As ultimately derivative and deprecating as we are of Free Darko at our core, we (okay; it's just me) at Pearls of Mystery are aware of the cosmic irony of this pronouncement. Being about ten years Shoals' younger, we're not oblivious to the fact that Pearls of Mystery is ultimately destined for a still more farcical conclusion than anything we've published yet, or any interaction yet, be it with Shoals or RJ or Burl Ives or even with the gnawing belief that "maybe it's wrong the things I wrote there." Who knows how it will happen? How will Pearls of Mystery die? Well, no one knows. Who by water and who by fire? Who by sword? Who by beast?
Who by simultaneously vindicating and deconstructing happenings in the world of basketball? Enter Richard Jefferson and his amazing series against the Spurs, his former comrades. Frig. In 2:44 of Game 1 against the Spurs, Warrior Richard Jefferson put up a -14, and his only contribution statistically was to miss two free throws. In this void of meaningful basketball activity, the Spurs struck with an inspiring comeback, ultimately helping the Spurs to finish the Warriors off after a strong series. Granted, the entire series was not his fault, but the one time Jefferson did visibly play defense, he botched it so badly I had to laugh. In transition against Tony Parker, he either committed to the lane (but didn't actually help) or committed to the corner (but didn't actually cover the corner), giving the Spurs either an easy layup or an easy corner three. Even the Warriors that could have stopped one of the options were hurt by Jefferson's defense, as they assumed he'd be covering something. It was amazing, guys.
May 5, 2013
Spurs vs. Warriors Part I
Ah, what is there to write about in the NBA? Nothing, it seems. At present there are four series presenting themselves. First found Kevin Durant having to go it alone against the Memphis Grizzlies, in the wake of Russell Westbrook's injury! Second, we have the Knicks and Pacers deciding whether they would grind it out or would shoot the ball; in other words, who would win the series. Third, we have the Heat looking to sweep the Bulls without Rose, and the Bulls - on whom Nate Robinson is literally the best offensive player - were looking to... not get swept? And finally we have the Spurs in the second round of the playoffs. Ho hum. But what is this? They would be facing Richard Jefferson-led Golden State Warriors? This I have to cover.
Alright, let's back up. Just like RJ, not a starter. He is a back-up. I lied about that leadership thing. At 32 or 33, Richard Jefferson is by leaps and bounds the oldest and most experienced player of the young Warriors, and simultaneously their best and worst role model imaginable. He is definitely not their leader. Richard Jefferson is by leaps and bounds not the Warriors' leader.
But, carrying himself with class and dignity, the not-so-young Jefferson conducts every interview trying to root out all things he cannot possibly be held accountable for, and then apologizes for each of them in turn. "Do you feel they were giving the other team cheap fouls?" he'd be asked, and without hesitation would respond, "You know who gets cheap fouls? Savvy vets. I don't care if I wasn't on the floor, you know, I failed to teach these younger guys how to draw and avoid cheap fouls. It's on me." Savvy of him to note - he takes a burden of fault off the young players and places upon himself, while still putting that burden on them in the future. Savvy of him to note also because it reinforces that he has some reason to exist. And, really, he does. He genuinely tries his best to teach the young players, not just about being savvy but about the subtle margins and compensations every player must make in order to succeed. Jefferson notes with a laugh that he has one of the biggest hitches in his shot in the league, and one of the worst handles. He openly admits it because he doesn't expect to join another team. Even the Spurs he kept this information from, but now, he laughs about it. His punchline: "I never got into a conversation that would end in HORSE or a one-on-one. I avoided those conversations with wily cleverness. I got into a lot of dunk contests, though, haha."
Alright, let's back up. Just like RJ, not a starter. He is a back-up. I lied about that leadership thing. At 32 or 33, Richard Jefferson is by leaps and bounds the oldest and most experienced player of the young Warriors, and simultaneously their best and worst role model imaginable. He is definitely not their leader. Richard Jefferson is by leaps and bounds not the Warriors' leader.
