Let Earthquakes Be Earthquakes

"Welp. Still haven't posted at The Gothic Ginobili yet. Writer's block."

It's the strained, pathetic cry of futility, meaning nothing and aggravating me with its meaninglessness. I've long known there's something to this block beyond some nebulous "things have to change": it's just that I haven't known or been able to articulate just what.

I love basketball, and I love writing about basketball. As the spooky, CIA-monitored, RJ-enshrining, prevolutionary version of my contributions to that blog, Pearls of Mystery gives the lie to the writer's block. I have no trouble writing these sentences and approving them for publication when I'm safe in the knowledge that no one will read this crap. And so it goes that here I can write whatever I want, and I feel not just respite from the "block" but the non-existence of this block entirely. It's not performance anxiety, either: If you could witness the number of things I manage to say about sports in a given day to friends and acquaintances, you'd think that I'd thought about little else. I love the public discourse, too: That's not the friggin' problem. Nor is time commitment: I've been spending a lot of time learning sort of the theoretical and empirical basis for competition. I've really been exploring my most basic impulses, competitively, and been learning to articulate them. That's not the problem.

There is no damn writer's block, and there's nothing wrong with the Gothic Ginobili. So what the hell gives? Why am I suddenly so d*mn profane? LOL.

Well, the truth is, I think it starts with my relationship to my family (especially my extended family on my father's side). See, I love my family dearly and I'm certain they love me back. But while the love is unquestionably genuine at every turn on both sides, the relationships, communications, and expressions are ingenuous and infinitely questionable. Which is only to say that the love is human.


A bit of background: My father died when I was 12 and after that, frankly, I grew up with my mother and younger brother in a giant, beautiful house.

That house that the three of us lived in was filled with corridors and endless clean areas and equally endless areas of filth - long open halls and rooms to run and conceptualize space in.. Introverted and computer-oriented and sprawling and brilliant in its entropy to space ratio. How could one house have so much space, so much order, and so much ruin? It was a house for interesting, mildly-brain-addled people of superlative intelligence to wander from task to task, from setting to setting. A house like some sort of Borgesian Aleph capturing all of human endeavor simultaneously and imperfectly - the memories and musical equipment of my father and the mourning struggles of my mother providing the heavy, musty counterweights to the gifted, forward-looking children and the songs the oldest was imagining and the technology the children were adapting.

Functionally, the house served as a less mature, more open version of my current apartment. Today, about six years later, I still select for that house's paradoxical trifecta in simultaneity: order, disorder, and space. I need disorder to span my thoughts, space to collect them, and order to spin them. Or as one might rotate these creative needs in spacetime: past context, forward-looking creativity, and those beads of sand in the hour glass that you can find crossing over from hemisphere to hemisphere at least once during every notable quantity of time.



Organization has been a big problem with my on-going job search, hell, in my search for improvement as a writer. At some point writing about basketball becomes a sort of non-stop, agile hopping from rock to rock of slightly different shapes, sizes, and aspects. Imagine a field of coal lumps, except without the heat (unless you're on a deadline!). The rocks represent the manifold different subjects in the field of basketball. This one is Fashion. This big one is irony. That one is Rajon Rondo! Careful... He's connected to some slippery rocks representing Enigmatic and Introverted and Surly! Don't get too close!

Anyway, so we walk from rock to rock, at every step taking critical consensus as our foothold. Then we look around at the next step to take, and try to find the angle that will best connect the two, will best make the jump to the critical consensus of the next rock. And then - this is the part that gets me! - we forget the previous stepping stone and goes forth in the same monotonous athletic grind of the communicator-athlete. Along the way we potentially hit all the rocks on the arid, coal-ridden shore of an endless sea... And at the end of it - a process taking perhaps an earnest man's year, at the end of that trawl, all the rocks have changed, and we are but older!

But the hard part isn't planning out your chosen steps or the existential crisis of this process writ large: Athletes don't have much problem with that, and neither do I. Nor is it the monotony of endless steps. And no, it's not the pressure on the ankles; it's not the speed of the hops. You deal with these things if you're meant to deal with them, and if you don't, you probably haven't made it to the field of coals in the first place.

No, the hard part is choosing your steps. Stepping on rocks is easy if you know what you're doing. I love the feeling of writing something, and there's an endlessly fascinating variant of reasoning particular to story-crafting and prose composition. But if you don't put yourself into a position to succeed at this process as it pertains to your chosen topic, or if you choose a topic that is hard to write about? Good luck. If you try to go too deep into a shallow subject, you write a piece that is too eclectic and waste a lot of everyone's time (Google: site:pearlsofmystery.blogspot.com "Richard Jefferson").. If you try to step too lightly over a big rock like Statistics or The Fan Experience or Watching Kobe, or if you're simply too light as you are when you're walking on that rock, you're liable to leave it looking nearly untouched by your earthly feet, defeating your noblest intentions to say anything at all.

