with being so calm about it all. “She said she’d put the cat to sleep. Meh, whatever,” or “We’d be driving down I-25 and she’d just let go of the steering wheel and let it veer nearly into the ditch. That was odd.” The stuff I want to forget gets in the way of the stuff I’ll never forget, like burgers on a Monday evening, which is all pointless anyway, since the other person doesn’t, or persons don’t, remember it. What do you do with a headful of useless crap? WHISKEY! THAT’S WHAT YOU DO!
3:59 p.m.: Whiskey of the Week. Whiskey of the day. Whiskey of the hour. In about 18 minutes or so, my back will stop hurting.
4:04 p.m.: That may be the most logical song I’ve heard all day.
4:15 p.m.: I hope KC comes home soon.
4:18 p.m.: I’m not usually this needy, or this angry. Or am I?
4:24 p.m.: If I do something great and it’s too late, and he doesn’t remember, then what was the point? Perhaps that’s where the urgency comes from, to make moments that feel like memories before memories are impossible for him to form.
4:27 p.m.: I should call.
4:30 p.m.: No, I should write Nebraska, because it was due a week ago, and if I’m going to maim and assassinate people at the office, I’ll have to also blame myself for missing the deadline. Fuck, I hate being management sometimes.
4:32 p.m.: My feet are on the floor, I had my eyes closed and I smiled. It was weird.
4:35 p.m.: KC’s coming home soon, right?
4:38 p.m.: “I’ve been doing a lot of reading about depression and trying to learn how to deal with people like you.” And I’ve learned ‘how to deal with’ people like you by dumping your ignorant ass.
4:41 p.m.: GET SOMETHING DONE GODDAMNIT ANYTHING!
5:36 p.m.: That there was some bad writing. But it is done and I managed to concentrate for long enough to vomit on a page. Sometimes, it is all that you can hope for.
5:38 p.m.: Laura reminds me that I always tell her that I remember to laugh because the joke is on them.
5:45 p.m.: What would I go back to?
5:50 p.m.: Okay, I figured it all out. The problem is that she’s like my ex-wife. I’ve been dwelling on this now for a little while. Yes, she’s like a psychopath with BPD, right down to the ability to masquerade as being empathic, or at least flip the switch here and there and fake it for the purposes of her profession. No, that’s not it. They can feel what you need so long as they’re the ones deciding to give it to you. It’s fake empathy, a power trip. These sorts of people are fucking toxic and fucking dangerous. Interacting with one of these type of people recently has reminded me of this fact and sent me down this fucking rathole, which is why I’m all screwed up in the head right now. You know that type of person when you see them. But … but … but … you can’t say that aloud. You can’t say that’s a psychopath and it will only end in tears. You can’t say he’s a narcissist and it will lead to disappointment. You can’t say these things even though you’re right. Who gives a fuck about being right? I’d rather be wrong for once. I’ve spent the past 16 years wishing I was wrong and lamenting that I’m not wrong about other people and politics and whatnot. Christ, I’m not even bright and I can see this. All of this stuff should be FUCKING OBVIOUS to anyone with an IQ higher than a mollusk.
5:55 p.m.: Fuck off and stay dead Tam, you fucking psychopath.
6:10 p.m.: KC is bringing me a sandwich. This day might not be a total loss.
- - -
As nervous breakdowns go, this one was slightly more awful than the norm, but nothing that I can’t get past.
So, take this day here, and do this every single day. Do this all day, every day, inside your head, while you’re multitasking and carrying on with the quotidian torpor and banality of evil that is day-to-day existence. Do this EVERY FUCKING DAY for the rest of your life, because if you don’t talk your way through it in your head, you’ll probably drop dead.
Welcome to my life. Sorry if I get a bit distracted.
And when some prick says something malignantly ignorant and stupid such as this, I get really annoyed.
And if you, my good reader, are someone who does suffer from a form of mental illness of some sort, get help. Seek help. And if you don’t suffer from that, and you know someone who does, practice empathy and not sympathy with them. Listen to them, learn from them, and love them in your own way.
And sometimes, all that you need is a really good sandwich:
KC knows what to say, even if it means saying nothing at all.
Monday, August 7, 2017
Mail Call
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| At least he didn’t miss the cutoff man |
SO the dumpster fire that is my summer may actually be simmering down a little bit here, and I can get back into Lose with the appropriate amount of gusto. I don’t think I’ve said this often enough, but I greatly appreciate all of the readers out there. This blog is fun, first and foremost, and knowing so many of you enjoy it keeps me doing it.
Seeing as how we’re in a bit of a lull at the moment before the losing and the lunacy really takes hold full throttle in the fall, I thought that we would try something different here. I’d like to hear from you, the readers. What would you like to see this blog? Do you have any questions you’d like to ask? Would you like to commiserate because your team sucks? Drop me a line! You can email me at inplaylose@gmail.com, and when we get enough questions and comments gathered up, I’ll do a special Hate Mail edition of In Play Lose.
Something different, something fun. Let’s go for it. So send in your questions and comments. I look forward to hearing from you.
Sunday, July 30, 2017
Busting a Move
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| There is no reason for this gif to be here. I just thought we needed a moose chasing a golfer in Sweden, because moose. |
TODAY we’re going to talk about player movement. This is a good time of the year to do that, since we’re approaching the baseball trade deadline. It’s that time of year where bad teams trade good players, and good teams trade bad players in return for those good players.
Okay, well, maybe that’s not entirely true. The players being dealt back aren’t necessarily bad before they get dealt, but most of them will amount to nothing in the end. This is because the bad teams doing the trading of good players usually are bad teams because a) they have no real good eye for talent, and/or b) they have a coaching, development, and/or organizational system which sucks, meaning whatever talent they acquire will likely go to waste.
This is why, when you see some list of all of the great young talent the Chicago White Sox have acquired in the great purge that is their summer of 2017, you should take it with a grain of salt. The White Sox have done almost nothing right as an organization since they won the World Series in 2005, and have returned to the protoypical bad and boring state of irrelevancy which has generally plagued them for a century. The White Sox excel in producing players who are either mediocre or malcontents. How that is somehow going to magically change remains a mystery. As I’ve said before, if a management team runs your franchise into a ditch, it’s foolish to think they’ll be smart enough to get you out of it.
