My niece, who was born in 92, has just told me that everyone her age likes GNR’s “Sweet Child O’Mine” because it’s a classic. A bit of reflection reveals that, to her, Appetite For Destruction must seem exactly as old as Abbey Road does to me.
For some reason this bit of arithmetic makes me feel older than I ever have in my life.
Bleh.
Has this line ever been said before, do you think?
There will come a time when I feel like shit and say: you know what, fucker, I’m having a pizza. Often this comes on a Sunday afternoon after I’ve pissed away a weekend and have another week of toil and looming obligation to look forward to. Also, Autumns are bad.
The key element, though, is that once I start down this road I know what’s coming next and there are no possible surprises: I’ll go to Angeno’s, eat the pizza, feel briefly good, then feel awful, physically and mentally, for the next twelve hours or so. As I pause in my kitchen, car keys in hand, I can see this with perfect clarity. And then I leave anyway, and it all falls out the way I have foreseen.
*
This is the closest I can get to describing the feeling I had sitting through the second quarter of last night’s Timberwolves game. I knew what was going to happen; I knew how I was going to feel about it.
*
Kevin Love wound up with thirty-one points and thirty-one rebounds. I’ve read that the game wasn’t on TV, so you might think you know how someone goes about getting thirty points and thirty rebounds, which hasn’t been done in 28 years. But you’d be wrong.
The reason you’d be wrong is because Kevin Love did not bust his ass the whole game as a relentless scorer and rebound-getter. He had zero points and two rebounds at the beginning of the second quarter; he opened the game bricking shots, shuffling back on defense, and in general playing like he was helping his brother-in-law resurface a hardwood floor: you can’t really not show up, but you don’t have to like it.
At one point in the third quarter, when they were down by around twenty, I suggested to Chad that the Wolves should show one of the games being played by some other team on the Jumbotron, so that we’d have something to watch. He agreed that was a fine idea. Then we talked about Tiger Woods for a while.
*
So basically, Love’s historic 30-30 game happened in three quarters. This is what I don’t get — how the same player can phone it in, and then bust his ass at the highest possible level of ass-busting. During a stoppage in the fourth Love was hunched over panting, hands on knees, and appeared to not even know where he was.
“Imagine if he played hard all four quarters,” I said.
“No way,” Chad said. ”If he’d played the first quarter, too, he’d be dead by now.”
*
The other thing is that I’d like to invite Darko to come over to my house. We can get pizza, watch an episode of Arrested Development. That poor guy. I’m not even mad at him, and you shouldn’t be either. He’s trying, and he’s pretty good defensively.
Darko moves around the court not really looking anybody in the eye, playing hard but not getting excited. It’s like when Metallica got that new bassist, and they still rocked, but even in the midst of it that guy was always on the outside. Darko is like that, except minus the group success. It’s as if something inside him broke and then set wrong, and now he’s mangled. This isn’t even about basketball now, which is why I’m not upset.
If anyone knows Darko, tell him I want to have him over. Monica will make cookies, it will be just a nice evening. We can all relax.
Peaches suggested I do game wrap-ups. Since I have nothing else to say that’s appropriate for public consumption, maybe I will. I’ll at least do this one. It might help if I don’t try to be authoritative or do too good a job. With that disclaimer, here’s some stuff you might not have known.
1) White Guys
The Wolves _have to_ be the whitest team in the league now. Ridnour, Love, Milicic, Koufos, Pekovic. Five out of fifteen are white, and none of them is some token ‘three point specialist.’ All get real minutes. Is any other team even close to this? I can’t think of one.
2) Height
The Wolves are suddenly tall. They suddenly have a bunch of giant guys guarding the paint and blocking and changing shots. I don’t think I have ever seen a Wolves team who could assemble that kind of wall inside.
3) Defense
After one quarter my opinion was: son of a bitch. Here we go again.
After two quarters, and through the rest of the game, my thought was: am I watching a team of android dopplegangers?
Could this really be the Wolves? Because their defense was, at times, extraordinary, mostly the flavor of extraordinary that results from having a bunch of giant white guys in the paint. Milicic is very, very good defensively, which I’d heard but didn’t really believe — good at showing and recovering on pick and rolls, good at falling back to challenge stuff. Pekovic is also good. Koufos is also good. Corey Brewer, once he got into it, is an amazing nuisance, and even Beasley was great: active hands, sneaky, good anticipation, very smart. Love is somehow the best rebounder in the NBA, which isn’t exactly defense but sort of is.
