With the 7th pick in the Basketball Feelings Feelings Draft, Basketball Feelings selects... ANGER
There are entry points to anger. The ascending kind has worn grooves like familiar handholds, muscle memory to where your hands go the more frequently you’ve used it. You feel your body propel you up, in your chest a rising rush of blood, in your head, clarity. There is also the plummeting type, where it’s not only the rug ripped out from under you but the entire structure on which you stood. You fall, terror rises up to catch or greet you, depending on the height you’re coming from and whether or not you were shoved or, all other options exhausted, stepped out. There is noxious anger, long simmering that you take small tastes of and adjust accordingly. Anger you guard, anger you want to give away. Anger like a ballast in your body. Anger like a hangnail, a sunburn. Anger so deep you’re not sure you’ve ever been out from it.
The anger I’ve felt has entry points exclusive to me, the tier of it I understand, engage with and utilize are fixed by my perspective, my privilege. The moral superiority of my anger isn’t always just my being an asshole, or resolute in a point that will fix whatever argument I’m in to my framing, the glass casing of it shining, it has been inherited by me because of my whiteness and the high ground it places me on.
My anger, most often, lets me downshift. I can retreat from it when it is sated, solved, no longer useful. I can go long stretches without so much as feeling its shadow pass over me, skin pricking in a warning solved by shrouding myself in something else, layering up. The privilege of my anger lets me talk about it abstractly, examine it, write about it with distance.
Very badly now we all want to land on one feeling we can wrap around our knuckles. One feeling to prime us, pull us together. Anger comes close. But tied up in my anger from the murder of George Floyd is a separation, a hairline rift, I can’t be inside of it completely but more than that I shouldn’t be.
The race to anger is another kind of reaction, of who got there first and how can you prove it. A performance of outrage that traces its steps very carefully. One pro sports team makes a statement, then they mostly all do, then XBox does. The anger is stacked like sandbags, immovable, facing one collective direction, already useless because the insidiousness its meant to hold against has broken through, has been there all along.
The clip of Trump standing there dumbly, passing a bible back and forth in his hands with the trepidation of someone holding a squirming reptile while police sirens squall in the background is too encompassing, too absolute of this moment. A path to the church was first ploughed for him by police expelling rubber bullets, launching canisters of tear gas into the crowds of protestors, priests, so he could lurch past graffiti that said FUCK TRUMP, his whole person a live wire to being in open air. He brings the book low at his hip, then it drifts to his stomach. He tilts the cover up as he peers down at it, feigning interest for the split second his brain will allow. I don’t rightly think he’s ever held a book before. He shifts his hand along the bottom, experimenting with holds, before lifting it like dead weight over his shoulder, his face a shitty rendering of a moai statue. Shutters click, he sways. Someone shouts, “Is that your bible?” He seems to forget there had been anyone watching him, anyone there at this photo op he’d hoped would prove his cowardice anything less than unconditional. “It’s a bible,” he lazes over the words. Sirens wail.
Anger isn’t meant to be sustained. It pushes the body like a car shuddering against speed its not meant to hit. Your brain shoves blood away from your gut, out to muscles flooding with adrenalin, cortisol. Your temperature spikes with your heart rate, your breath becomes shallow. Anger, repeatedly triggered over extended stretches of time, disrupts your memory, wiping out neurons and inhibiting the creation of new ones. The longterm stress of it decreases eyesight, bone density, so you aren’t only burdened with the weight of it but diminished, made less solid inside yourself.
This anger, seething for a week, has not once had to search for fortification. It’s been force-fed since four cops killed one black man in broad daylight on camera. Every protest against police brutality that ends in police brutality is a feast. Every false word uttered by a government doubling down, talking in circles, panicked that what worked before — threats, violence, driving cars and trucks into people, tear gassing kids, shooting press, curfews, lockdowns, propaganda — is not working now, an all-you-can-eat buffet. There is anguish, fear and rage enough to go around, and people are starving.
You can, right now, stand with your anger. You can let it wash over you, cramp your stomach, fill you with a fury you have maybe not ever felt before, but you are the only one beholden to it. If your anger has an entry point you are familiar with then it means you’ve very often been able to exit it, too. If it is that kind of anger then you shouldn’t be laying it at anyone else’s feet as proof or tribute, shouldn’t be centring yourself in its swell. If you have the privilege of coming and going from your anger then stand beside it and see it for the first time as a secondary thing, something you do not need to react to but can use. Temper it, then put it to work.