I’m wondering if there’s some web-parallel service to a Winter Caretaker, someone who could come by once a month and open the windows, dusting and airing the rooms out in the summer, then battening down the hatches come autumn, while keeping the water running a bit in the winter to make sure the pipes don’t freeze up, and then coming around to make the minor repairs needed in the spring…basically, someone to do the little bits of daily upkeep that prevent a structure from becoming a ruin.

I wonder this because I’m going to be moving on from here.  Pretentiously Eloquent Microfiction is closing up shop, boarding up the windows and putting in a change of address form.

A while back, I speculated on what to do with this site…it began as a novelty, a place to record my returning ability—and willingness—to write, and what was driving me at the time was short bursts of language, Pretentiously Eloquent Microfiction, as I originally defined it on day one.

I had realized that, over time, my work—fiction and non—had moved away from that structure, and was of two minds about what to do:  do I change things around here, reflecting the evolution of what I’m working on now and how I want to share it?  Or do I keep things as-is, a reminder of what’s come before, and a desire to maintain a realistic history, at least as much as you can online.

And I decided, then, to keep on keeping on.  P.E.M. is critically important to me, as much a part of what defines me in this last half-decade of my life as my family and my new career.

But the time has come for me to realize, and acknowledge, that the work begun here, lo many years back, hasn’t just changed in direction:  it’s complete.  As in, over.  Something new is come ‘round, and it just doesn’t fit here anymore.

So, I’m turning out the lights and locking the door behind me.  I may return to these parts at some point in the future—if publishing my fiction on the web ever again becomes something that I feel I need to do, it’ll end up here.  But it’s time for some new scenery.

So update your bookmarks, if you will:  SpaceJunk.

These are my new online digs.  Something shiny, with different places to arrange the furniture and a new view outside the windows.  I’ve migrated some of the least-fiction-related posts from here over there already, just so we have something to build from, and now that I’m getting comfortable there, and feeling somewhat freed from the original strictures that were built here, you may even find me posting there more often there than I have been here of late…though, of course, the Rules of Engagement still hold.

And in case this truly is the last post that will go up here, I want to end it with something that it began with, something important that reminds me—and I hope encourages you to do the same—that intent is everything, and the baggage and previously-existing conditions surrounding a thought, or emotion, or situation, can and must be re-evaluated, so that it becomes meaningful to you, and you’re not just absorbing the meaning that others have given it as your own:

“We’re deathly afraid of that stabbing word ‘pretentious,’ the word that students use to curse each other’s ambition.  It’s a young person’s word, a shortcut-to-thinking word. I’m a big fan of pretension.  It means ‘an aspiration or intention that may or may not reach fulfillment.’  It doesn’t mean failing upward.  It means trying to exceed your grasp.  Which is how things grow.”

- Warren Ellis

I had the idea of writing this up in a nice meta fashion, mimicking the book—my vibe of it, not necessarily the specific style of GRRM’s voice—but then realized I’d have to write some 10k+ words of generally meandering chatter, spending most of my time talking about the crisis that guy who was working the drive-through window at the place I went for lunch suffered through this morning in his parking lot, and other random bullshit, all while occasionally, briefly mentioning in passing that, oh yeah, there’s a review coming, and it’ll be amazing, and then back to inane, unrelated stuff, before ending the review with a sudden, massive, completely absurd shocker like “BTW, if you read past page 643, you’ll get AIDS and die!”

And that wouldn’t be much fun for anyone, me or you.  Which, incidentally, would serve as a perfectly adequate and accurate review, but, you know, fun and lack thereof.  So here’s something that was at least a bit more fun to write, if not hopefully read.

Ultimately, I finished it.  And had moments where I genuinely enjoyed what I was reading.  He’s a good writer, and has created a handful of vivid characters in incredible circumstances, and I genuinely want to read about them and see how their stories end up.

The key there:  a handful.  All great storytellers seem to understand this just fine.  You can have a cast of thousands, but you need a couple of key names above the titles for people to latch on to.  Especially in an epic story where the POV keeps moving around from location to location…that’s jarring enough.  With all sorts of intertwining conspiracies and plotting, and motivations and loyalties switching on a dime…  And if you want to keep your readers invested in what’s going on while moving them around all over the place, it really helps to have a consistent landing spot for them whenever you return them to someplace they haven’t been for a while.

You don’t suddenly, 500+ pages in, drop in a long chapter involving characters that we haven’t even heard mentioned since halfway through the last book, some 5 years and 700+ pages ago, a dozen or so of them with very similar, hard-to-pronounce names, and somewhat bland and overlapping, easily-confused personalities and motives, and try to reveal  a whole bunch of obscure minutiae about a small element in a vaster conspiracy, then abandon those characters and that location and the whole conspiracy for the rest of the damn book, and expect me to care or even fully follow what’s going on, even after reading through it multiple times.

I’ll say it again:  a handful.  It’s worth noting that the book ends with an Appendix that attempts to list out the key characters and their relationships to each other, just for this one book.

It’s 53 pages long.  That’s not a typo.

In the Appendices for The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien does something similar, listing out the family trees of each of the major houses involved in his stories…not just those mentioned in the book you’ve just read, by the way, but everyone, from the very first great-great grandfather, long since dead, through all the generations over thousands of years, up to the present day and the living heroes who participate in the events covered in the book you’ve just finished reading, a book that is often cited as the definition of Epic Fantasy.  All those people, across multiple races, and thousands of years.  And it’s barely half as long as GRRM’s list of the people in just one book that we’re supposed to keep straight in order to understand what’s going on.

Seriously?  I’m not dumb, I’m actually pretty smart and occasionally smart enough to justify at least a reasonable amount of my inherent arrogance and misanthropy…and halfway through the book, I just gave up trying to follow all the major narrative threads and treated it like a long collection of vaguely-related short stories, pretending at the beginning of each chapter that it was unconnected to anything I’d read previously.

And then we come back around to those few characters who are interesting and worth paying attention to, and they’ve actually got a decent part of the book set aside for their stories, and what do we get?

Jon wakes up, and it’s cold.  He eats some food, drinks some wine, wanders outside into the snow, meets with people who don’t like him, discusses a decision that’s somehow important to whatever’s eventually going to happen (probably in just a couple thousand more pages, it’s like imminent and shit), finds that those people disagree with him, and makes his decision anyway, one that seems pretty obviously clear to everyone reading along.  He leaves, walks outside, it’s cold, he mopes for a bit about how hard it is to be a commander, and then goes to bed.

There.  Fill in some of the generic blanks with random specific details (who he’s meeting with, what the decision is), and you can mad-libs about 90% of the Jon chapters in the book, some 200+ pages.

Was that fun?  Let’s do it again.

Daenerys wakes up, bathes in her pool, chooses what dress to wear, and goes off to procrastinate.  She worries about her “children”, makes a decision that’s pretty obviously awful to everyone reading along, worries some more about her “children”, goes to her pool, and then goes to bed.

Same thing:  we just covered another 200-ish pages of the whole book.

And the worst part is that there’s some really good stuff in there.  Jon does make some pretty massive decisions regarding the future of the whole realm, and his story does bring us ever closer to the fabled Winter that is coming…in the same way that tilting your head slightly forward while standing in Santa Monica does, in absolute terms, bring you slightly closer to Yankee Stadium.  And Daenerys ends up riding one of her dragons, finally claiming her birthright in full…until she stops, and leaves him, gets diarrhea from eating unripe berries, and worries some more about her “children”.

