With the 22nd pick in the Basketball Feelings Feelings Draft, Basketball Feelings selects... BLISS
Small pleasures, minuscule pleasures, by default belong to only you.
If there’s one thing I’ve always been good at and has emerged as a pandemic asset it’s been making occasions out of nothing.
When my parents finally got off the boat they’d been stuck on in the South Pacific for weeks from March into April my mom had just asked we get them essentials — bread, eggs, milk. They were a little embarrassed by what I’d instead stocked their fridge and cupboards with. Things I knew they loved but that they would never buy for themselves. There was practicality to the occasion, they’d been gone for over a month and would be quarantined for 2 weeks at least, but it was also their safety, sudden geographical proximity, and my crashing anxiety, to be able to do this for them was something I hadn’t let myself picture.
The one weekend in the past 6 months Dylan was away from our apartment, I went to the store and bought hard cheese, a whole fish to grill like I had ever done that before, my first peach basket of the season, a six-pack of Tsingtao, sour cherries, a steak, just all these things that hardly constituted a meal but made me feel like a person still capable of momentum, who could decide how to move forward in the world as I arranged them carefully on the shelves in the fridge.
Scratching out small moments of space and then padding those moments further with things you associate with rest or pleasure so they are within easy reach. It’s entirely precious to behave this way about yourself, you can’t do it all the time, it becomes quickly delusional, but as a tactic for isolating bliss it’s been useful.
The torture of watching Kyle Lowry’s bliss unfold in juddering stops and starts rather than all at once. Shrill whistles punctuating those last five minutes of the Raptors Game 6 Finals, seizing any momentum of the moment catching. You can trace those five minutes back to a season, back to several, as a build to right then. Piling years of effort, of the relief of bliss alluding him. What Lowry does in those last five minutes is what he’d been doing, grown expert at, for years — waiting. He never felt impatient over the final few seconds coming down to strange protocols, disrupted by the Warriors in trying to call a timeout when they were flush out or a foul call that delivered Toronto an extra pair of points.
He had no blueprint in his brain of how that game would play out, even if watching you had definitely imagined it, and you had definitely imagined a long shot going up at the buzzer, or a steal with the cinematic quality of an old Western’s train heist, everyone on the bench rushing the floor, colliding together in a way they deserved to rather than having to find each other in the isolated places they’d ended up.
But his bliss eventually unfurled that night, visible in his grinning dazed post-game interviews, and later that summer, when it took over six hours for the parade to do a route that should have taken one, and he stood at the prow of a giant red bus and heard the relief and recognition coalesce from hundreds of thousands of people at once, rise like heat, relief.
The bliss of watching someone who knows how to harness their body use it. How secondary, even languid, entirely explosive physical responses can start as. People who, rather than jogging muscle memory, shift the entire tense of it, pull it to the present, gentle it like a bird in hand and then release, all at once.
Lonnie Walker bounding to the basket, his sailing stride gone airborne before he’s even close, holding the ball in one hand like a gift, palm up, the flash of his wrist the only real vulnerable part of him, he floats by the rim and is all but past it when he curves his arm, his hand, the ball, gently down, a forbearance of pleasure.
The squeak of these low all white Blazers I wear in summer. Even as they beat up and dull to a smudged seagull grey the potency of that sole squeak stays sharp, explosive. I can be doing a pathetic little pivot to scoot out of somebody’s way on the subway tunnel stairs, the shoes screech for me. They amplify every move I make with urgency and the kind of shot clock counting down tension my life, right now, truly does not have.
Catching the softened tang of chlorine on your skin the day after swimming when you haven’t showered yet. Huffing it guiltily.
Damian Lillard used to shoot with a 12lb ball as a kid and in his every shot is the ghost of that weight, sinking like a stone. He will pull up within a deep breath of the player in front of him, so close he must see the muscles in their mouth preemptively go to grimace as he lifts, leans back, sends it floating.
The dappled, heat-rash pink spread of a perfectly ripe peach just under its fuzzed skin.