And teams have wised up and come to understand that you shouldn’t go overpaying at the trade deadline. There hasn’t been a truly wretched deadline deal in baseball for quite a while now. The days of the Heathcliff Slocumb deal have long since passed. And yes, realizing that yesterday was the 20th anniversary of that horrible trade by the Mariners “inspired” me to write this blog, so to speak. In terms of long-term damage to a franchise, I’d probably argue that the Mariners’ trade of Adam Jones for Erik Bédard was actually a worse trade, and that Shelby Miller stinker by the Snakes looks to have lasting power in the annals of deals gone awry, but both of those were offseason deals. In the context of the midseason trade deadline, the Slocumb deal is the (Fool’s) Gold Standard of awful. And the Red Sox made out like bandits in that Slocumb deal, but not even they have been immune to the horrible midsummer trade, which I’m reminded of watching TV here and seeing Jeff Bagwell inducted into the Hall of Fame.
The most common currency these days is pitching prospects, which are basically lottery tickets. Want a guy from a bad team? Give them 2-3 pitching prospects from the lower leagues, and if they balk at that price, then give them 2-3 more. Among the prospects the Giants just received for trading 3B Eduardo Nuñez to the Rex Sox was a 17-year-old presently pitching in the Dominican Summer League. As longshots go, they don’t get much longer than that. Failed African kleptocracies possess currency of greater value than young pitching prospects. There’s a reason for this, of course: pitchers are fragile and prone to breaking down. The likelihood that any of those lottery tickets will cash is slim to none.
And this has proven true with pitching prospects at all levels, regardless of prowess or pedigree. Even picking up seemingly can’t miss prospects can blow up spectacularly. In 2011, the Giants traded for Carlos Beltran from the Mets in an effort to boost their chances at defending their World Series title from the year before. (They failed.) Giants fans were decidedly unhappy about the price for a 3-month rental of Beltran: Zac Wheeler, the 6th overall pick in the draft and considered to be the #1 prospect in the Giants farm system at the time. In five seasons with the Mets, Wheeler has produced a total of 21 wins and has spent 2½ years on the DL with arm problems. Giants fans used to complain about that trade, since Beltran didn’t really do much in two months bayside while Wheeler had so much upside, but no one complains much now given the unfortunate trajectory of Wheeler’s career.
Then again, given the constant and perpetual spate of injuries which seems to ravage the Mets on a yearly basis, it’s quite right to question their training and medical staffs. Injuries can be one-off and bad luck, but runs of injuries throughout a club on a regular basis point to a certain level of organizational incompetence. (We can make light of this in the context of chronicling failure, but something as damaging as this story about the New Orleans Pelicans, from a human standpoint, is pretty alarming.) This goes to what I was saying before about bad organizations, insofar as that, one way or another, they go about making good players into bad ones over time. And make no mistake about it, the New York Mets have been a bad organization for years, one which has won in spite of itself of late. For perpetually bad teams, the buying and selling of talent usually proves to be the perpetuation of the same old mistakes.
The whole point of bad teams trading at the deadline, of course, is to dump salary and try to recoup anything for expiring contracts of players you have no intention of keeping. If you’re bad with those guys on your team, you can quite easily go on being bad without them. But as deadline buyers have smartened up over time, dealing guys away at the deadline has become less and less desirable. Not only are you still bad now, but you’re unlikely to get anything in return which will prevent you from being bad in the future. Your best chance to retool through the trade market actually comes in the offseason.
Then again, if you suck, you’ll probably screw up the offseason as well.
The baseball deadline nears just as the flurry of activity surrounding the free agency period in the NBA finally peters out. (Or so we thought, but more on that in a minute.) I continue to maintain that the Golden State Warriors have, in fact, broken the NBA, is as much as that the response from the other 29 teams to this dominant juggernaut seemingly having risen from straight out of the Pacific Ocean is to completely melt down and lose their collective minds. We’ve already killed the Kings and the Bulls for selling off their stars – Boogie Cousins and Jimmy Butler – for pennies on the dollar, but then the Indiana Pacers said “hold my beer” and one-upped them with one of the more mind-bogglingly bad trades I’ve seen of late, swapping their disgruntled star Paul George to OKC for a couple pairs of shoes. OKC can now pair PG13 with Russell Westbrook for a season in yet another attempt to remain relevant before George inevitably jets off to Los Angeles in free agency. The primary piece going back to Indiana is Victor Oladipo, who has now been traded twice in a year, and who the Zombies are happy to get off their books after inexplicably giving him an $84 million extension. Sam Presti didn’t get nearly enough shit for offering that awful contract up last season, nor does he get enough slag for some of his awful drafts in OKC in recent years, because Presti’s greatest strength over the years has been to figure out who the dumbest teams in the league are and trade with them.
Which is a description that fits Indiana well, at the moment. Presti must have known he should make a deal with Indiana GM Kevin Pritchard because it was Pritchard, as GM of the Portland Trail Blazers, who picked Greg Oden instead of Kevin Durant with the 1st pick in the 2007 draft, and that pick of Durant at #2 served Presti quite well over the years. Indiana apparently had a three-team deal worked out whereby they’d move George to Cleveland, the Cavs would trade Kevin Love to Denver, and the Pacers would get a bunch of promising stuff back from the Nuggets, but the proposed 3-team trade has a funny way of winding up being a no-team trade. For some reason, Indy pulled out of that deal – apparently neither the Cavs nor Nuggets quite know why – and then they scrambled around and cobbled together this dog of a deal with OKC. Oladipo is a decent player, but not great by any means, and now they are on the hook for $84 million of decent-but-not-great. The best, and also most cynical, reason that I figure this deal took place is that the Pacers thought they were going to stink regardless after trading PG13, so the best way to keep asses in seats at The Fieldhouse was to bring back a guy who played down the road at the University of Indiana. And I don’t think that aspect of this trade has been played up enough. Seriously, if this decent-but-not-great player owed $84 million hadn’t played at I.U., I think there is ZERO chance Pritchard trades for him. NBA fans, even in Indianapolis, are far savvier than that. It’s small-time thinking on the part of what’s become a small-time franchise.