It’s all just buried until mountains of wasted paper and ink.  Sigh.  The man needs an editor more than anyone since Steve King wrote 300 pages too many for The Tommyknockers.

The only one who actually has anything to do is Tyrion, and that’s not because he’s actively pursuing anything—if it was left up to him, he’d happily stay in one place, drinking and whoring until his money, dick or liver runs out, whichever comes first—but because larger people with ulterior motives keep dragging him around, listening to his fast talking just enough to decide to keep him alive, but never enough to actually take his advice and get shit done.  (Except for one memorable occasion, which is probably the most interesting part of the whole book:  Connington’s and Aegon’s return to Westeros, which is the only part of the book I have no issue with at all.  There are a handful of complex but easily-discernible characters, each with their own private motives but all with a clearly-defined goal, and together they take actual tangible steps to achieve that goal.  It’s like someone snuck in and wrote some GRRM fan-fiction while he wasn’t looking, and he never bothered to take it out.)

You know those detective shows or movies, where they’re hunting a serial killer, and they finally come upon his apartment (and of course he’s already long-gone), and they see what must have started as a simple peg board, a few newspaper clippings and notes to help keep things straight, only the guy is bug-shit nuts and now every inch of every wall is covered with photos and articles and notes and drawings so disturbing they’d make a childhood psychologist shoot himself in despair for the next generation, with lines drawn randomly connecting stuff, and it’s all done in some very natural lighting, like afternoon sun from a window, with plenty of dust and haze in the air, and the whole point is to make the audience think “Holy shit, this guy is bug-shit nuts, no sane person could even read through all this, let alone try to make sense of it and connect it all into a larger whole?”

I imagine that’s what GRRM’s writing office looks like these days.

So, to sum up, I didn’t hate it, there was some really good stuff in there, and of course all the hints of some grand, once-in-a millennia conflict coming “soon”, which is entertaining (at least for the first couple thousand pages of foreshadowing), but I won’t be re-reading it, ever, and if the next book is anything like this one, I’m probably just going to set them aside and ignore them until the entire series is done, by which point I’ll be retired and have plenty of time to wade through them and see if the whole damn thing was worth it.

…

And, seriously, TWO Arya chapters?  That’s it?  That’s like paying a stripper for a lap dance and giving her $200 to take off her watch.  If we don’t get at minimum an entire book’s worth of Arya killing all the motherfuckers on her morning prayers’ list before this things wraps up, I’m gonna be pissed.

That isn’t to say that this post is a “hey everyone, I’m back, expect multiple posts per week from now on” piece.  I honestly have no idea what will be going on here and when for the near future.  The day job is slow now (though looks to be ending up rather manic shortly, all the way until late spring), but there are other things taking a sizeable chunk of my attention span:  books to read, games to play (got a PS3, finally, and there’s a metric shit-ton of games to catch up on), evolving family dynamics that are important to me, that I want to be present for and not regret missing later on.

Mostly, though, I hit a point late last year where I was able to come to peace with some things that were starting to rear their heads again.

Put simply, I love writing.  Fiction, non, whatever.  Short pieces, longer pieces, Lakers pieces, all of it.  Falling through the hole in the page and being utterly and completely present in the moment, with the external censors and observers turned off, is a transcendent, ecstatic experience for me.  My understanding of the process, and my experiences with it, have done more to shape my understanding of the world and my own spiritual and religious outlook on the world than all the reading, praying, fellowship…ing, etc., put together.

But it’s not a compulsion for me, at least not usually.  I don’t feel “wrong” if I haven’t written on a regular basis recently (again, at least not usually).  The love of it is always there, but the alignment of my priorities and the net gain when weighed against the other things I’m not doing when I’m writing is something that ebbs and flows.

Up until about a year ago, it had ebbed for nearly ten years, and then last year was a definite case of flow.  I wrote half a dozen new short fiction (the microfiction this blog is named for), two much longer stories (edging into the realm of short novellas), and over 50,000 words on a new novel, the longest single piece of work I’ve ever put down on the page (even if it’s not done yet).  Not to mention  what is close to 100,000 words worth of posts here on the blog.  For anyone not named Piers Anthony or Stephen King, that’s quite a haul, and compared to the years-long dry spell preceding it, it was astonishing.

And then—partly due to external events (like changing my job and career path), partly just due to the tidal flow of these things that I’ve come to accept within myself—it began to ebb again.  I have a new story, longer than the microfiction, shorter than the epic genre pieces of last year, that’s about 2/3 done…and has been in the works for almost two months, off and on.  I have the scattered notes for the second part of my essay on Grace spread across two different notebooks and a partial Google Docs file…and it’s showing no signs of coalescing in the immediate future.  I even figured out a solve for a major issue with the novel that was one of the reasons progress on that came to a halt (I couldn’t muster the effort to keep bricklaying on new chapters until sorting out that major structural flaw)…but have no real compulsion to try to get my head around the effort it’s going to take to write the remaining 40k or so words that it’ll take to finish the book.

See, while it rarely feels wrong for me to take a break from writing (even if that word, “break”, is a bit longer than what other people would consider using that word for), what does feel wrong to me is to feel bad for not working when I don’t want to.

I know I’m going to piss off anyone reading this who’s done any sort of work towards becoming a writer themselves, especially if they’ve taken a class, or a workshop, or read books on the subject.  Because beyond style, beyond how to find an agent, or use of adverbs, or proper manuscript formatting, the one thing they will all tell you, relentlessly and with zero pity, is:

-          Doesn’t matter if it’s great, just get it down on the page (or “Don’t worry about getting it right, just get it written”).

-          Write every day, no matter what.

-          You can’t call yourself a writer, you either write or you don’t write.

And, hey, that may work for some people, probably even most, it just doesn’t work for me.  I’m not setting aside every other effort in my life to make writing my primary path.  Writing is, for me, ultimately, fun.  It is a good thing, a benefit that enriches my life beyond the daily work to be happy and healthy with my family and home.  It is, in other words, gravy, desert, a bonus bit that helps the sum of good things equal something great.

And I refuse to view it like taking my vitamins.  I refuse to feel guilty for not having written X-hundred words every day.  I refuse to beat myself up because this weekend, just like last weekend, I’m going to pleasantly descend into the proper gaming posture and spend multiple hours “wasting” time that could better be spent on something “more important”.  Like writing.

Writing isn’t important in and of itself.  It isn’t some holy task that we—even those of us who love it and are really good at it—are obligated to complete on a regular basis, like attending church or changing your underwear.  It is nothing more than scribbled symbols on paper (or the electronic facsimile thereof).

Its value comes first and foremost from the benefit it brings to the person making those scribbles.  If you’re lucky, someone else will gain additional value from it later when they read it, but sorry, that’s a downstream consideration, not the reason pen first gets put to paper.  And it loses all value for me when I start beating myself up for not having done it.  I’m okay with the notion that I may, at times, be suffering a lower level of amazing greatness in my life than I could, under ideal circumstances, if I found a way to incorporate writing into that ideal circumstance.  But I refuse to take a net loss from a happy baseline just because, at that particular moment, writing was not a part of forming that happy baseline.

Imagine if the money in your pocket was worth 20% less because it was all ones, fives and twenties, and without some tens in there, the rest of it just didn’t mean as much.

That’s horseshit, and something I will not have in my life anymore.