But, carrying himself with class and dignity, the not-so-young Jefferson conducts every interview trying to root out all things he cannot possibly be held accountable for, and then apologizes for each of them in turn. "Do you feel they were giving the other team cheap fouls?" he'd be asked, and without hesitation would respond, "You know who gets cheap fouls? Savvy vets. I don't care if I wasn't on the floor, you know, I failed to teach these younger guys how to draw and avoid cheap fouls. It's on me." Savvy of him to note - he takes a burden of fault off the young players and places upon himself, while still putting that burden on them in the future. Savvy of him to note also because it reinforces that he has some reason to exist. And, really, he does. He genuinely tries his best to teach the young players, not just about being savvy but about the subtle margins and compensations every player must make in order to succeed. Jefferson notes with a laugh that he has one of the biggest hitches in his shot in the league, and one of the worst handles. He openly admits it because he doesn't expect to join another team. Even the Spurs he kept this information from, but now, he laughs about it. His punchline: "I never got into a conversation that would end in HORSE or a one-on-one. I avoided those conversations with wily cleverness. I got into a lot of dunk contests, though, haha."
Interlude: Pearls of Mystery Tackles the Big Questions
So I get to this site, and it asks me to take a survey to see the page. I just wanted to, you know, see the cap space on all the teams in the league, you know? I'm (theoretically) making the NBA world a little more comprehensible. I'd been asked a direct question, and I wanted to answer. And so I get to this site. And this site has the audacity to ask me a fairly personal question, you know, or share the page with all my little friends on Facebook or Twitter, so now everyone knows I'm reading this page (I haven't read it yet!) or some anonymous marketer somewhere gets to look at his quarterly numbers and say "Thank God for Alex Dewey; we can go to Aruba now." I don't even know where Aruba is, and, frankly, you know, I don't think I'd want to. I thought about it and closed the web site without getting that information. Other places would have it.
But like, here's the thing... like, I was curious, because, like, I've seen this a few places, newspapers and all that, and it pissed me off every time, right? So I started researching it. I was curious, you know, what's the protocol for society when someone invents something that immediately annoys us? What's the proverbial ventilation for our social irritants?
But like, here's the thing... like, I was curious, because, like, I've seen this a few places, newspapers and all that, and it pissed me off every time, right? So I started researching it. I was curious, you know, what's the protocol for society when someone invents something that immediately annoys us? What's the proverbial ventilation for our social irritants?
April 27, 2013
Yet Another Ill-Advised Free Darko Fan Fiction Meta-Blog
Bethlehem Shoals walked through the advertising agency feeling chipper. The wind had blown as Shoals rushed from his bus over endless grass fields of fallow corporate campuses to his agency. It was Casual Friday at the agency and, as such, Shoals had made commensurate sartorial choices. He wore his Iverson jersey. He crossed over a few of his co-workers with a mimed dribble. One co-worker even fell as he did this and Shoals stepped over him like Allen Iverson over Tyronn Lue, feeling the unconscious, objectifying swagger that AI must have felt at that moment, where it did not matter if he was stepping over a stone or a man; it was all but an obstacle in our endless journey. Then he turned and helped the man up and apologized.
Then Shoals got back to work, at which he was fastidious. "How the hell," he mused as he considered his latest account, "can I make my co-workers better by practicing?" He smiled and put his non-Microsoft-or-Apple mp3 player on to a continuous loop of "Today Was a Good Day" and counted the numbers of syllables in each bar. "Thinking, "Will I live another 24?"." Shoals now looked 24 years in the future and saw himself as Tyronn Lue, stepped over by an indifferent history, whether living or dead then. But history could wait; he had accounts to work on.
Shoals checked the endless reams of papers strewn about his office's desk, making perfectly certain that the total number of papers was a multiple of three, then organized all the papers for an hour until they were all in the right places, in three piles ("Naturally," he said mockingly). Then he wrote 3000 words of his best copy, skipping lunch, and came home late from his bus to watch tennis while dribbling a basketball with his family. Briefly tempted to turn the channel to the NBA playoffs, Shoals kept his peace. Roland Garros was on, and Shoals felt no need to miss the next Iverson moment. He had a family, and Novak Djokovic was just as fierce as Kobe in the grander view, and what was sports anyway but the succession of endless dramas, much like his Netflix queue, ever-expanding with that Elisabeth Moss series here or that commitment he'd made last week to learn about Terrence Malick there. Maybe, he supposed, he would even take another crack at Infinite Jest. The dribble kept on its way, consistently, in his specially outfitted kitchen. Softly like hardwood, not a spot of damage, his kitchen remained immaculate as his obsession with order demanded. Perfect. No crossovers here, no one falling or causing another to fall. Xanadu. No, there could never be another Iverson. And, Shoals mused, there could never be another Shoals. And he wasn't coming back. He was just button-down Nathan now, he guessed.
