I don’t typically write about sports. If I do, I keep it confined to the areas I know: snow and ice-based sports. I would never consider dipping my toe into… basketball analysis, noooo.

Well, here’s my analysis of Jokic, the most interesting sports figure to me since… since ever. I had to think about it, and this is the most interesting figure to me–ever. I have more childhood nostalgia tied up in Patrick Roy, more raw emotion tied up in Gareth Bale, more admiration for JP Auclair and Seth Morrison, but Jokic stands nearly alone as the most Interesting.

I remember the first time I saw him. It was in person, strangely enough. My Philly friend during college, my tendency to do long-form irony bits, and my love of losers had led me, by 2014-ish, to become very invested in the 6ers and their whole Process. I liked their mercurial, oft-injured big man, the Troel Embiid.

My little brother, a Nuggets die hard from the time that Melo got drafted (he was young, it wasn’t bandwagoning, just timed out that way), got some tickets for a few games in the dismal 300 section for Christmas in 2016. My kind, generous little brother, knowing my irony-saturated affinity for the 6ers, decided to bring me to the 6ers visit to the then-Pepsi Center around New Year’s. I even had a “Trust The Process” shirt he’d gotten me.

This was a few weeks after Jokmas. Not being a Nuggets fan (at least, not since AI) and not being a basketball fan, in general, I was not aware of the significance. Luckily, my little brother was willing to give me the necessary information.

The next two and a half hours changed me, changed my life. I saw a goofy, galomphing galoot impose his will on a game that seemed to be moving twice the speed he was. I saw a man who seemed like he should be followed around by a tuba and tuba player for comedic effect absolutely torch a team that was supposed to be one of the up and comers in the league. That said, I saw the Nuggets lose, despite a late flurry and so many streaks of promise. That night, I bought a t-shirt with the Canadian flag superimposed onto the crossed pickaxe alterate Nuggets logo and I have not looked back. Since that day, my favorite Colorado team is the Nuggets, and it’s not close. (I am a hockey 1st guy, but a Blackhawks fan due to my father’s early intervention.)

My personal affinity for Jamal Murray’s ornery Canadian ass, aside, it’s pretty clear what got me paying attention, what had me so heartbroken later that season when Russ came and ended ours, or on Game 82 of the next season, or in the WCF of the bubble year. This team became the team I “loved” the most, outside of the Cymru national football team (fuck INGURLAND). And it’s all down to Jokic.

Jokic is an anomaly in the constellation of American Sports Leagues’ greats. He is self-effacing (evidence: any post 2021 presser, but ESPECIALLY the post game of game 6 2024 WCSF, after the Nuggets were dusted by almost 50 points). He is selfless (perhaps to a fault, even according to his current and former teammates). He is the inverse of the American Sports Star in his physique, his mentality, his cultural and linguisitic makeup. This man is different.

And he’s the greatest center of my lifetime! Sorry Shaq! I have eyes, and I don’t care that you were so big that no one could guard you, so big that you effected roster changes around the league. I’m looking at a Minnesota team that was designed around beating Jokic, so kind of a non-unique point anyway! No, I’m looking at the circius passes, the Sombor Shuffle 3s over DPOYs and DPOY candidates. Sorry Shaq: when Jokic retires, he’ll be past you. He may already well be.

So, here I sit, nearly June, Nuggets out of the playoffs (and nearly Minnesota, too). I didn’t get this written before my Nugs were sundered on the 3 Big Man model, didn’t get to see a repeat.

But success is ephemeral in sports, especially modern PARITY-FOCUSED leagues like the NBA. To hope for another title is natural, to expect it is borderline insane and entitled. But was it so insane to expect it, really?

I’ve seen the face of god, and it’s a blokheaded Serb.

I studied philosophy in college (OH WOW, NO WAY, REALLY), and one of my grad-req. seminars was on the general corpus of American Pragmatism. I ended up going on some wild goose chase about the philosophical pragmatism of SCOTUS Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (It’s somewhere on this website if you want to read it; you don’t want to read it.) The long and short of it, though, is that I read A LOT of William James.

