We turn today from yesterday’s oh-so-farcical reflection by Maugham on biblical distortion (
Years ago in one of my many critically acclaimed, but financially doomed publications, the Blue Marble, Scott Mitchell wrote a brilliant and funny piece called “Kissing Your Sister, or Why I read the Sports Page”. His premise was simple and something like the Sports page is somehow more humanizing and yet real than all the other news.
Or something like that. I’ll ask him tonight, some 17 years later, as we watch the Fighting Illini coolly bomb the crap out of the Tar Heels and take away their first National Title.
Scott has been my best friend for over 30 years and is currently somewhere between here and San Diego, blaring dark Led Zeppelin music at a volume that could rupture an eardrum and leave clear fluid dripping out of a normal passenger’s ear. He’s probably in-between Selma and Fowler on 99 by now. Shitty drive.
Scott loves college sports. He'’s been prattling on for years about it, mostly football, which he follows with the glee or glum of a true fanatic. I have always listening with mock interest, just he does with my many jobs and endless divorces.
But then this year’'s championship is a new event. It pits seemingly omnipresent North Carolina against the upstart Fighting Illini of Illinois in their first run for the whole schle-bange.
I have to confess I have not watched college basketball since the mid-70’s when I went to USF games to watch Phil Smith do miracles (he went on to win an NBA championship across the bay with Golden State).
Though I had always assumed that college basketball was a dumber slower version of the NBA, I started to track with this year’s March Madness for two reasons. The first was the self-inflicted demise of one of my mentors, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. His vivid descriptions of the weird world of gambling and the financial beatings and fleecing that could take place during March Madness were a thing of beauty (get Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness) and a clear invitation to a new world I should visit often.
It is sad that this year, at Owl Farm, the Good Doctor will not be holding court with the Sheriff, Anita, the depraved Ewing brothers, Princess Omin and Prince Omar and Ed Bradley, with large sums of cash rotating around the room in a blinding foray of side-betting. Johnny Depp will not crawl up from his room in the basement and Sean Penn will not call in for some half-time action.
No. There will be a great big hole there in Colorado and in that remote part of the National Soul that still has one.
The Good Doctor would have bet on the Tar Heels and insisted on, at the very least, the 3 point spread. He would scream that I was a rube, a sucker and a lamb led to slaughter to take Illinois straight up, but I would. He might even shoot over my head, threaten me with the Volt Stick or Mace me...but not until he had secured my active bond.
Oh yeah, reason number two for my interest is I am generationally surrounded by Illinois fans.
My father is a dyed in the wool Fighting Illini. And my poet-neighbor Raymond, who is young enough to be my son, is also a rabid Illinois alumni.
The two have never met. Though distanced by 50 years, different cultures and a good 400 miles, both exhibit the same exact edgy, existential, and nervous attachment to tonight’s results...like men who have been promised a life-long unconditional and torrid affair with Jennifer Connelly but cannot quite bring themselves to believe it until three weeks after it actually happens. They just scratch their heads.
My father finds it hard to even watch the game. This must be true of Raymond as well. We invited him to come watch games in our more spacious apartment and even provide tons of food and refreshments. He deflected, preferring his obsession as either a private sweet nirvana or a slow tablet of personal agonizing cyanide.
I’'m on safer ground. Like those (I was not one) who jumped on the Joe Montana/49er Express back in the early 80’s, I have everything to win and little to lose. I’m just here for the ride. Hell, my “college” was Sacramento State, and you cannot get any more sorry than that.
In fact, I have already won. Illinois has introduced me to college basketball. Damn. I am ashamed by all I have been missing. This is SOOOOO much better than the NBA. What a fool! What an obnoxious Fool I have been.
If the Good Doctor could see my shame, he would unleashing hordes of vermin in The Citadel and toss a Molotov Cocktail up over the big wall to both alert and terrify us with a medieval firelight as they quickly closed in. Like a drunken fundamentalist preacher, he would spew all manner of caustic insults and curses meant to dismantle whatever sense of self I had remaining then laughingly dance on my rotting vermin-eaten corpse like Baryshnikov on steroids.