April 19, 2013
Mall Outlet Apology
I'd like to apologize for that last post. Enough of you complained and I heard you. So let me just say a few things and we can get on with the blog.
Look, a mall outlet is a beautiful thing. I've gone to mall outlets once or twice, perhaps even taking an evening to peruse the mall outlets. Never drinking, I nevertheless get a rush akin to intoxication at the multifaceted vendor complex of even an average suburban mall. And the workers are so kind: Shaped like squids to me, almost, because of my peculiar mental disposition, their emanant grunts I find satisfactory and even polite. One goes to a mall complex for an experience; a mall outlet all the more so. It's a beautiful experience and I didn't mean to offend anyone. That Sugar Foot Rub flyer was real. And yet, in my rush to create a story, I invented a facsimile as a vessel for my writerly machinations and I hereby apologize.
Look, a mall outlet is a beautiful thing. I've gone to mall outlets once or twice, perhaps even taking an evening to peruse the mall outlets. Never drinking, I nevertheless get a rush akin to intoxication at the multifaceted vendor complex of even an average suburban mall. And the workers are so kind: Shaped like squids to me, almost, because of my peculiar mental disposition, their emanant grunts I find satisfactory and even polite. One goes to a mall complex for an experience; a mall outlet all the more so. It's a beautiful experience and I didn't mean to offend anyone. That Sugar Foot Rub flyer was real. And yet, in my rush to create a story, I invented a facsimile as a vessel for my writerly machinations and I hereby apologize.
April 17, 2013
The Mall Outlet
I received the flyer for a "Sugar Foot Rub" in the mail after arriving by bus at my home. There was a free massage that the flyer promised. The only "rub" is that for my freedom from cost on this account, I would have no respite from cost on the rub itself. At the mall a mile from my house, this sugar foot rub would no doubt be pleasant and exfoliating. So, having little else to oblige me that night but my precious books, I figured I had no choice, and immediately got into my luxury sedan.
I walked from the parking lot to the mall's entrance in sunny spirits, despite the dismal gray of an evening, a continuous rain having only ceased in the last hour. The sunshine in my heart did not warm all the way to my extremities, but I put my hands in my pockets, the better to resist beggars and thieves and cold, unfeeling others, and walked into the mall of commerce.
I have a pathological fear of maps at malls so every mall is an adventure to me, its own special maze. But that's another story for another occasion. Whatever the cause, for twenty minutes, I wandered around the mall, like Moses. At seven I reached the mall outlet I'd sought, this "Sugar Foot Rub" of published legend. I wondered where I'd heard about its pleasant, exfoliating effects, or how I'd even decided to make my way here.
I walked from the parking lot to the mall's entrance in sunny spirits, despite the dismal gray of an evening, a continuous rain having only ceased in the last hour. The sunshine in my heart did not warm all the way to my extremities, but I put my hands in my pockets, the better to resist beggars and thieves and cold, unfeeling others, and walked into the mall of commerce.
I have a pathological fear of maps at malls so every mall is an adventure to me, its own special maze. But that's another story for another occasion. Whatever the cause, for twenty minutes, I wandered around the mall, like Moses. At seven I reached the mall outlet I'd sought, this "Sugar Foot Rub" of published legend. I wondered where I'd heard about its pleasant, exfoliating effects, or how I'd even decided to make my way here.