In James’ “Varieties of Religious Experience,” he attempts to quantify or describe the transcendent, the immanent, the sublime. To me, it mostly failed. Never penetrated my deeply materialist brain. That’s fine, though, because now I know the Sublime. The Sublime is a Serbian Cart Horse Racing Fan.

May we all one day know the Sublime.

It’s December 31st, 2023–the year I un-fucked my life after the Law School/childhood dream fulfillment fiasco of 2017. Finances still not great, car still shit. But there’s a strange optimism for the future in my life right now–one not present since 2017, frankly.

Continuity and rupture are the objects of focus in this topic. A million little ruptures and one main continuity seems to be the state of human existence, but the specific ruptures and continuties with the past can be illuminating.

Continuity is easy enough to dispense with: I’m still Trevor, unfortunately. Spent roughly 3 years getting high and pretending this wasn’t the case, but getting out of the cooler definitely made that acceptance process easier. I’m this guy. I will change a bit more before dying, but this is what–who–I am. Still irony poisoned, still a wounded romantic at heart, still a wild-eyed revolutionary extremely uncomfortable with the realities of violence. A mess of contradicitons, in other words–that’s my continuity.

Ruptures?

I don’t work in a physical labor job anymore. I am slowly advancing on a career track (a rupture, in itself) that doesn’t involve my words or politics in the slightest (the more major rupture, to be honest). I have excised (hopefully) the ghost of my Big Bad Ex with a (frankly insane) transcription project.

So, what’s for next year? Quitting smoking is the first goal, in my book. New car after that. Then maybe I date again? Still feels kinda unfair to any potential romantic partner, but I have to get back out there, eventually, right? (No, you don’t; you CAN just die alone, many do.) Get back into listening to new music as it’s released? Well, let’s not shoot for the stars.

(Side note: “We Looked Like Giants” cover by Car Seat Headrest might be the only track released in 2023 I’ve listened to more than once. Hence: Song of the Year 2023.)

Maybe set a real goal for next year. (As though quitting smoking isn’t a major achievement.) Here’s one: one fiction piece published. You know you can do the polemic, the opinion, the historical analysis. That’s easy. Bare your soul, you coward.

The transcription process reminded you how much you amuse yourself with your rhetoric. So, just keep playing with yourself! You’ve been doing that since 2018 anyway, sad sack! (Ow, self. Ow.)

I guess this technically counts as a New Year’s Resolution post. Well:
1) Quit Smoking
2) Publish Something
3) Car?
4) (…Fine) Date Again

This seems eminently reasonable. Can’t wait to find out how I’ll fuck it up when I’m back here a year from now.

I’m sitting here, in a bedroom slowly being readied for a move-out, naked and slightly chilly. I’m listening to one of the greatest albums of the 90s and considering the notion of pop-cultural “correctness”.

Bad Religion was one of the most “correct” bands of the 80s and 90s. The most correct, I’d wager, is Rage Against the Machine. That group may well be the most correct of all time, even if most took them neither seriously nor literally at the zenith of their influence. Our loss! (Free Leonard Peltier.)

“Progress” is playing while I do what I’ve done for the last few days: I get angry in the morning about the state of Israel and their brutal apartheid. I gape and gawk at my tax dollars blowing up apartment buildings in Gaza. I nearly work myself to tears thinking about the base injustice and inhumanity of it all.

And then I scroll Tinder for a bit, never intending to do anything other than scroll. Maybe I masturbate afterward because I became sufficiently horny from the mere thought of maybe one day dating again(?), maybe I don’t. I probably should. My mom’s dad and my dad’s dad both had prostate cancer, after all.

I get out of bed and try to forget that I live in a fallen world, a late-life convert to gnosticism without a shred of spirituality. I experience intermittent success.

