Losing the sun

Disorientation and the difference in skill, psyche and seriousness of the NBA's East and West going into the playoffs.

Since getting home from Texas I’ve had a couple nights where, waking in the middle of them, I’ve got no idea where I am. Most of us have experienced this, probably remember it most from when we were kids and we moved, or went on vacation, or stayed over at a friend’s place. That feeling of struggling just below an awareness that’s out of reach, so disorienting and scary when you’re younger, turned into a panic less piercing as we get older and our existence isn’t tied to one specific place for identity, security, anchor. For everything.

I travel a decent amount, and have lived in a few different places distinct enough in their look, sounds and other sensory markers that my brain loosened up early on keeping locational tabs. There’s also been times waking, in the quiet of the small hours to silence or in the morning of a place coming awake, and that first disorientation is its own small, private pleasure. Like the night’s steady rain finally tapering off and the smell of wet, green earth and frangipani rising with the sun in Santa Teresa. Or the smell of coffee and cheerful chattering of Yusef’s daughter warmly spreading through the old, worn cracks of the house in Queens. The quiet thrill in remembering you are, just then, still away.

The sensation I had this week was so alien compared to any confusion I’ve had before in straddling that line between asleep and awake. A line that usually begins to dissolve, like the last tide line on a beach before the next set of waves washes up, the second you become aware of it. It was a disorientation so deep that I couldn’t distinguish, first, whether I was awake or not, and then, as my squinting eyes slid over the walls of the bedroom in the dark and settled on what I’d normally recognize — the straw purse I got with Steph in Mexico City hanging on my closet door, a photo on my dresser of my mom painting in front of Georgian Bay, the dumb little pleated lamp I got from AliExpress — I only had the sensation of observing these things like they were under glass. The disorientation ran so deep that I felt like instead of swimming up to the surface of awareness I knew I’d eventually break, I felt like I was hovering above it. Like I’d missed that crucial consciousness checkpoint and had crossed into a completely different state and was now bound forever to its rules.

I want to say I stayed that way for 10 minutes, but it was probably just under one. It felt like 10 minutes, not because I was growing panicked, but because I felt myself becoming more resigned to whatever the limbo was the longer it lasted. So resigned that my brain gave up trying to pull me out and instead put me back under, because I woke to bright sun and the dogs groaning awake however many hours later.

I was overtired, definitely. Had just spent two weeks working on the road and every day filling my head with new stimulus and people, on not much sleep. There’s something, too, in our place still not feeling settled to me (after I just wrote that our homes become less singular as we get older, I know). Anyway, please don’t somebody tell me it was a psychotic break, is mostly what I’m saying.

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Disorientation, at its most 17th century primitive, means “to turn from the east”. Orient, derived from the Latin oriens, meaning east. Dis, the Latin prefix for lack of, or not.

The east, the point of the rising sun, the surest way to understand your position in accordance with the world and the direction you’re holding within it. Your bearing, be it active in the way you’re going or how you’re holding yourself up to the pressures of the world, becomes the crucial way of staying oriented. To misstep, to buckle, to go momentarily off course, is to lose the notion of the world and your place within it.

No wonder, even now, that to stumble, make an error, have a lapse, can feel like losing the sun.

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Looking out over the league, on the last day of many franchises’ regular seasons and with the playoffs locked and looming, disorientation feels like a fine way to put the state of things.

Dallas, woo doggy. Top of mind because I was just there, but top of mind because Mark Cuban won’t give it a rest. We all must know, by now, what the crux of the Mavericks’ problems are. Long-standing dilemmas rarely get smaller, and Cuban et. al have danced around their disfunction for a long while now. Hard to believe that Luka Doncic’s first season was just five years ago, the same season the Raptors would go on to win the title, the season proceeding the Bubble and, not to glance over it for the sake of basketball’s tidy time-framing, a raging pandemic.

