Have you ever been in a room with a lot of bad vibes, and just thought, "Everyone is looking at me"? And then, of course, you realized that if they weren't looking at you before, their telepathy had certainly picked up on that thought, and were now focused on you? That's sort of what being in a league overseen by David Stern is like. I've seen NBA headquarters, behind the office building fronts on every continent: I've seen how they all connect below the surface of the earth. I've seen the snakes in the tunnels, David. I have wept in underground tunnels in terror but like Lot fleeing, dared not avert my gaze.
By order of the Commissioner (Владимир "David" стярн), you can only view the true underground headquarters through a special "context visor" full of mirrors and lenses and distortions. Stern says that those without the visor are susceptible to attacks by rabid former players. I know he's just concerned with the image of the NBA, but it seems excessive. No doubt the visor was rigged by Stern to increase my fear and marketability, but there is simply no way to know for sure - whether the snakes I saw were real - without removing the visor and risking a fatal encounter.
Oh yes, there are hundreds of snakes.
One such snake was revealed to me in a giant underground fortress the size of South America. Stern's pet viper, named Sedusa for some reason, with the length of Chile, was housed in a large hall, even beneath the deep fortress. The room apparently had but two entrances. Stern beckoned us to take the west entrance. We rappelled, very slowly, down hundreds of feet to the linoleum-tiled hall and there were lights along the side and going down the hall, illuminating a sort of highway. The highway was parallel to the ground, but about fifty or sixty feet above. This was the snake, ostensibly.
After using pick-axes to mount the tail, three stories up, the scaly, slimy nature of the snake became apparent. The scales were surprisingly dense for such a massive creature, I noticed. The scales were piled on as finely as those of a frog the size of my big toe, like the tiny beads in a fine, artistic mesh that you can find in a New Orleans market, but of course, the snake spread out into eternity. I calculated that the snake must have more scales than a human has cells. If this is really as long as Chile, then the great viper's scales must dwarf our cells in number. Stern and I moved along the adder's great flat surface on special electric surfboards made of fiberglass. David Stern and I therefore began our great snake-journey at the tail.
Starting from the tail and working towards the presumed head, we observed that the body of the snake seemed fairly normal and otherwise proportionate, all considering. To Stern and I the snake just melted, effectively, into just another mundane highway to surf along, after awhile, you see. In other words I began to see the snake completely objectively, through the perspective of a motorist on the road. For the first six hours and hundred miles of surfing, it was a free for all - a fairly flat, green, damp, winding 6-lane interstate.
But one gradually noticed forks in the road - lane changes at first, and then outright exits. Little gaps between the lanes became pronounced and the lanes started to twist in contradictory directions. The snake's many bodies doubled back into the snake and lanes disappeared. The whole thing was like going through a woman's long black hair from roots to ends, tousled on a bed as I combed it through. Stern had warned me, but there were little ripples of motion making us shudder as we went further on. The walls of the giant hall clung tightly to the snake's forms, burrowing into tight tunnels like a continuous train in a subway. We often had to duck and crawl on the snake's surface because the ceilings were so low above it.
Stern noticed minor fatigue in me at the 36-hour mark (right around Santiago, I joked) when I started making abrupt lane changes and speaking in tongues every couple of miles, but he decided to let me continue and I eventually got on with it. I honestly don't know if there are any true escapes from the snake's room between the tail and the head of the snake. Merging lanes and...end arounds emerged as most of the highways (our single mainline excluded) slowly lost their former thickness and became as small country roads, and from there became little driveways and then on to even smaller flowing tributaries. And finally, some of the driveways would end, as winding and gigantic as they may have once been. Even this civilization would decay someday as we followed its river, I suppose, and I got that sense every time a road ended.
At the first end point of a road, the first true dead end in a little country road in this winding tapestry, Stern had us take the exit, on our left, to this country road. Our journey halted abruptly as we went to meet this first end point on foot. I suppose I should have been prepared for what I saw, but the context visor was not able to hide my discomfort. The visor fogged up with slogans at first. "NBA ON NBC", "NBA SHOWTIME", and all the other little populisms of the 1990s, filled my eyes. Stern gave me a tissue and I gently wiped off the sensitive visor. What I beheld before me was a head. The dead end of the street was a head, of a room-sized snake, a busy, massive, slithering end that seemed to jut from the main road like clay pinched out. A mist of moist life appeared in all directions and one could sense, with all senses, the concentration in biological energy. The head moved towards as Stern expertly shielded me and spoke in snakesong to calm it. The linoleum beneath it had long since been impacted and crushed and turned to dust. After the shock of the head's existence wore off, we gave a mutual nod and turned back to the mainline, and the little tremors of the beginning of our journey began to seem like real waves on the surface as we continued. The main snake's tail was obviously locked in place, and Stern assured me that this was the case for the main head. However, that gave the main snake amazing and terrifying freedom everywhere in between, especially at the very center. That is where we must be now.