Not to say that a regular regimen isn’t a good thing for many, even most other writers.  And truthfully, when the compulsion to scribble on the page is upon me, it helps to have a schedule, even a quota, to make sure I keep myself organized, because under those circumstances, a lack of writing ­is a bad thing, not because I was supposed to and didn’t, but because I wanted to and didn’t manage to make the time for it.  It’s when I don’t want to—and note, this is not an active “I am really opposed to writing right now” but a sated “I don’t feel a strong urge to write right now” thing—that beating myself up for doing something I do want to do instead of writing just seems absurd to me.

And I’ve now spent almost 1300 words writing out why I don’t feel like writing.  And I’m okay with that contradiction.  To sum up, I’m not gone for good…just not entirely sure when I’ll be back.

See you soon(ish).

But that’s sort of where tonight’s post will lead.  It’s not like it’s all that controversial, but I’m also not likely to be in the mood for non-committed back and forth on it.  Most topics, I can take either side, enjoying the effort more than what side the victory is on.  Not this one, I don’t think.

I also need to caveat that I don’t plan to go into detail about any of the tangential topics that this one would naturally raise.  I’m going to give you the minimal amount of background necessary to grok where I’m coming from, and then we’ll move on.

And I finally need to caveat that this post already has two (and now three) caveats more than I like—my blog, I get to do what I want, when I want, and shouldn’t have to explain things.  But as I noted, this is a somewhat serious topic, and since I don’t tend to go publicly diving in those waters that often, I’d like for them to be clear and not open for a variety of troll-baiting interpretations.

And now, with sufficient baggage strapped aboard, we’re off…

So, here’s the background.  Once upon a time, I was very religious.  Serious case of bornagainitis.  Probably because I was first introduced to religion at a critical moment in my life…parents recently divorced, transitioning from elementary school to high school, puberty, intellectual awaking…all that great after school special crap.  My mind and heart were desperate for something deep and involved to sink their teeth in to, and a fervent Born-Again Christian meal just happened to be walking by.

I will now skip ahead 20 years—and easily a couple hundred thousand words, if I just stuck to summarizing the high points—and expect you to keep up.

These days, I don’t like religion.  I don’t think my actual beliefs have changed all that much, but I am a lot clearer on A) what exactly “a belief” is, and B) what mine are.  There’s been a demi-glace-like reduction to the overwhelming symphony of ideas and concepts I first walked into 20 years ago, distilling the core principals to their essences while somehow increasing and balancing their complexity at the same time.

Which are pretty words to sum up something I already posted here a while ago:  Before enlightenment:  chop wood, carry water.  After enlightenment:  chop wood, carry water.

To conclude the incredibly-brief background section of this post:  I once was Christian, in an organized fashion, and while I now pursue disorganization (spiritually speaking), my beliefs are rooted in that ground, and despite two decades of scrutiny, and wide-spread exploration into a large number of seemingly-incompatible belief systems, those aspects I’ve identified as the basic principals of Christianity stick with me to this day.

One of which is the topic of the post I’m almost finally about to start writing.

(And no, I’m not talking about the Bud Light version of Christianity, the “Jesus was a cool guy, and what we can really learn from the bible is to be good to each other and love each other and maybe go to church on Easter, but there’s no need to get too bogged down in the details” version…fucking pussies.)

(And, one more [fuck me, does that make four?] caveat:  when I mention the word God, no, I do not mean it the way you think I mean it, except yes, I mean it exactly the way you think I mean it.  Which is to say, I’m not about to get into specific definitions here in this post, and do not assume that I’m being vague because I’m assuming that y’all already know exactly what I’m talking about; I’ve just spent 645 fucking words setting up this post before even mentioning what the post is going to be about.  I’m not leaving out a specific description of God because I’m aiming to be brief.  You want to challenge what I have to say because I mention God, and how absurd is it to believe in a dude with a beard on a throne living up in the clouds?  Well, I don’t believe in that either.  When I say God—at least for the purposes of this post—I could be talking beard-dude, I could be talking Yahweh, I could be talking the Ineffable, I could be talking t_P / t…meet me halfway, if you would.)

What I want to talk about is grace, and why it’s a unique concept, one that blows apart the typical Christian-centric structure that usually encloses it.

I think I can say—without tempting too much in the way of debate—that as long as we’re moving along through the dimension of time, we’re all heading from something to something else.  There is an ideal, no matter how minor, vague or undefined, that we’re moving towards.  It can be superficially consumerist (“I’m not thin enough,” or “I’m not rich enough.”), it can be more personally meaningful (“I don’t take good enough care of myself,” or “I need to treat the people I care about better.”), or overtly hedonistic (“I am not nearly as baked as I should be,” or “I have not slept with nearly enough girls as I’d like to.”) ,or overtly spiritual (“I am not yet as far down the Eightfold Path as I aim to be,” or “I have yet to properly give Satan his full due.”), or any of a million different variations of all of the thoughts that pass through our heads in any given day.  And it doesn’t necessarily have to be fully conscious:  dropping trou and squatting is moving you closer from the present state of stomach cramps to the ideal of “deuce successfully dropped,” no matter how consciously you’re staking out those milestones.  We’re talking prime mathematic givens here, not specific recipes.

When the spiritual aspect is considered, just about every possible path (I hesitate to call them “religions,” since there are far more people pursuing spiritual paths without the trappings of religion than there are people genuinely pursuing a religiously-defined path, as opposed to giving that religion lip service while more actively following one of the consumerist/personal/hedonistic/etc. paths already mentioned) is just that:  a path.  Today, you are Here.  Tomorrow, you will be There.  If successful, that There will be closer to the ultimate goal than Here is.  And most of the time spent walking that spiritual path is focused on defining the steps needing to take you from Here to There, and monitoring your progress.

This is true even for most Christian paths, which to my mind completely misses the point.

See, Christianity has this unique concept, one that none others have or embrace, called grace.

Grace is a gift.  Grace is something un-asked for, given regardless of whether or not it’s deserved or has been earned.  Grace is, in the context of the notion of a path described above, a profoundly disturbing disruption of the basic understanding of how things work.

Put another way, grace is the fucked-up quantum entanglement to traditional religious Newtonian processes.

In the specific context of Christianity, grace is the given forgiveness of your sins before you can ask for it and with zero comprehension or concern for the notion of atonement.  Grace is the gift given by God that removes the need to walk any distance down a spiritual path.  Grace says that you do not have to earn the ideal you are pursuing by measuring yourself against some external spiritual yardstick—you already have it.  Grace says “I have a pancake on my head; your argument is invalid.”

Enough with the platitudes:  let’s get down to business.

Here’s what’s amazing about the concept of grace:  because it cannot be earned, it is given to everyone.  That fat fuck next to you on the bus, the one you caught staring at your ass, making you wish you hadn’t worn the low-riding jeans, knowing he’s saving up the brief, furtive views for his spank-bank later?  Yeah, he’s been given grace.  Your boss, the one who gave you a list of things to do today, and then kept passing on emergency requests from his boss, and then spends his time in the break room bitching about how you’re too lazy to get through the short list of easy tasks he gave you earlier?  Yup, he’s been given grace too.

…That guy who screamed out something in Farsi before triggering the ball-bearing-laced plastic explosive he has strapped to his chest in the midst of a crowded market?  Again, yes, he’s been given grace.

Which is kinda the point:  if grace can’t be earned, then when given, it’s given to everyone.  There’s no criteria for being an eligible receiver.  That’s what’s beautiful about it:  the drunk puking on himself in the gutter is as beloved and worthy of grace as you are, and while that might feel like a bit of a raw deal for you and your paid-my-rent-on-time-no-speeding-tickets-in-two-years self-esteem right now, it very profoundly says that all of the joy and wonders of God and the universe are equally available to both of you.  All of you.  All of us.

