"There's Always This Year"

[fiefoe]

Hanif Abdurraqib's last essay collection, "A Little Devil in America", was a revelation. This book unfortunately is more of a muddle, though part of it shines. 

• we are not beholden to each other in whatever rage we do or do not share, but if you will, please, imagine with me. You are putting your hand into my open palm, and I am resting one free hand atop yours, and I am saying to you that I would like to commiserate, here and now, about our enemies. And you will know, then, that at least for the next few pages, my enemies are your enemies.
• But there’s another reality: to talk about our enemies is also to talk about our beloveds. To take a windowless room and paint a single window, through which the width and breadth of affection can be observed.
• Let us consider, again, what it means to have a place as reprieve, a people as reprieve, somewhere the survival comes easy. Should there not be a language for that? A signifier not only for who is to be let in but also who absolutely gotta stay the fuck out?
• * Of the many possible ways to do close readings of pleasure, among my favorite is being a witness to people I love taking great care with rituals some might consider to be quotidian. And my father was a man who enjoyed a meal.
• every now and then, my father would pull a handkerchief from what seemed like out of the air itself, dabbing his head furiously with one hand while still eating with the other. The sweat, I believed, was a signifier. This is how I knew my father was somewhere beyond. Blown past the doorstep of pleasure and well into a tour of its many-roomed home, an elsewhere that only he could touch. One that required such labor to arrive at, what else but sweat could there be as evidence?
• If my father worked in the backyard washing his car or hauling some wayward tree branches, his bald mound laid out for the birds to circle around in song, I could see the sunlight find a spot to kick its feet up, right at the crown of his head...  And nothing felt more like love to me than imagining this. A man whose face I hadn’t grown into yet, wielding an immovable mirror which is, always, a sort of promise which, through your staring, might whisper to you Yes, this is what you have now. Yes, the future has its arms open, waiting for you to run.
• No matter how many times they have fallen into dreams of our language, our enemies wake up with the same tongues, reaching but falling short. What else to do, then, but to imagine every gesture toward flyness as an affront to their own monochromatic living?
• Jalen Rose used to study his opponents, do real-time research on motherfuckers—in the no-internet early 1990s, no less. Just so he would have some shit to say to make sure a nigga was shook. And listen, ain’t that a kind of love? To say You are worthy of the time it takes to dismantle you.
• So much of the machinery of race- and/or culture-driven fear relies on who is willing to be convinced of what. How easy it is to manufacture weaponry out of someone else’s living if the emphasis is placed on the right or wrong word, or if that word is repeated enough, perhaps in a hushed tone... simply looking for anyone, anywhere to dress those fears up in an attire that the panicked might consider to be more publicly palatable than the boring racism humming underneath the dressing up of haphazardly assembled fears.
• Michael Jordan's baldness: Made it easier for him to be cradled in a tunnel of air when he stretched himself skyward, made it easier to believe oneself as impenetrable cool,
• * MJ: When he started at one end of Market Square Arena in Indianapolis and ran, catapulting himself from the free-throw line (yes, the actual free-throw line!) and remaining, suspended and extended, for what feels, even now, like a glorious hour. Your finest hour. The hour you’ve dreamed of living again ever since the final grains of it kissed the mountain of sand at the bottom of the hourglass. Have you ever been in the air so long that your feet begin to fall in love with the new familiar, walking along some invisible surface that is surely there, that must be,.. How long have you been suspended in a place that loves you with the same ferocity and freedom as the ground might, as the grave might, as a heaven that lets you walk in drowning in gold might?
• Smiling to himself like he was awaking from a dream—a good dream, a dream of invincibility, a dream where no one can kill you but you. Even now, I wish to touch the hem of that type of cool.
• And yes, with the plane tilting at the right hour, the gold from the sky can make its way across your newly awakened eyes, the color itself, two hands nudging you home.
• the first crush that sped me toward the cliffs of all things irrational.
• Perhaps I am averse to my own baldness because of what it signals to my often fragile interior: another language for loneliness, having to carry a version of myself that is at least a little bit more empty than the version before it.
