Cooling out, staying Melo

I’ve been having a hard time recently with comparing myself to other people. Finding myself doing too many spirals into useless territory with slow bouncing anxiety for tumbleweeds, too far off to touch, just kind of skittering at the horizon. Because there’s no reason for it, and that’s where my bigger guilt kicks in. The opportunities I’m getting, the stokes of luck that are hitting in the same place way beyond twice, the measure of happiness stacked against those things—but then that’s sort of the problem, isn’t it? The idea that comparison stops once you move past a certain marker, that satisfaction is bound to accomplishment, to effort, is finite, and knowing that those feelings are more often blips than blankets.

If I’m being honest, it’s the opposite of Staying Melo.

Carmelo Anthony made his debut in Portland this week, a year and ten days since he played his last game in Houston. Between then and now he spent a week and change in Chicago, a deal done for money—cash considerations and to keep Houston out of the tax—but he never saw the floor. I’m not sure he even saw Chicago.

Melo’s polarizing for people. Fandom for him goes parallel to his career, along boom and bust cycles and then long periods of dormancy that range on a spectrum from languishing to outright captivity. There is always a certain degree of wanting him to prove he is serious this time after a trade which, after six trades and 16 years of playing basketball, has softened, but has not run itself out.

It can feel very hard to wait. And by wait I mean what happens between blips, between your triumphs, however you measure them. Waiting is deceptive because it’s not like you are sitting on some scheduled next thing to come chugging along, waiting is working, moving incrementally toward the next thing. But we get so used to using accomplishments like hand holds and even in metaphor I’m describing this process as a climb. What if progress isn’t an up and up and up, is instead only steady going forward, or better yet swaying in several directions at once, not making your mind up as a means of self preservation, holding onto many wishes at once.

Melo is good at waiting. He did it in Denver, eight years in after asking for an out that summer, he went at the deadline to New York. New York in February, didn’t matter, Melo was going home. Then—boom and bust for seven years straight. Opting out and coming back, missing the playoffs for the first time in his career, keeping a team together that was falling apart with injuries, was festering internally in its front office with something much more terminal, getting sidelined by surgery, asking to leave.

What happened the summer of of 2017 was the first errant spark shooting out from a franchise already self-immolating. Anthony was coming off a record breaking season—23,000 career points, the 3rd player to ever score 10,000 for two separate NBA teams—seemed buoyed by Porzingis being ready, Ntilikina on the way, and the Knicks appeared to finally be feeling a momentum that could keep. Not so. Phil Jackson was going Supernova, all that zen reversing and threatening to take the team with it.

A complaint about Melo, if not directly then what it amounts to, is that he makes things too public. He’s dramatic, drags things out for all to see, is like, this harbinger for disfunction. But the opposite is true. In New York and Houston, Anthony kept the disfunction of two labouring franchises contained, the former for a long, long time and the latter with a kind of heartbreaking hope. When he demanded out of New York, finally going for the ripcord, it wasn’t a zealous move of someone who couldn’t wait, it was a measured reach. Melo must have known that was his last best chance for his last best deal, and he’d expanded his sights past Houston, to OKC and Cleveland, in order to try for it.

One perfectly fine season in Oklahoma and he was floated for cap space to Atlanta, before, it seemed like, he was finally going to get what he wanted in Houston.

As a brief aside, and I know it’s a silly thing to feel sorry for with guys still making millions, but the trend that started here of Anthony getting skipped along because his salary was going to bloat a team past luxury tax is a bummer one. Mostly because it signals decline, where value no longer matches the pinch that might be easier to ignore if a player were, say, Kawhi Leonard or even better, Pascal Siakam—someone still to peak and who presumably has more excellent years than just fine ones ahead of them. Anyway.

According to Mike D’Antoni, Anthony did everything the team asked of him. Played every position, working to find a fit alongside Harden and what seemed a team with this recurring, nervous tic. He said the fit they envisioned for Anthony never materialized, but then how specific of a fit could that have been, if they couldn’t even figure out where to put him? Melo isn’t a chimera player. He’s a scorer. You put him where he’s going to have opportunities to do that. What he wasn’t was probably a good buffer between Harden and Chris Paul, so last November the Rockets put Melo on ice. They didn’t waive him initially, they “parted ways”. It was the conscious uncoupling of basketball and Melo, once more, was waiting. He would until January 2019 when Houston finally cut him loose, and then waited some more, all summer and fall, before injury would force Portland to ask him to do the only thing Melo ever wanted to—play basketball.

At least, until Damian Lillard gets well, or CJ McCollum gets back in the swing, Hassan Whiteside remembers how to work, or Anfernee Simmons gets a little harder to spook, plus any other variable that could come as soon as next month or as long as a whole season that would turn this Portland team back into the one it looked like on paper. Ironically, Melo could be the cause of his own cutting this time. If he comes in marginally hot, can ballast this team, and any one of those factors comes true. ‘Cause with his non-guarantee deal Melo’s the equivalent of a basketball mercenary, a tourniquet, back long enough to get the job done, to staunch a team from bleeding out this early in the season.

What shook me out of my own glum spiral ended up being electric blue.

Melo in the tunnel, heading toward his second game. His face framed in a colour that is supposed to signal in our brains commitment, trust, even keel, dependability. His face, forward, full of resolve, softened by a steadiness that suggests the wait has been worth it, that the wait has lightened considerably how heavy the pressure, has brought in the kind of levity that only comes with having gone through it (and gone through it, and through it).

Staying Melo, to me, has come to mean a readied state of suspension. The work that goes into waiting. The lull between luck, or hitting your mark, where the natural momentum of motivation will lurch and stall and you gotta keep jump-starting yourself, however you will. Using comparison, because I don’t believe there’s anybody who can get all the way away from it, as a motivator until it starts to send you backward isn’t bad. But it’s a fine line of chasing what you set out to catch and leaning too far into somebody else’s lane.

The thing I still forget, that I really should know better by now, is that I require periods of isolation, getting all the way out of whatever I have going on, especially the pressing things, to stay in. It feels like taking a mental lap, cooling out, and when I get back whatever had wound too tight—to other people, my own expectations—comes loose. It always feels like there’s more to work with.

Accomplishment, while difficult, isn’t hard. The moving past your own accomplishments, going beyond your proudest points, not lingering for the sake of identity, is hard. Preservation is hard. Knowing what you want, what you won’t get, what you want but won’t say out loud, why you are pressing yourself against other people—strangers—and looking down at your differences as you would with your silhouette on the sidewalk, cast out and cutting an impressive shape about four feet taller than you, where you might never catch or have the light disappear trying to, that is what will wear you out. The way to cope can be tendering, it can also be not gentle at all. Telling yourself enough by physically removing the bridge by which you compare. Putting down the phone. Checking out. Taking a walk and feeling no better, so taking a longer one.

And when you’re ready again you show up to the tunnel in your own equivalent of a full suited electric blue.