March 1, 2013
That Same Silent Hill
When I was young, as young as I can remember, I cared mainly for things and their systems. Never facile with my hands, I nevertheless had an obvious gift for taking intellectual things apart and putting them back together. Maybe I wasn't able to use a screwdriver until shamefully late in my development, but I could put numbers together in my head, take a word apart into its individual syllables and affixes and rhythms, and give a sentence an oil change and make that sturdy old sentence feel just like new. I got the Five Books of Moses from a bookstore one time and as we waited in the drive-thru on the way back home, I read Genesis aloud (to my parents' embarrassment, I must suppose) just because I loved the thunder I could hear in God's voice. Let there be light. And it felt like I was shedding light on all the most important things, and I was gleeful at finding a new puzzle or game to set my mind towards. Give me a multiplication problem and I'd be on that like dressing on a Reuben. Delicious. And I collected these things and systems, too, cataloging whatever I could in something akin to a mental library, making what connections I would.
But it was a disorganized library. And so you'd try to sell me an idea that was bigger than any system or sentence, and I'd look at you with almost-total incomprehension. And challenge my library's usefulness and accuracy? What do you mean I didn't perfectly catalog popular music by decade from memory? Material Girl was not in the 1980s? Is there no God, Mother?
But I grew out of that phase and grew to love ideas, grew to relish ideas with the same sense of intellectual accomplishment that I'd reserved for my old library of things and systems. Now I wanted not to be the curator of a library I'd built: I wanted (in Borges' metaphor) just the library catalog! I wanted the Big Ideas that would unlock every system and subsystem of the world. Real mathematics, foundations-of-mathematics stuff, proofs, logic, long trains of discovery with the Fibonacci sequence! Generalization after often-pretty-specious generalization! Libertarianism as a objective perspective! Category theory! Perspectives taken for their own sake (how far can you take 'em before their low utility or their frailty is revealed?)! Jokes that seemed to me to peel at the wallpaper to give you a glimpse into the support beams of the House of Humor and Truth! Wikipedia was a god-send for this period of exploration, as was college. Formal systems and computer science made much of my exploration relatively rigorous in the hard sciences, and my exacting self-selected intellectual circles kept all of the exploration into the soft sciences out of the nebulous haze of college freshmen..Through it all I guess the uniting frame was the Heart Sutra, which was about the closest thing I came to a religious, all-is-one revelation. I talked about qualias at dawn and tried to fix the seg-faults in time for due dates. Yes, as I'll explain, it was bereft of some crucial aspects of life. But it was enlightening, and I never lost sight of the importance of things like literature as more than just applied systems and ideas and styles. There was something there in those words larger than the author, the reader, and the book. That's the whole point, after all, of the Sutra.
But the limitations really became apparent and a nuisance and I couldn't shake them: I would ask myself simple questions that anyone should be able to answer: Hey, why are simple conversations so damn hard for me? Why was communication a seeming act of condescending? Why was speaking the simple truth to my life filled with so many awkward pleasantries, as if apologizing for the way my mind works, God forbid you and I have different wavelengths and strengths and weaknesses? Anyway, these questions really welled up as fundamental doubts, and at the end of the day I began to doubt the whole enterprise of an intellectual life (okay, not really, but perhaps the way I was living it). And so I searched for answers, of course, in a system or an idea (do what you know even when you don't know, heh). I began to ask better questions: Was I closing myself off? Was I just neurologically unable to empathize? Did I just not want to identify or communicate with people? Did I actually want experiences or did I want to live an ascetic life of unencumbered distance (which I was, truth be told, ultimately living)? And I found in this last question the true fundamental, existential doubt. I was living in unencumbered distance. Any way the wind blows and all that. You're supposed to shiver and plan and your dreams be tossed and blown. It's supposed to be hard. It's supposed to be engaged.
