#363

Well, my actual labor for this school week is complete, except for securing my materials and doing a bunch of reading and a small amount of tasks around that reading, a couple hours of work which I have four more days to complete. At any rate, I am free to leap into this first today, which is exceedingly pleasurable.

Hey, post 363! I FUCKIN LOVE THAT U KNO HOW I AM PEOPLE three six thrrrreeeeeeee

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Fuckin addicted to smoking again. It's easy to tell. The main thing is breaking your word on yourself and bargaining with yourself only to break your word again, a cycle which makes every pack of cigarettes pose a question of incredible weight, and the failure to answer that question supplying guilt as fuel for the weight of the next question, and so on.

This is why they tell you not to smoke, but if you're ever going to smoke, not smoking is impossible.

Addiction is the land of amongst the most demonic tautologies that plague consciousness.

*

Typing that stressed me out so bad I went to smoke a cigarette. And how precious, the calm that flooded my whole system! And how pernicious, that guilt should stress me out again before the cigarette is even smoked to completion!

They do talk about them, these vicious cycles. And how much viciousness we poor earthling creatures will subject ourselves to, for just a snatch of comfort!

*

So. Watched that documentary about Magic Johnson and Larry Bird a little while ago, which marinated, by and by leading me to start watching Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, which is a shitty title about something I thought I didn't give a fuck about. Once I had the context to give a fuck, because it is actually some damn fucking interesting American history, the title was fine, and the show has made such statements and shown such crazy real shit about the human condition that it hs brought me to tears multiple times.

My father is going to have a field day with this. I have asserted that professional sports in America constitute multiple forms of modern physical and mental slavery, and he hates that to death. Particularly the word slavery, which I'm actually still not going to back away from one inch. We've argued about it a lot, with some heat. 

However, it has become impossible for me not to concede that there is more to it, that it is something essential that runs through our shared existence and that it is conceivably a net good. How I fucking hate to see this. How it galls me that this fucking propaganda delivered its payload with such faultless precision.

Still. The purpose all art is to help us see that the world is more complex and layered than we realized, that our perspective is never ever complete, that motivations that run differently and even countered against our our own have validity that we may never access, but which exists. Even propaganda can show us this, and serve as an inoculation to its more sinister forces.

*

When I was coming up, all that eighties shit was literally ancient history. I never even heard the name Magic Johnson until I was like twelve or thirteen years old--primarily through AIDS jokes, ha-ha--and I didn't really get who Larry Bird was until basically two months ago. 

23 ruled the heavens and the earth when I was coming up. 

Talk about propaganda delivering its unerring payload--my dad made me try all kinds of sports as a little kid, but I was pretty whatever about all that--all I cared about was reading, and watching Fantasia and The Little Mermaid over and over and over again. Later though, I would also be get into cartoons of all kinds--the early nineties animation revolution which swept me up still supported hours and hours of the old Hanna-Barbera shit, and I loved them toons almost as much as the crazy gorgeous new shit that was happening. So, Space Jam happened, and basketball was the shit to me all of a sudden, the only sport I showed genuine enthusiasm for. I mean, sue me. I was six. Space Jam holds up ok, too. Plenty for the furries there. 

My father seized upon this with both hands; he loves playing sports, especially goalie in soccer, and basketball. I remember with great fondness a basketball jacket he bought me, in great nineties-bright teal and violet and black with white piping, with that iconic dunking profile puff-embroidered on the back, royal purple on a field of midnight. 

So I used to watch basketball with my old man, the Bulls in the nineties, other teams I don't really remember, even Venezuelan basketball, Los Cocodrilos de Caracas against whoever. I have to say the poetry and exuberance of that team name exceeds any in English, in my humble estimation. And I did basketball camp at my catholic school one or two summers. When Disney's Tarzan* came out, I remember a camp thing we did was take an afternoon off and watch a pirated tape of it. The colors were unbearably garish and the plastic straw from somebody's drink was in and out of the frame for three-quarters of the runtime, but it was a pretty fun day at camp. Air-conditioning, you know. 

I fucking suck at basketball. No grace at all, I mean none. I can pass well and play good strong defense, but under pressure and in the flow I have literally never sunk a shot. I mean, definitely never in middle school, the last time I played basketball seriously. Maybe I'm forgetting scrimmages at basketball camp when I was eight or nine, sure, but in conscious memory, any baskets I have made in this life have been foul shots, drills, and playing HORSE, which I have never won. Gym class? Did I score scrimmage baskets in gym class? Maybe? I honestly think not. Bad at ballhandling, no great dribbler, and I have to think way too much to play offense. It's like this in soccer and football and lacrosse, too. These team sports that rely on spheres, formation and location on a field, man. I cannot think offensively as a player under these conditions**. 