Two hours of surfing after the first head, the roads had finally begun to hit dead ends in substantial quantities. Of course, each dead end was another outcropped head of the snake, some of them living, most dead. I counted at least a million heads. Each head was, relative to the snake, the size of a thick little hair on an human arm or a leg, and once while I watched closely a small little head (about the size of an ordinary snake's head, the snake tried to seize and bite me as it opened its eyes and put out its tongue. I narrowly avoided a bite - who knows how the venom could be distributed? I then supposed it would have venom that might not be poisonous - after all, why keep a pet that can merely kill? Maybe this is how NBA players find injury, how they find blurriness and darkness in their minds. Maybe this is the source of hubris and malice. Maybe this is the source of the afterlife. Who knows what visions Stern has implanted in the minds of his players - has implanted in me? The waves of motion on the snake started to weaken. How much longer, David, how much longer would it be?
After hours without a dead end head, the circumference of the snake gradually increased, and I knew we had reached the main head, and I noticed it was anchored into complete stillness to the hall but for its eyes and mouth. There was no linoleum beneath it. The room seemed warmer near the snake, and the warmth actually comforted me. Though its beady eyes on each side were as large as a city, I somehow only felt depressed and worried for my favorite players, and the suicides and depression this snake must have caused. But the snake itself seemed pitiable, intelligent, almost beautiful. The snake licked out its tongue at Stern, who briefly grew large enough to hug the tongue. It was a hug between absent lovers. The snake's mouth was the shape of a large, inside-out woman, now that you mention it. I don't know if there is any love in this world that we can find in view of Stern's vacuum-heart, but perhaps that love of the snake translates into love of the game on some wrong, but real, level of understanding. And there was certainly physical love. I decline to elaborate on this point, however, as I am under confidentiality agreements with the NBA and the transdimensional ABA.
After some reservations, I eventually asked the smitten Stern if there was anything else I would need to see before leaving. He told me to push a button on the visor that would show me the world as it really is. I saw, with the visor, geometries that do not belong to this realm, and yet, even in those geometries of eight or more dimensions, the snake of a million heads slithered just the same. I'd imagine in this world, without Stern's visor, that the heads would seem to be transporting themselves through space and time. Add to that Stern's mastery of physics, and we may safely presume there is no longer any safety, wherever in the world one may choose to sleep and slither and dream.
We went to the surface and I asked him if the Earth was the only planet that bore life in the universe. He said it probably was but that our eyes can't grasp all of the life on Earth, and that if we knew how diverse the life was that we would not consider this a limited answer. The Earth is a whole universe, and like our familiar spatial universe, we only have access to a single planet.
"There are," Stern warned as I made for the exit near Munich, "occasional collisions between these various Earths. Sometimes, perhaps even frequently, there are gravitational disturbances between the worlds. Maybe you'd like to forget this."
I poiltely declined and signed the confidentiality agreements. There was a lot I would be required to withhold, but reader, it goes so much deeper than what I have presented, and, suffice it to say, I am not breaking anything by telling you all of this.
By order of the Commissioner (Владимир "David" стярн), you can only view the true underground headquarters through a special "context visor" full of mirrors and lenses and distortions. Stern says that those without the visor are susceptible to attacks by rabid former players. I know he's just concerned with the image of the NBA, but it seems excessive. No doubt the visor was rigged by Stern to increase my fear and marketability, but there is simply no way to know for sure - whether the snakes I saw were real - without removing the visor and risking a fatal encounter.
Oh yes, there are hundreds of snakes.
One such snake was revealed to me in a giant underground fortress the size of South America. Stern's pet viper, named Sedusa for some reason, with the length of Chile, was housed in a large hall, even beneath the deep fortress. The room apparently had but two entrances. Stern beckoned us to take the west entrance. We rappelled, very slowly, down hundreds of feet to the linoleum-tiled hall and there were lights along the side and going down the hall, illuminating a sort of highway. The highway was parallel to the ground, but about fifty or sixty feet above. This was the snake, ostensibly.
After using pick-axes to mount the tail, three stories up, the scaly, slimy nature of the snake became apparent. The scales were surprisingly dense for such a massive creature, I noticed. The scales were piled on as finely as those of a frog the size of my big toe, like the tiny beads in a fine, artistic mesh that you can find in a New Orleans market, but of course, the snake spread out into eternity. I calculated that the snake must have more scales than a human has cells. If this is really as long as Chile, then the great viper's scales must dwarf our cells in number. Stern and I moved along the adder's great flat surface on special electric surfboards made of fiberglass. David Stern and I therefore began our great snake-journey at the tail.
Starting from the tail and working towards the presumed head, we observed that the body of the snake seemed fairly normal and otherwise proportionate, all considering. To Stern and I the snake just melted, effectively, into just another mundane highway to surf along, after awhile, you see. In other words I began to see the snake completely objectively, through the perspective of a motorist on the road. For the first six hours and hundred miles of surfing, it was a free for all - a fairly flat, green, damp, winding 6-lane interstate.
But one gradually noticed forks in the road - lane changes at first, and then outright exits. Little gaps between the lanes became pronounced and the lanes started to twist in contradictory directions. The snake's many bodies doubled back into the snake and lanes disappeared. The whole thing was like going through a woman's long black hair from roots to ends, tousled on a bed as I combed it through. Stern had warned me, but there were little ripples of motion making us shudder as we went further on. The walls of the giant hall clung tightly to the snake's forms, burrowing into tight tunnels like a continuous train in a subway. We often had to duck and crawl on the snake's surface because the ceilings were so low above it.