Which is how it should be, or else what’s the point?  I don’t want to believe in a God that would pick and choose which people are worthy of Him based on an ever-changing, semi-objective matrix.  I mean, are we to assume that God was okay with Abraham having multiple wives back then but isn’t in favor of it now?  That’s too much like trying to get into the right clique in high school.  Sure, he might like caring for puppies now, but who’s to say he won’t like people who paint their dicks blue later?  Sure, that sounds absurd…but it fits within the set.

It’s far more likely that the ultimate point of convergence with God isn’t defined by nor dependant upon details like that.

But that makes for a difficult follow-up question:  if everyone has been given grace, does it matter what we do?  Are we all going to heaven (or whatever you want to interpret that particular phrase to mean)?  And if we are, then does it matter one bit what we actually do?  Can those people doing what strikes us to our core as evil be just as promised the Promised Land as those of us who try each day to do more good than harm?  And the people who aren’t even paying attention, who are wandering through life in a self-induced haze, do they get to wake up at the pearly gates and say, “Hey, there’s a heaven.  Who knew?”

I don’t think so.  It’s not that it isn’t there, waiting for them; it’s that, fundamentally, gift giving requires two people.

Anyone who’s been a scout of any kind (boy, girl, whatever) or had a father/relative/etc. teach them more “traditional” skills will know what an Active Transfer of Control is, even if that particular name wasn’t used.  It’s the first lesson of knife safety.  When someone is handing you a knife, they hold it out and say, “I’m giving you this knife.”  You reach out, put your hand on it, and once you have a firm hold of it say, “I have the knife,” at which point that someone lets go, and the knife is yours.  Or there’s the rock climbing ritual of “On Belay?” “Belay On.”

What it comes down to is a clear, active decision with awareness of what that decision means, with no unstated assumptions.  And that’s the second half of the grace equation:  the gift has been given, but you still have to accept it.

And really, the only way to do so is with a prayer I learned long ago, when I first joined the Church, just read along and say the words out loud as you do, “Heavenly Father, in Jesus’ name I repent of my sins and open my heart…”

Ah, I’m just fucking with you.

Not to say that that particular method isn’t perfectly and completely valid.  Here’s where that thing I said earlier, that I “hate religion”, is proven to be not entirely accurate.  You certainly won’t hear me speaking against—especially to denigrate—anyone’s particular religious beliefs (unless there’s a joke to be made, because one of my most profoundly-held beliefs is, if you can’t take a joke, fuck off).

The flip side of grace being available to everyone means that everyone has to be able to receive it, if they’re willing, and that notion is incompatible with having a single, set, pre-defined path for doing so.  Which does mean that all paths are valid, including the familiar, stereotypical ones you all already know about…

…within reason.

Because—and here another traditionally-Christian tradition pops its useful head up—words are cheap.  Or as a youth pastor back in my high school days (for reals…which may help explain my willingness to do some desert wandering, given his mentorship) quoted to me, “Money talks and bullshit walks.”

You know and I know that unless you’re dealing with a world-class actor—or you’re intentionally willing to deceive yourself because of some unresolved and possibly unrelated issue—it’s pretty damn easy to tell when someone’s going through the motions.  My six year-old daughter may say “Sorry” for sticking her fingers all through my rice, but she was laughing when she did it, and sullen when she says it, and I know the only reason she’s saying “Sorry” is because she doesn’t want to get punished again, not because she’s honestly understood that her actions have negatively impacted another’s life and desires to communicate to that person her awareness of the consequences of her actions, both empirical and emotional, and regrets her actions, and her willingness to make amends.

And she’s a lot better at faking it than most people I know my own age.

There’s a reason you don’t handle knives with just anyone, and why you don’t rock climb with people you don’t know.  The giving-accepting relationship requires trust, since the only definitive proof you’re going to get of the other person’s trustworthiness is when you pull your hand away, and either the knife falls to the ground, possibly impaling your foot, or slices your fingers as the other person fails to release it, or when your handhold slips and the rope that’s supposed to catch you shortly after you fall whistles through the carabineer loud enough for you to hear the entire way down.

To sum up the point of these analogies, it’s pretty obvious to God, however you define Him…and to yourself, really…whether or not you’re telling the truth when you consciously decide to accept the grace that’s been given.

I’m not going to tell you what specific fruit will be borne when you do that.  I have my own thoughts on the matter, but there’s a reason I ultimately decided against going to seminary and becoming a preacher, and it’s because I have a hard enough time sorting this shit out for myself, and the most difficult thing to do was de-brainwash myself from all the rules and regulations other people had posted on my walls.  I’m not about to just switch seats here.

But I can at least tell you what I think are some pretty critical components of the process, however they end up manifesting themselves:

You have to know yourself.  More importantly, you have to be willing to know yourself.  Borrowing from David Brin here when I say that the greatest inherited skill human beings have today is self-deception, especially rationalization.  You take the dumbest motherfucker off the streets right now, hand him one more beer than he knows he should really drink tonight, and he’ll find some way to convince himself that not only is it okay to drink that beer, but the world is a better place because of it.

In order to accept grace, you have to be able to know if you’re telling the truth or not.  You can ask any smoker who’s in the car on the way to 7-11 even though they’re trying to quit how hard that can be.  I found it through the progressive mind-clearing zazen of Zen.  Others find it through prayer and bible study.  Others find it through rigorous adherence to the scientific method, even when their pet theory—the one that’s going to get them tenure and an extra zero on the end of the grant check, maybe even that ½ paragraph blurb in Time magazine’s year-end round ups of the “best of” in science—turns out, by the evidence, to be completely wrong, and not in the “well, then the opposite must be true” way, but in the “wow, I have no fucking idea what’s going on here” way.

It just requires an acceptance that most of what you think you know about yourself is completely, flatteringly wrong, and a willingness to turn that laser-sharp ability to dissect others’ faults onto yourself.

Simple, right?

Next time:  so you’re willing to examine how much of a shit you are…what’s next?

So here’s the one I was talking about.  Posted exactly when I said I would.

Over

There’s music playing in the background, badly.  The selection could use some improvement as well.  We were speculating earlier that the musician is probably related to the restaurant’s owner—nepotism, that great equalizer.  But I’m into my third glass of wine—miles behind my rambling friend here—and the buzz is smoothing out the rougher edges nicely.  Even Barry Manilow on an out-of-tune guitar is bearable after your third Merlot.

It’s a small restaurant.  “Atmosphere” they advertise; cramped it is.  You can only apologize for so many inadvertent elbows for so long before it all descends into absurdity.  Or a brawl.  Thankfully, this appears to be a crowd of the former.  My knees, on the other hand, are black and blue and know the underside of our off-balance table too well.  I imagine I’ll be feeling them—and everything else—rather vividly tomorrow morning.  God bless Merlot—but God really loves two aspirin and a glass of water before bed.

It’s an Italian restaurant, supposedly.  The menu is in Italian, and there’s enough garlic hanging to invade Transylvania with, but there isn’t a pasta dish or a clam in sight.  It’s good, don’t get me wrong; in fact, it’s already gone.  It’s getting pretty late, and most of the new customers wandering in are wearing blazers and pearls—it’s time to go.  Except our second bottle’s only half empty, and we both know we’ve only got a few more of these Romantic Evenings left in us, so we’re lingering.