“You” is also a very good track. “You”–>”Progress” is a very good two song block. Everyone should go out and buy a copy of “No Control”.

5 stars

There are no lessons to be drawn from 2020 other than depressing lessons.

The Failure of Bernie

We lost! We lost hard and there’s no moral victory to be derived!

The Capitalist Meat Grinder and COVID

They would rather we die and accidentally stop consuming than live and intentionally stop consuming! This sucks!

The Biden “Win” and the Negation of Politics

Face it: that this man won this year in the manner he did proves that politics is more or less untethered from actual material concerns and is now a contest to see who gets owned the least. We all get owned, though.

Lockdown Instagram and the (sadly temporary) Death of FOMO

For a brief moment, Instagram was good. Why was it good for that short stretch?

George Floyd’s Black Posting Boxes

Ah, yes, when it got bad. The liberal buys indulgences from Robin DeAngelo and learns and feels nothing. They scream abolish the police when taken as a public matter AND they loudly and proudly support Biden and Harris. They are histrionic morons with no real political commitments and they are more dangerous than annoying.

QAnon aka Thule 2.0

I remember* when people laughed at how ridiculous the beliefs of the Thule Society were. Well, how did that turn out, folks?

The American Christian Democratic Party

The centrists of both parties, the Bidens and Kasichs of the world, got their wish: a Popular Front against Trump (and, let’s be real: Bernie) winning the Presidency. Now, let’s see how they govern with this coalition.

It’s been a week since I turned 29. One miserable, aching week. Every day I wake up, pretend that I’m even treading water (as opposed to slowly sinking), and go to work in an abattoir of American capitalism. There is little hope, less future.

It is before 7 am and snow is falling. I will risk my life to get to work this morning. No one will care that this is the case and if I crash they will only wonder why I am late.

I will get to work and hear one of my three managers loudly and proudly proclaim that “this tissue won’t protect me from getting sick” despite having the utility of the mask explained to him several times. He is a shithead and I hope he dies of COVID for his arrogance.

I will make it to the afternoon and I will have an ache somewhere in my right knee, perhaps even my left if I should be so lucky. I will duck and dodge dozens of customers. I hate customers.

They will come to the grocery store, and they will act like we are vending machines–liable to be kicked when an improper product (or no product at all) comes out of the coils. They will never consider that many of us live in constant anxiety, having reframed any and all physical proximity (let alone touch) as a viral transmission risk. They will get annoyed at us for our rudeness and they will buy their bread and leave.

I will go out for my second smoke break and I will consider hitting my THC pen. I will refrain from doing so because, even considering all the above, it still bothers me when I don’t do my job well. I will never make a living wage for doing this job well.

I will go back inside, try to clean my area for the next person, and I will clock out. I will likely clock out ten minutes early because I want to leave more than I want to be paid for 10 minutes of my time.

I will wake up the next morning and do it all again. Until one day, I won’t. Hopefully that’ll be because of a better job, with better pay and regular weekends and actual benefits. At this point, it looks nearly as likely that I’ll just kill myself.

Colorado Public Radio could have solved this by just giving me a fucking job in Feb. 2019. If I kill myself, blame them.

No one is reading this, so it’s safe to ramble for a while. Ramble until I stumble upon something new and real, at least.

It’s been 4 months since the COVID shook this shit up and I still don’t have a proper grasp on What Is Going On. The atomization of individual little American monads has made a society-wide action feel alienated and lonesome; despite the knowledge that it sucks for everyone and sucks in a similar way for everyone, I feel more alone than I’ve felt in years. Perhaps more alone than any time since Freshman year of college.

Personal shit aside, it’s been interesting to live through the dying gasps of an empire, the global hegemon. Looking around at the patchwork reaction, the federal abdication, and the people themselves (there’s a whole piece to be done on the COVIDiot), we are a failed state. But we’re a failed state with nukes. So.

On the people, oh la peuple. If I could abolish them, I would! Selfish… gonna elaborate on that

I just spent 2 1/2 months in the cradle of American elitism and I have some takes.