• Fear is one thing that can carry an unassuming heart to the gates of love, or at least gates that might be in the same neighborhood as the gates of love.
• The short, sparse title track of Meshell Ndegeocello’s Bitter ends with the lyric “For us there will be no more / and now my eyes, they look at you / bitterly / bitterly / bitterly.” And though I understood this to be about a beloved making a permanent exit, I used to think it would be better if I understood it as the present version of a self pushing a past version away.
• And yes, laughter and crying both tumble out of the body’s orchestra at a similar tune, and so who is to say, really, when one became the other, or if they were ever disparate devices of pleasure at all on that afternoon, the rain percussive against the windows, keeping time with our reckless unfurling.
• * one of the negotiations of the game, and of the court, revolved around which ball could be played with for the real, serious, full-court runs. There wasn’t judgment in these assessments as much as a kind of science. Players passing a ball around, squeezing it, turning it over gently in their hands... depending on how well the outdoor surface was cared for, and on my block it was never cared for, but we knew how to navigate the aftermath of neglect. Which side of the court dipped slightly and which crack in the surface might send the rock careening toward the baseball diamond... But it was also here that I learned that there is nobility in a basketball that has faded, that has gone bald. And there is nobility in the person who carries it to the court. The shooter who has learned to shoot at a deficit, with a ball that slides around in their hand, or the dribbler who made a way with a ball that had endured seasons of being battered against the concrete.
• It is a strange miracle to be able to trace your own aging, your own mortality through someone who is living alongside you, someone who has survived eras at the same time as you have, in some of the same places. LeBron’s face was as bare as my own when I first heard his name.
• One thing that is for sure is that my father and I have two different hairlines, mine (gracefully! thankfully!) still intact, and I pray to whatever gods oversee such matters of self-indulgence to keep it intact for at least a little while longer.
• and you must find a barber who cherishes the hair on their own head slowly, thoughtfully, and carefully, so that they might (if you are lucky) extend that kindness toward yours.
• Lord, release me from whatever might make me wish for the way I looked as a child, which I can hardly remember through this beautiful fog of mortality, this slow march to the kingdom.
• I do not wish to be alive in the aftermath of the world ending. The movies and television shows don’t make it look appealing, what with all of the scavenging and the hard surfaces and the need to be proficient with multiple forms of weaponry and alert at all times.
• * Absence, maybe, but absence requires an understanding of what should be. What was once. It has always been impermanence, beloveds. Impermanence was the altar I was leading us to this entire time. The altar that right now we are kneeling before. My hand on your shoulder, as it has always been.
• I don’t trust people who don’t love a place to understand how that place remembers its dead. The living who throw an item the dead once cherished toward heaven, wrap it around the highest wire. So high that it looks like the shoes are swinging from the sky itself. Like two legs are hanging down from the edge of a cloud.
• I propose that above all, you are a reflection of who loves you.
• * The floater, the most romantic shot in the game when done right, guided toward the rim with a heave and a wish, how the follow-through after the ball leaves the hand can look like an overeager wave, like saying goodbye to a person you never wanted to leave. The floater is beautiful for how it relies on height, how the shot itself turns the ball into a bit of a show-off, obsessed with drama, almost pausing in the air to make sure you get its good side before it begins to twirl downward.
• * worked a crossover at just the right moment to send someone flailing backward, like a ghost of their future self latched on to their jersey to get them the fuck out the way of whatever was coming.
• * When a city names a place unlivable, it suggests that there is something wrong or damaged about the people who do live there. It suggests that their lives are expendable, down to the homes or apartments they live in. And just like that, the lens turns toward property, toward land. Toward the value of vacancy. Don’t play like you haven’t heard this one before. When you create the conditions of war, you get to name the places it happens.
• * The student parking lot was lined with used cars, none of them from the decade we were living in. Even if someone did have a clean pair of kicks, it was one of one, or at best one of a few. There was a shared language not of struggle, not of survival, but of pleasure. Reveling in what we did have, knowing that we could have so much less.
• My old college wanted me to come back and speak to the graduates this year. In exchange, I jokingly asked if they would release my transcripts. I was told that my parking debt was in the thousands, even nearly two decades later. I’d have to pay it first. Everything has a cost.
