It's a Beautiful D(eer Antler Spr)ay

I wrote a piece but it's too weird to post at The Gothic Ginobili so I'm posting it here. Heh. -Alex

Mavericks-Blazers Recap, January 29, 2013:

Last night, I sprayed some deer antler spray into my eyes and sat down to watch the Portland game. This is my usual Tuesday-night custom, but today I think I might have held the spray on a half-second too long because the famous "5-on-5" Blazers logo at center court got up and turned into players. Then the logo-spawned players changed color: the red turned to white and the white turned to blue as the logo remembered it was a home game and by now I was futilely washing the spray out of my eyes to no avail. At some point I decided simply to ride the waves of excessive deer antler essence with class and dignity. My eyes widened, and with a sudden feeling of compassion for all sentient beings, I paid attention to the world around me. Only problem is I couldn't move, and I couldn't blink (strange side-effect, but at least I had some eye drops that I couldn't use because I couldn't move). Anyway, what I'm saying is that my performance as a viewer was enhanced, and the blue-shifted logo went back to the center of the Rose Garden floor and then the arms of the logo circled around and around, creating a hurricane-eye through which I could see at a glance every possible iteration of the game and analyze a high-dimensional distribution of possible games. The distribution, shaped ironically like a deer, let me see every possible outcome of every possible move, and it galloped as things unfolded in the game.

But it was kind of an ordinary game, honestly. The distributional deer just kept walkin' along, chillin' out. It seemed pretty mellow and I was pretty cool. I just kind of watched it. It was more interesting than watching Wesley Matthews bobble the ball out of bounds. See, even in a hallucinogenic, omniscient state, I still thought Sasha Pavlovic and J.J. Hickson and Wes Matthews were pretty boring players. So for 45 minutes I sort of hummed along with the uncollapsed wave-function centered on reality and the present moment. And then something happened.

Darren Collison hit a miraculous banker (not soft enough to be a "glasser" Zach) from 27 feet to beat the shot clock with 3 minutes left. Usually when a huge uncertainty like a shot attempt gets resolved into a make or a miss, we calm denizens of probability feel placid and consummated: Our distributions collapse into certainties, our Bayesian needles shift the percentages smoothly to the new, more certain reality, and we settle in to our new, more comfortable chair that is reality, adjusted for the soothing music of fresh, breath-mint-flavored evidence. Our sample sizes increase, our normal distributions get a little more tail. We are happy. But this is just the lulling intro that makes that harsh, jangly synthesizer loudness so jarring. See, some certainties beget further uncertainty by their nature. When Darren Collison is hitting a freakish banker from 27 feet to beat the shot clock, something isn't right in the world. We have shifted to a new, less consistent, high-variance world. We have moved into the Twilight Zone. The deer-shaped distribution at the center of the Rose Garden began laughing uncontrollably in the eye of the hurricane-force spiral, its laugh rather akin to a staggered, polyrhythmic ululating on the note "High C" and the approximate pronunciation of the letter "M". And then the distributional deer exploded. The light was blinding and instincts took over and I blinked and reality disappeared for a few minutes.

When I woke up, instead of the distributional deer, I saw a familiar red-and-white logo and above it a spirited walk. I immediately knew that reality had returned. LaMarcus Aldridge was returning to his bench to acclaim by teammates. He had hit an improbable corner three! The deer antler spray must have worn off at this point because I could see reality not in a haze of distributional data but as it was. Now everything was clear to me. At first I was happy for the clarity of perception, but then I started to look around at the world, in clear and opened mind. And what I'd once considered to be a stable hold reality was absolutely, mind-shatteringly insane, far more so than when I was on that deer antler spray. Ordinary things like the economy and politics suddenly made no sense to me. What do you mean, government spending can actually help the economy now? How do you escape the broken-window fallacy in these economic projections? How can you possibly project with such certainty the state of the economy in 10 years when we don't even know if we'll be living in huts or microchips then? And while we're at it, why can't we just learn to love one another, and reach out with confidence, knowing that yes, sometimes we'll get hurt, but ultimately we are nearly always better for the experience if we take it in good faith? What's so funny about peace, love, and understanding? And why is everything so bleak? What is this desert of the real before me?

And that's when it hit me. I had woken up too far. Damn you, Darren Collison. That was too unsettling an improbability. So I wanted the haze back, if only slightly, but I was nearly out of antler spray and a news ticker helpfully reminded me that I would not be able to purchase any of that anytime soon. So I'm here, I'm terrified, and I'm watching the Aldridge three on replay again and again, not sure what to believe anymore. Having to face reality, I rewound back to the Collison three and found nothing but chaos ever sense. I saw Dirk hit a pull-up three from above the break and, just before that, Nic Batum hit an above-the-break three. Four threes. This was too much. I did not want to live in such a world.

So in desperation, I put the final drops of deer antler spray into my eye with a delicate brush. I went live on the game again just as the final possession was starting. With a second and change left, Portland got the ball to LaMarcus Aldridge and I knew that for whatever would be resolved by the result of his turnaround jumper, something else, something bigger would be displaced. I braced in anticipation of the Lovecraftian horrors I might be subjecting myself to as I watched that high-arcing Rose Garden shot.

But it was not to be. The shot simply went in, in a straightforward way. The sight of the tickled twine and the buzzer's definite sound had apparently exhausted chaos for a merciful moment, and it was just a perfunctory game-winner.