The crux of control
What and how it is to be known, plus reveling in the unknowns right before the NBA season.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what it is to be known, and at how many levels. What the thresholds are where you can move to shorthand with someone, or assume your point is taken through whatever medium of communication you’re using, and more than your point, but the delivery. How someone will or won’t picture your face when reading what you wrote them, or listening to your voice on the phone, or what they’ll see plain on it if they’re looking right at it. I’ve been thinking about it because it’s felt like I’ve been having a harder time communicating, or find myself hesitating, tripping up, losing words when I go looking for them, all where I normally wouldn’t.
I don’t mean how you’re known, as in the perception people have of you, because that’s an endless exercise in self-duplicity as much as it is impossible to pin or do much about. I mean what it is to know someone, or to feel that back from another person, sure as both your bones and just as much something you can press on for assurance.
Sometimes, I think these spans of cognizant blundering or feeling blocked up can signal stages of growth, or in-betweens. Clarity of thought goes cloudy because the perception of self gets slippery, more elusive, when shifting between what was and what might come next. I try, hard, not to beat myself up about them, and understand by now I tend to have these metamorphic blips around my birthday. But it’s still a difficult thing to feel or to see that you aren’t being received or understood in the way you’ve set out to be, like you’re spinning out past reference points and intention, because it can feel you’ve lost that fundamental thing intrinsic to just about everything there is in being human: to be seen, heard, known.
Basketball has made me known in ways I’d never expect. Marginally, diminutively known, but still, to some, to more than before, known.
I’m always a little shocked when I hear things that highlight it. Like when a friend of a friend will tell a closer friend who tells me they heard me on the radio while they were driving, and that friend will say they said something like, “Yeah, she’s on there all the time” (not true), or an agent tells me they knew of me before we were introduced.
It doesn’t exactly feel out of body when it happens, but it does make me, for a minute, picture myself out of my body, abstracted. My voice filling up somebody’s car or my name, formalized and attached to work, reflecting it, becoming just the work. When I think about it I feel, briefly, like two people. Me, wherever I am and whatever I’m doing in that moment and then this perception, always a little more polished.
There were two funny, entirely sweet instances of this recently, one leap-frogging the next within the same week. The first, on my way to dinner with Steph, a guy stopped walking down the train to stand in front of where I was sitting on the subway long enough that I looked up, popped one headphone out.
“Basketball Feelings?” He asked.
Admittedly, there’d been a bracing on my part. Too many times being on the receiving end of something unwanted in circumstances exactly like this. So I was slower to register, to smile, laugh and say yeah, yes.
He nodded and lifted his hand up in a solidarity fist. I said thanks man, and he turned and kept walking down the car. I told Steph when I got to dinner and her big eyes got wider, surprised and sparking with the same kind of disbelief as me. A little bit like, what’s to even say about this? (Which is why, I’ll say, what the guy did on the subway was perfect.)
The next was at Richard’s birthday party, after I’d given a speech I had a hard time reading out of my notebook for how my eyes kept watering. Two different cousins of his came up smiling, saying they felt a bit starstruck, saying “We’ve been googling you back there”, motioning paper plates with slices of cake on them at the bar’s small garden patio out back. Cousins I’ve met and said quiet hellos to at Christmas parties, funerals, louder hellos to on the arena concourse, now placed in another context by the small world I’ve built for myself in basketball bouncing out. Cousins who aren’t even the cousin who is an active subscriber of this newsletter (hi Nick!)
That night ended how it started, me hugging Richard and reversing my steps out onto the street, trailing Rachel and Yusef and thinking, as I tend to picture, our friendships as constellation. How the things we might know ourselves best by at any given moment won’t be how we’re known to each other, and the grounding comfort of that.
With Steph, life crowded in with the evening and we moved on. I chattered with the chill, which came on with the evening, too, and when I walked Steph to her car she took off the long denim shirt she had on as a jacket and handed it to me so I could shrug it over my bare shoulders. Heading home on the train, little stirrings of her perfume wafted around me whenever I turned a page of my book. Something so snug about being wrapped up in the physical shroud of someone who knows you best, cloying almost in how self-satisfying. All your layers that they’ve peeled back and now here you are, pulling one of theirs on over top.
There’s such a heady rush to know in the beginning of an NBA season. To know who the contenders are going to be, to know who it’ll be fine to ignore. To know what the standings will be, the conference and league leaders, to predict an outcome eight months away. To know the difficult matchups, the interesting teams, the money stuff, to smooth out the wrinkles that haven’t happened yet.
A lot of it is excitement, face value. I wonder if some of it is control. To make sense of a small, somewhat contained universe inside our own, the crux of that control always hinging on forgetting the figures inside of it we’re trying to predict are people who step in and out of it every night.
The exercise of predictions and previews, and the intricacies of these things even when they’re predicated on pure fantasy. That is, circumstances made up about things that have yet to happen, things that don’t exist yet. Predictive NBA dialogue can be more robust than even the most complicated fantasy or sci-fi novels, because it all relies on a pre-existing framework the producers assume the reader or listener will already understand by heart. A knowledge of characters and chronology, themes, laws of outcome, states of governance and rules of physics (physics rejected the night before last by Dalano Banton and Blake Griffin both hovering horizontal for a very long second). A basketball version of the maps at the beginning of books about dragons.
It’s the one place, thing, world or future I don’t want to know what happens in. To me, the up-in-the-airness of this time, days out from the season start and the preseason only an indicator that this world is back and functioning, is the best part. What can happen now that anything can?
You have to guess who I’m being, Rei says smiling, it’s someone we’re both obsessed with.
That doesn’t really narrow it down, I say, meaning it, but also feeling my brain take off like a racing gun has sounded, trying to run through all the options.
I’ve already got the costumes for the kids, who are on the couch in a straight-backed row, attentive to Mario Party on the TV but still softly pliable into each other the way that kids are. The last time I was over, two years at least, Rei’s son, deciding I could be trusted, pulled out a shoe box of treasures from under his bed to show me — rocks, feathers, little family heirlooms that had come into his possession — now he moves and talks in that affable, a little bit eye-rolling way pre-pre-teen boys do. Rachel’s two are so big since I’ve last seen them. T, chatty and self-possessed and C, sweet and shy, just five, but as tall as the eight year olds. I love how it escapes me, that these children were babies I held or serious kids I listened to as they explained things intently to me, that these children are my friends’ children, because the realization will crash over me anew with a high-pitched shriek they let out, an expression they make, how comfortable they are with themselves, or something else that runs like a current between them and their parents. Not that it makes them into versions in miniature of them, my friends, but that it makes them up as entirely new people.
Okay but, Rei leans grinning over the table toward me, we are the only two people obsessed with this person. There is no one who thinks about this person more than us.
Instantly, the wheeling of my brain brakes. A name settles with more assurance than if she had asked me the day’s date.
Oh, Rasputin.
Her arms shoot up and I feel it too, the triumph in knowing someone, especially in your dumbest interludes.
😭❤️ love this