First Take: “America” is not long for this world and I welcome our collective demise. “We” are a federation held together by myths of slaveholder apotheosis and a constitution that acts more like a suicide pact in the face of climate change. The position of global hegemon insulates from the nagging fear that what is here today may not be tomorrow, but that doesn’t change anything. The Soviets had a term for this. Look up the Adam Curtis documentary; I’m not explaining it right now. The collapse can still come, regardless the education-by-empire that the inhabitants of the imperial core possess. And I’ll be goddamned if the experience of door knocking isn’t one of the surest fire ways to peek into the political id bred by imperial education. You know what we learned from the door? The boomers will burn us for fossil fuel before they change their lifestyles. And millennials? We’re too broken down to even vote. And it’s so fuckin easy to vote. So, yeah, apathy plus catastrophe minus a generation that ever had its hands on the levers of power before the prior generation relinquished control equals a collapse that could potentially end this union. My prediction for the final triggering moment is water shortages in the American West. Then we’ll splinter and balkanize and race to seize the nukes in WY, SD, and ND. RIP America. Good riddance.

Second Take: radicalism will not come from the Blue States of our rich American coasts. The comfortable, smug liberals who made up my candidate’s base convinced me. Oh boy, did they convince me. They’re too fat and happy at the apogee of American empire. They have no incentive to change–barring PRESIDENT CHEETO occupying the thing they think was portrayed by The West Wing but was in reality created: the honorable presidency. I’m not going to do my pet history lesson again–the one where I show that American labor struggle was 99% between Chicago and Reno–but the liberal (not left) assumption that CA, MA, and NY would be able to do anything is perhaps partially correct. They’ll ban plastic bags and straws. They’ll create renewable energy standards. They’ll even start to consider pricing carbon! They’ll also vote down pro-union ballot measures, vote down pro-worker ballot measures, vote down pro-tenant ballot measures, and vote for Rockefeller Republicans who will maintain the status quo (and marginal tax rates).  I used to think it was a problem of the machine politics of those states. Now I know better. MA Dems LOVE Charlie Baker. NYS vote overwhelmingly for Cuomo. CA didn’t pitch Feinstein. These people like what they’re getting. So fuck ’em. The elevator pitch version of my history lesson is this: successful American radicalism used to come from flyover country, and goddamn we’re gonna have to get back to that.

Third Take: running as an unabashed progressive is always, always better than running scared. I’m not gonna elaborate on this one. It’s self-evident. Authenticity is key. Medium, message, and all that shit.

Hoity-toity title, eh? But I do love that alliteration.

So, it’s Oct. 29th. 8 days remain before election day. Because this blog is at least semi-private, I’m not gonna go into the identifiable specifics. I’m managing a campaign in a part of the country two time zones removed from my own. That’s it, that’s all–at least as it applies to my whereabouts and current occupation.

Haha, wait, occupation typically denotes pay. I’m not getting paid. Trust me, we’ll circle back to that.

Anyway, I’m miserable, folks. Bolsonaro won, the fascist right is now using political violence, and I’m here trying to win a goddamn State Rep. campaign in a fuckin’ retirement community.

There’s nothing, NOTHING better at showing the inherent limitations of electoral politics like watching repeated rhetorical compromises on baseline social democratic policies at the doorstep while actual fascists are proliferating and killing and winning elections. Granted, part of that is the basic demographics of the electorate (these people are old and these people are white and they are extremely both of those things). But, goddamn if–as usual–working electoral stuff has disenchanted me with the possibilities of that politics.

Fact is that what’s coming can’t be answered by “voting blue no matter who.” Climate change disregards the ballot box–so, too, does fascism. What is actually needed is a radical street politics, the likes of which have not been seen in over 85ish years in the USA. What is needed is an acknowledgement that voting is the bare minimum–a necessary but wholly insufficient condition.

