Today has been a long time coming. It started last year when I came to LeBron’s defense after he was excoriated by the media not only for leaving Cleveland for Miami, but the manner in which he did it. My disgust with the media backlash at LeBron led me to follow the NBA regular season more closely than I’d ever done, hoping that LeBron’s play with his new all-star teammates would vindicate his decision, and that his conduct throughout the year would bear out the thoughtful, savvy, respectful person he seemed to be. Both things have happened. The Heat, in their first tumultuous season together, have survived the grueling test of the regular season, the crucible of the Eastern Conference playoffs and stand at the brink of the NBA Finals. Throughout the year LeBron has been nothing but classy, regularly giving credit to his opponents and never letting the scrutiny or the criticism affect the composure with which he carried himself or the quality of his play.
Archive for May, 2011
Mavs Beat the Heat? I Think So
Tuesday, May 31st, 2011
Tribe-less
Monday, May 30th, 2011I have never been part of a tribe. It struck me as I was looking through photos on Facebook of a wedding my brother attended this weekend. It was a good friend of his from high school, a friend of his who was in his tribe, an extension of boys, now men, who, for reasons that I still don’t fully understand, considered themselves a tribe. The word you use is inconsequential: tribe, clique, gang. Hell, even family might fit there, but whatever you call it, I’ve never had it. Read the rest »
Self-Portrait III – My Belly
Sunday, May 29th, 2011Somewhere out there, buried in a forgotten box tucked away inside an abandoned closet already full of things floating on the edge of abandonment, the limnal space between wanting to remember and needing to forget, there is a photo of me in my youth, 18 years old. My arm is wrapped around my first real love, the girl who would become my first true broken heart. The wound I left untended festered for years, its fumes producing a kind of intoxication, an impenetrable Delphic nostalgia against which nothing measured up, whose abyssal sense of loss I treasured much longer than was healthy for me or for the her that existed beyond the mythology I did not want see through. The photo was taken at school, after hours. I had finished with volleyball practice, and she was still in the yearbook room working on a deadline. It was a loopy kind of afternoon merging into early evening, the unusual feeling of being a usually strict place without much supervision or regulation. At some point that evening, somewhere in my things I discovered a tie, the one I wore in my senior pictures, and tied it around my head bandanna style. The absurdity of my bleached blonde hair combed upward, hommage a Kramer, set off by my refashioning of the tie is difficult to describe, and is in some ways inconsequential; it was high school and I didn’t care, or perhaps more accurately, I wanted everyone to know that I didn’t care. Read the rest »
Self-Portrait II: My Forehead
Monday, May 23rd, 2011There is a disfigurement in the center of my forehead, a small lump and a tiny star-shaped scar. I got it when I was 7 or 8 years old. We had just moved to Southern California and were living in a shitty two bedroom condo in a complex called Countryside. Its cruelly ironic moniker another example of the wishful naming culture of Southern California and reminds me of the diatribe of Wesley Snipes’ wife in White Men Can’t Jump (a staple of my youth) about living in the Vista View apartments: “There ain’t no vista, there ain’t no view, and there sure as hell ain’t no vista of no views!”
Self-Portrait I: The Top of My Head
Sunday, May 22nd, 2011The top of my head is bald, balding really. I keep my hair shorn, shaving it weekly or semi-weekly, depending on how motivated I am. It’s color is uninspiring, unmemorable, a dark blonde or brown. Maybe just brown; any trace of blonde has long since leeched away, and including it in my description is an aspiration to my past, a fragment of the boy I still remember myself to be, often catch myself thinking I am.