But that brings up something which a lot of people forget, which is that these sorts of decisions by franchises aren’t always made for reasons pertaining to on-field performance. Quite often, other forces and factors come into play. Sales reasons, marketing reasons, or hell, maybe the guy is a pain in the ass and you just want him to go away. Those reasons aren’t necessarily any better or worse, in terms of making a deal, than reasons relating to on-field performance. I think playing on the Hoosiers sentiment with Oladipo in Indianapolis is stupid – I’d argue the best way to keep asses in seats is through winning basketball games – but you can understand that line of reasoning when it doesn’t appear that you’re going to be any good, anyway. One of the more amazing non-trades I can recall from my Seattle days came in the panic that followed the Sonics choking in the 1994 playoffs. Head Coach and Acting GM George Karl cobbled together a deal to trade Shawn Kemp and the #7 pick in that draft to the Bulls for Scottie Pippen, a deal which didn’t come to pass, in part, because Kemp was the Sonics most marketable star at the time, and it was reported that many season ticket holders and corporate sponsors made it be known to the business office that their support was being pulled if Kemp was dealt. In retrospect, of course, that deal would probably have been good for Seattle, but in retrospect, most everything about the RIP Sonics could have been done better.
And one of the reasons the Indiana Pacers dealt Paul George was because he’d told them, in no uncertain terms, that once his contract was up, he was leaving. The trade in professional sports is something of a strange relic from earlier times when the franchises had complete control over the players and could dictate the entire course of their careers. While clubs in baseball and the NBA and such will insist the trade is vital to their interests and the ability to do it is essential, the players haven’t nearly figured out the ways in which they can leverage the situation in their best interests. Because ultimately, trades don’t make much sense in the abstract – why should I be told that I have to now pick up and relocate to someplace else where I don’t necessarily want to be? It’s been reported that numerous possible trades of George were, in fact, scuttled by his agent catching wind of the possible deal, calling up the potential suitor, and saying “we’re not signing with you, so don’t bother.” And it surprises me that more guys don’t do this sort of thing. Obviously, role players and 25th men on the end of an MLB bench don’t have nearly the sort of leverage, but stars have the power to shape and control and chart their careers, often failing to realize just how much power they actually have.
And we should applaud players for taking control of careers, instead of taking the sides of ownership and management. Don’t buy into any argument a sports league puts forth about trying to promote competitive balance through salary caps, revenue sharing, luxury taxes and the like. That’s not about competitive balance. That’s about cost certainty, which is entirely different. Major League Baseball finally clamped down on one of baseball’s biggest freeloaders, the Oakland A’s, and told them to stop skimping on payroll and claiming to be broke while raking in the easy money provided by revenue sharing. MLB had to force the Florida Marlins to promise they’d spend revenue sharing money on players after they’d been found to be turning rather nice profits while fielding horrible teams with horribly low payrolls. In North American sports, there are few incentives to be good and plenty of incentives to be terrible. Hell, the Seattle Mariners are worth over $1 billion, even though they’ve never won anything, they’ve lived off of the aegis of the state of Washington, who built them Safeco Field, and they made it a point to actively fight and thwart Chris Hansen, the guy who wanted to buy the Sacramento Kings, when he wanted to build a new arena down the street from their ballpark. They’ve not been good neighbors, and they’ve not been any good. How much are they worth again? A billion dollars? As in billion with a B?
North American sports fans are strangely conditioned to take the sige of management when it comes to all labor-related issues. One of the reasons for this is that fans root for teams for decades, whereas players inevitably come and go. Fans have a sense of loyalty to their favorite teams, and they assume that players should as well. This is naive, it always has been, and always will be. We also buy into dumb narratives about players being selfish, not caring about the team, and not caring about winning. Bullshit. These are the most competitive people on the planet. They want to win no matter what jersey they put on – it’s just that quite a few of them would rather be wearing a different jersey, which I’m perfectly okay with. I personally don’t understand why more players don’t force trades out of bad situations, nor have their agents work behind the scenes to prevent them. Your career is not best served by being traded to the Phoenix Suns or the San Diego Padres. Well, obviously, in the short-term, the reason guys don’t force their way out of places is because they get killed in the press for it, but ultimately, players should have the power and the control over their careers. We’re fans, we’ll get over it and root for whomever dons the jersey next. (Well, maybe those hillbillies in OKC won’t get over Durant. Tough shit. I would love it if Russell Westbrook, when given the opportunity to sign the new übermax $200 million extension, decides not to sign it – and he has all the leverage, so he has no reason to do it right away – and sends that entire garbage franchise into such a panic that they’ll corkscrew themselves straight into the ground, which would be glorious. But I digress.)
And this brings us to Kyrie Irving, who ruined the summer vacation plans of a great many NBA beat writers when it became public knowledge that he’d asked for a trade from the Cleveland Cavaliers. The Cavs have been in full-on meltdown mode ever since the NBA Finals ended. Cavs owner and junk mortgage king Comic Sans Dan Gilbert wouldn’t bring back GM David Griffin, one of whose main jobs in Cleveland involved keeping the peace. He then lowballed his first choice candidate for the job, Chauncey Billups, who turned it down. In the meantime, the Cavs whiffed on trading for either Paul George or Jimmy Butler, the sort of player they needed to add to compete with the Warriors, and no one who covers the NBA is able to deny the bevy of rumors of LeBron James leaving next summer to go to L.A. All of that probably has something to do with Kyrie’s thinking, not to mention the fact that he’s very likely sick of playing with LeBron and wants to be the #1 option on a team – which seems odd to me, in that he’s already somewhat of a #1 option in Cleveland, where he shoots more than anyone, and also seems somewhat delusional to me, seeing how whenever he truly has been the #1 option (i.e., without LeBron), the Cavs have been terrible. Be that as it may, I have no issues with Kyrie wanting to take control of his career and dictate its terms. In that sense, he’s learned from LeBron, who has spent his entire career maximizing his leverage and looking out for his own best interests.
Kyrie wants out of Cleveland and good on him for doing it. He’s something of a complex character, the value of whom is truly hard to discern. On the one hand, he’s an incredible scorer and one of the great shotmakers I’ve ever seen, a trick shot artist with the ball in his hand. On the other, he’s never shown himself to be very good running an offense, he’s not a great playmaker, he is truly one of the worst defenders I’ve ever seen, and I’m not sure he’s ever made a teammate better. Further still, it could be argued that with constant turbulence and instability in the franchise – so many coaches, so many GMs – and having had to play second fiddle to LeBron, he hasn’t truly developed all of his game. Further still, and this one is important, regardless of what the numbers tell you – and the numbers suggest to me that he might be overrated as a player – Kyrie Irving is a superstar. He hit the biggest shot in the history of the franchise, the championship-winning shot in Game 7 of the NBA Finals. He sells shoes, he’ll sell jerseys, and he’ll put asses in seats. And all of that stuff matters. In many ways, it matters even more than what he produces from a pure numbers standpoint. (Which could lead me into a long rant about how I hate all discussions about Halls of Fame in which statheads through numbers at me and disregard the narrative aspects of a player’s career, because Halls of Fame aren’t Halls of Stats, but I’ll get to that line of argument at another time.)