However, I am good at getting my hands on the ball. Sure, once I have it, I can't help that much, because I don't grasp the art of scoring. I mean, a breakaway layup is easy enough to understand, but I'm bad at them, and get confused when I try to execute offensive strategy beyond identifying my best pass. I'm good at taking it down the court and making a solid pass, but not very good at protecting it from a defender or working my way in or even finding a position, which wouldn't help, since I'm a christing bricklayer out there. I'm not tall and my vertical is, to say the least, humble. But I play aggressive defense on the wings and outside court, of which I have an intuitive strategic grasp.

Disrupting offensive strategies and discovering the best ways to guard particular individuals quickly comes naturally to me, though, and I can move well enough to fuck things up for taller, faster dudes. Playing that outside defense, I become a total asshole, getting right up inside em to kill their momentum, checking and snatching, hips low and shoving hard, putting my hand about three inches from their face so they can't see anything but me and get pissed off enought to take me on, which is when my surprisingly fast hands come in. I don't know how I'm so decent at getting the ball, but I think it's even more about my eyes than my hands. Plus, timing. 

All this boils down to my middle school basketball coach literally screaming at me afterwards when I tried to make a shot one game--I really must have looked like a fool--but praising my defensive capabilities in just as loud a scream most other games, his "tiger on d." I was able to play my part, so far as that went.

*

Later than all that, wrestling in high school, this one dude Oakley had a habit of throwing his right arm out extremely fast out of the greco-roman stance, if you were fool enough to lock in with him, and snatch a single leg for the takedown, or move the hips in quick enough for a headlock much more difficult to defend against then a straightforward one, a sequence I studied and adapted to myself because it's a great technique for someone with quickness and timing and who can get low and up fast and smooth and grasp the footwork. Also because it worked extremely well on my friend Topher, who suffered badly under Oakley's lash, and subsequently, under mine. He paid me back in many kinds, though. That's wrestling.

Anyway, Oakley's trick never once worked on me. I could see the arm coming a mile away, and the thing to do is loosen up out of the stance lock--which you should never fully commit to anyway, in my opinion--duck the arm like you would duck a punch and use the advantage to lock on the body from the side and take him up and back down to the mat. I must say that as I was a sophomore and Oakley was a senior, I felt no guilt about slamming him hard, and he had to develop other ways of dealing me, which I harbor some pride about. 

Topher came up to me one practice after losing to Oakley yet again. 

"Hey. Ok. How do you beat Oakley's thing?"

"What do you mean?" I have to say, I was a different person then. I knew exactly, minutely what he was talking about. He overcommitted to the lock, trying to muscle Oakley into something as quick as he could, and was helpless against Oakley's move. Couldn't avoid the arm even when he tried, couldn't get the leg away after. I was being a dick because I wanted to hear him say it. 

"The arm thing. Dude, I can see he can't get you with the arm. How are you avoiding it?"

"You just duck."

"How?"

"What are you talking about? When he goes to do the arm thing, you fuckin duck the arm." I was being earnest at this point. I'm not that bad of a dick. 

"Well, how do you see it coming?"

Now I was baffled. I mean, how do you explain better, honestly? You see it coming and you react. I don't know how else to say it, still.

"You see it coming and you react." 

Suppose now I might add "You wait for him to do it, you know he likes to do it, you know it works if it happens, so you anticipate it and you react. You know if it misses it creates an opening, and you concentrate on that, all before you even lock up, all before you even square up. This is chess. You have to chess this all before it happens and then you're fast enough easy because your eyes are faster and your brain doesn't have to think as much and you just move because the moves are already all laid out. The rest is timing. Timing."

Back then, I just said "What the fuck's so hard about that? Duck the arm!"

"Dude. I can't see it coming. He's too fucking fast. But you're not faster than me, I know because we wrestle too, so how the fuck do you do it?"

I stared at him for a few seconds, probably with my mouth open, and told him I literally didn't know how else to explain it. A simple task: dodge an incoming attack. If you can't, you fuckin can't, I guess. Back then, I was not nearly as proficient with or dedicated to the concept of empathy, and conflated mercy with pity, so I could be pretty harsh with people a lot of the time. 

*

Wrestling season overlaps with basketball season, so the game was something I left behind. In that moment, I also completely stopped giving a fuck about it even as a concept. One of those breaks so clean and complete you never think about the past of it all again, really. Until you do. 

*

Guess this has been Factually Sportsmanlike 2024? It's one of those one-offs I like to do sometimes for sure. 

In other news, I really like listening to The Electric Mayhem, formerly Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. They sound pretty good. 

--JL

*Tarzan's kind of a weird movie. Kind of uncomfortable in a lot of ways. Definitely it showcases the idea that Tarzan is like a Superhuman Noble Savage Jesus. His ability to learn English in ten canonical minutes twenty years beyond the crititcal period certainly speaks to that. Even if we accept that he's technically multilingual because he can speak animal tongues and is also some kind of ideal, natural genius in the body of a demigod, it's a pretty out-there sell.

**never mind hockey. I can skate well enough, but what the fuck is even playing hockey anyway? That shit is craaaaaazy. Hockey players come into this world with computers running a significantly different operating system than the one I got.