In all but his rookie year, and now this, Doncic has made the playoffs. As maddening as it must have felt to Mavs fans, it felt like exacting, perfect hubris for the night the team would officially call their season (literally, head coach Jason Kidd said the team planned to “play until they were told otherwise, and today was the day that we’ve been told that we’re gonna do something different”) to be Slovenia Night — the night meant to celebrate their perennial, now potentially collapsing, star. If the only point of Cuban’s bizarre, impromptu pregame courtside chat four days ago, and the team failing at their protested loss to the Warriors, was to signal competitiveness, or desperate resiliency, then it all went out the widow in the decision to sit the starting lineup in the games since.

If I feel for the Mavs then it’s for the players, who have expended so much effort this season, most times way too arduously, first to improve, then to stay static, then to claw their way back to where they were, and finally just to keep their heads above water. It must be exasperating, to see the physical toll such a waste of a work year has taken, and to intellectually know it was for nothing. The semantics of whatever Cuban and Kidd and the rest are saying rendered wholly redundant in how finite the average NBA career.

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Waking last night to cramps tearing out from my abdomen, uterus basically made into macerating teeth, my eyes picked out a searing dot in the dark out the balcony windows. A star, so bright my eyes had to first blink against it, pummelling through a perfect punched out break in the canopy of cedars.

We’d come up north for the long weekend, surprised to find so much snow and the lake the cottage is on still frozen, but not solid enough to walk on. At the shore, the lengthening of the sun each day has pared away the ice, leaving a perfectly traced line of freezing cold water, and the rivulets of thaw on the road and in the woods gurgle away by day and freeze solid in the night. Every day is a cycle of the same, nudging toward spring.

The star gives me something to focus on while I get energy up enough to feel my way to the bathroom in the dark and get painkillers. After I do, I lie back down and let my eyes come to focus on it again. When I younger I used to get such bad upset stomachs and I remember my mom once telling me to focus on the pain. That to focus on the waves and qualities of it as it sharpened to intensity and then let go was almost meditative (to also take painkillers, we’re not masochists). The pain, as you wait for whatever you have to dull it or take it away for a while, its own orientation.

I fell asleep staring at the star. When I woke the next time the moon, just past full, was up on the other side of the cottage because all the trees through the window were washed in a pale milk glow and the star was gone. The pain was too. Without either I felt, for a moment, adrift. Dazzled by light but not sure which way the night was going.

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The East is going to be a gauntlet. Even in the play-in, no team is going to have it easy. How much better the Eastern Conference has turned out to be this season, while daunting for the fight it’s going to be for whichever team comes out of it, is regimented, oriented in its difficulty. The ambition, the technical skill, the fine-tuning of both these things all season has made for compass point perfection in its leaders. The Bucks, so severely workaday, no understanding of what it means to clock out. The Celtics, closer to Roman legion, locked into quiet and deadly formation; the Sixers, steely and the correct kind of desperate. The Cavs haven’t lost their joy or velocity but now understand control, what a pleasure it is to toy with opponents.

As the playoff picture squares up, turning from the East is where things get messy.

To point: the Knicks’ exact parallel in Western Conference standings are the Clippers. There are no similarities there. The jump between .531 and .580 never more steep (the difference, strangely, reads more daunting as a 4.9 per cent differential than if it was an even 5).

There is no team in the West best suited to play the winner of the East. The Kings could run some circles around the Celtics before Boston decides to clamp down, the Suns could get some shooting in on the Sixers, but all I can picture, if I place the Nuggets next to the Bucks, is Denver withering under the by then bruised, banged up, and somehow more assured still stare of Milwaukee. Not by lack of talent, but by lack of tempering all season. They just don’t stack up.

Though there’s this overarching sense that the West has always held the heaviest hitters (and yes, it does have the most modern dynasties), the East holds 40 titles to the West’s 36. To turn from the East, in NBA terms this season, more of a freewheeling state of suspension. The rules and logic of what constitutes “good” in the West don’t follow the same parameters, fix to the same compass, as what it took to get here in the East.

To turn to the East coming out of the West, well we’ll see it soon enough but the etymology and natural laws might just shift. To look to the sun for position and purpose and find it instead a blinding, squinting doom. To look to the east and have the lights go out.