Let's look at outer space through the eyes of a baller.
The Solar System (at time of writing) must be understood to be a Finals game between the Cavs and Spurs. Right now I suppose that the Spurs have the ball (Earth's moon) on offense, and the Earth is Tony Parker, driving the moon through Mars (LeBron) and Jupiter (Shaq) through Saturn's Rings, the rims of this side of the arena.
Unfortunately, Ilguaskas is Saturn, ever in a stupid goaltending position, hoisting himself between the great rims. Meanwhile, the other Cavs dance electric around Shaq and Lebron and Ilgauskas, like the moons of these respective planets in orbit. For example, Jamario Moon is a moon. This doomed gambit of Parker driving towards a blocked basket will soon demand an official or a foul of contact on the lingering lunk Saturn, but life is so slow for planets, those ponderous giants set in a world of light and speedy atoms. For planets any resolution is long in coming.
On this play Tim Duncan is the reliable, total circle that is our protective asteroid belt, and he is expertly screening the Earth or in the post with Shaq, just as the asteroid belt has been doing for Earth. The asteroid belt is almost fluid, and its presence on the astral plane prevents most of the occasional stray objects in our system from striking our planet. The weight of Duncan's enormous accepted burden lifts the burdens from his point guard. But for what? There is no victory in the motion of the planets! Ah, but there is duty and honor and dignity, is there not? Tim Duncan as a planet will find a place for virtue to be expressed.
There were Duncans before Tim: great, careful protectors of the point guards from which life has always sprung against the forces of darkness and banality and incomprehensibility (Moon, Ilgauskas, and Shaq, respectively, in this play). Before even the invention of basketball, or even the creation of planet Earth have such forces withstood and aged and withered, in dutiful protection. James Naismith may have lit the very fire that Duncan holds against the brutish in service of the sparky Tony Parker, but that fire was ever in the minds of men, and the entities before men. For this fire we might pray: that it always should burn.
There are so many worlds before and after the Earth, and so many asteroid belts screening them, ready to accept the moon in the solid paint of endgames and responsibility.
Quirky and doughy-faced Richard Jefferson is Neptune (just one level of playfulness and ability and madness away from a Starbury or an Iverson on meaningless Pluto), and Mercury, Venus, and Uranus are the invisible people on every court that, through past administration or future destiny, determine a good deal of the game's outcome.
From the past administration, we might have Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley. These players, coaches, and writers have ordered the game and its perception for decades. What would Duncan's post moves look like without Hakeem or Magic? Would Shaq still be Jupiter? They would both be different, somehow, if there at all. This is sort of like Mercury in our star system.
From the future we have people like, say, David Robinson's thousandth descendant, or, say, the cynical child that starred in Kazaam now as an aging and warlike Secretary of Defense in a cold and nightmarish totalitarian U.N. in 2180, finger on the apocalypse, or even Sean Elliott, or Larry Brown, or Dirk "Lisa Leslie's Oldest Daughter's Youngest Son" Malone Stockton (grandson of John and named after his great uncles). You know, people like that: people with yet-unrealized destinies that shape the court of today like basic forces of nature to reach these destinies.
Past and future always seem to tear at us meaningfully, don't they? But these planets have very little real sway on the actual passage of life on Earth, and of the solar system. There is only the sun, the asteroid belt, Jupiter, and Earth. The rest is superfluous. So it is on the solar system, so is it on the court. The past contributes the form and the future contributes the literature, but the content is all in the present.
Speaking of which, the sun is the radiating fusion of coaches Popovich and Brown, that manage most of the gravitational infrastructure of the game. That radiation of light and heat, fuelling ecosystems of talent and belief, prevents too much coldness and stagnation from reaching the players. Mike Brown's rays are more distant than Pop's: though warm, his influence is by and large to create sunspots and storms on Shaq and Ilgauskas - the only way for us to view fully Mike Brown's great folly and absurdity.
Darnell Jackson is the very universe outside the Solar System. Naturally, the other teams are teams inside of Darnell Jackson. He rarely needs his uniform of red, unlike Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn - lacking form, it wouldn't make sense for him to put on a color, though he humors his coach by radiating half-assed but consistent Microwave Radiation. Third-string Darnell is a multiverse, and you may travel from one game to another, from one system to another, from one time to another, all of them sparsely distributed around the frail Darnell Jackson, who notices and feels effectively nothing.
They all follow the rules and the penalties implied, but the rules change from solar system to solar system, with different Gods officiating, different physical laws, and different conceptions of art and competition dominating, and through it all I wonder, on occasion, if it is all basketball anymore. To that I respond, half-weeping, that I don't know all of the games that planets play in their systems (pathologies are uncovered every day), and I suppose that all these different games and implications seem to me like words trapped, without easy compartment, in a strict 10-dimensional sonnet.
POSTSCRIPT:
For the sake of the image, there are a few notes to make here: Each dribble by Parker is a single orbit by the moon. Delonte West is a comet that displaces the ball with the precision of the finest watch, from or to the desired player, but he's inconsistent and scared and doesn't have an easy time outside the Solar System. "No Manu, no championship" spoke the sun. He knows something's wrong, and he's right. But Manu is Planet X, with a body as Tweaked as Starbury's mind. He is Planet X, and waits patiently on the bench for the sun to sub out Phobos, Matt Bonner, so that he can crash through the rim himself. But for our purposes all of this is neither here nor there, as the game's duration is on the order of eons for us.