With the aid of a lot of great (and a few random-but-oddly-prodding) people pushing me in the right direction, I started to really figure out what it means to engage with the world. I surely am not done with this process, but I made a lot of huge steps (I'd like to think, heh). In the process, I started to realize that, yes, obviously, I had gone too far into the realm of ideas. But more importantly, I'd kind of denied myself humanity in the process. Like, in this obsession I had with methodology and rationality and Socratic dialogues and finding the core research papers, the gooey nougat papers in the annals of academia that truthfully alone justify its existence as an institution, that I ended up kind of overlooking that, hey, the human intuition is just as miraculous as the human mind. And that you need to feel confident and you need to hear out what people are trying to tell you. And that culture is just as much a triumph of human endeavor as academia (not in practical terms, but in a "Wow, that really exists? Pretty amazing, guys." sense). And that when you deny the brain its due experiences, you might as well be denying the body food. An mind bereft of problems is a mind that starves. Oh, you can live for a long time without your food, as long as you're getting your water (your stimulation, in this analogy, I suppose). But eventually you get hungry. You get really, really hungry. I was hungry for experience at that point. And I guess something snapped in me (call it a light switch) and I started to really seek help and to really talk about myself frankly and exhaustively, not in the abstract sense of a self and the particular example of Alex Dewey, but in the sense of an actual person whose fate I cared about a great deal and who wanted something more than a perfect library catalog and the smallest number of proverbial grains of experiential rice I could eat per day without starving my brain.
Recently I've been eating like it's an Indian buffet.
And it's been great. I don't want to trivialize that, it really has been great. But almost by the nature of the shift I'm always-already looking forward. And looking forward today at my life, there's a fear that emerges. Because from systems to ideas to experiences have I traveled in my category of obsession. And as I move from one to the other, I find myself going gradually and then quickly along a spectrum starting with pure neurological functionality (almost like test-drives) and sliding over towards pure humanity and culture and social undertaking. I love to coach and teach now, and I used to only like mentoring because it clarified my ideas; now I genuinely like imparting the thrill of discovery and I enjoy the happiness of other people, even if it feels a little abstract.
And there's a fear there, because where I'm headed is a place laid bare: To love and be loved by another beyond mere infatuation. To empathize deeply. To begin to obsess over and collect people and relationships and the small victories of social conduct that constitute a society, the same way I've loved things and ideas and experience in their own times. Where I'm headed is a place of openness and vulnerability and expectation and, ultimately, judgement and constant discomfiture leading to change or surrender.
And as this process goes, I truly feel I can handle all of it. I'm not afraid at all of the process, no. But what I do fear is that this love of people and relationships will be done with my characteristic acuity, attention, and placid obsession. That's what scares me and it scares me (in a good way, a life-affirming way) to think about. Imagine: That one day my travails will lead me to a new island. And on that island I'll speak another's name and they'll whisper back "Alex" with a certain thunderous quality and I'll feel like they'd just shouted into the darkness "Let there be light!" to my most cherished encumbrances for a moment and all that will be left in me to love is she.
But it was a disorganized library. And so you'd try to sell me an idea that was bigger than any system or sentence, and I'd look at you with almost-total incomprehension. And challenge my library's usefulness and accuracy? What do you mean I didn't perfectly catalog popular music by decade from memory? Material Girl was not in the 1980s? Is there no God, Mother?
But I grew out of that phase and grew to love ideas, grew to relish ideas with the same sense of intellectual accomplishment that I'd reserved for my old library of things and systems. Now I wanted not to be the curator of a library I'd built: I wanted (in Borges' metaphor) just the library catalog! I wanted the Big Ideas that would unlock every system and subsystem of the world. Real mathematics, foundations-of-mathematics stuff, proofs, logic, long trains of discovery with the Fibonacci sequence! Generalization after often-pretty-specious generalization! Libertarianism as a objective perspective! Category theory! Perspectives taken for their own sake (how far can you take 'em before their low utility or their frailty is revealed?)! Jokes that seemed to me to peel at the wallpaper to give you a glimpse into the support beams of the House of Humor and Truth! Wikipedia was a god-send for this period of exploration, as was college. Formal systems and computer science made much of my exploration relatively rigorous in the hard sciences, and my exacting self-selected intellectual circles kept all of the exploration into the soft sciences out of the nebulous haze of college freshmen..Through it all I guess the uniting frame was the Heart Sutra, which was about the closest thing I came to a religious, all-is-one revelation. I talked about qualias at dawn and tried to fix the seg-faults in time for due dates. Yes, as I'll explain, it was bereft of some crucial aspects of life. But it was enlightening, and I never lost sight of the importance of things like literature as more than just applied systems and ideas and styles. There was something there in those words larger than the author, the reader, and the book. That's the whole point, after all, of the Sutra.
