I don’t necessarily want to get back into writing about every game, and I don’t think anybody wants me to. On the other hand, I do enjoy capturing some of these little moments in time.
Last night’s contest was full of drama, of both the basketball and non-basketball kinds. In the first half, it was mostly the latter, with the W’s Draymond Green — currently the NBA’s reigning villain — facing off against the Rockets’ Dillon Brooks, an aspirant to the throne. But I think Day-Day kept the title. Although I personally find Brooks eminently hateable, Draymond remains Public Enemy #1, not without reason.
In this game, after coming to Steph Curry’s defense in a scuffle and receiving a technical foul he probably didn’t deserve, Dray started acting up. He got tangled up with Tamari Eason on the floor and… well… the details don’t really matter, After a decade-plus we’re used to this kind of thing from Draymond, suffice it to say we all expected him to be ejected from the game, and he probably should have been. Instead, the referees decided to give him a flagrant foul, which gave the Rockets free throws but enabled him to stay in the game.
There was a bunch of that stuff — from both teams — in the first half, which seemed to go on forever. In the second half an actual basketball game broke out. Down the stretch the teams traded baskets, never separated by more than a couple points.
When I started this blog back in 2005, My Golden State Warriors were in the midst of a historic run of futility that lasted two full decades, save that one glorious month in 2007. During all that time they went to the playoffs just the once.
So in 2013, when we became a real NBA team again, I got a little giddy and started writing about the playoff games. I’ve continued that more or less to the present day, though I know these posts are not very popular, even with myself. It’s more of a compulsion; having invested so much mental energy in the doings of an ever-changing cast of large men, I feel like I need to get something out of it.
The Warriors last won the NBA title in 2022, which amazingly was only three years ago. (Just the last three months feels like an eternity.) Last year they suffered an ignominious exit at the hands of the Sacramento Kings, with beloved Klay Thompson going 0-for-10 in what turned out to be his last game as a Warrior.
That kind of felt like the end, and most of this season was a slog, with the Dubs playing uninspired ball, occasionally giving reason for hope, then falling back into mediocrity. Finally, after a long period of angst, ennui, and indecision, something actually happened: GM Mike Dunleavy pulled the trigger on a trade that brought in Jimmy Butler from Miami. Many of us, including myself, were skeptical about this move; it was a big gamble on an aging player who was serially disgruntled.
But it has worked. The Warriors finished the regular season strong, and survived an unnecessary trip to the Play-In Tournament, earning themselves a series against the #2 seed Houston Rockets.
This week I find myself, not entirely of my own free will, at the Opryland Hotel near Nashville, Tennessee. This is basically a domed city, 9 enclosed acres kept at a constant temperature of 71 degrees. In addition to the guest rooms it has gardens, a water park, numerous restaurants, and a sports bar where yesterday I watched my Golden State Warriors choke away a crucial game to the goddamn Clippers.
Sho nuff a weird place from which to monitor the continued unraveling of America as we know it. Today the POTUS1pustulent orange tub uv shitwas on all the channels sitting in the White House with the president of El Salvador, not only defying a court order by refusing to lift a finger to bring back a man wrongfully deported to a Salvadorean gulag, but openly plotting to start sending American citizens there too. And smirking all the while like a schoolboy who knows he’ll never be punished because daddy owns the school.
It’s all quite sickening but how worried can I really be with fake ocean sounds in the background, even though we are more than 500 miles from the ocean? OK, yes, I am kind of afraid to leave the room, although it’s impossible to get meaningfully lost; this place has its own dedicated app to help you find your way around. I just feel sort of existentially disoriented once I am out in the hallway.
Lately I kind of feel that way everywhere in this country. But it beats being in prison in El Salvador, that’s for sure. So I am not complaining.
I was saddened today to learn of the passing of Dave Allen, bass player for Gang of Four and later Shriekback.
Dave was my favorite bassman. I’m not saying the best — he wasn’t a virtuoso like Bootsy or James Jamerson; he mostly played simple parts that were just impeccably funky and right. I’m hard-pressed to pick one example to post here, but how about this one?
As it happens, Shriekback has a new album out today. Dave hadn’t played with them — and by “them” I mean Barry Andrews, who is back to making the records all by his lonesome these days — for many years. But life goes on, for now.
Progress Made: VALIS, Philip K. Dick The Black Count, Tom Reiss
Books Finished: The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Imagine my delight when, just days after lamenting that “my favorite free box, at the Coffee Break in Sunny Brae, is no more, replaced by a vintage gas pump,” I went over there and saw this:
Miracle of miracles, some positive change in these dark times! Also, this week the good people of Wisconsin told That Other Fucking Guy to go screw, electing liberal Susan Crawford to the state Supreme Court. Normally this is not something we’d get excited about, but it is reason for celebration. Never mind the 99 things that went wrong this week; let’s focus on the things that went right.
OK, on with the report.
Normally periodical reading doesn’t count here, but I want some credit for the time I put into “Heisenberg’s Eyes,” a lengthy two-part Frank Herbert story that appeared in the June and August 1966 issues of Galaxy magazine. I was never a Dune guy, but “Heisenberg” was entertaining enough to prompt me to buy a copy of a 1956 Herbert submarine thriller called Under Pressure — which I started and immediately decided was militaristic claptrap; into the gas pump it went. Thus ended my brief bromance with Frank Herbert.