So congratulations, new Cavaliers GM Koby Altman, you now get to figure out how to trade Kyrie Irving and not get screwed over in the process. Have fun with that. Kyrie is only 25 years old, and has two years left on a contract that is, by NBA standards, incredibly team-friendly, as it was signed under the previous CBA. I mentioned previously that he was the Cavs’ best trade chip, precisely for those reasons. I also said they’d be insane to trade him, but everyone involved with the Cavs seems to be insane, so this is not as far off-script as you’d think.
And yeah, if you’re the Cavs, you really should try to trade him. You could be a dick about it and say, “you have two years left on your contract, so tough shit,” but that’s just asking for two years of distractions on a team that’s already rife with them. And you’re also better off if you make a good-faith effort to work out a deal with one of his preferred destinations – San Antonio, Minnesota, New York, Miami – because otherwise, Kyrie’s agent can say, “we ain’t resigning in two years” and likely scare off some suiters, or at least cause them to lower the asking prices. The players really do have more leverage than they realize in these situations. OKC didn’t care about trading for a year of Paul George’s services, because for them it’s a no-lose situation. If he walks, it’s a whole lot of open space on their books. If he stays, it’s a bonus. But most teams will not be willing to do something so ballsy, and be more inclined to play it safe.
Given the circumstances, this is a bad spot for Cleveland to be in. They need to stay relevant, in case LeBron wants to stay, because the only way LeBron will stay is if he thinks they can win. They also need to somehow get younger, because if LeBron leaves in 2018, he leaves behind a whole roster of guys well-suited to play with LeBron but not so good otherwise, all of them with contracts that make them extremely undesirable to anyone else. The chance for a bad outcome here is high, and so I thought I would cook up a few bad outcomes of my own for the fun of it …
Over on ESPN, they have a fun NBA Trade Machine which will allow to propose all sorts of trades and see if they meet the criteria established in the CBA. In the wrong hands, of course, such technology can be a dangerous thing. I decided to set out on a misguided quest to see if I could cook up the worst trades possible for Kyrie Irving, based upon the number of expected wins the trade will cost the Cavs. Behold some of my masterpieces, starting with the Knicks, who are one of the four teams Kyrie had on his wish list:
How’s that for a return? Only -11 wins for Cleveland though. Surely we can do better – or do worse, as it were, especially if we try to move some salary and trade some of the contracts the Cavs would be happy to get rid of.
Orlando has plenty of pieces with which to make an awful deal.
I don’t know if Sacramento would be willing to make this deal, since it would mark a radical departure from Vlade Divac’s usual philosophy, which is to amass as many basketball players from the Balkans as possible and grossly overpay all of them.
Here’s a 3-team deal with the Blazers and
Here’s a bad trade with Detroit. You’ll notice some themes developing here, one of which is that a lot of the guys going back to Cleveland in these deals are guys who signed last summer, when NBA ownership got drunk on salary cap space and inked a bunch of not very good players to expensive contracts they now regret. The other theme you will notice is a lot of centers, which is a position no one cares about in the NBA anymore, anyway, and is a position laden these days with a general dearth of talent.
Atlanta has nothing good to offer, which is perfect for this exercise.
Okay, now this is more like it. Team up Kyrie with AD and Boogie in New Orleans in exchange for someone who is always hurt, two not very good centers, and some guy that I’ve never heard of. This is getting better and better.
In terms of number of Hollinger losses, this trade here of Kyrie to the Griz for the rotting corpse that is Chandler Parsons’ contract is the overall champ at -14. But this isn’t my favorite deal.
This is my favorite deal. I think this one is my Sistine Chapel.
And as dumb as those deals are, there have been deals in all sports in North America which were worse than those.
In the NBA, a superstar player rattling the sabres about wanting to be moved is a source of leaguewide upheaval. In soccer, it’s a day ending in Y. The biggest saga of the summer when it comes to superstars possibly changing teams is not Kyrie Irving leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers – but we’ll get to him in a minute – but the possibility of Neymar moving from F.C. Barcelona to Paris St. Germain at a price which is gobsmacking. The reports have suggested a transfer fee for the Brazilian in the realm of €250,000,000, which seems just preposterous, but everything about international transfers in soccer seems preposterous, and there is a good reason for that – most of the reporting turns out to be smoke, with very little fire behind it.
Transfers are a shady and shadowy business, and the international market is deliberately rife with gossip and innuendo. This is because clubs cannot directly speak to players who are under contract with other clubs. That’s against the rules. Transfers are the ultimate act of “have your people call my people.” Recruitment operations at club will employ fleets of middlemen whose job it is to go out and contact player’s agents and attempt to gauge interest in a player being willing to be moved – and the agents, of course, are perfectly happy to let it slip out that such-and-such a club would be interested in a player’s services if it results in said player getting a better contract out of the deal.
A result of the landmark Bosman ruling in 1995 has been that players have tremendous power when it comes to dictating where they play. When a player is out of contract, the club gets nothing if a player changes teams. As such, players hold the ultimate leverage: all it takes to squash a potential move is for an agent to tell a club there is zero chance in hell his client will sign a new contract, meaning the club has shelled out X amount of euros to acquire him and will wind up getting nothing in return. If you run a club, and you have a guy you want to keep, and he wants a new deal, his agent will go contacting middlemen working for other clubs, and then some strange transfer offer will materialize seemingly out of thin air from some other club saying “hey, we’ll give you X for such-and-such player,” at which point you have to go back to the agent, who will say “gosh, I have no idea why that club is so interested since my client loves playing for your club, and he would love to play for your club going forward for another €100,000 a week.” The only real leverage a club has is through playing time. If you want to get rid of someone, bench him and tell him he’s not in the future plans. Guys want to get paid, but guys also want to play football. If you tell him he’s not in the plans, he’ll want to go someplace else.
And when you’re a fan of a soccer club, you get used to it. My beloved Canaries of Norwich City make for a good reference point here. Norwich City are, for all intents and purposes, a Division 1.5 club. Every nation has in Europe has these sorts of clubs to one degree or another. The Canaries are one of the yo-yos, bouncing up and down between the EPL and the Championship on a regular basis. They’re a midsized club and, as such, they’re likely to look for younger talent at more reasonable prices and, at the first sign of trouble, they’re also likely to sell. When they were relegated from the EPL in 2016, I took stock of the roster and noted which guys were most likely to be sold to bigger clubs. Now, little more than a year later, the first five guys on that list of mine are all gone.