• mid-’90s: 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. And it is one thing to map those aesthetics onto the suburbs, a Hummer parked in a garage with an American flag affixed to a wall or swinging from a post in the front yard. It is one thing for people to romanticize the violence of sports and compare game to war. It is another for athletes to call themselves soldiers. It is one thing to create conditions under which survival seems unattainable for some, but it is certainly another thing for hood niggas who have never enlisted in anything to call themselves soldiers. To wear the uniform of soldiers as fashion.
• But all of their stunts were from a different era, when being loud meant something other than being loud. It ain’t about what you can hear on the inside, it’s about what motherfuckers can hear on the outside, and how far away they can hear it from, and how long the song lingers once the car passes, the way the air chops and screws whatever faint vocals might be fighting beneath the swell of deep bass, how the voice might sound like it is descending under water as the car inches farther beyond the block.
• long enough to fill a corner of a house with puffs of black smoke, the kind that rise in praise of absence, a gentle reminder before the flame, and I know there is a difference between what happens in real time and what we are subjected to in the endless replays of a moment, the ones that project into the darkness of closed eyes. But I swear, Kenny Gregory jumped from the damn-near foul line in Colorado, and it seemed like he might never come down. It seemed like he was aiming for something even higher than the rim itself.
• What do you call it when players who came after you fight back tears at the mere memory of you, at the mere mention of your life now, the path you made. Someone who ages, thank God. Someone who lives beyond their past selves. But someone who is also bronzed, a monument embedded in the emotional infrastructure of a place.
• * Sometimes there are funerals, and sometimes there is nothing. No portal through which grief can be passed, no housewarming for the new grief that furnishes the ever-growing tower that we carry, that we are responsible for, whether we want to be or not. Both landlords and tenants within our own sadness, and sometimes it just happens. Grows while you sleep. Death isn’t the only way to die, though it can be argued that it is the most merciful.
• I do suppose the dream is a doorstep of sorts, and any appearance of someone we can no longer touch in the earthly life is not entirely unlike the flower—breathtaking, but momentary. Fleeting. Forgotten about once the dying sets back in. But in Islam, the appearance means that the dead are in good condition in the afterlife.
• 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 the best. The crowd that sees you the clearest.
• * I’ve got no problem not seeing what I don’t need to see. I’ve got no problem baptizing the mind every now and then. What good is a witness in a country obsessed with forgetting? But I’m talking about history now and history ain’t nothing but a whole bunch of shit a lot of witnesses don’t wanna speak on.
• some might say a prayer is simply a wish that punches above its weight.
• Mimicing LeBron: Living rooms and the thick air of arenas and the skies of downtown filled with the residue of white powder, tributary clouds, hovering and then becoming another memory. This is how you know a city has started to become your city. When it moves alongside you, a dance partner who you can never out-step.
• There is a way to blend into the architecture of a place, as long as you don’t summon any chaos while you do it. Walk through a park where the weight of summer has broken the necks of the sunflowers, sent their faces moaning near the soil they burst from, and imagine that even the flowers must try to make a deal with whoever their god is, hoping for a better result than their current predicament.
• * spending my nights in a storage unit just wide enough to hold my entire body when sprawled out on its floor. But I imagine they did suspect all of it. They had to. 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 you a little bit of dignity.
• And yes, whoever saw fit to open the doors of the downtown church a little early on the mornings, and whoever saw fit to leave blankets on the pews, and whoever saw fit to play the gospel so low it became a morning lullaby,
• Inch a little bit closer to a good night’s sleep if someone didn’t mind sleeping directly on the hard floor. It all depended on finding someone who needed something you had more than they needed the comfort of a border between them and the ground. Separate but relentless desires can make two fools out of desperate negotiators.
• Someone might be telling a child to shoehorn you into their bedtime prayers, the way children sometimes pray, a collage of names and half-formed wishes thrown up to the sky where someone surely has to untangle the fabric of it all before handing it off to someone else. And somewhere on the other side of the walls, the stars run a tongue across the lips of night
• The man who, not far from your kingdom, says a prayer on the night before his court dates and then comes back the next afternoon, newly broken but still moaning the Lord’s name into his palms in an attempt to put himself back together.