It’s over, almost, for us.  You couldn’t tell from the outside, and, hey, we’re doing a pretty decent job of ignoring it ourselves.  But we’re lingering, and we know it.  It’s not exactly devastating.  Oh, hopefully it’ll happen as a fight, so she can cry and throw things and I can yell and get righteously pissed-drunk afterwards.  But it’s coming regardless.  I can feel it lurking just a couple of tomorrows away.

So, we linger.

But we’re not the only ones.  Just across the aisle from us, actually.  She’s by herself, has been since we first came in.  I can only imagine the scene we missed.  Just as we were showing up, a big, burly man came storming out of the restaurant’s front door.  I hope to God I never have on my face the expression he had on his.  He looked damned.  Like whatever had been haunting him had finished its work and seen that it was good.  He brushed by us without noticing, and I probably would’ve forgotten all about it except, when we went inside, the place was silent, not a word or a clank or warbly Fmaj7 cord in sight.  And all eyes were on this woman, this woman we ended up sitting just across the aisle from.

If he looked bad, she was worse.  Still is, as far as my surreptitious glances can tell.  Her table is as small as ours, and was set for two, but—and this is what’s absolutely killing me, and probably her as well—along the edge of the table are four or five crayons, strewn across a half-finished child’s activity place-mat.  The man who left didn’t have a little one in tow behind him, and there’s no one else at the table with her now, and so the question I still haven’t been able to answer is:  where the hell is the kid? I don’t know and still don’t know.

She has a glass of wine—whatever plates and silverware she had were picked up a while ago—and occasionally she takes a polite sip from it, probably without realizing she’s doing it.  She doesn’t look like she’s paying much attention to anything right now.  I’ve seen couples waiting by the door for a table, and given how rude our waiter has been to us, I’d expected someone to ask her to leave a long time ago.  But they haven’t yet.  In fact, part of the crampedness at our table is a result of everyone who uses the aisle’s swerving around her, ending up in our laps.  And no one’s staring anymore.  Maybe there is some compassion left in this world after all, people who won’t kick you, no matter how gently, out of their way when you’re down.

Her make-up is still in place, same with her hair.  She doesn’t look like she’s been crying.  Her dress is nice but doesn’t look very expensive.  If I had to guess I’d say she was just the other side of thirty.  She’s wearing a bracelet and stud earrings but nothing on her fingers or around her neck.  If I weren’t still lingering, I might wonder if she was attractive.  Her napkin is folded in her lap, a streak on a dangling end showing that it’s done its job.  But I can’t get over those crayons.  They aren’t set so that she or the person sitting across from her would have used them.

What happened?

I think it’s time to go.  There’s still a little wine left, but I have some more at home if we need it.  No more lingering; dinner’s over.

Lakers?  The NBA’s in its deadest spot of the year right now, mid-summer with most of the major personnel moves already made and training camps still more than a month away, but I can always come up with something to say there.

U2?  I could let you know the results of this mad march through their entire career (still going, btw, with Zooropa just about to wrap up as I type this; I’ve had to take the expected breaks for family/food/bathroom/etc., so it may not finish tonight), or any of a hundred other thoughts I’ve briefly touched on here and elsewhere and expand on it in full.

But no, neither of those, at least not tonight.  If I’m going to complete this Refresh of the blog, catching both it and everyone who swings by up on where my head is at right now, then I need to cover all the bases.  And aside from my family (which I will not now nor at any point the future be writing about here), the three most important things in my life are the Lakers, U2…and writing.

So, a post about writing it is.

I need to point out something that I’ve mentioned in the past but never quite explicitly laid out before:  writing has seldom been a compulsion for me, the way it seems to be with every successful, productive writer I’ve read and admired in my life.  Sure, there have been stretches in my life where nothing has felt right unless I’ve been at a keyboard, or sitting with a notebook and good pen, churning out the wordcount.  As recently as this past spring, I had stretches where I was putting down well more than 10,000 words a week.  (To give a reference point, the average published novel is approximately 90k-100k words, meaning at a rate of 10k words a week, you could write five complete novels in one year.)

But that’s the exception, not the rule.  I don’t ever really get hit with writer’s block; it’s more what Kevin Smith so eloquently referred to as “writer’s laze”.  As in laziness.  As in, more often than not, I don’t want to expend the energy to create something that will entertain others as much as I want someone else to entertain me.  Getting back into a groove where that someone who’s entertaining me is me takes a convergence of events that I have yet to fully understand, let alone master.

Viewed another way, my relationship with my writing would be familiar to anyone who’s ever spent time working out.  When you’re in the thick of it, taking even a single day off leaves you feeling awful, with your entire life out of sorts until you get your body moving again, muscles working, sweat flowing…  But if you take more than a few days off, it gets harder and harder to remember how good it feels when you’re in the thick of it, and easier and easier to reach for the remote/beer/chips instead.  That’s not the whole of it, but it’s a measurable part.

And I’d have to say, right now, I’m very comfortable on my writing couch, and finding it harder to remember how good it feels when I’ve worked up a wordcount sweat.

Part of it is just that this stuff is cyclical, and not something I’m going to beat myself up about.  If I ever, ever feel like writing is something I have to do, and begin chastising myself for not doing it, like a sinner eager for the burn of confession, then I will stop cold turkey.  Writing improves my life, its presence in my life makes it a better thing; I will never allow it to be viewed in reverse, that writing is the default baseline, and its absence is a sub-optimal, suffering existence.  So, I’m not working right now at the same pace I was recently.  That’s okay.  I love the people around me, I show up on-time for my job and work hard while I’m on the clock there, I find lots of things in my life that make it well more than worth living…a downswing in my writing production does not negate any of that.

Part of it is the new job I’m working at.  There’s a much longer post in my head, waiting to be written, about this specific sub-topic, but the short summary is that after eight years of joy and suffering, I’m in a new place, with a new vocabulary and syntax—and I don’t just mean the words we use at the workplace, I mean the rhythm and intent that the entire workplace operates at—and it’s taking me some time to figure out how my life fits with all that.  Imagine a musician, just joined an orchestra, learning a new piece of music.  And while he’s not worried about his ability to play the new piece and play it well, and fit in well with all the other musicians around him, it’s still new to him, and so all the little things that define him as a musician worth having around have to come from conscious intention, rather than unconscious trust.  I know, after I’ve been there for a while, I’ll know the people, places and processes well enough that I can focus my conscious intent on what’s truly important, rather than the moment-to-moment logistics, but at the moment, it’s consuming rather a large percentage of my mental RAM, which doesn’t leave a lot left for working on a novel that has three main characters, their stories intertwining, all while a massive religious war is breaking out (and I’m right now at the moment when the armies are invading and alliances are forming and breaking…it would be a bit much to wrap my head around if I were reading it, let alone trying to create it out of blank pieces of paper).

And part of it is just that the creative tank is low, and I need to fill it up.  You don’t tend to realize just how limited your input of vital nutrients is until you push yourself out of your comfort zone and start relying on every last ounce of what you’ve got.  Borrowing from an analogy earlier in this post, about six months ago I started working out in earnest, driving my body to do more and more each day, only to completely crap out a month ago, and realized that I hadn’t paid any attention to my diet.  I was still eating the same crap food, but my body needed far more of it, and much better of it, if I was going to be able to keep up at that pace.