But this is how it goes. You accept it as part of the game and you move on. You’d love to keep your players for as long as possible, but if a bigger club comes calling and willing to buy, you’d be stupid to sell. Nobody in Leicester bitched too much when, the summer after winning the EPL title, the Foxes sold their best player, N’Golo Kanté, to Chelsea for £32 million. Kanté being sold to the Blues, a year after he arrived in Leicester, meant first and foremost that Kanté wanted to go to Chelsea. And why wouldn’t he want to go to Chelsea? He can make more money, first and foremost, and given Chelsea’s resources, he’s likely to win a lot more football games over the course of his career. Can you blame him?
Of course you can. Here in the states, we still have hillbillies decrying Kevin Durant’s lack of loyalty to an organization he had no choice in joining, and hooters who will burn LeBron’s jersey when he decides to take his talents to South Beach. That’s just dumb. If you’re going to root for the name on the front of the jersey, then root for the guys presently wearing those jerseys, instead of the guys who have moved on. Stop buying that stupid narrative about loyalty. There isn’t any loyalty the other way. Teams will dump players in a heartbeat if it serves their needs. Why do we, as fans, continue to grant license for ownership to do that, yet balk at the idea of players looking out for their own best interests?
Being a sports fan, ultimately, means allowing yourself to be conned into thinking that the ownership of your favorite club actually gives a shit about what you think. They want you to buy season tickets, of course, since that lump sum payment in the offseason is a nice influx of cash with which they frontload their budget. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that many of those either don’t care about winning, or are far too incompetent to go about doing it. I have never begrudged any player who wanted to leave a favorite team of mine. They move on, the club resets and you go from there. It’s fun to think about the mechanics of making trades, like I did with the trade machine earlier, but if your team sucks, a trade isn’t likely to make them all that much better by themselves. If your team sucks, the rot likely begins at the top with ownership and then filters down into management. About the only thing they aren’t willing to trade, unfortunately, is themselves.
Sunday, June 25, 2017
Loose Balls
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| In Play Lose World HQ |
THE LOSE apologizes for the absence during the month of June, but real life interfered, as it is wont to do. It pleases me to say that In Play Lose has a new world headquarters, but it also pains me to say that, because moving to our new digs has left my back a shambles. But I am now on the road to the recovery with the aid of the Official Chiropractor of In Play Lose. It pains me that everything hurts. It pleases me that some things about me hurt which I’d forgotten exist, so their rediscovery counts as success.
We’ve talked a great deal about the NBA here so far at In Play Lose in 2017, and I wanted to wrap that up now that the Finals are over and the folly that is the NBA draft has taken place. We’ll get into some other subjects here in the coming days. It was a fascinating season to me in that what we all pretty much expected would happen wound up happening – the Golden State Warriors won the NBA championship – and yet I found the road traveled in order to get this point to be endlessly fascinating. There is never any certainty to the outcome, no matter how inevitable the end results may seem.
And you can certainly make a case for the inevitability of the outcome in these NBA Finals because Golden State possesses the most ridiculous assemblage of talent in the history of the NBA. No team that I can ever recall had a roster with four All-Stars under the age of 30. The most comparable collection of talent in any North American sport in my lifetime is the Edmonton Oilers of the 1980s, who won five Stanley Cups and were so deep that they could trade the greatest player in the history of the sport and still win that 5th Cup after he’d left. The Oilers talent level went even beyond the Warriors – they had eight all-stars one season – but even so, Stanley Cup success for The Oil was never assured. They choked away playoff series in 1982 and 1986, and were taken to seven games by the Philadelphia Flyers in the 1987 finals. Wayne Gretzky has spoken in the past of how guys were playing in the playoffs with broken hands, broken wrists, severe shoulder and knee injuries and the like. Just because they were the greatest team ever assembled in the history of the sport, it didn’t mean the others were going to just roll over and give them the titles. They still had to play the games, they still had to go out there and earn it.
And Golden State earned it this season as well, because in the last three games of the NBA Finals, Cleveland was great. They were absolutely great. Their shotmaking was spectacular, and Cleveland got better and better as the series progressed. But the Cavs messed up the series when they messed up the end of Game 3, coughing up a 6-point lead in the final 90 seconds and losing 118:113, which put the Dubs up 3-0 and pretty much ended any realistic chance Cleveland had of winning. But it was precisely the sort of game that you’d expect to happen if you were picking this to be a 5-game series – that close game which could go either way and winds up going to the road team. Again, a sort of understandable script wound up being followed in the NBA Finals: the Warriors win Games 1 and 2 big at home, the Cavs win a game big at home, but Warriors win a close one at The Q to come home with a 3-1 lead and then close it out at home. But the series was nonetheless wildly entertaining, just as the season was wildly entertaining, featuring some of the greatest basketball we have ever seen.
Predictions of Cleveland winning this series always seemed preposterous to me, as they were predicated upon this fantasyland notion that somehow Cleveland’s bad defense would be able to stop what is arguably the greatest offense in NBA history. For all of their truly exquisite shotmaking in the last three games of the series, the Cavs were only able to muster one win. Cleveland’s 2016 title was well-deserved, but then the Warriors responded by making a slight upgrade to their roster. The onus is now on Cleveland to respond. The Warriors got better last summer, and Cleveland has to get better now.
But how?
I would submit that not re-upping GM David Griffin, who only managed to construct a roster around LeBron that won Cleveland an NBA championship, doesn’t count as an auspicious beginning to the summer. Whomever replaces Griffin will be the 5th Cavs GM in the past 12 years, which is a ridiculous amount of turnover for what is one the league’s marquee franchises. Cavs owner Dan Gilbert has never really valued front office positions, but good ol’ Comic Sans Dan just may have laid the groundwork for killing his golden goose. LeBron can be a free agent in 2018, after all, and after the native son came back to Cleveland and brought a title to his hometown club, he has nothing left to prove there. Unlike when he first left in 2010, and they burned his jerseys in the streets, LeBron can walk away from Cleveland having done what he set out to do and brought them the ultimate prize of a championship. If, come next summer, LeBron doesn’t think the Cavs can win anymore, he won’t hesitate to head elsewhere. He’s done it before – twice – and he’ll do it again.