4) Offense
The Wolves seemed way better running a kind of triangle-ish offense than I remember from before. Ball movement was generally very fluid, and Darko looked comfortable in the pivot with the two guys cutting around him. Beasley is really crafty: likes his spin moves, creates a lot of contact on drives. Could this be the first Wolves team that gets to the line? Swoon.
5) Darko
Darko is quite the mixed bag. He’s way bigger than I used to think; he’s way better defensively than I used to think. But his offense is among the worst I have ever seen — his single move is a kind of abortive hooky thing from six feet, which I say ‘hooky’ because it’s not properly any kind of real hook, more a “release the ball above my head” flailing kind of shot that never once went in. I mean, it’s almost eery how devoid his game is of any kind of offensive mechanics or artistry.
6) Love
Love is, in my mind, one of the biggest puzzles in the NBA. Looking at him you’d think he worked at a gas station; and yet somehow he manages to be the best rebounder in the entire league. He manages to get to the right place at the right time and when the ball’s released he works his ass off to get to it. It’s like the guy’s schizophrenic, in fact: I’d say about 70% of the time he absolutely busts his ass, and he’s all hustle. The other 30% he’s not exactly sulking, but sort of. How can those two qualities live in the same person?
Anyway, maybe next semester when I have some time I’ll dust off the play by play code I wrote last year and do some statistical analysis, because I can tell already that Love’s the kind of player who’s way more valuable than shows up in box scores: he moves the ball well in ways that don’t result in assists; he positions himself in ways that take rebounds away from guys who would normally get them; and he not only scores a substantial amount of his own points on offensive rebounds, but draws fouls in the process, thereby getting the other team’s players in foul trouble, and the other team in the penalty. Guys like this win championships on the sly, regardless of who appears to be the hero by hitting the game-winner.
7) Idiots sitting behind us
Once again I had the good fortune to sit right next to some douchebags rooting for the other team, and not only that, but one of them could yell super loud, and was not shy about using this gift. He missed a calling as a rock star or opera singer to focus on being a fat choad in a baseball cap who supports the Bucks. Which has got to wear on you during those reflective moments.
8) Summary
It’s way too early to tell, obviously, but this is an intriguing team with a huge upside. And aside from basketball, there’s a lot of human drama afoot — particularly, a kind of redemption story for Beasley and Milicic; a ‘growing up and becoming a man’ opportunity for Love. It’s like a very complicated kind of cake that could turn out super good or super shitty. Actually that’s a crap metaphor, I don’t know what to compare it to. But at least they’re interesting, there’s the possibility for good things to happen; and seems like forever since I’ve been able to say that about the Wolves.
I’ve picked up some contracting work to help us through the lean times and I’m learning JQuery. Until this point I’ve never used Javascript or JQuery at all, which will become important later.
The JQuery ‘hello world’ equivalent is basically this:
$(document).ready(function() {
alert('Suck it.');
});
If you stick that in a file, stick the appropriate script tag in your .html code, and run it, it pops up a window that says: “suck it.” in your browser. Super duper, right?
What interested me was my own thinking process as I figured all this out. Remember, I don’t know Javascript or JQuery; I’ve never done client-side web development before. All of this is new territory. But when I read that little code snippet posted above, what I thought to myself was: “Okay, so I’m doing a selector at the document node in the DOM tree; and I’m installing an anonymous function into the ‘ready’ callback.”
Now, that needn’t mean anything to you; and in fact, it’s probably not exactly right. But it’s MOSTLY right, and this is the remarkable part: that I have enough experience in other languages to recognize, at a conceptual level, what’s going on here. And not only to recognize it, but to grasp it quickly and automatically. Having grasped this bit of logic — that there are apparently lambda functions (to use the lisp parlance) that can be created and passed around in this way, I can bring to bear a significant amount of expertise. It’s like downloading a bunch of knowledge from somebody’s else’s brain, except it’s from my own brain. From my past to my present.