• less angel: with too much time on their hands, who disrupted an otherwise reasonably stable emotional cocktail with their own whimsy.
• Heartbreak itself is a primary color. Stagnant without a series of secondary colors to activate it. Longing is an activator. Loneliness and heartbreak are not the same.
• * I am of a particular emotional makeup, and because of this, I believe that misery doesn’t need company as much as I believe that misery is company. Damn good company too, if you can get it honest enough.
• Not just wanting him to fail and wanting him to come home, but wanting him to fail so that he would come home. So that he might, through his failings, realize the error of his ways and return to familiar arms, with all forgiven, both parties eager to get back to the work of healing. <> Of course this is absurd, but so much longing is steeped in absurdity.
• * The dilemma for me has always been the reality that the early moments of falling for anyone or anything are so seductive, and can rarely be captured again. They can be manufactured, but never fully sung back to life by the same effortless chorus. They appear, and then they drift away. I remember the first time I heard Nina Simone’s voice, singing “Pirate Jenny,”
• “Let’s Get It On,” for example, is a song where the question unravels until you realize, at the end, that nothing is being asked at all. It is a ravenous demand built from Marvin’s creaking howls in the song’s final act, a final act that seems like an entire universe away from the restrained conceit of the song’s entry. <> Our old pal James Brown could pour it on when he wanted to, though I never believed it, because even he seemed to not always believe it. I’m not saying everything on a record has to be believable, but I’m saying she ain’t comin’ home if you’ve realized you like the home more when she’s not in it.
• I remember the immediate moments of the offseason, the looming understanding of LeBron’s free agent status descending, becoming more tangible than it had been during the season. This is when the emotional negotiation that we learned from those foolish soul songs began within the hearts and minds of Cleveland sports fans.
• The people who ignored LeBron’s obvious exit knew they didn’t have any control over what LeBron James did or didn’t do. But they were in complete control over when and how their own heartbreak arrived. And yes, when it arrives in this mode, it might come all at once and render the broken-heart holder a bit more breathless than it would if they were to take the former approach, acceptance that lets the ache through in small manageable portions. But I appreciated those Cleveland fans who, like I have in the past, let their denial lead to some torrential damage.
• The song is called “We Are LeBron,” and if you are, right now, counting syllables in your head, wondering if this is a riff off of “We Are the World,” you have already done the required math to understand this level of desperation. Instead of chart-topping singers clustered together in a studio, this version was populated by local news anchors, politicians (including Ted Strickland, the actual governor of Ohio at the time),
• * resent the birds breathing out small melodic shouts from the branches outside of my window. It is a resentment I recognize as borderline evil, but I hold it nonetheless. Nothing so beautiful should arrive with such ease. The lone bird on the lone branch sings a pretty, lonely, effortless song, and no one runs to its side. Because how could they? There is no sweat on the notes. The sound is too clean to suggest that its maker has ever known pain, has ever longed for anything but a sky as clean, as empty, as blue as a perfect note from the lips of someone who has just made peace with the fact that they might die lonely.
• 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.
• fire is a song, fire be a whole symphony if you allow it to be. And I don’t just mean its sounds, the way it disrupts the sky with a snapping of fingers—rhythmic if you catch it on the right notes (I suppose it depends on who and what is doing the burning there, too). I mean the hands, I mean its makers, I mean the things that drag people to its urgent heat,
• The shell of a team left behind by its once-savior? It wasn’t ever about that. It was about dreaming through the brutality of leaving, of being left. What I didn’t mention when we began this examination of the subtle nuances that come along with heartbreak is what is humming underneath this specific delusion: I need anyone who has ever hurt me to know that I am doing more than just surviving.
• * 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.
• Boobie’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
• At some point, my face echoed into the face of my brother, and I do not mean this in any sense of romanticizing shared lineage. I mean literally, looking through the glass and our many reflections, I could not tell where his face ended and my face began, which is one way of saying that we were both afraid of the same thing. We both knew what I was capable of surviving and for exactly how long I was capable of surviving it.