The trust Ja Morant’s body has in him. That he can spring, coil, curl, twist, slam and hit the floor all in one trip and stand, smiling, running back down the floor and ready to try it again. He is rangy and malleable in the green way bodies and bones feel with youth, yes, but there’s an intuitive sense of how quickly he can conjure and bunch his blood that speaks to discipline and practice. To watch him is to feel your own bones strain to work, your muscles clench in pantomime. The bliss of breath half spent, blanked on for a second, caught in your throat.
The gap between pleasure felt and anticipated. The lull of coasting, sated, between extremes. Sexual pleasure as much as the first bites of something when your blood sugar has plummeted so low you can’t hold a conversation, a thought, a fork. Bliss is a break in your own action.
The cascading bloom of a firework smearing, after the squeal and the boom. The release in hitting water, in a fight that’s been simmering, in a forced rush of air, a groan, a moan, some approximation of the two.
Bliss is the alleviation of a certain weight.
When Klay Thompson is going full tilt he plays like a person reading the paper on Sunday morning, nothing else in the world they need to be doing: intuitive, skimming, easy, incredulity and amusement shifting with what’s on the page in front of him.
For Patrick Beverley bliss is in tugging on an opponent’s loosest part and unraveling them, as slow as he can stand, in his hands over the course of a game.
Standing with the refrigerator door open and plucking Spanish olives out of the crammed full small plastic container the woman behind the Italian grocery store’s antipasto counter packed for me. The specific balance of salt and fat, brine and richness. Thinking how these came ahead of every meal in Spain.
I made myself stop thinking of travel for a while in spring and early summer, the prospect being so far off if not impossible, but I’ve caved, projecting forward or back as a means of escape.
For a week, almost four years ago, how good my skin looked and hair felt because of all the oils in all the olives I was eating. Thinking about Tarifa, the southernmost town in Spain, buffeted by winds from the Atlantic and Strait of Gibraltar constantly colliding, but how unbothered the magenta bougainvillea that trails lazily down from the hot terracotta roofs of its squeezed together bleached out buildings. A tiny restaurant that everyone had to stand shoulder to shoulder inside, all the windows thrown open to the barely cooling streets, where men that all looked like different generations of Sean Penn handed Dylan and me small, instantly beading glasses of cold beer, eggplant croquets, albóndigas and charred squid still salty from the sea.
Galloping an honest to god Andalusian horse (this just hits different for horse people) down the beach into a fog so thick I couldn’t see, until a group of cattle came lowing out of it and a bull charged us and navigating a sightless chase by the sound of the waves, the smell of eucalyptus that marked the forest on the other side and the receding bellows of the bull behind. Being on the slick knife’s edge of fear and freedom, adrenalin shocking my senses wide awake. The idiot bliss that fear can give as it falls away.
Marc Gasol waiting is a glut of patience. Unmovable feast. Watching Gasol you can feel your own world even out, quit throttling, quit roiling, he stands sure until there is something he has to do. When he snaps toward a rebound he wades through defenders like he’s waist-high in the ocean with a tiny bit of drag from a wave fresh crashed and folding itself back out to sea. One-handed, he’ll go up to the glass, pulling the ball back to earth, his other hand resting gently, firmly, not a suggestion, on the chest of whoever got there second. In the corners, from deep, whether he just got there or not, he is comfortable. He’s been waiting and that’s why there is no hesitation, when the ball hits his hands he shoots. Gasol sinking a three is a deep down pull, the grim tang of gravity. Your breath slowing as you sink into sleep.
August mornings, when the sun has become reluctant to rouse in as an anticipatory an hour when summer first cracked itself open. The light, like everything else, has blanched, even the heat has lost its incessant edge. Now, it drops at once in a buzzing haze when the day grows bright enough.
At the top of my street, turning to cut across the main, the 7am light tumbles from the east, sluicing across my legs, my still damp hair. Already I’m thinking how much I’m going to miss the feeling of warming air on my bare limbs, the pleasure in this kind of exposure, the carelessness, half awake and glowing, when this slow-thrumming, unspooled summer cools.