If you replace “body” with “writing output”, and the food bit with creative stimulus…well, that’s where I’m at right now.  I can’t work off just the pure adrenaline that accompanies the realization that I can work, I need to make sure that all aspects of my life are pulling in harness, input supporting output, the rhythm and routine of things resulting in a harmony that’s pleasing and worth pursuing.

I’m in the earliest stages of that process right now, and thus the actual wordcount output has been a bit low.  I don’t expect that to last.

In the meantime, I’ll be posting an old story tomorrow, one of my all-time favorites, just to keep the fiction blood fresh here.  Something to keep the pump primed until the spice begins flowing again.

I am about to do something so absurd, on the surface you would have to question my sanity.  But dig a bit deeper, and…well, yeah, it’s pretty fucking crazy.  The word “fan”, after all, comes from “fanatic”.

But there are some good reasons for what I’m about to do.

First, I kind of already started on it today, somewhat by accident, and realized that if I’m going to do it, I may as well do it right.

Second, I’m doing it because I can, because technology allows me to do so.  Most folks view the digital revolution in music to mean that people are more interested in individual songs for download than in full albums; the flipside of that is that you’re no longer limited to just a single album…you can build a playlist that’s quite a bit longer.  If you’re into that sort of thing.

Third, this is probably the best possible opportunity to do so.  U2 have reached a point in their career that’s unparalleled in modern times.  I’m not going to argue about their “ranking” in the all-time rock greats—you can feel free to argue the relative merits of Sgt. Peppers, or the purity of Exile on Main Street, or the poetry of Dylan, the hubristic-majesty of Tommy, the unrestrained power of “Black Dog”, or the integrity of that fucking hipster indie band, they’re kinda obscure, you’ve probably never heard of them.

But no band in history has had a career as long, as varied, and as accomplished as what U2 have done.  The only possible contenders would be The Beatles, The Stones, and R.E.M., when looking at both longevity and artistic accomplishment, and all fall well short of what U2 has done.  The Beatles didn’t last nearly long enough (would you believe that U2 has been together, releasing innovative albums and selling out stadiums nearly twice as long as The Beatles were together?), The Stones peaked in the late seventies and have been releasing variations on that same album for three decades, and R.E.M. has been navel-gazing with no drummer for the last decade and a half.

There is no other band where you can assemble, in order, nearly 34 years of amazing rock and roll and listen to it start to finish.

Which is what I’m going to do.  I have created a playlist that starts with U2: 3 and ends with the live version of the Redanka’s “Kick the Darkness” remix of “I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” from their 360 tour.  It’s 12.7 hours long, 173 songs, and I’m going to listen to the whole thing, start to finish, in one go.

When I said that this is the perfect opportunity to do so, what I meant is that U2 is on the brink of a possibly major evolution in what they do and how they do it.  They have—depending on how much you believe what they’ve said recently—literally five different projects between 80 and 90 percent done, just waiting for that final tying-together moment to finish them off.

• The soundtrack for the Spider-Man musical:  While this is mostly Bono and the Edge, anyone who thinks that when they needed someone to play bass and drums on the tracks and looked further than their childhood friends is crazy.
• The Rick Rubin sessions:  Back after finishing the Vertigo tour, U2 went into the studio—Abbey Road studios, in fact—with Rick Rubin to record an album.  One song, “Window in the Skies”, saw the light of day; the rest were shelved for a later date.  They’ve constantly said they will revisit these rock-centric session and finish the album.  They’ve never said when.  Bastards.
• Songs of Ascent:  This album is by now both legendary and infamous amongst the hardcore U2 fans.  When their last album was wrapping up, all four of the band members said that they had a bunch of material that was finished but left off the album because it didn’t quite fit.  It was atmospheric, spiritual, meditative and like nothing they’ve done since the more abstract moments on The Unforgettable Fire.  They said it would be out by the end of the year, it just needed some final polishing.  That was in early 2009.  We’re still waiting on it a year and a half later.  Bastards.
• An “electronic” album:  Both Bono and the Edge have mentioned this lately as something they’re really excited about, all new songs (i.e. recorded after Songs of Ascent) that is offbeat and driven with a groove they didn’t know they still had in them.
• The “rehab” sessions:  In between the US leg of the 360 tour and the 2010 relaunch of the tour, Bono hurt his back, had surgery, and the band had to delay the start of the 2010 leg until he had healed and rehabbed.  They couldn’t practice for the tour, but they could sit in the studio in Bono’s house and record new material.  Again.  Which still hasn’t been released, though we have heard at least one of those songs performed since the tour started up again (one, incidentally, recorded before Bono hurt his back, so it isn’t technically part of the “rehab” sessions, but fuck it, this is all getting a bit confusing).

All of that is to say that there’s no telling what’s going to happen next with them, and now is as good a moment as any to take a detailed tour of where they’ve been so far.

I’d actually thought of listing the entire track listing up here, all 173 songs, because fuck it, it’s my blog, I’m not exactly paying by the inch, I can write out the names of 173 songs if I want to.  But instead I’m just going to give a quick overview of the playlist.  It will be worth reading—at least, I would enjoy reading it, were another U2 fan doing this insanity and I happened across his blog—because this is not a simple one-album-after-another affair.  There are stretches in their career where fandom has, quite successfully, second-guessed their track selection and ordering, and it gives a much more interesting perspective on those particular moments in their career.  So that’s what follows:  a short list, with occasionally-extensive commentary.  Which is what I do here, so if you’re already at this blog, and have read this far through this post already, and are suddenly balking at going a little further with me…what the hell is wrong with you?

Then comes two of the three songs from U2:3, the EP they recorded that got them their record deal.  Just “Boy-Girl” and “Stories for Boys”; no need for “Out of Control”, the version here is nearly the same as that on Boy (“Stories for Boys” is included because of how much it changed between this EP and Boy).

Then comes Boy, October and War, in order, no need to futz with the order or include any rare B-sides; they were spending all their time touring instead of recording and dithering like they did later on.

After War, we skip Under a Blood Red Sky.  I’m focusing on the songs here, and while there’s certainly a different energy and impact when the songs are played live, there’s no need to revisit them again so soon.  We’ll save that for when I decide to do this madness over again, next time with just bootlegs, no studio recordings.

“Boomerang I” introduces the The Unforgettable Fire era, and leads right into the first song of the album.  Again, no need to re-order anything on the album proper.  After wrapping up with “MLK,” we head to “Boomerang II” and “Bass Trap”, two of the B-sides recorded at this time that don’t have much of a real home anywhere else.  And then comes the first huge departure from cannon.

The Joshua Tree is reconstituted as the band originally intended it:  a double-album.  19 songs.  Full track listing follows.  The story of how an epic double-album became one of the greatest “normal” albums ever released is very interesting, but not something I’m going to get into here now; it’s a long story, and this post is already spiraling out of control.  Suffice to say, almost every single song is both familiar and incredibly fresh and new when heard in the double-album context for the first time.

The Joshua Tree – Restored

1. Beautiful Ghost/Introduction to Songs of Experience
2. Where the Streets Have No Name
3. Silver and Gold
4. I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For
5. Spanish Eyes
6. With or Without You
7. Luminous Times (Hold On To Love)
8. Walk to the Water
9. Bullet the Blue Sky
10. Running to Stand Still
11. Red Hill Mining Town
12. In God’s Country
13. Trip Through Your Wires
14. Sweetest Thing
15. One Tree Hill
16. Deep in the Heart
17. Exit
18. Race Against Time
19. Mothers of the Disappeared

After the restored JT comes another album that fandom has reworked with incredibly successful results.  I should note that this version is my own, not the one more commonly accepted by the other nutjobs out there, but I like it, and that’s what matters, given who’s doing the listening.