• * I love the dead, too, because I have no choice. Because there are so many of them. Because in the spring of 2011, when the Cavs weren’t winning a damn thing, I buried Cam’s ashes under a sycamore tree in Cleveland, which I only knew was a sycamore tree because of how Cam would sometimes point to a tree that looked like it
• * I know that time itself is a hustle. Spend a few days in Franklin County corrections and you might come to realize, urgently, that time is a currency. Silence is a currency. Any currency that can be interrupted can be the source of a hustle. Which brings me, again, back to intimacy—though I promise I won’t linger here too long, except to say that not all hustles are intimate, but the best ones have an undercurrent of intimacy.
• As the aforementioned tanks poured into town, my city’s mayor stood behind a podium and said, “This country is better than what we’re seeing today.” The hustle is that everyone talks about the “today” as a single day that materialized, untethered, with no connection to any history before it or any history that will come after it. As if a moment is not within a braid of moments that defines a place. As if a place is not defined, at least in part, by how eagerly and comfortably it retreats to violence as a type of language. To make a myth of a country is a misguided extension of kindness, but it is also a hustle. People who believe so richly in the inherent goodness of whiteness that they believe empathy alone will grow the hearts of fascists are both hustlers and easily hustled. Trapped within the mouth of a predator, a true hustler will talk about the glow of the predator’s teeth as soft, romantic lighting.
• It was a delight to drink from this dream, but know, the bottom of the glass, tilted to our mouths, is visible enough to offer a reflection.
• I first heard “California Dreamin’ ” before I knew where California was. When I barely knew what it looked like on a map. But I wanted to go there. It’s a vicious trick. The there wasn’t California at all. The there was a feeling.
• * I cannot explain this to anyone who hasn’t stumbled their way into some undeniable beauty only to set it on fire at their arrival because they felt too close to that which they weren’t sure they deserved. I cannot explain this to anyone who hasn’t prayed in a church for something they weren’t entirely sure God gave a fuck about. The trivial, selfish pearls of survival, the things that don’t entirely help anyone else but might drag someone from one moment of living to the next.
• And yes, I am rebuilding the interior of a dream that I had once, its beauty still stitched into a quilt that slips gradually from the shoulders of my memory.
• This moment is lost, but soon there will be another season, another blank slate. Possibility awaits. If you can believe in it long enough, destiny rotates, tilts its wild and colorful feathers toward everyone eventually.
• While watching the clock during basketball games, I most love the moment when the end of a game turns itself from minutes to seconds. I like to see the anatomy of a minute, the fractions of a second peeling themselves away. Fractions that we do not get treated to when the countdown clock is still concerned with the slower math of minutes.
• If you know this feeling like I know this feeling, welcome to the church of silence and awe. Our mouths are open, but nothing spills out. Our backs against a trembling door, praying to cut the veil of night into small scattered pieces. If you know this feeling as I have known this feeling, if you have wanted to hold the moment before an inevitable ending in your own hands and stretch it to near distortion, you also love a Game 7.
• * I mention this to say that rarely does a moment like this happen in a real-life game for me. A moment that feels so slow that it seems as if I am not actually in control of my own watching of it. I watch the Dick Snyder shot like this. The small window of eight seconds it takes for the shot to happen, it happens in small acts, or movements, the way a play or a dance might. In the first act, Snyder catches an inbound pass from Jim Cleamons... Of the many things I love about basketball, I most love to consider it as a duel of angles. A defender and an opponent locked together in a lightless chamber, both seeking a window, cracked and begging for them to slide through.
• I know exactly when and where to force the scene into stillness. There is a moment when the ball hangs in air, before it kisses the sweetest spot of the backboard—the spot that anyone who has shot a basketball enough knows, the spot that breathes the ball in before blowing it, gently, through the net.
• But trust: there are more of us, always. Whole gang of us. Some of us carved our names into trees, into the wet concrete of new sidewalks. Some of us took small knives to metal and wrote our names into the death traps of the playground. And so we stay, one way or another. We never make it out, and we never disappear. Permanence is the greatest stunt of them all.