But how in the hell is Cleveland going to get better? They have one of the oldest teams in the NBA, and they have the most expensive team in the NBA. Win-now mode netted them the ultimate prize in 2016, of course, which means that ultimately it was worth the cost, but that moment has passed and now the Cavs are stuck. They have no promising young players, they have no draft assets to work with – that trade of a 1st round pick to Atlanta for Kyle Korver looks really awful in hindsight – and the NBA repeater tax is going to kill them this coming season.
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| Cleveland Cavaliers payroll obligations for the next three seasons |
Cleveland’s problem is a problem endemic to the NBA salary cap, in that you wind up paying players on your roster relative to their value to your own team – which has nothing at all to do with their value to anyone else in the league. This is why making trades can be really difficult. A guy worth $15 million on your end probably isn’t valued at that level by anyone else, and in a league that’s constrained by salary caps and floors and luxury taxes and the like, the salary math is almost as important as if they can hit a jump shot, if not more so.Your $15 million player is not necessary my $15 million player. The highest paid player in the league this year was Mike Conley of Memphis – a very good player, mind you, but one who owes that salary not to being the best point guard in the league, but to the fact that he is the best player on his team and, since they had a max contract slot to dole out, they may as well give it to him. It will be interesting this offseason to see what happens in Washington and Detroit, where Otto Porter and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, respectively, will likely demand max contracts in order to re-sign. Nice players, both of them, but neither of them would even start on the Warriors, much less be paid the max. If I am going to watch a Buzzards game, I am going to see John Wall and Bradley Beal, not Otto Porter. I pretty much never want to see a Detroit game ever, since that team verges on unwatchable.
For the Cavs here, Tristan Thompson is owed $16.4 million this coming season, and $52.4 million over the next three years. Tristan Thompson fills an important role for the Cavs – holding down the center of the floor while the others are bombing away from three. His value to the Cavs, however, is much higher than with anyone else in the league. No one wants $52.4 million worth of a limited offensive center who got played off the floor in the first two games of the NBA finals. The contracts for J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert are similar – whatever their role on the Cavs, no one else wants to take on those contracts in trade. Those guys fill a need around LeBron in Cleveland, but take LeBron out of it, and they are not nearly as useful as players.
In truth, Cleveland’s only really good trade chip is Kyrie Irving. But you’d be an idiot to trade Kyrie Irving. Kyrie Irving is one of the most creative shotmakers the game of basketball has ever seen. That’s a stupid idea. So then what do you do? The Cavs were already shopping Kevin Love, who is an élite offensive talent, but he’s also 28, is owed $46.7 million over the next two seasons, just had knee surgery this past season, can’t guard anyone in the open floor, and much like Thompson, Love also got played off the floor at times by the Warriors. I’ve been hearing about these trade rumors ever since the finals ended in which the Cavs would make a 3-team deal whereby they would ship Love to Team X, Team X would give a bunch of stuff to either Chicago or Indiana, and the Cavs would land either Paul George or Jimmy Butler. (More on him in a minute.) Those rumors made no sense to me, simply because if I’m Team X, I’d rather have Butler or George than Love, and if it’s going to cost me a bunch of stuff in order to move those guys, I’d rather just deal with Chicago and Indy directly and ignore Cleveland’s phone calls.
I don’t see how Cleveland gets any better. I suppose you could hope that Dwyane Wade and Carmelo Anthony get bought out from the Bulls and the Knicks eventually, but an old team with a bad defense and two ball-dominant players probably doesn’t need two more old, ball-dominant players who play bad defense. That formula didn’t work against the Warriors in 2017, and it isn’t likely to work in 2018, either. Teams that are old and slow don’t magically get younger and faster, and once they go bad, they tend to go really bad, really fast. Cleveland cruised through the Eastern playoffs this season, but I would argue their competition in the East is closer to them than they are to the Warriors, assuming that competition bothers to actually make some moves …
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The aforementioned Jimmy Butler was ultimately dealt during the comedy of errors that was the Chicago Bulls draft night. It’s rare that true stars get traded in the NBA, but now we’ve seen it twice in 2017 and, just as was the case with Boogie Cousins going to New Orleans, the return on the star sale seemed somewhat laughable. Butler is reunited with Thibs now in Minnesota, while the tag team comedy duo running the Bulls referred to as GarPax uttered the obligatory, “this was the best deal we could get” line, which seems dubious seeing as how it’s the exact same trade they apparently nixed a year ago – Butler for Kris Dunn and Zac LeVine – before both Wolves’ dudes were damaged goods. This deal got grades ranging from F to F+ from the assortment of NBA pundits, and the Bulls then compounded the disaster by swapping pick positions with Minnesota – if you’re the one trading the star, you shouldn’t be giving away stuff – using the 7th pick in the draft on Lauri Markkanen, who can shoot but can’t defend and who rebounds about as badly as any 7’0” guy I’ve ever seen, and then selling the 38th pick to the Warriors for $3.5 million, allowing the NBA champs to get the guy they wanted, Jordan Bell, on a cheap deal. This is precisely the same strategy Golden State used a year ago, paying $2.4 million to the Bucks for Patrick McCaw, and all McCaw wound up doing this year was playing 4th Quarter minutes in Game 5 of the NBA Finals and looking far better prepared to play NBA basketball than any of the 37 guys picked ahead of him in the draft. If the Warriors come knocking on your door and throwing money at you to buy their way into the draft, you might want to shut the door in their faces.
And I asked the same question, when I saw this Butler trade, that I did when Cousins got traded back in February: where are the Celtics? Why is Danny Ainge sitting on his ass … ets? Stars are hard to come by in the NBA, but you need them to win. You need them more than ever, now that Golden State has four of them. But instead, the Celtics played it safe once more, although they did make one deal: swapping the 1st overall pick to the 76ers, trading down to the third spot, and taking one of Philly’s picks over the next two years.
I hated this deal. And I hated this deal for two reasons.
Golden State has changed the calculus in the NBA. They have four All-stars under 30, all of them signed or soon to be signed up through at least 2019. They’re not going anywhere, so what are you going to do about it? Clearly, the second-best team in the league is Cleveland, and to get your shot at the Warriors in the East, you have to go through Cleveland first. Boston isn’t good enough to beat either of those teams in a playoff series, as the East final clearly showed. So if you’re Boston, what are you going to do about the Cavs? Are you just going to sit around and wait for LeBron to get old, or are you going to try to push the envelope?