The Solar System (at time of writing) must be understood to be a Finals game between the Cavs and Spurs. Right now I suppose that the Spurs have the ball (Earth's moon) on offense, and the Earth is Tony Parker, driving the moon through Mars (LeBron) and Jupiter (Shaq) through Saturn's Rings, the rims of this side of the arena.
Unfortunately, Ilguaskas is Saturn, ever in a stupid goaltending position, hoisting himself between the great rims. Meanwhile, the other Cavs dance electric around Shaq and Lebron and Ilgauskas, like the moons of these respective planets in orbit. For example, Jamario Moon is a moon. This doomed gambit of Parker driving towards a blocked basket will soon demand an official or a foul of contact on the lingering lunk Saturn, but life is so slow for planets, those ponderous giants set in a world of light and speedy atoms. For planets any resolution is long in coming.
On this play Tim Duncan is the reliable, total circle that is our protective asteroid belt, and he is expertly screening the Earth or in the post with Shaq, just as the asteroid belt has been doing for Earth. The asteroid belt is almost fluid, and its presence on the astral plane prevents most of the occasional stray objects in our system from striking our planet. The weight of Duncan's enormous accepted burden lifts the burdens from his point guard. But for what? There is no victory in the motion of the planets! Ah, but there is duty and honor and dignity, is there not? Tim Duncan as a planet will find a place for virtue to be expressed.
There were Duncans before Tim: great, careful protectors of the point guards from which life has always sprung against the forces of darkness and banality and incomprehensibility (Moon, Ilgauskas, and Shaq, respectively, in this play). Before even the invention of basketball, or even the creation of planet Earth have such forces withstood and aged and withered, in dutiful protection. James Naismith may have lit the very fire that Duncan holds against the brutish in service of the sparky Tony Parker, but that fire was ever in the minds of men, and the entities before men. For this fire we might pray: that it always should burn.
There are so many worlds before and after the Earth, and so many asteroid belts screening them, ready to accept the moon in the solid paint of endgames and responsibility.
Quirky and doughy-faced Richard Jefferson is Neptune (just one level of playfulness and ability and madness away from a Starbury or an Iverson on meaningless Pluto), and Mercury, Venus, and Uranus are the invisible people on every court that, through past administration or future destiny, determine a good deal of the game's outcome.
From the past administration, we might have Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley. These players, coaches, and writers have ordered the game and its perception for decades. What would Duncan's post moves look like without Hakeem or Magic? Would Shaq still be Jupiter? They would both be different, somehow, if there at all. This is sort of like Mercury in our star system.
From the future we have people like, say, David Robinson's thousandth descendant, or, say, the cynical child that starred in Kazaam now as an aging and warlike Secretary of Defense in a cold and nightmarish totalitarian U.N. in 2180, finger on the apocalypse, or even Sean Elliott, or Larry Brown, or Dirk "Lisa Leslie's Oldest Daughter's Youngest Son" Malone Stockton (grandson of John and named after his great uncles). You know, people like that: people with yet-unrealized destinies that shape the court of today like basic forces of nature to reach these destinies.
Past and future always seem to tear at us meaningfully, don't they? But these planets have very little real sway on the actual passage of life on Earth, and of the solar system. There is only the sun, the asteroid belt, Jupiter, and Earth. The rest is superfluous. So it is on the solar system, so is it on the court. The past contributes the form and the future contributes the literature, but the content is all in the present.
Speaking of which, the sun is the radiating fusion of coaches Popovich and Brown, that manage most of the gravitational infrastructure of the game. That radiation of light and heat, fuelling ecosystems of talent and belief, prevents too much coldness and stagnation from reaching the players. Mike Brown's rays are more distant than Pop's: though warm, his influence is by and large to create sunspots and storms on Shaq and Ilgauskas - the only way for us to view fully Mike Brown's great folly and absurdity.
Darnell Jackson is the very universe outside the Solar System. Naturally, the other teams are teams inside of Darnell Jackson. He rarely needs his uniform of red, unlike Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn - lacking form, it wouldn't make sense for him to put on a color, though he humors his coach by radiating half-assed but consistent Microwave Radiation. Third-string Darnell is a multiverse, and you may travel from one game to another, from one system to another, from one time to another, all of them sparsely distributed around the frail Darnell Jackson, who notices and feels effectively nothing.
They all follow the rules and the penalties implied, but the rules change from solar system to solar system, with different Gods officiating, different physical laws, and different conceptions of art and competition dominating, and through it all I wonder, on occasion, if it is all basketball anymore. To that I respond, half-weeping, that I don't know all of the games that planets play in their systems (pathologies are uncovered every day), and I suppose that all these different games and implications seem to me like words trapped, without easy compartment, in a strict 10-dimensional sonnet.
POSTSCRIPT:
For the sake of the image, there are a few notes to make here: Each dribble by Parker is a single orbit by the moon. Delonte West is a comet that displaces the ball with the precision of the finest watch, from or to the desired player, but he's inconsistent and scared and doesn't have an easy time outside the Solar System. "No Manu, no championship" spoke the sun. He knows something's wrong, and he's right. But Manu is Planet X, with a body as Tweaked as Starbury's mind. He is Planet X, and waits patiently on the bench for the sun to sub out Phobos, Matt Bonner, so that he can crash through the rim himself. But for our purposes all of this is neither here nor there, as the game's duration is on the order of eons for us.
Alright, I know I wrote this a couple years ago, but what in Christ is this?
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