Basically, we take Rattle & Hum, strip out all the live stuff, add in all the B-Sides during this era (seriously, U2’s B-sides from 1985-1989 would comprise a decent career for most bands), and then combine and bake until golden brown and delicious.

Rattle & Hum – Studio

1. Desire
2. Dancing Barefoot
3. God Part II
4. Hawkmoon 269
5. Unchained Melody
6. Hallelujah Here She Comes
7. Love Rescue Me
8. Everlasting Love
9. When Love Comes to Town
10. Heartland
11. A Room at the Heartbreak Hotel
12. All I Want Is You

From here we’re into the most amazing single moment of any musician’s career, the transition between the long-haired, earnest boys of The Joshua Tree and “Fuck the revolution!” and the cynical, smoking men thrusting their hips to “Even Better than the Real Thing.”  I could write thousands of words just about how important and amazing Achtung Baby is, but, again, not here and now, probably later.  I’ll just say that the tracklisting for Achtung is the closest to perfection mortal man has ever achieved, so it remains untouched.

After “Love Is Blindness”, we get a quick tour through some of the B-Sides of this era, those completed before ZooTV became Zooropa:  “Slow Dancing”, “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me”, “Lady with the Spinning Head”, and “Alex Descends into Hell for a Bottle of Milk” (which was written, believe it or not, as part of the score for a stage production of A Clockwork Orange; again, a story for another time).  And then we crash into Zooropa proper, with no need to change up anything until the air-raid siren comes on in the wake of Johnny Cash’s devastating “The Wanderer” (a song that Bono considers U2’s best, as in the [paraphrased, non-verbatim] quote “It’s a shame that I don’t even sing on our best song).

From here we enter the Passengers/POP era, the last legs of the long, dark tunnel of self-discovery, revelation and deception they entered nearly a decade prior when they landed in Hansa studios to begin work on Achtung.  First the interstitial stuff, “Your Blue Room” and “Always Forever Now” and “Holy Joe (Guilty Mix)”, after which we head straight into POP itself, a grossly-underrated album and one which I love just fine in it’s original form.  And we wrap up the 1990’s with two amazing B-sides, “The Hands that Built America” and “North and South of the River”.

And it’s at this point that I start to become a bit…deviant.  U2 is my favorite band, and are still blowing my mind almost three and a half decades after they first came together.  (Of note, they first sat down together in the fall/winter of 1976, right when I was being born; coincidence?  I think not.)  But that doesn’t mean they’re perfect, and they have had some missteps along the way.  These became more noticeable at the end of the millennium, and to be honest, it’s mostly either non-musical errors in judgment (what to release and when) or “secondary” musical issues (what versions to release and why).

So here we are at All that You Can’t Leave Behind and How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, and I’ve taken many liberties here.  First, I’ve added in several of the songs that were recorded but never released, not even as B-sides.  I’ve also swapped in different versions of some songs because I think the unreleased versions are just better.  If there’s one common thread to all the mistakes they’ve made in the last fifteen years, it’s that they’ve over-thought what they were doing; where I can, I’ve resurrected their initial inspiration.

All That You Can’t Leave Behind – Instinctual

1. Levitate
2. Elevation
3. Love You Like Mad
4. Walk On
5. In A Little While
6. Flower Child
7. Stuck in a Moment (acoustic)
8. Summer Rain
9. Wild Honey
10. Beautiful Day
11. Kite
12. When I Look at the World
13. New York
14. The Ground Beneath Her Feet
15. Electrical Storm
16. Stateless
17. Grace
18. Always

Then a few B-sides, “Big Girls Are Best” (written for Ali when she was pregnant, any father/husband will understand) and “Neon Lights”.

How to Dismantle and Atomic Bomb – Instinctual

1. City of Blinding Lights
2. Miracle Drug
3. Crumbs from Your Table
4. Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own
5. Love and Peace or Else
6. Native Son
7. All Because of You (alternate)
8. Fast Cars
9. A Man and a Woman
10. Smile
11. Original of the Species (Killahurtz Casa De Angeles Mix)
12. Window in the Skies
13. One Step Closer
14. Mercy
15. Yaweh (from Vertigo: Live in Chicago)

And then another B-side, “I Believe in Christmas (No Snow)”.

No Line on the Horizon – Instinctual

1. No Line on the Horizon
2. Magnificent
3. Breathe
4. Stand Up Comedy
5. I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight
6. Get on Your Boots (Long Intro)
7. Fez – Being Born
8. Unknown Caller
9. White as Snow
10. Winter
11. Moment of Surrender
12. Cedars of Lebanon
13. Soon

And we end the whole thing with “No Line on the Horizon 2”, like U2 Meets the Go-Go’s, and the live version of the Redanka’s “Kick the Darkness” remix of “I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” from their 360 tour.

Which brings us right up to the present day.  I’m not sure what I’m hoping to accomplish with this musical death march.  It’s a sort of “It’s so crazy, it just might work,” scenario, and when you hit that point, the details tend to not matter too much.  When it’s all listened and done, I’ll try to drop back by here and let y’all know how it went.

There are plenty of other reasons why I’ve been away…many of which will pop up in the next few days as I try to get back into some semblance of regular posting…or at least try to brain-dump the accumulated detritus I’m carrying around in my head right now.  Because, while I haven’t been posting lately, I have been Writing, especially in the “If you’re talking to a writer, and explaining some involved situation to them, and get to the end and ask them for their advice on what you should do, and they kinda stand there for a few seconds, then nod and mumble ‘Uh-huh,’ and walk off, they’re not ignoring you, they’re Writing” way.

But first, the obligatory Lakers thoughts…good goddamn, the summer is a long fucking drought until training camp opens.

Also, note the nifty Tweet button at the bottom of this post (only seems to show up when you’re looking at the specific post page, not the site as a whole). So do me a favor and retweet this mother.

I think I finally understand why Jordan Farmar went to New Jersey.  On the surface it doesn’t make any sense.  You’ve got a young PG, feeling held back, sublimating the best parts of his game to fit in on a championship-caliber team like the Lakers, so the obvious move is to…go to the worst team in the NBA as a back-up to an All Star-caliber PG like Devin Harris, the kind of guy who’s locked in for 35+ minutes a night.  He’s going to get reduced minutes to play for a god-awful team, which is clearly so much better than playing 20-25 minutes a night for a championship contender, right?

But there’s more to it than that.

First, Devin Harris gets hurt.  A lot.  I’m pulling these numbers out of my ass, but I don’t think the guy has played more than 60 games a year over the last three years, and it would be an even-money bet that he won’t play more than that this year.  Which means for 20+ games this season, Farmar is going to be starting and playing big minutes, which is a huge upside over playing behind an iron man like Fisher.

Second, he’ll be playing for coach Avery Johnson, the polar opposite to Phil Jackson.  Avery is a feisty point-guard, guided the Spurs to a championship with his passing hands and squeaky voice, and I’m sure Farmar is drooling over what he can learn from someone who’s game was very similar to what he does.

