Throwing bones
Burdens of proof, in life lately and in late-season basketball.
A night this week, I took a long walk out in the dark. Cutting north and north and north over streets I’d never set foot on in the year-plus it’s been since moving to this part of the city, one I still feel out of step in, with the strange, premature spring weather urging me on.
The further I went the more everything behind me dropped away, including the familiar organization of streets. The orderly grids of the city gave way to roads that curved along rambling frontages, sidewalks vanishing and streetlights becoming erratic, if there at all. Light came pooling out of the large houses and I stopped to look in on the interiors I could, over and through sparse winter hedges and where heavy curtains weren’t drawn. Even if they were ornately, or contemporarily decorated — lamps with the presence of people, heavy marble and wooden tables, low-slung chairs in leather oversized as a single bed — most places looked empty. Cars came rarely if at all.
Overhead, the bare branches of very old trees reached into the road, into each other, twining and shaking in gusts of warm wind like animals loosening themselves up to run. Overhead, the moon in full and flushed brassy gold, rising.
And here’s Klay Thompson, sitting quiet in a raucous pregame locker room, lacing his shoes to go warm up. This is what my brain is thinking even as my feet close the gap between the door and him, weave around Chris Paul on the foldout treatment table, cross the last couple steps through the circular room. This is what my brain is thinking in narration, so when my mouth opens I’m surprised when I ask whether this time is good or after the game is better. But he glances up and smiles and says now is good, he’s got a couple minutes now, what do I want to talk about?
Later, I’ll think how the last time I did this I was prepared for what seemed every conversational scenario except the one where it didn’t happen, and this time, while I knew the broad strokes, had been thinking of them in some rudimentary form for as long as I’ve watched Klay Thompson play basketball, my feet got me there before I had time to get ahead of myself.
I don’t like thinking too hard on whether the universe prefers action without pretence, motion without motive, since it assumes the universe is thinking of a brief exchange in a visiting locker room at all, but sometimes the best thing is to just get there. To not cast doubt not because your brain has evolved into some higher realm beyond it, but because you’ve left it lurching several steps behind you.
At dinner in Koreatown after getting back from All-Star, I told Rei writing has been so much slower for me since the pandemic. At least, that’s when I can place it first slowing down. She was asking because she’d noted how long it took her, between work and family, to write her last film review. I had told Rob the same as we sat in a hotel lobby in Indianapolis after 2am, me so desperate to absorb every last minute of a weekend I almost didn’t make it to, people like him I wouldn’t have gotten to see.
Do you think it could be burnout? Rei offered gently.
It both had and hadn’t occurred to me. Had because, I haven’t stopped writing since I started writing full-time in February 2019, and because I’ve ticked off all the points in the burnout checklist, now ubiquitous and a checklist at all because of how many people feel the same. Hadn’t because I still think, regularly, what is writing? I feel the work in it, while I’m working through it, or the happy, wrung-out release after finishing something, but whether because it’s solitary or the act of sifting my brain through the sieve of a keyboard or nub of a pen on paper, the act itself is one I struggle over feeling pronouncedly like work — even when the goal is to make pronouncements; subtle, for the reader to find on their own, or outright.
Some of the reticence is a world that values art, or things created, less and less rubbing off on me, I’m sure. The underlying source of that reticence is in the time it takes to make something, that sometimes in the process of creating you wind up scrapping everything. This isn’t how our logic under capitalism works. Time spent must equal out to proof of concept to be worth something, for the attempt and the person behind it, too, to be worthy.
Rei and I were in a big booth at the back of the restaurant and over the three hours we sat and ate and caught up occasional clouds of spice set to flame would rush from the kitchen. Invisible except for how our eyes would suddenly well up or the air would prick at the back of our throats. Over the next few days, whenever I’d pull the same sweatshirt on my eyes would tear, spice still clinging to the fabric. A latent reminder that the burden of proof is one we’re always wearing, whether outwardly or in layers.
What I’ve realized lately is how good I’ve gotten at hiding it, especially from the people closest to me. Hiding the fact of what’s hard, to ease some perceived strain of myself on them thinking they were bound to see it anyway, and redoubling the weight for myself when they didn’t. Taking this plus their worries and strains and changes in stride, now practically buckling but not saying a thing.