So, okay, let’s take the tact that the Celtics are playing “the long game.” (I’ll get to why I think that is dumb here in a minute.) Okay, so in the post-LeBron world, who looks to be your chief adversaries in the East? I was talking previously about the absence of upside in the first round of this year’s NBA playoffs, talking about how so few of the losing teams showed any real long-term potential. But who does have the long term potential in the East? Milwaukee, to be sure, because one day Giannis will develop a jump shot, basketball will be over as we know it, life will be over as we know it and we’ll all bow down to our Bucks overlord. So who else? Philadelphia, of course. Philadelphia cannot get everyone on the court just yet, and health is a huge concern for them, but if they do ever get all of their guys on the court healthy and knowing where they are supposed to be at any point in time, they have two guys – Simmons and Embiid – with star potential. How many guys among the many redundant, nice-but-not-outstanding members of the Celtics can you say that about? IT? He’s certainly a star at the moment, but he’s still 5’7” and now he has a hip injury. Who else? Some people like Jaylen Brown. Then again, some people also like mayonnaise. I like neither of those things. Who else? Anyone? Didn’t think so.
So if you’re Boston and you’re playing the long game here, and thinking of the post-LeBron world, you have to think that the Sixers will be your prime rivals. This 2017 draft is a draft filled with good players, but it’s hard to guess who has the potential to be great. My hunch is that there are three potential superstars in this draft, all of whom are point guards with one of whom – Markelle Fultz – being the clear #1. The Celtics had the #1 pick, and their future rivals, the 76ers, wanted Fultz – so why are they giving him to the Sixers? It’s Fultz reaches his potential along with the others, the Sixers now have three stars in their lineup. They have exactly the core that they need to become a championship team. This is reason #1 that I hated this trade: Don’t give something to your closest rivals.
Oh, but they didn’t give Fultz to the 76ers, because they got another draft pick! Here’s the second reason I hated this trade: the Celtics don’t need more picks. They have too many draft assets already. They had eight draft picks in the 2016 draft – yes, that’s right eight – and wound up essentially throwing a lot of them away, which makes them useless. Danny Ainge commented, in the aftermath of the Butler trade to Minnesota, that teams ask for too much stuff from the Celtics because they know how much stuff that the Celtics have. He seems to think that the others in the league are undervaluing his many assets, but if anything, Ainge appears to be overvaluing them.
And here is why I think playing the long game is dumb, and why I thought it was dumb this past season as well. Boston isn’t as good as Cleveland, but Cleveland is old and plays bad defense and there were, and still are, guys out there – not just guys, but actual stars – whom the Celtics have the assets to acquire which could make an East final against the Cavs at least competitive, if not tipped in Boston’s favor outright. Jimmy Butler and Boogie Cousins were each traded basically for a pair of shoes. Boston could easily have beaten those offers and barely made a dent in their asset stashes. Paul George is now on the market as well, as he’s told the Pacers he’s leaving in free agency next summer. Why not rent the guy for a year? Throw two first round picks at the Pacers for him – and Boston can afford to do that, since they have seven first round in the next four years, which is far more than they can ever truly use effectively. Hell, if Kristaps Porziņģis actually is available from the Knicks (good lord), I’m calling up Phil Jackson and saying, “Here Phil, I’ve got seven first round picks in the next four years. Pick any two! Hell, pick any three! You’re giving me a unicorn, a 7-footer who shoots threes and protects the rim and is still on his rookie wage scale! Take any of that stuff that you want!” But instead, you’ve got Danny Ainge hoarding picks and kicking the can down the road, and now would be a good time for me to point out that his judgment in the draft has been, well, meh, and that most of his acumen amid all of his wheelings and dealings has come in finding undervalued players in the league like IT and Crowder and maximizing their value.
But the main reason I want to see the Celtics playing short, bulking up and beating on the Cavs has to do with what I said earlier in the show here, which is that LeBron can be a free agent in 2018. LeBron has some designs on being in L.A., of course, but his decisions are going to come down to whether or not he can win in Cleveland – so go and beat his ass! If the Celtics stock themselves up this offseason and then kick Cleveland’s ass in the playoffs, they also quite possibly kick LeBron all the way to the Western Conference, which means they have the run of the East until Philly gets its shit together, or until Giannis develops a jump shot and life on earth as we know it is over. (But at least our Bucks overlord will be a benevolent sort of overlord, since Giannis seems like a genuinely nice guy.)
All that I can think is happening at the moment, given the favorable hand they hold and given the market conditions, is that Ainge has been standing pat because he is as close to certain as he can possibly be that a big free agent – possibly Gordon Hayward, possibly Blake Griffin – is going to be signing this summer. Otherwise, none of this makes any sense. I don’t believe for a second that they drafted Jason Tatum, a nice shooter from Duke, with the idea in mind that he was the best guy in the draft and worth trading down for. Tatum adds to the Celtics’ glut on the wings – another position of strength of theirs in the trade market, as 3-and-D guys are in demand, but it isn’t a position of strength if your action is to just stock up on even more of them. Remember, Sam Hinkie’s death blow in Philly was drafting a third center, creating needless redundancy and overstocking at a position that is becoming less and less important in the modern NBA. The Celtics have too many wings, too many nice players who aren’t great players and all of whom are going to start getting expensive, and their other roster quandary going forward is what to do with IT, who is great but who is also 5’7” and going to be 29 when his contract ends and now has a dicey sort of hip injury. Boston could have gone a long way towards solving those problems in the future by drafting either Fultz or Ball and then trading some combo of Crowder/Bradley/Smart for either Butler or George, but they didn’t do any of that, and as a long time Celtics admirer, I’m sort of getting tired of continuing to build for some future that never, ever seems to exist. The future could be now, if they want it to be now.
I’d still try to rent Paul George, just so Cleveland doesn’t get him. Maybe he decides in the summer of 2018 that he wants to go to L.A., but maybe with him in tow, Boston could knock Cleveland off and make a good showing against the Warriors in the finals, and maybe PG13 sticks around at that point, because he comes to discover that he actually likes winning, which is ultimately the point of all of this.
In order to win in the NBA, you need stars. The best way to get stars is to draft them, but an even better way to get them is to trade for them when you have the means to do so, which is clearly where the Celtics are at this point in time. Failing to do so constitutes missed opportunities, and when you have a behemoth on the other side of the continent that you’re up against, you just can’t let those opportunities slip past.
