In the Doledrums

Here’s an old video for this part of the NBA season, courtesy of my favorite band ever (ever). Yes, it’s a piss-take of 80s videos from the 1980s by some arch New Zealanders. Every generation seems to believe it’s the first and only self-aware one. Everyone else is utterly sincere about whatever it was they are, or were, doing. Which is why we’re so clearly superior now, and the cleverest, coolest, funniest, most moral people ever to live. Or not.

Basketball! Ok. I’ll try! We’re in the very doledrums of the NBA season, so it isn’t easy. (The benefits arrive and life goes on.)

Right now the games matter, but they also, don’t matter that much. How much can they matter when nearly every game for Western playoff teams seems to feature Cleveland, Phoenix, Minnesota (so much better Jimmy Butler Free!) and somehow, Cleveland again. Cleveland JV or perhaps Cleveland “B”, they seem so encamped in the Western Conference. Maybe the poor, sad, Hornets. And of course, endless Lakers on national TV. How better to highlight and frame their shame, Lebron James hiding on the bench, texting commands to the directors of Space Jam 2?

The games may matter to your team, yet the final night of the season will have the final say. The path is narrowing every night.

The Rockets, however, seem to still be getting a few real games, I resent it. I want nothing but the Knicks, not just one game with the Knicks.

While we wait, and worry, about the season’s disposition, we may indulge in speculation and support for individual awards.

I’ve said before that I only care about these awards the way a parent might care about a kids sports trophy. If you ask me if I could possibly give a damn about, say, a random middle school boys basketball tournament, the answer is emphatically, no. Unless my kid is involved. Then justice must prevail; justice being my child receiving his due. His due being ultimate accolades.

So I’m in the argument trenches, fighting dirty, and desultorily, with a sharpened shovel for James Harden. In a feeble echo of all those long-ago boys who went “over the top” that never met the King, I’ll likely never meet James Harden. But here I am, in the internet mud, anyway. Frivolous hobbies are that way, sometimes.

It’s like the old joke,

Q: “Why are office politics so vicious?”

A: “Because the stakes are so low.”

Or as the Germans would have it, Froschmausekrieg, the war of the frogs and the mice.

Which itself comes from a parody of the Iliad: Batrachomyomachy, the war of the frogs and mice. Yes, even then there were piss-takes of honored classics. Somehow people possessed that sort of awareness, irony and irreverence, so very long ago. Despite it all being invented with the internet.

(I may have trotted out this reference before, so I’ll make a self-justifying reference to the cyclical nature of writing. Or really, the repetitive nature of sports seasons, and their arguments.)

So, said the frog to the mouse, “Let’s all endure the remaining games, and relax. “

The doledrums will pass soon.