People are gonna have to get used to the idea that getting arrested is political action. People are gonna have to adjust to a world where placing your body between an agent of an increasingly out fascist state and a stranger is not only rational, but required. People are gonna have to accept that violence is a reality of politics in times of flux and chaos. People are gonna have to change.

But people don’t change.

A lot of (extremely nosey) people ask me why I dropped out of law school. After my faux-nebbish dissembling, about half the time I’ll give about half of the overall story: got there, figured out I couldn’t do what I set out to do, and started to hate law school and myself. That’s half true.

Sure, there was one case that made it easier: BMS v. Superior Court of CA. Between May 25th when I got my (overly, mystifyingly) generous scholarship package and August 28th when I started class, the ground upon which I’d made my calculation to go to law school had shifted. Without going in to the boring legalese for a paragraph or two, I’ll summarize: BMS made it impossible for me to do one of the three things I wanted to do. I had a theory of a way to essentially kamikaze the big petrol companies without regard for my potential disbarment. And after June 19th of 2017, that path more or less disappeared.

Now, that’s one avenue of analysis pertaining to why I got the fuck out, but it’s mainly an entry into the main idea: I wanted (want, let’s be real) to punish motherfuckers (primarily oil fuckers) and I quit because I figured out I couldn’t do it as quickly as I could taking other avenues.

Going in to law school, I thought that my passion was protecting the weak and voiceless. I really had some naive, insane internal image of a legal paladin, valiantly cutting swathes through a corrupt (but not irredeemable) legal system. Well, turns out that, uh, no: I like to attack and uh, no: the legal system is going to be closed off to people on my side of the divide for 30, maybe 50 years.

I want to attack–and bring low–the large and powerful. I want to see them embarrassed, sundered, broken. Justice is a fiction, but it’d be real nice to inflict our play-acted, preschool ideal on the obscenely rich and powerful men who have made the world into the hell my generation will try (and fail) to improve. But that’s not defense. That’s not becoming a public defender, or working with immigration law practices to ensure that people scooped up by ICE have the best possible* legal representation.

And the system is broken. It’s no coincidence that I return to finish this draft in the FBI-granted grace period for GOP senators to brainstorm reasons they’re going to confirm Justice Brett (BRETT!) despite his being an alcoholic rapist. Trump did what I hoped Obama would do in 2012 when I cast my first “Dems suck, but…” ballot in my life. (I wanted him to fill a bunch of judicial vacancies. Trump is outpacing him, thus far. We live in Hell.) You want change? Don’t look to the courts.

Mostly, law school taught me that I was wrong. Wrong about a great many things, including things I had taken for granted about myself. But the number one thing I learned I was wrong about was “how bad it’s actually going to be.” My whole law school thesis was based on three premises proved wrong in quick succession, but even if those had remained, I’d likely end up in the same place. Physics cannot be reasoned with; hydrology doesn’t care what your educational credentials are.

The interior west, and my home in particular, is fucked. There’s not enough water and there’s too many people. That’s the facts, ma’am, and there’s no way out. But in the process of coming to this conclusion, I started to look back at what I wanted to do in law school. I wanted (again, want) to punish the fuckers. They deserve it, and I want to be the one to give it to them.

At the time it may have been unspoken, but I now recognize a climate fatalism in the “punish the fuckers” thesis. Before I immersed myself in the true danger of the irrigation and agriculture of the Colorado River Basin, my Green Leftist take was “expropriate and go green” or some nonsense like that. I don’t even say that anymore, unless I’m in mixed company. I just don’t believe it can happen; the only thing we can get is punishment. It won’t fix anything, but goddammit it’ll make the people moving their lives 20 miles in from the coast or 100 miles closer to freshwater, or the people who remained from a deadly climate catastrophe, or the people who baked to death in the hot, ever hotter sun just an iota happier, I’d like to think.

And, honestly, who cares if the punishment doesn’t solve anything, if we’re so fucked that there’s no coming back? They deserve it.