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And as I’m writing this blog, I’m now reading about how there is a possible 3-team trade in the works involving Cleveland, Indiana, and Denver. Denver? Sure, because Kevin Love is precisely what a team who couldn’t guard their own shadows last season needs to add to the roster. I get that Denver is desperate to be relevant, but they finished 9th in the West last season and everyone who finished 4-8 has huge question marks this offseason: the Clippers have a new front office head honcho in Jerry West, Paul and Griffin need to be re-signed, etc.; the Jazz don’t know if they’ll have Hayward and George Hill around; the Grizzlies are old and slow, capped out and have no draft assets; OKC has to upgrade their horrible roster and aren’t likely to be so lucky in close games; Portland is in salary cap hell. Hell, if Denver does nothing except stay the course, they could be relevant again simply through attrition. Trading for Kevin Love seems completely unnecessary to me. But as we’ve seen with the trades of Boogie and then Jimmy Butler, you cannot expect actors to act rationally in these situations.
The NBA is drunk this offseason. The Warriors broke the league. They went out and signed KD, stomped on everyone, and now every other team seems to be losing its mind in one way or another. What’s strange to me about the PG13-to-Cleveland rumor is that I still don’t think it makes the Cavs good enough to beat the Warriors, but I guess you can’t blame them for trying. I’ve heard more bizarre rumors in the past two weeks than I can wrap my head around. It’s hard for me to keep up:
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Apart from the weird 1-for-3 Boston-Philly exchange, and Chicago going insane, the NBA draft was basically chalk. Lest you get too excited about the players in the 2017 NBA draft – a draft which is supposedly one of the deepest in ages – I invite to look back at the 2015 NBA draft, which people thought was going to be pretty good, and see what’s come of it in two short years: #1 was Karl Anthony Towns to Minnesota, which was a no-brainer and is still a no-brainer; #2 was DeAngelo Russell, who was so bad in two years in L.A. that the Lakers threw him into a Mozgov salary dump trade with Brooklyn (and while I’m at it, I should give the Swamp Dragons some props here for making that deal, because Russell still has considerable upside and Brooklyn has nothing to lose giving him the keys and trying to develop him); #3 in that draft was Okafor to the 76ers, who will probably get traded at some point this season for about 25¢ on the dollar; #4 was Porziņģis, who shouldn’t be traded but just might be because Phil Jackson is the worst GM in the NBA; and #5 was Mario Hezonja to Orlando, who has basically been a bust. Outside of Towns and Porziņģis, you’d probably have to say the best player to come out of that draft was Devin Booker, who was picked 13th by Phoenix. But otherwise, there are a lot of iffy guys in that draft who, just two years ago, looked as if they might possibly be useful NBA players.
We love the draft because we’re intoxicated by the great opiate that is potential, but the truth is that a lot of good talents will have their careers negatively affected by being drafted by organizations which are completely incompetent. It was pointed out during the coverage of the NBA draft that more All-Stars have been drafted 10th than have been drafted 2nd, which says far less about the players being picked and more about who is doing the picking. To that end, if I had a guess who’d ultimately be the best player in this draft, my guess is that it would be Dennis Smith, who was the 9th pick in the draft and went to the Dallas Mavericks, simply because the Mavericks generally know what they are doing and will put the kid in the most positions to succeed. A lot of those guys we just pointed out in that 2015 draft were put into positions where failure was inevitable. In Russell’s case, his rookie season coincided with the bombast and bluster of the Kobe Bryant victory lap around the NBA and he was subjected to the indifference of Byron Scott on the bench. In Okafor’s case, he was on a team that was designed to be terrible and made no secret of its wishes to be terrible. Guys get hurt, guys blossom late and whatnot. This is all an inexact science we’re talking about here.
Which is why, when you have great young talent, you need to do everything possible to keep it, which makes what’s going on with Porziņģis in New York even dumber. In terms of the most valuable young assets in the game, I’d submit that only Towns, Giannis, and maybe Anthony Davis surpass Porziņģis. He’s that unique, and his upside is that great. It’s not a big deal that Jackson’s fielding offers for him, because everyone is always fielding offers for everyone – former Sonic/Blazer GM Bob Whitsitt always liked to point out that he’d ask about Michael Jordan trades every time he spoke with the brass in Chicago on the phone – but what’s a big deal is that Jackson is perpetually talking about it. By doing so, he’s letting it be known that Porziņģis is available when, by all rights, he shouldn’t be. But this is how it goes with Phil, who is completely tone deaf and out-of-step with the modern game, and whose incompetence as an exec has called into question whether his success as a coach really was little more than rolling the ball out for his superstars, since his intelligence and judgment seem to have been greatly overstated. Jackson got himself into a huff when Porziņģis skipped his exit meeting at the end of the vortex that was the Knicks 2016-2017 season – an act which Porziņģis did because he didn’t care for the way that Jackson was running the team, of course, and particularly in response to the ways in which Phil has constantly devalued his team’s best player, Carmelo Anthony, whom he’d like to trade but cannot because of the no-trade clause which Phil foolishly handed him during their last negotiation. It’s all a mess.
The problem with letting it be known that Porziņģis is available is that, because of his rookie scale contract, literally every team in the league can afford him including those over the cap and the tax lines, meaning Phil is going to field 100 offers, probably 98 of which will be bad and, quite possibly, one of which he’ll foolishly accept. In response to the current state of affairs, most of the Knick fans that I know have either developed even more damaging drinking problems than they already possessed, or have simply thrown up their hands and given up on watching basketball entirely. Come back, Knicks fans! Come back! It’s not that bad! There are brighter days ahead in … well, it’ll happen at some point, I’m sure of it …
And to all of my faithful readers out there who may have lost faith in the NBA here of late, as the Warriors have stomped on everyone’s faces and gone 16-1 to win an NBA title with a roster that appears set to dominate the league for the next 3-5 years, I say this: all of this is cyclical and nothing is forever. I’m reminded on the fabulous This Day in Suck twitter account that it was on this day back in 2009 that the Golden State Warriors drafted Steph Curry. Things improved after that, suffice to say. The franchise was SO DIRE back then. Seriously, you have no idea how hopeless this team was. You really have no idea. And here we are, eight years later, with the Warriors being arguably the single-most dominant and most marketable franchise in all of sports, an entity which is going to be worth about $4.5 billion when their new arena opens in downtown San Francisco and whose Q rating is so high that any sort of fanciful notions from the past of taking away the Golden State moniker have been thrown out the window. None of this was ever expected, none of it could have ever been anticipated.
There is zero guarantee that will happen to your team, of course, but the point is that it could, in fact, happen. So stick with it and stay the course. And in the meantime, enjoy the game of basketball being played as skilfully and as beautifully as it’s ever been played. What’s not to like about that?
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