Third, and most importantly, Farmar has an almost absurd confidence in his own abilities, even if he hasn’t had a chance to show them off fully yet.  (Though, two years ago, when Fisher was suspended for a game against the Rockets in the second round of the playoffs after forearm-shivering Sciola, Farmar started and had one of the best games of his career, both numbers-wise and in his overall maturity and ability to run the team.)  Whether it’s just something he and his people have tossed around, or maybe someone in the organization said something to him off the record, I think he believes that the Nets are willing to consider him as more than just another body off the bench.  Surely he took note of what happened when Chris Paul went down last year to injury and Darren Collison—Farmar’s former understudy at UCLA—got a serious chance to start at PG, and played so well that many serious observers were suggesting that the Hornets should give the starting spot to him and trade CP3 for parts to put around him.  I think, in Farmar’s mind, there are two possible scenarios over the next year or two:

1)      Farmar plays well enough that the team decides he could start for them, and decide to trade Harris (and his hefty salary-matching salary) and other pieces for a superstar forward or SG (something that was speculated on last year, even without a competent back-up for Harris).

2)      Farmar plays well enough that other teams with serious PG needs (Atlanta [Bibby’s not exactly young], New York [realizing they won’t ever get CP3], Bobcats, etc.) ask for him in a trade that would bring solid pieces back to New Jersey and push Farmar into the starting spot on a better team.

No idea if any of this is true or would actually happen, but it’s the only way I can wrap my head around the decision.  Other than the possibility that it was the only/best offer out there for him.  Which, given that FreeDarko got a 4-year, $20 million deal this summer, isn’t too likely.

Anyway, the fucker went to Taft, took the Bruins to the Final Four, and picked up two rings for the Lakers.  He’s family, wherever he is, and will always be loved and welcomed home.

And I’m not going to get into the debacle of last night; plenty of other folks online have commented thoroughly on it, and how clearly the look on his face is like the one half-decent guy in a group of bullies (his entourage) when he realizes the joke has gone a bit too far and people are getting hurt.

But I’ve never really hated the guy.  I grew up around rich, entitled kids my whole life, so that goofy, un-self-aware complete lack of empathetic understanding of what the world might be like outside of their “please sir, thank you sir, another sir?” bubble isn’t news to me.  I was a bit sad that he was living through it without having actually earned anything, like an entitled nouveau riche type who isn’t even liquid, just waiting (hoping) for their eight-figure options to vest.  And the antics, the dancing and chalk and 3rd-person-itis…it mostly made me wince, the way you do when any kid is going about blithely making the same mistakes you did that are so stupidly obvious in hindsight.

And it’s odd, in the midst of this incredible hubris, the one thing that stands out to me about him now is:  enforced humility. Because it’s clear, he not only doesn’t care if he’s The Man, is not just willing to “sacrifice” being The Man…he doesn’t want to be The Man.

I’ve seen what it’s like firsthand when great players decide that the only thing important to them is winning a championship, money and egos be damned.  That was the “joy” of the Payton/Malone tour through LA.  They both left millions on the table–guaranteed hall of famers, the clear alpha-males on their respective teams for more than a decade–and came to LA for a last chance to win a ring.  And it wasn’t a small paycut either; I think they split the mid-level exception, so they each made between $2-$6 million that year (to compare, Luke Walton–love him like I do–is making more than that right now).  And they came to a team where an alpha vs. alpha competition was already ongoing between Kobe and Shaq, meaning that there was zero chance that either of them would even be in contention for option A or even option B.  But there was nothing else as important to them as winning, and they did it.

(And yes, I’m aware that LA lost that year, which I blame on Payton’s realization that, contrary to intentions, he couldn’t really relinquish his head-strong nature for the betterment of the team…a realization that allowed him to actually do that very thing a year later, with the Heat, which got him his ring, thanks to the superhuman efforts of NBA superstar Bennett Salvatore.  And it was also Malone’s fault, specifically his karma…seriously, the most injury-safe player of his generation, could jump through a razor-wire-wrapped plate glass window and not even get a bruise, suffers an injury that keeps him out for most of the year and most of the playoffs?  Karma, man, for all those Utah years…and I sarcastically thank him for coming to stand right next to us at the exact moment that boomerang came swinging back around.)

And so, if LBJ’s real, true, only desire was to win–not just in a “30% of me wants money, 30% of me wants fame, and 40% of me wants a ring, so a ring’s the most important thing” way, but in a “I don’t care what number’s on the contract, this is the team that can win, give me a place to sign” way–then there was really only one viable option for him:

Orlando.

But wait, you say, they weren’t a possibility.  They weren’t even in the conversation, how could he have gone there? Well, he could have taken their mid-level exception.  $6 million-ish a year isn’t too bad, especially considering his income from all the sponsorships.  Or, hell, take the veteran’s minimum (like $2 million, I think?), which would allow them to sign someone else (like re-upping Reddick, or a solid back-up for Nelson).  And that line-up–Nelson, LBJ, Lewis, Howard, Redick, and various other assorted parts, all of whom have experience actually winning a game in the NBA finals–that one scares me.  The Miami line-up, not so much (more on that later).  But you have those four on your starting five…holy god.

But he didn’t even consider it.

He could have gone to Chicago:  Rose, LBJ, Boozer (or Amar’e, or Bosh…either of their decisions might have been different if LBJ had handled this differently), Noah…that line-up rules the East and seriously scares me as a Lakers fan.  And he could have gotten max money too.

And didn’t Cleveland have the best record in the NBA the last 2 years?  Seems that would only look to continue, if LBJ wanted to put the team and the city on his back and keep trying to carry them to glory.

But he didn’t.  He went to Miami, where, essentially, he becomes Pippen to Wade’s MJ.  He not only acknowledges that he needed more help than he got in Cleveland–an acknowledgement that he would also have been making had he gone to Chicago or Orlando–but that he isn’t able to carry things on his shoulders alone.  There’s only one way to look at it:  he and Bosh are there to help Wade’s team win titles.  They are his support players, in the hopes that they can out-talent the rest of the NBA into a ring or two.

Which isn’t a guaranteed thing.  They don’t have anyone to deal with Dwight Howard–really only the C*****s have the frontline to do so in the East–so just getting past Orlando will be a wild ride.  And with the rest of the C*****s back, probably playing their final years, hoping not to go out a loser, that won’t be an easy series either.  And really, putting the Bulls lineup–with a few years experience playing with each other under their belts–plus adding Korver as a deep threat, and their new coach putting in the same defense that’s given LBJ fits the last two years when playing Boston…plus the strong hate the Bulls will feel after being spurned by the “big 3″…I wouldn’t put money on that series either way.

But even assuming that they could get past all of those obstacles, there’s still the reigning champs, and I like our chances against the Heat across the board.  Kobe-Wade is a wash, young athleticism against perhaps the wiliest vet the game’s ever seen (and with a full summer to rest and heal too); Artest isn’t the offensive player LBJ is, but in a 7 game series, I give the over/under at 3 games before LBJ wakes up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, expecting to find Artest hovering over his bed, pinning an arm down to fight to deny him the pass; Gasol is to Bosh what a Lotus is to a Mustang (both excellent, but really no comparison 1 on 1)…and then what?  You’ve got Fisher/Blake, Sasha/Walton, Odom and Bynum looking at the guy across from them, asking, “Hey, didn’t I see you playing in the D-League a month ago?”

Sure, years 4 and 5 (and maybe 3) will be different in unexpected ways as that core 3 get used to playing with each other and the rest of the NBA changes around them.  But it’s no sure thing.  There’s no way to say that the Heat are now head and shoulders above the rest, only an injury or lockout away from guaranteed rings. LBJ could have put himself in a situation where that statement was true, or at least less unlikely…but he didn’t want to.

For him, it’s just not all about winning.  It’s about making sure that he’s not responsible for whether his team wins or loses.