The Most Important Question

Q: Are you obsessed with Richard Jefferson? Straight-up. No jokes, Alex. This is the moment of truth.

A: Nope, but because I'm a blogger I can't just give you a one-word answer. When someone on Twitter lightly implied that my large sub-oeuvre of RJ write-ups was evidence of an actual obsession, I became defensive.

See, I've seen interviews with two of the great character actors of our generation, Stephen Colbert and Bryan Cranston. Cranston takes a hot bath to unwind from Walter White/Heisenberg. Colbert quoted his comedy roots in a Second City saying: "Wear your character as lightly as a cap."

And while I am a certifiably weird person, I've never had any problem doing taking the cap off or putting the cap on. Wearing different caps (hopefully the range of this blog is some bit of testimony to that), combining characters I've built, etc. Not to say it's always easy to figure out how to do a certain thing, and a lot of the reason I write as RJ so much is because:

a) it's an especially easy cap to wear and take off, dag namit, and
b) RJ genuinely is a fun and satisfying character to write as that helps create dramatically interesting situations.

Check out this from the introduction of my RJ-meets-Mark Jackson piece (actually written about 8 months before RJ was traded to the Warriors):

This took me by surprise. Of all the players likely to be considered for a job in the surreal and paranormal, Richard Jefferson was right below Ron Artest and Deshawn Stevenson. He had seen it all in this league, and he had an acute sense for what was abnormal, largely because he was the most average player in the history of the league: What was abnormal was merely what was unlike Jefferson.

"Richard Jefferson and I meet Coach Mark Jackson"

For me that's the impulse - RJ is such a normal, average person, so reasonable and well-spoken... that any other figure in the league becomes a foil around Jefferson, and their normal characteristics (or their characteristics as I've conveniently defined them) become exaggerated.

So yeah, Jefferson's character is a convenient literary device and a fun cap to wear. That's honestly all I would need to justify how much I've used RJ.

That said, you'd be forgiven for thinking I have a sincere obsession or fascination or whatever. First of all, you wouldn't know this, but I'm a young musician and (arguably) an accomplished composer. And so my mind works in rhythms and timbres, and I hear dialogue and prose (often fully-formed) hundreds of times over in my head. And, over long periods of silence, the dialogue and prose shifts with natural rhythms as with a Brian Wilson melody baking in the California sun as he drives along the ocean's shore (not my original image, but I'll be damned if I can remember where it came from). Phrases tend to repeat endlessly in my head, and I'd be lying if "Richard Jefferson" weren't a perfect name for this kind of unconscious audio synthesis. And it's sometimes something I just think of altogether randomly: I'll say something amusing and self-deprecating and I'll be like, "If I had RJ say that that would be really funny. Heh."

And yeah, the tattoo and the ears and eyes make me laugh. But believe me when I say there is nothing mean-spirited or obsessive about it: See, in some sense I'm laughing at myself: my Richard Jefferson character is indeed based on a combination of Richard Jefferson in interviews and myself in a lot of ways. Especially the clumsy, deer-in-the-headlights on-court stumbling that anyone that has ever had to help me move or asked me to do something physically simple knows well. I'm clumsy, and altogether more reasonable and thoughtful than what I can put into action on the stage of life. I can relate to RJ's absurdity as I've painted it; that absurdity you see is actually mine.

So yes, I wear my character as lightly as a cap. And in a couple ways, I can't take the cap completely off, but a) that part of the cap has always been a part of me, and b) most of this is because I designed the cap to fit my head really well, if that makes sense. Also, there are a few times when my RJ character is just not funny... but as a comic creation I think it has to be one of my favorites, and when it stops being funny I'll let you know.

Follow-up: "Okay, then, can you at least admit it's self-indulgent and weird and wrong?"

A: "(ethered silence)"