But the limitations really became apparent and a nuisance and I couldn't shake them: I would ask myself simple questions that anyone should be able to answer: Hey, why are simple conversations so damn hard for me? Why was communication a seeming act of condescending? Why was speaking the simple truth to my life filled with so many awkward pleasantries, as if apologizing for the way my mind works, God forbid you and I have different wavelengths and strengths and weaknesses? Anyway, these questions really welled up as fundamental doubts, and at the end of the day I began to doubt the whole enterprise of an intellectual life (okay, not really, but perhaps the way I was living it). And so I searched for answers, of course, in a system or an idea (do what you know even when you don't know, heh). I began to ask better questions: Was I closing myself off? Was I just neurologically unable to empathize? Did I just not want to identify or communicate with people? Did I actually want experiences or did I want to live an ascetic life of unencumbered distance (which I was, truth be told, ultimately living)? And I found in this last question the true fundamental, existential doubt. I was living in unencumbered distance. Any way the wind blows and all that. You're supposed to shiver and plan and your dreams be tossed and blown. It's supposed to be hard. It's supposed to be engaged.
With the aid of a lot of great (and a few random-but-oddly-prodding) people pushing me in the right direction, I started to really figure out what it means to engage with the world. I surely am not done with this process, but I made a lot of huge steps (I'd like to think, heh). In the process, I started to realize that, yes, obviously, I had gone too far into the realm of ideas. But more importantly, I'd kind of denied myself humanity in the process. Like, in this obsession I had with methodology and rationality and Socratic dialogues and finding the core research papers, the gooey nougat papers in the annals of academia that truthfully alone justify its existence as an institution, that I ended up kind of overlooking that, hey, the human intuition is just as miraculous as the human mind. And that you need to feel confident and you need to hear out what people are trying to tell you. And that culture is just as much a triumph of human endeavor as academia (not in practical terms, but in a "Wow, that really exists? Pretty amazing, guys." sense). And that when you deny the brain its due experiences, you might as well be denying the body food. An mind bereft of problems is a mind that starves. Oh, you can live for a long time without your food, as long as you're getting your water (your stimulation, in this analogy, I suppose). But eventually you get hungry. You get really, really hungry. I was hungry for experience at that point. And I guess something snapped in me (call it a light switch) and I started to really seek help and to really talk about myself frankly and exhaustively, not in the abstract sense of a self and the particular example of Alex Dewey, but in the sense of an actual person whose fate I cared about a great deal and who wanted something more than a perfect library catalog and the smallest number of proverbial grains of experiential rice I could eat per day without starving my brain.
And it's been great. I don't want to trivialize that, it really has been great. But almost by the nature of the shift I'm always-already looking forward. And looking forward today at my life, there's a fear that emerges. Because from systems to ideas to experiences have I traveled in my category of obsession. And as I move from one to the other, I find myself going gradually and then quickly along a spectrum starting with pure neurological functionality (almost like test-drives) and sliding over towards pure humanity and culture and social undertaking. I love to coach and teach now, and I used to only like mentoring because it clarified my ideas; now I genuinely like imparting the thrill of discovery and I enjoy the happiness of other people, even if it feels a little abstract.
And there's a fear there, because where I'm headed is a place laid bare: To love and be loved by another beyond mere infatuation. To empathize deeply. To begin to obsess over and collect people and relationships and the small victories of social conduct that constitute a society, the same way I've loved things and ideas and experience in their own times. Where I'm headed is a place of openness and vulnerability and expectation and, ultimately, judgement and constant discomfiture leading to change or surrender.
And as this process goes, I truly feel I can handle all of it. I'm not afraid at all of the process, no. But what I do fear is that this love of people and relationships will be done with my characteristic acuity, attention, and placid obsession. That's what scares me and it scares me (in a good way, a life-affirming way) to think about. Imagine: That one day my travails will lead me to a new island. And on that island I'll speak another's name and they'll whisper back "Alex" with a certain thunderous quality and I'll feel like they'd just shouted into the darkness "Let there be light!" to my most cherished encumbrances for a moment and all that will be left in me to love is she.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)