There's Always This Year On Basketball and Ascension

and isn't it funny the lengths our enemies go to in order to say I am afraid I am being left behind, and then who will love me?

I have sat at the feet of poets who told me that there is power in withholding In not offering the parts of yourself that people are most eager to see.

America relies on making the soldier both an inspiration and an aspiration. It relies on making war and surviving war a part of the American fabric by making the aesthetics of war cool. And then makes those aesthetics available for the public to buy.

There is the feeling of knowing and understanding that you have been crying but fully grasping the velocity with which the crying has overtaken you until you realize that you are, in fact, gasping in the darkness, a darkness that feels new but has always been there. In these moments, the darkness is a mirror too.

What is sweat but decoration, jewelry upon the extended arms beckoning people toward a revival

I like a long aimless road trip for how it flirts with the act of leaving but never fully commits. You get to try on the outfits of different sunrises through a car window for however long you want and then you return to the familiar colors of where you are, where your things are, where your people are.

But don't get it twisted. It could always be worse. Survive enough and there is always a darker tunnel lurking in the periphery.

Booby's biggest crime was that he couldn't be what people imagined him becoming. And some might say there are far worse crimes. But I believe failing the imagination of others might be the crime from which all other crimes are born, if I am using the term 'crime' loosely, independently of what might get you thrown in a cell.

What I mean when I say that 'a villain stays a villain' is that our damage remains even after we have been punished for it. And there is very little control any of us have over our own absolution.

I used to talk about 'growing up poor' as if it is something that left me, no longer hovered over my life well into my twenties. A better phrase is that I 'grew into poverty' and simply learned how to navigate it as efficiently as possible through various disasters. And because I grew into poverty, my needs, by this point, were simple and constricted.

I am a devotee of the emotional politics of place, but even I know they are flimsy. Not a requirement for anyone else find themselves beholden to. The politics of place aren't necessarily always linked to the politics of staying as much as they are linked to the politics of knowing: 'I do dirt here because I know exactly where the dirt can be done. I know the shelter I can run toward when the dark city bathes in the silent sirens rotating lights. When I am lovesick here, I know where there is a bar with a jukebox, a place where one quarter gets you four whole songs and no one asks why you're alone because they're alone too.' There are few things more intimate than the history made when a person touches a place, runs a hand along it for decades at a time. Few things more intimate than the history made when a place touches you too, if you are open to it. Every repeated turn toward the familiar is an act of that touching, the drive you take from one corner of the city to the next, avoiding the highway so you might, again, reach for a memory that can only be seen from the street, taken in at 25 mph, someone in the passenger if you're lucky, someone who learns you through every past you've survived. The long way home is still a way home. I am a devotee of these politics, overly romantic as they might be.

And of course, I am not immune to the desire for exits. I've said already that I once believed my salvation would be found in another place and so I get it. What it comes down to is that some of us would rather live a long life of what some might consider failure but do it in a place that will catch you every time. I will take that over a triumph in a city that doesn't touch me back. One that holds my joyful shouts but returns no echo.

A multitude of rejections sting in a multitude of ways. This rejection could've been looked at from two different angles. From the first, it makes sense that someone who spent the majority of their life in a place would, eventually, want to at least dip their toes into an elsewhere. That desire, of course, accelerated by the very real limitations of their home state. This happens, to some degree, almost everywhere. People I love have marched out of Ohio with an eye toward the coasts, toward the south. Kids I went to high school with chartered paths out of this town by the time they were sixteen. That is a rejection, sure, but it's easier to live with when broken down to its simplest parts. Even though the stakes and circumstances aren't legacy or a championship, it's still just young people trying to figure out where they fit.

The other way of looking at it though, is more painful. Someone who is beholden to a place, who loves that place, who wants to be in that place, and still it just can't work. It has less to do with wanting to explore or take risks, it's not even a firm rejection of the place itself. It's the circumstances which have become so unbearable that it serves someone to leave even their most familiar comforts behind.

