preface or the complete history of everyone who has ever lived in detroit
Once, about two hundred years ago, someone named Mildred or Dorothy got tired of her man in Detroit, Michigan and dragged herself south across the prairies and dunes to a place called Tulsa, Oklahoma. The history of Mildred or Dorothy leaving her man in Detroit was never recorded. No one cared. I made it up. After she left, her man in Detroit smoked crack until his eyeballs turned into fingernails and fell off. His lack of vision made him lonely so he bought a pet mouse and used old tuna cans to make the mouse a suit of aluminum. Time passed. The mouse became a symbol for the city and everyone got drunk and celebrated the mouse, but in this drunkenness someone got carried away and shot the mouse with a machine gun. The city of Detroit collapsed. Hundreds of miles away Mildred or Dorothy sat in her small and average duplex drinking hot chocolate thinking about the time she was in college and someone said the name, “Thoreau,” which made her want to eat every person who had ever walked the Appalachian Trail. Mildred or Dorothy ended up majoring in business psychology.
introduction or if i was a basketball i would name myself ‘pam’
This other time, maybe two years ago, another woman got tired of her man in Detroit and moved to Tulsa. This woman was named, “The WNBA Team Formally known as the Detroit Shock.” After she left, I rented a movie about two people who fall in love and then fall out of love. In one scene a guy plays a ukulele and sings to a bird. When the bird dies the guy playing a ukulele punches a doctor. The ukulele was made of honey so it won’t hold a tune longer than a few seconds. Someone named Eddie Vedder ate the honey. Last week, I was on a bus and I overheard a man on the bus say that he went to Yemen and all the people in Yemen were jealous of a place called Tulsa because it was one of the fastest growing economies in the United States. This other time I was hanging out on the internet and someone said, “The city of Detroit is going to make a statue dedicated to RoboCop in honor of Women’s Professional Basketball no longer being a form of entertainment within the city limits.” For those who don’t know, basketball is a game I sometimes play when I close my eyes and turn into the shape of an African American stereotype, but basketball is also a team sport in which two teams of five players try to score points by throwing a ball at regulated diameter.
when i was still a small girl i didn’t know what i wanted to be because everything i wanted to be didn’t exist
Woman’s Professional Basketball sometimes reminds me of a song I’ve never heard called, “The Sun is a Golden Tuba Trying to Have Sex With My Arabian Childhood.” This song doesn’t quite register the same organic frathouse moans of the grass-fed lamb sausage I bought yesterday at Whole Foods, but it does remind me of the sadness I feel for the lost potential of a place in my closet that I used to reserve for a Shawn Kemp Seattle Supersonics jersey. Still, this is less about nostalgia and more about a bright prairie of economic equality burgeoning somewhere in the hearts of a tired Midwestern belief in the glory that the repetitive motions of a feminine dribble can somehow make a man rise from his seat and scream for no other reason than pure and unadulterated joy.
when the world realized i was a little boy i was given the understated writings of a gray mustache and it told me how to be a man
Mumbling half-conscious opinions aside, there is a truth in all of this and that truth is just another half-conscious mumble. Basically, if I fed the last American man a story about how Ernest Hemingway’s daughter was born from the loins of every lion her father ever hunted down and killed in Africa and that this daughter spent her early twenties running around New York City pretending to be a student at Columbia University while snorting cocaine out of the tip of one of Goldman Sacks’ ten billion urethras before deciding to pursue her basketball career then the WNBA would become a wild success and would eventually get made into a movie starring Nicolas Cage as Ernest Hemingway’s illegitimate daughter born from the dead meat of wounded Africa.
i am a reporter and my job is to make you believe that what i am telling you is true and really happened
Once, a man walked into a stadium and sat down. He ate some popcorn. He watched two players struggle for a ball and his eyes glazed over as he imagined two very beautiful naked girls lying on their sides facing each other, kissing, touching each other’s breasts. The man ate more popcorn and thought about a song he didn’t want to admit he liked even though he had been humming it a lot the past few days. The song was about a guy from Kansas who wanted to move to Brooklyn and become a hologram. In the song the guy buys a plane ticket through American Airlines because someone told him that NASA owns American Airlines. The song ends with the guy from Kansas renting an apartment that is too small for all his organs so he has to mail his pancreas and heart back to his mother in Kansas. The man eating popcorn continued to eat popcorn and pay less and less attention to the game as he hummed the song he didn’t want to admit he liked.
sports are similar to life in that one thing happens and then another thing happens
In most sports and especially basketball, one team will begin to score more points than the other team. In the first quarter of Tulsa’s 73-93 loss someone on the other team dribbled the ball and then tried to make a basket, but missed. Somewhere in America a family finished their dinner. One of the family members rose from the table to clean their plate, but dropped their fork and waited a few seconds before bending down to pick it up. The odd thing about dropping a fork or missing a layup is that it makes you realize you would often rather yawn than have to think about why you will never be president.
an attempt to qualify my opinions using advance metric systems or a belief in the probability of my mathematical failure
Somewhere in Oklahoma there is a beautiful creek. Statistics show that if you don’t win the first game of the season you are much more likely to lose every game that year than if you had won the first game. Statistics will also probably show that if you replace one player on every women’s professional basketball team with a Christmas tree then people who like Christmas trees will be more likely to talk about women’s professional basketball. A final statistic, one that I am not sure is even a number or based on logic, but is more just a whisper in my gut, tells me of a system of reality that exists in America beyond its big budget movies and brand name products. It is a secret club. The average foreign tourist or even the casual American intellectual will not bother seeking it out or even know how to view it. This structure gains momentum through small references in conversation when everyone stops to breathe and is constantly nibbling at the outer circle of whatever is culturally acceptable. Often, it is a void, something that can’t be put into words, a presence not even worth describing because what you describe won’t make people interested anyway. A large part of me says I should just give up describing whatever microbe activity is making me feel whatever slow hunch I think I’m feeling. I only listen to the large parts of myself.
afterword or a space where i will say more things
After their last game, which they lost 93 to 62, the announcer for the Tulsa Shock said, “I am apt to speak vaguely sometimes. I believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest person thinks he or she must attend to in a day. When a mathematician solves a difficult problem he first simplifies his life. In every game there is only one bread crumb on the court. Only one team has eaten tonight. It feels like victory is a long way from what I perceive anyone in Tulsa is capable of.”
