Set the hills on fire.

I’m back home in the hell hole town that I grew up in that I’ll never name in print. I like to say I’ve gotten over it all, but to tell you the truth, I don’t know if you ever totally get over it. I don’t know if now is the time or place to get into that, but I’ve got some baggage. I took an acting class where everybody was asked to ‘confront’ the person that they had unfinished business with, and ended up embarrassing myself by bawling almost uncontrollably in front of these people with who I had only occasionally gone out with for drinks. I went last, and saw every girl fight off tears, and every guy get to that teeth gritting level where they looked as if they wanted to punch the guy who did them wrong. And then it was my turn, and I’d thought I could say my piece…and I just started crying. I begged them to lower the lights, abandoned my chair, told the totem that I was supposed to direct my anger or sadness toward to retreat back to the ranks of the other students, and let myself fall into a puddle in a corner in the back of the room. And then I ugly cried thick, disgusting tears, and fought to get the words out in anything other than cracked wails. Absolutely nothing was dignified, and I’m almost as traumatized about the exercise than I was about the public school experience.

Shit, I forgot why I even got started on this tangent.

Oh, right. I’m back home. Anyway, I have some complicated feelings about going back home, and don’t do it very often. But as I’ve been gifted free car, that’s just what you do, even if you tell your mom that you’re covering the Nets, and that she doesn’t have cable, and that you’ll have to steal her YouTube TV password. And the one thing that allowed me to justify the trip (aside from actually seeing my mom) was that Upstate New York is legitimately beautiful in the fall. So I’d told my wife that we were taking the kid upstate, and then after all that, I find this ugly bullshit. Instead of the hills exploding into ruby reds and marigold oranges, dotted with the evergreen pines and blond tones, I see that half the trees are skeletons and the other half are still as green as August. It went from summer to winter without the beauty that these hill folk have been promised each and every autumn. And I am up here feeling ripped off, and ready to sue the local chamber of commerce for false advertising whenever they publish photos of picturesque landscapes. Burn it all to the ground, I say. There are a million reasons to hide within the safe confines of the city and never emerge to the small mindedness of whatever rural community you came from, but the beauty of the hills is always supposed to be there. Not to be.

Man, if I was ever planning on reactivating my facebook account to promote this blog before, I can probably kiss that shit goodbye now.

Anyway, speaking of bad transitions, I’m noticing a trend in these Nets games, where their starting five seems capable of making most games interesting, but eventually leads to their disappointing bench eventually giving the game away. LeVert and Allen are two legitimate fringe All-Star caliber players. D’Angelo Russell is still capable of showing glipses of the promise that got him drafted 2nd by the Lakers, and is even debuted a Killmonger type hairdo tonight. But then they eventually give way to their bench, and the 2nd unit can’t quite hold up. In the first two games the damage came in the 3rd quarter. In this, it was in the 4th. I guess I sound ridiculous suggesting that a 20 point loss was closer than it sounds, even when in the closing minutes it was closer to a 30 point loss. Fuck, maybe I’ve become a true believer and have already succumbed to Stockholm Syndrome three games into the season. But I swear to God that I had hope for a win in the 4th quarter. Maybe this is what I should expect covering these Nets.

“Yeah man,” my younger cousin said over the text. “Sometimes they’re going to get out-talented.”

That they will. Maybe that’s enough to win me over though. I don’t know how to describe this, but I find myself consistently entertained by this squad. Maybe the charm will wear thin as the season moves along to say, I don’t know, past Halloween. We’re three fucking games in, man. Don’t just give yourself away, you cheap fuckin’ trick. But look, my eyes see what they see. LeVert’s off-kiltered drives make me think that anything is possible, and Allen’s ability to become a fucking eraser at the rim is more fun than I’ve had rooting for any local team in years. In some regards, maybe I’m the poor man’s version of an Indiana Pacers fan. And while a sizable portion of fans would ask “Why the fuck would you ever want to be a Pacers fan? They haven’t won a goddamn thing” I would tell you that titles are overrated. Yes. They are. You feel the losses more than you feel the titles. I’ve celebrated five Yankee World Series, and three Giants Super Bowls (I’m not going to bullshit you and pretend that I gave a shit about football when I was 6 during Super Bowl XXI) and I can tell you that the feeling is pretty damn hollow. I’m not telling you that it isn’t fun to talk shit with your friends, and to roast fools online. It really is. But there are only so many commemorative DVD’s that you can buy, and eventually you find yourself sad that there isn’t one more game where you can see the crew together busting heads one last time. The party is over. You’re already living in the past.

Also, championship parades kind of suck if you’re not on a float. But whatever.

My point is for decades the fans of the Pacers have had plenty to celebrate night in and night out, and to my knowledge, they’ve never tanked. I respect the Pacers, and not for some racially coded “Gym Rat” way, but as a simple “They could have cynically thrown away seasons, but never did” way. They’ve always been professional, and they’ve always given their fans a reason to actually buy a ticket without conning them with the chance to throw away multiple years for the prospect of shiny trophies down the road.

I don’t want to say that I am a Nets fan just yet (I totally am, but I’ll claim that’s the Beefeater talking tomorrow), but I think there’s a part of me that will accept that much. Like a woman who has been married to a rich man who could shower her with Range Rovers, and was ready to move on to the guy they didn’t really love but wasn’t going to hurt them either. My rambling point is that I think that I’m ready to settle for and settle down with a team that can reliably keep me entertained, and that I’m willing to overlook the eventual and inevitable blowout loss to much better teams, if it means that I can watch entertaining basketball.

But this might fall into my effort theory from Game 1. Let’s not forget that all of these games have occurred when I have had to force myself to actually see them. Let’s see what happens when I’m farting around on my own couch, and have an unlimited amount of distractions at my disposal. Or when they lose 20 games in a row and suddenly aren’t so cute and cuddly.

Fuck, it’s 1 in the morning and my daughter is almost definitely going to wake up at 6, isn’t she? Alright. I’m out of this bitch.