Since we are considering all manner of jokes, in a courthouse in early 2003, months before I was on what was called my 'last chance', the chance before all of my warnings ran out and I'd have to spend some time in jail, someone walked out of the probation office, their t-shirt half on and half off, a portion of the pristine excess white thrown over his shoulder, an exposed arm swinging out of a tank top with the ink 'only God can judge me' in big block text winding down the shoulder and stopping before the elbow, and I admit it was not funny to me then as I trembled in the waiting room of an office where someone was going to tell me to make amends for some shit I did and then tell me how long I'd be down serving time if I didn't make amends as quickly as I could. And I admit, when I say 'funny', I mean funny as in isn't it funny how the assassins demands answers while holding a loaded gun inside your open mouth. I mean funny as in the punch line is not the grave itself but the towering mounds of dirt ready to be heaped upon the coffin. Yes, only God can judge me, but then, what to make of the judges, the earthly rulers of lies? What to make of the people awaiting trials in a box, the families waiting for a number to start counting down from? What to make of the people, anywhere, who can no longer tell the difference in sound between a door opening and a door closing, and only know there is no place for them on the other side? A sentence is an arbitrary thing. It begins and ends at the whims of its most viscous architect. Who is to say what 'good behavior' is when the reward for it is being a little more free? If I will play the game, and submit myself to a nefarious binary, I will say that I have been good. I have never been innocent, but I have tried to be good. Even when I robbed, I was good. It is good to survive, after all, if one is to be sentenced to living. All I know is a door closed once and even when it opened, there wasn't enough light to find my way out of the room that consumed me. Forgive me for committing to suffering, I thought it might be the answer. That if I suffered loudly enough, for long enough, I would be owed something from somewhere holy. And isn't it funny, also, to imagine that the only time God judges us is after we've died?

The two of us were considering different types of odds. I know of no good fortune that I haven't had to chase. The bad fortunes are going to show up whenever they want, whether you invite them or not.

Luck isn't always about what wins and sometimes is about what you can keep close, what doesn't get you glory but also has never done you wrong.

Nothing survives but the imagination in a place like this. Nothing fights its way to the surface of anguish, still breathing like the imagination. The tunnels you can close your eyes and speed into, praying there is no exit, or at least no exit that will place you back in the reality of a cracked blue mat and a meal that was grey when it arrived, turning greyer by the hour. On the other side of the walls, the stars that I cannot see are surely glinting like a gold tooth in the mouth of some dark skinned and adored living ancestor throwing their head back and letting a laugh play a symphony across the night sky.

The greatest engine within the machinery of deception is mercy. The mercy visited upon you by those who know something is amiss but don't say shit. Who know the machinery is what is keeping you going, granting a little bit of dignity. And the deception that mothers all other deceptions I may try to finesse past you is the one that whispers in my ear and tells me I keep all of my heartbreak in the chamber, zip it up before going out into the world. But oh, how it overflows, even when I have prayed that it doesn't.

Tough for me to tell the difference between a prayer and a wish, though some might say a prayer is simply a wish that punches above its weight

So many of us try to play our gods for fools, it's incredible that we think they wouldn't notice.

Home isn't a choice one makes. Home is a set of circumstances.

What is rarely said about these people and about these moments in our lives is that sometimes, 'the wrong crowd' is simply the crowd that loves you best, the crowd that sees you the clearest. Their wrongness perhaps not inherent but cultivated through a series of neglects or unresolved pains.

It might do all of us some good to reconsider what 'making it' even means, or at least to honor a world where 'making it' is not defined by the glamorous exit, not only by television cameras, not only by coming back with a pair of trophies riding shotgun.

And yes, sometimes, it is that unspectacular. The math of who makes it and who doesn't, or what 'making it' even is, all of it a series of accidents. Who got caught with what and when, who did their dirt on the low, so low that it hums indecipherable beneath the decoration of stardom.

But 'is real' and 'not real' is sometimes a matter of who is witnessing the miracle and who can be tricked into a suspension of disbelief at the alter of light.