Stern noticed minor fatigue in me at the 36-hour mark (right around Santiago, I joked) when I started making abrupt lane changes and speaking in tongues every couple of miles, but he decided to let me continue and I eventually got on with it. I honestly don't know if there are any true escapes from the snake's room between the tail and the head of the snake. Merging lanes and...end arounds emerged as most of the highways (our single mainline excluded) slowly lost their former thickness and became as small country roads, and from there became little driveways and then on to even smaller flowing tributaries. And finally, some of the driveways would end, as winding and gigantic as they may have once been. Even this civilization would decay someday as we followed its river, I suppose, and I got that sense every time a road ended.
At the first end point of a road, the first true dead end in a little country road in this winding tapestry, Stern had us take the exit, on our left, to this country road. Our journey halted abruptly as we went to meet this first end point on foot. I suppose I should have been prepared for what I saw, but the context visor was not able to hide my discomfort. The visor fogged up with slogans at first. "NBA ON NBC", "NBA SHOWTIME", and all the other little populisms of the 1990s, filled my eyes. Stern gave me a tissue and I gently wiped off the sensitive visor. What I beheld before me was a head. The dead end of the street was a head, of a room-sized snake, a busy, massive, slithering end that seemed to jut from the main road like clay pinched out. A mist of moist life appeared in all directions and one could sense, with all senses, the concentration in biological energy. The head moved towards as Stern expertly shielded me and spoke in snakesong to calm it. The linoleum beneath it had long since been impacted and crushed and turned to dust. After the shock of the head's existence wore off, we gave a mutual nod and turned back to the mainline, and the little tremors of the beginning of our journey began to seem like real waves on the surface as we continued. The main snake's tail was obviously locked in place, and Stern assured me that this was the case for the main head. However, that gave the main snake amazing and terrifying freedom everywhere in between, especially at the very center. That is where we must be now.
Two hours of surfing after the first head, the roads had finally begun to hit dead ends in substantial quantities. Of course, each dead end was another outcropped head of the snake, some of them living, most dead. I counted at least a million heads. Each head was, relative to the snake, the size of a thick little hair on an human arm or a leg, and once while I watched closely a small little head (about the size of an ordinary snake's head, the snake tried to seize and bite me as it opened its eyes and put out its tongue. I narrowly avoided a bite - who knows how the venom could be distributed? I then supposed it would have venom that might not be poisonous - after all, why keep a pet that can merely kill? Maybe this is how NBA players find injury, how they find blurriness and darkness in their minds. Maybe this is the source of hubris and malice. Maybe this is the source of the afterlife. Who knows what visions Stern has implanted in the minds of his players - has implanted in me? The waves of motion on the snake started to weaken. How much longer, David, how much longer would it be?
After hours without a dead end head, the circumference of the snake gradually increased, and I knew we had reached the main head, and I noticed it was anchored into complete stillness to the hall but for its eyes and mouth. There was no linoleum beneath it. The room seemed warmer near the snake, and the warmth actually comforted me. Though its beady eyes on each side were as large as a city, I somehow only felt depressed and worried for my favorite players, and the suicides and depression this snake must have caused. But the snake itself seemed pitiable, intelligent, almost beautiful. The snake licked out its tongue at Stern, who briefly grew large enough to hug the tongue. It was a hug between absent lovers. The snake's mouth was the shape of a large, inside-out woman, now that you mention it. I don't know if there is any love in this world that we can find in view of Stern's vacuum-heart, but perhaps that love of the snake translates into love of the game on some wrong, but real, level of understanding. And there was certainly physical love. I decline to elaborate on this point, however, as I am under confidentiality agreements with the NBA and the transdimensional ABA.
After some reservations, I eventually asked the smitten Stern if there was anything else I would need to see before leaving. He told me to push a button on the visor that would show me the world as it really is. I saw, with the visor, geometries that do not belong to this realm, and yet, even in those geometries of eight or more dimensions, the snake of a million heads slithered just the same. I'd imagine in this world, without Stern's visor, that the heads would seem to be transporting themselves through space and time. Add to that Stern's mastery of physics, and we may safely presume there is no longer any safety, wherever in the world one may choose to sleep and slither and dream.
We went to the surface and I asked him if the Earth was the only planet that bore life in the universe. He said it probably was but that our eyes can't grasp all of the life on Earth, and that if we knew how diverse the life was that we would not consider this a limited answer. The Earth is a whole universe, and like our familiar spatial universe, we only have access to a single planet.
"There are," Stern warned as I made for the exit near Munich, "occasional collisions between these various Earths. Sometimes, perhaps even frequently, there are gravitational disturbances between the worlds. Maybe you'd like to forget this."
I poiltely declined and signed the confidentiality agreements. There was a lot I would be required to withhold, but reader, it goes so much deeper than what I have presented, and, suffice it to say, I am not breaking anything by telling you all of this.
Whoa, some of this old stuff is pretty weird. What was I thinking?
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