Then he would use my phone to call Del Toro and Penn and double-down on the Tar Heels.
And he would have lost (this is, by the way 6 hours before game time).
What the Good Doctor never factored in was divine grace. I’'ve seen it in sports more often than in the world at large (except perhaps for events in the Philippines, Romania and South Africa..okay...it does happen...but not here).
While Dubya prattles on about being on "God'’s side", the Divine Being just scoffs. Bush is, even in his ignoreagance, still like a drop of feeble Texas piss in an empty bucket that is about to fall down a darkened staircase. You can see it in his blinking eyes as he tries to keep up the charade and pretend he cares about anything more than money and oil.
These are dark times indeed, and the deep wounds that this administration has allowed, created and left as a legacy for future generations will not go away anytime soon. As the Good Doctor so plainly pointed out, we went from a boisterous economy of peace and progress into a ruinous economy, record deficits, and decades of war in the matter of two years.
Maybe Hunter did not want to stick around to watch it get worse. He won that bet...it is getting worse.
When I get up in the morning it is like a flashback to the days of the Blue Marble when all the news was bad and dark and made you wish you were born in Samoa and lived in a bamboo hut. We were a nation at war. Unemployment was rampant and there were financial scandals and corruption.
Those were the good old days by comparison now.
Not much can be done today about the evil and lostness of our country. So, I’ll watch the NCAA Finals in six hours with my love Reese and my best friend semi-fresh from San Diego. We’ll sit out on the Citadel deck and talk about love, life, sex, politics and God and laugh at good old stories. Scott will rail about something truly important, Reese will laugh at shameful stories from my youth, the dishes will pile in the sink and I’ll fall asleep later thankful yet haunted all the same.
Thankful for Scott, Reese, my brilliant and grace-laden children, my father (and his wife), and for Illinois coming out of obscurity in just a year or so to invite me into their new-found party, and a whole new game.
I am thankful for the good years the Good Doctor gave me and all his letters. He taught me, among so many things, that there is always a new game in America. As Irish front man Bono keeps reminding us “"America is an idea”". Right now it is an idea gone bad and horribly rancid, but it can correct itself with unbending swiftness if we allow.
Therein comes part two: the haunting.
The specter of America looms... flipping off its allies and the whole world community, or engaging in pre-emptive wars in several countries, or prison abuses and grinding down our precious liberties at home while also empowering the courts to drag us all in for any reason. It is all just too much. It makes you feel like you live in a third world country where you should fear a trip to the grocer, a visit from a death squad, not to mention that you cannot get health care for your body, teeth or find a decent auto mechanic to save your life.
Haunted by reality TV which is the farthest thing from Reality; by Fox News which is the farthest thing from News; and The White House which is the farthest thing from Freedom, Democracy or the Constitution, we have the worst situation since King George laid siege to our mainland in the 1700’s.
Still, tomorrow morning we can read the sports page on Illinois'’ win and wish that this world was really about such things and them alone.
Would'n’t it be a great world if the loser simply went home to North Carolina (or wherever) and had a week or so of depression about a game...then moved on into their full and vibrant lives?
2 comments:
What happened to the Illini??? The Tar Heel defense kept them almost exclusively out of the paint. You can't win a game by only shooting from the perimeter....Man shall not live by 3-pointers alone...
Some have called suburbia a "failed experiment." I have to agree. Every place is an "idea", whether you're in Uzbekistan or the Falkland Islands or San Anselmo -- we all conceptualize and attach meaning to place, that's part of our humanity. Perhaps the rift in our "collective idea" and how to get there has grown so wide that we're sucking ourselves into the ugly pit. Yet again, the same type of rift is what caused many to leave the Old World to find the New World in America, so maybe the cycle is coming around full circle. Who knows?
Well it does seem to have resulted in ritual cocooning and a lack of any community (except the shopping mall).
A number of years ago I did talk with some planninng activists in Sacto. Notably Thomas Whitney (you shd look him up...drop my name)who were discussing, among other things, "Pedestrian Pockets" where small businesses and park lands would be at the center of new developments.
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