With the 16th pick in the Basketball Feelings Feelings Draft, Basketball Feelings selects... ANNOYANCE
Annoyance is prelude. An inkling. Ozone in the air before a big storm. An edging tang in your mouth and the sudden awareness of a creeping along your spine, a burr at the base of your skull. It’s the tipping point on a scale about to go either way. On one side the bright, blooming flare of anger, on the other the acquiesce into affection.
A circling fly droning on and on you watch and will to settle. Something snakes your attention away and in that split second it lands, bites. Annoyance the fly, the vehicle; anger the pain.
Heat that crawls. Heat with legs to climb you, to roil around your temples. Heat with weight. You feel your senses swimming, breath speeding, patience shot. There is a real sense of danger for the next person who speaks or looks at you with just about any inflection. Then a breeze, maybe, hardly. Like a puff of air inadvertently forced from the mouth of a settling animal, used up and stagnant itself. Still, hair lifts from where it’s clamped on your neck. The sweat — not so much clinging as a glossy sheen — cools. Annoyance takes a breath, releases, relief.
The morning sounds. Dylan in the kitchen, hitting the rim of the portafilter against the green bin, as quietly as one can really do that. The machine buzzing as it gets to work, a low drone that stirs the dogs. On the floor, Captain groans. On the bed George stands on long legs and circles, once, twice, paws mincing at the sheets clumped at my knees from the course of a night. Jeans is tearing up and down the hall, every small bound erupts a trilling sound from her wide-awake body, all 12lbs electric.
Dylan has the morning news on low. They go through traffic and weather in a familiar chant my brain, half-asleep, understands the swells and dips of. At my feet George finally settles but my body is tipping toward awake. Annoyance creases around my squinting eyes.
From the living room, a reaching honeyed light. The clouds must have shifted, split, the sun lifting in the windows. The light rushes the hall with Jeans, making her orange fur glow, a heavenly lit demon. The dogs breathing gets deeper, both of them gone under again. The air in the apartment smells like coffee. Annoyance flickers, tumbles in my chest with a yawn, expels as ease, affection, gratitude.
There was this kind of outpouring of disagreement, recently, with what’s to be made of Bill Simmons. I don’t say what’s going to happen to, because someone like that, what really will?
The most annoying thing was how Knausgårdian the accounts, centred entirely on the men who had watched Simmons, from across the same literal and figurative rooms, behave in the ways they were, a little gleefully, sharing. What he would say or how he would act toward women. His self importance, self aggrandizing. That he stocked those rooms with people who looked like him, looked like the guys authoring those accounts. I had a hard time separating them from Simmons. Not in power, or personality, but in perspective. They were looking at him in elevators, across tables, they were looking at him from the same level. The examples, by and large, things that had been done, that they’d seen being done, to other people and secondary to their own perceived sleights and personal grievances. Stories that were worth retelling now only to underscore their own.
Strangely, as far as personifications go, Simmons steps into annoyance quite well. He is the divisive fork in the road where point of opinion splits. Anger or affection. He’s not the one, though it can feel like it, forcing you into either. It doesn’t excuse him from the ways he’s harmed or held up careers, in that way he is not at all passive. But as a figure, a conduit, he lets you work yourself into a frenzy or else find something in him recognizable, and with that recognition arrive at familiarity, which can loosen into a kind of comfort.
Where the tell-alls fell short, where I found my annoyance slipping easily into the undertow of anger, is where they failed to recognize which way they’d willingly let Simmons provide a pathway for them, until it became problematic or until he in some way focused some small act of erasure on them. That and there was no ownership. No acknowledgement that to be looking at Simmons, even if it was critically, from where they were lined up with him for so long, then they probably had opportunity to be accountable for the voices that got lost while theirs were, or stayed, lifted.
As gleeful as it can be to pile-on, to entertain the idea that shit talking signals the initiation of public reckoning, it is all so dependent on exhaustive narratives of the past. No actionable shift toward a — any — future.
It’s too late to be in those rooms. Those kinds of careers, too, exist but can’t start like that anymore. They’re mausoleums. The few people they were built for, around, stuck immaculately, eternally, inside. What would be useful are less rooms, more roads. Careers are so much now directional over the sense of arrival, of shifting your course depending on what comes up, what quits. What looks like a better horizon, even betting that some part of it might be mirage, kicked up by the light of promise and the heat of your own exhaustion. Where annoyance serves better as an accelerator rather than something that will slow you down or stall you out on what somebody else, when they had years of chances, couldn’t make themselves uncomfortable enough to take for the sake of the view from the room they were already in.