Exits: Getting the best out of a body

Forever wars, the bizarre fallacy of wealth and altruism, Steve Ballmer's $2 billion character investment and Kawhi Leonard, in stark relief.

You can have it all but how much do you want it? — Oasis, ‘Supersonic’

Driving home from my dad’s birthday party, the sky shifting from lurid Kool-Aid pink to blazing red at the horizon, hundreds of cotton ball clouds suspended in colour. We were two turns off my parents street when Dylan tells me the U.S. bombed Iran.

Why can’t it be enough, Dylan says, the hypothetical already ripped out the open windows. Why can’t it be enough to look at the world, he motions to the sky, the clouds, the tumbling green of Scarborough treetops dense along the edge of the highway, And want to live? Want to let people just live?

Highway to Hell is playing on the radio.

---

What do I remember about 9/11 — is this what we’re doing? Rehashing our last forever war as the next unfolds?

I was in drama class, King Lear tented open on my desk. The teacher wheeled the TV in before they sent us home. Rumours in the hall: the CN Tower, a target. Over lunch, news reports. The same clip — shaky handheld camcorder catching the split-second shadow of a plane tail from Lower Manhattan — playing on CBC, CNN, over and over.

What muddies after that is the rest; “the rest” being the two decade that followed. I was 16 then I was 20, then I was 26, the U.S. left Iraq, elected Barack Obama, stayed in Afghanistan through Trump’s first term, then Biden’s. I was 36 when the U.S. left Afghanistan, a week and a half after my first NBA All-Star in Chicago, two weeks before the NBA shut down and the pandemic really got rolling. The costs, astronomical.

What muddies is partially due to my vantage point — a Canadian teenager into young adult pre cell phone, speed of the internet practically languishing compared to now. What were my reference points, really, moving cities, going to school, getting first big jobs and meeting the people I wanted to know for the rest of my life? I have a photo I took at Ground Zero on a film camera from a trip to New York. The demolition work of the towers was not yet finished. Jutting up from behind the hoarding wall were two steel beams perched on a lone concrete column, one clipped and crossing the other close to the top. All three exposed points of the beams ragged, one corkscrewed with force and all of it backlit by the day’s setting sun. Heavy handed of me to frame it in the viewfinder, I knew, even then, but a reference, even if it was borrowed.

What muddies is also the point. To tire the public out, loosen first the correct impulse of disapproval, dull the notion of protest, and finally swap the feeling of doubt for apathy. It gets easier the longer it takes, to slip off the world’s collective attention one finger at a time, let it tumble away. It’s even easier now with how breakneck our news cycle and the favour of our blip-short attention spans offered to the reckless, indulgent, publicly cruel and privately terrified people making these decisions. Consent on a silver platter.

The whole of our lives, war in one region. For profit, proliferation — of fear, justification, more conflict — for a brief flex of power; war for war’s sake. When everyone is your enemy you can never be blamed for dropping the first bomb, blanking out personhood. People become targets, vague numbers, casualties. Human features blur into abstract composites.

Bizarre to me how the playbook stays the same. The othering of an entire population to gain tacit approval for their destruction, derived from falsified fear. Bizarre because now, with the flick of our fingers, we can find the mirror mundanities of people living in the crosshairs of this new war — videos of their morning routines, commutes, oversharing like the rest of us. We can see there are no differences. Evidence immediate, right there in our own hands. A GRWM to launch a thousand ships.

If all you want is entertainment/If you can't have it you make hell — Fontaines D.C., ‘Jackie Down The Line’

You probably already know about the toilets? 1,000 of them.

Steve Ballmer didn’t want any Clippers fan to wait in line when nature called them away from the game, so he built for volume.

Volume was also top-of-mind for the team’s new 3rd quarter intro song, scored by Hans Zimmer, and in the decibel-registering sensors that scan the arena, down to the seat, for the loudest fans. Isolate, I think, the vibration and constancy of their cheers so they can be rewarded “with a free hamburger at the next game,” as Ballmer put it to 60 Minutes.

Ballmer spent $2 billion building the Intuit Dome, the same amount he spent buying the Clippers in 2014. A song, if you’re singing it now, when the team they once shared an arena with (the impetus for Intuit) just sold for $10 billion.