What I forget is that even burdens that turn desperate can be made bearable in the act of making light. To share with frankness even if the clarity of a solution isn’t there yet. That in the space of being seen things get bearable, easier to wield versus vaulting around in my own head.
What’s the burden of proof in late-season basketball? Is it a team shouldering injuries, tactically functional but mentally coasting, in a kind of competitive stasis, until their missing teammates come back? Is it a franchise on a Hail Mary run, springing ahead suddenly with the seasonal runway running out, pressure or expectation or whatever imagined thing it was holding them back now gone? Is it Playoff Jimmy Butler, ramping up as sure as the lengthening days? Or the Lakers bemoaning the state that they’re in, like it snuck up on them, again?
Is it the Celtics and Bucks stoic at the top of the standings, looking by all accounts self-possessed and deliberate, until they turn jumpy when the postseason starts? Or the Nuggets, so good they seem dull?
For all the patterns that have come to mark this point of the season, how we hold to them as comforts, markers to measure distance, I’m also enjoying the anomalies. How no one knows quite what to make of the Timberwolves, how to really talk about them, or whether, even, we want to. Or Luka Doncic, light and having fun, maybe because the Mavs are in a four-way tie for the bottom order of the West and so much more will bear out by what the competition is going to do versus what Dallas needs to. The Cavs, happy as ever but now a bit ferocious, eyeballing the jostling order of what a first-round matchup might be (probably muttering soft prayers of Please not the Heat) — eyeballing like the Pharaoh’s Horses, I mean. The Knicks, slowing; the Magic, here at all. The Clippers, automatic — and I can’t talk about Russell Westbrook out for this run after everything he did the past few seasons to stay in motion, to force his own kinetics, I just can’t. The Thunder, a bit like those tall and solitary windmills on the plains; daunting, desolate, and daring a natural force greater to come lift them up and crash them down.
What is this exercise, of divining the last month and a half of the NBA season, that we are so desperate to do? That if we can get a good sense, make an informed guess, we’ll be better prepared for… what? Joy or heartache or best of all, a big surprise ending? I like how we ascribe the final outcomes of the season to the heady safety of numbers, offering up stats and percentage outcomes like they aren’t another kind of osteomancy. Searching for signs, shadowboxing, scrying, desperate for facts but still throwing bones.
I wind up in a schoolyard. Backtracking from the street when I get to a gap in the chainlink, only wanting in there to chase the moon. A skunk ambled out of the dark and cut a weaving path across mine, in no special hurry. I walked onto a concrete basketball court, two rims shining in the moonlight with the great orb of it going up in reverse through the mesh. Out past the pavement, a baseball diamond with winter brown grass stretching toward the far fence, a busy road gone quiet, and the towers of midtown rising a few blocks east. Behind me, big rectangular slabs of rock cut and laid out to make three rows of amphitheatre steps between the schoolyard and the building. I climbed to the second level and sat facing the moon.
It rose in front of the winking towers, part of the skyline and stoically separate, a surprise guest with impeccable manners. Part of me wondered whether it was fine to be there, something about the quiet, the hour, what would be the normal chaos of this place now made reverent. I took my headphones out and listened to the wind buffeting the trees, the tidal rushing of an occasional car, and a faraway jet engine climbing overhead.
I thought about what’s permissible. What we allow to be done to us, out of loyalty, devotion, out of hope. What we take on assurance and what we take for granted. How growing out of and growing into something conflate, their signals crossing. How we don’t think to redraw or renew the boundaries we take to be home. How our fears will rear like shadows thrown up on a wall, our own projections the thing that made them so big.
I sat until the cold from the stone leeched up into my legs, through the light jacket I’d slipped on in a hurry, then pushed it until the moon finally broke away. The illusion of it shrinking as it lifted, free now from the low horizon and roofs of houses and the tall buildings, solitary though its clean light stayed unmistakeable. I shot a few glances back as I left — that trick that never works of wanting to remember a scene or a moment better, or more, than you already do — and moved on, no big shadow in the night.
love this. also the Sevald photograph is magical.
This was beautiful as always, Katie