I sometimes lose sight at what I'm good at - if you choose the wrong path from time to time, big deal. Try climbing a mountain by feel alone.

Is there hope in this process? Well, yes, if you love walking on coals as much as me! I love basketball, and even though I've been sick the last week and my quasi-singing, musically-gifted voice has been rendered gravelly and muted, my writing gone to hell and leaving me feeling fundamental doubts... yeah, it's getting to shoot hoops, and practice that crossover dribble, that's been getting me down about my sickness. I love the outdoors, but I mostly love that feeling - rather like a bird's song - of having my own beat, that relentless continuous dribble that ceases only for stretching and water.



After my father died, we wandered through that house for about 10 more years. There were troubles, but even then, I had the occasional moment when, in school or on-line, I really moved into that next-level mode of complex expressive ability that - in its more mature days - would eventually subsume my consciousness, my present "internal voice" being little more than a series of calculations, definitions, connections, and attempts to describe sensations in new, more interesting, and powerful ways. A artist and a mathematician.fused into one.

But back then all I had was a vague awareness of intelligence, my (still typical) insane level of humility about my rights and my position and my truths, and a troubled, complexly-nurturing home. And outside that home lay the absent extended family of my father, seeming to promise with their presence some fraction of their rich, connected, well-spoken, well-traveled lives. And I bought in, because the troubles seen at home were never going to sustain an adult existence by themselves, even if the creativity would help. I thought that if I just followed their arbitrary proscriptions for being a classy gentleman, I could find myself on the slow road to status and mental flourishing.

These were the expectations I had, but because of various fallings-out this connection never materialized, and now that necessity finds these people quite present in my life again, I see all the flaws in both sides of the equation (sides being immediate (self included) and extended family) that caused the fallings-out in the first place. Rampant irresponsibility, emotional distance, co-dependency, negligent management of one's finances, bad advisors, passive-aggressiveness, conflict avoidance, anxiety, and the conflation of money with love.

I think it's just hard to write (or really, to express yourself) when you presume you have to prove yourself every time you write something, and that the proof's validity hinges on the success of the expression. That's not how it works, though. We put a thought out there as fully as we can, and then, in the totality of that process and the monotonous step-step-step over hundreds of rocks, we go somewhere, we become something. Every piece of writing is essentially a self-proving boast (which is at any given time an absurdity) written in a writerly voice. To these absurd self-proving boasts, the whole body of one's writing slowly serves to give credence and meaning. Yes, the boasts are silly at first, and then, after arduous days and years, we establish ourselves and we suddenly are not boasting but giving an accurate picture of our body of work.

All this to say that I don't have to prove myself to my family. I will write what I need and the proofs will fall where they may. With this group of people that I love dearly, I have to negotiate the way to peace and prosperity. We have a difficult climb. But as long as it's about me proving myself instead of me saying what I need to, my family's expectations are simply a mire of hurt feelings. It's time to flip that script, forever. The boasts come first. Luckily for everyone involved, the art of writing is to render the boasts virtually undetectable to all but the most carefully-attuned ear. Luckily for everyone involved, I know that this is a writerly voice, not a sincere expression of impressive intellect.

Reluctantly, I let this side of the family see my blog, and I told them it was probably germane to my career, which is true in some real sense. But it was never about that and I should never have sold it that way, because it's the wrong half of the truth. Writing, for me, is always about re-creating that architectually marvelous house once that I lived in for others to inhabit for awhile. And when they told me to put little business cards and "WILL WORK FOR FOOD" placards on the front door of all my houses, it changed my attitude towards the houses that I'd like to build for an audience I eminently respect. Telling my family about the Gothic Ginobili and watching them try to appraise it for its practicality affected my attitude towards that blog on a frequency lower than the human ear could detect.

But the great part about imagination is that if we can pick up on our seismographs or tuning forks a frequency that we can't hear? Well, we don't have to accept that our ears will always live in ignorance. Because we can weld the seismograph to our backs and hook it up to our ears. We can graft ears of dogs to our own. And we can at long last hear - not merely sense - the second rumblings. And then we can go further than to hear - we can counter. We can become our own wonderful version of a noise-cancelling, tectonic anti-apocalypse, laughing as the fate's plan of earthquake is thwarted, as we plan the resumption of our madly-hopped, madly-hopping tour of the coal fields.