I remember the first time I was trying to learn C, in tenth grade. Hello world in K&R C looks like this:
#include <stdio.h>
main(argc, argv) {
int argc;
char **argv;
printf("Suck it!\n");
}
I might have screwed this up, because K&R C got replaced by ANSI C sometime in the mid-90s, but the idea is the same. Right now this is as familiar to me as English, but at the time it was a complete conundrum. All these squiggly brackets and asterisks and shit. Huh?
Of course, in between then and now is god knows how much water — lots of experience, lots of education, lots of screwing around. And _this_, more than anything, is what is remarkable to me, this vast collected archive we’re all carting around in our heads, and that informs our current actions quickly and automatically, that not only colors how we see the world but which actually defines the objects that are perceived in the first place. (This is not poetic license, it’s literally true, but it would take too long to go into the neuroscience.)
It’s easy to forget how much has gone into the person you happen to be at the moment, at the deep well of your expertise no matter what you’ve been doing with your life. I would do well to remember this, and to more frequently consider the implications.
Janet Fitch writes about writing dialogue:
Dialogue is only for conflict.
It’s like a racehorse, it can’t just carry any old thing, the pots and pans and old tires. You can’t heap all your expository business on it, the meet and greet, all that yack. It’s just for the conflict between one character and another. That’s it.
So if characters agree, you don’t need dialogue! If someone’s just buying a donut, nobody needs to say anything. That’s what narrative is for.
Also, great dialogue in fiction isn’t screenplay. In fiction you can just tell us what people are thinking, they don’t need to say the obvious. In fact, the most interesting fictional dialogue has people thinking one thing and saying another. That’s what gives your scene dimension, and it’s super fun to do.
The question in dialogue is always, who wins and who loses. Who is putting pressure on who, and how.
Dialogue works best in short bursts, three or five lines, then go back into the other tools of writing–landscape, internal thought, memory, observation, gesture and so on.
Keep it short. People don’t generally speak in full sentences. And nobody gets to make a speech, unless it increases the tension of the scene–where I’m waiting to see if you’re going to get me on that plane and don’t dare interrupt your long story about your grandmother’s prize apple pie.
I’m not sure how I feel about the ‘only for conflict’ thing — for me to agree we’d have to broaden the definition of ‘conflict’ so far that it would wind up being useless — but the last bit, about keeping it short, addresses one of my principle irritations in literature. Especially old literature. I _hate_ speechifying, where characters who hate each other stand around and give two page speeches about how much they hate each other, or deliver ten minute orations, or whatever. Nobody does that; nobody has ever done that. If you want to do that, write something else. Write an essay. I don’t want that shit in my fiction any more than I want raisins in my chocolate chip cookies. Which doesn’t mean that it’s A Rule that you can’t do it; only that if you do it, it will suck, in the same way that if you try to write in a vernacular you don’t really know, that will suck.
I want to think about the “think one thing, say another” bit, though.
I spend a significant amount of time being the crazy dude who came to someone else’s classroom to talk about how poetry is amazing. Right now, I’m the commencement speaker. I promise, in three hours, I’ll be the guy who looks uncomfortable in a tie on the downtown 4 train. The way it feels to live a life that can only be yours is never as clean as whatever label this world attaches to you. If you are alive — Is every person here alive?… If you are alive in this world, you can attest. What it feels like to be you is more complicated than what it looks like to be you.
So, is there ever a time you are more yourself than when doing what you love – with the people you love? Who you are exists in what you love. It is how you tell the children you have yet to bring into this world the person you were today. To tell the you who will exist 20 years from now what it felt like to close the locker door on your high school years.
From here. I’ll have more to say later.
“I don’t really know that liquor will cure all the ills in our society. But two or three slugs often cure our curious inability to know each other. Unless we know people well, we sit around with our words and our minds starched, afraid of being ourselves for fear of wrinkling them.”
—Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?
Hat tip: Jake Seliger.
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth.
None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.
Over the years I’ve heard many live recordings of Love Me Tender. The “official single” — the one you hear on the radio — is noteworthy as the only performance where Elvis does it straight.
In all the other ones he fucks it up. Either he breaks out laughing in the middle of it, or he inserts alternate words. Instead of “You have made my laugh complete” he’ll say: “You have made my life a wreck” or something of the kind.
At first I though this was just a funny little thing. But then, as I heard more and more of the live recordings, I realized that he did it every time. He _always_ fucked it up.
So my question is: why? What’s the story behind this? Because there must be one.