Human Victory Cigar

In recent days, my attention’s been strongly drawn to transitions. Maybe it’s because the new school year just began. Maybe because my girlfriend and I broke up a couple of months ago. Maybe because the swirling snow stinging my eyes yesterday – a record for the area’s earliest snowfall – brought home the change of seasons. I don’t know. But I’m sitting here writing this at Metro Airport, where I am waiting so see if I get on a flight for which I’m on standby.

It’s not that it matters too much whether I get on the flight or not.

I don’t really have to be in the Bay Area until Sunday morning (it’s Friday morning right now). But from the moment I missed my original flight and the very friendly Northwest Ticketing employee handed me my passenger verification card with the words “MUST PRESENT AT GATE” printed neatly where my seat assignment should be, a familiar knot formed in the pit of my stomach. Would they have a seat for me? What if someone else there – a more experienced and savvy air-traveler perhaps – manages to steal my seat out from under me? What if they don’t have a seat for me on the next flight? Will they have one on the flight after that? Won’t there always be only a limited and uncertain number of seats for standby passengers? There’s nothing to guarantee I’ll get one of those. All I can do is keep presenting my little card. Maybe I’ll never get a seat. Probably those of you who’ve experienced this before are laughing at me a little bit now. These things always resolve themselves, you might say. It’s an inconvenience sure, but hardly an occasion for stomach-knotting, anxious speculation. And I’d reply, if you were sitting here with me right now saying these things, you are absolutely 100 % right. But still…why did this happen to me? And what if…?

We Pistons fans are in just such a transition right now. Have been since Thursday, July 13, when the Bulls announced that they’d signed Pistons center Ben Wallace to a four-year contract. For the past few years, our offseasons have been pretty calm. Sure there’s been some changes – a new coach last year, a few new faces on the bench. But we’ve had the unique comfort of knowing, over the past few years, that our starting five — which, as you all know, is not just any starting five but rather the starting five – was coming back intact. We might wonder whether Rip would have developed a 3, Sheed some consistency, Ben his free throw shooting, Tayshaun his aggressiveness on offense, or Chauncey his passion, but even if we imagined that none of those things had happened during the offseason, it was all good. Nothing essential would have been taken from us. Some of us – perhaps the crazier among us – could even tell ourselves that Ben wouldn’t really be Ben if he didn’t cause you to groan everytime he stepped to the line with a grim look of false assurance, Sheed wouldn’t really be Sheed if he didn’t follow a 25 point, 10 rebound performance, with 7 and 2. But either way, we had our starting five. We had the starting five and that was what was essential. So we could luxuriate in speculation about how minor uncertainties would resolve themselves: “58 wins or 62?”

But not this year. This year the basketball Fates coldly clipped the umbilical cord that tied us snugly to our unwavering source of nourishment and comfort. Say what you want about Ben, nobody will really argue with the fact that Ben was the face of the Pistons’ current run of excellence and as such came to stand not just for this team and its brand of basketball (which brand gleefully thumbed its nose at the received wisdom about what it takes to win in today’s NBA’s, but for the city itself: hard working and hard to keep down, skilled to be sure, but really more about the payoffs of gritty determination, humble persistence, and tireless hustle. Ben was the city of Detroit — or at least the story that the city tends to want to tell itself about itself; which may amount to the same thing in the end). And when he left, make no mistake, we had lost something essential. And we didn’t know what would happen.

Since Ben’s departure pistonsforum.com has become the place for us to go to secrete those things we seem bound to secrete in the face of powerlessness and uncertainty: sour lament for what we have lost? Bitterly smug denial that we have lost anything at all? Timidly hopeful that, even though we have lost something essential, maybe we’ll be okay anyway? All of these sentiments, sometimes in combination, and many others have been floated over the past three months. The force of these expressions generates such a whirlwind that all kinds of topics get sucked into the vortex: Darko, Maxiell, the bench, Sheed, Flip, the new rules, the old rules, the Bad Boys, you name it. A couple of days ago I made a joke, on one of the innumerable threads in which we rehashed the catastrophe, sought to identify culprits and to sort confidence from delusion, that I’d like a dime for every time someone had posted “I’m sure there’s some blame for everyone. Let’s move on.” Let’s move on. Sure. I’m down with that. On some level, no doubt everyone’s down with that in their own way. But if we have to keep saying it, then we aren’t really doing it are we? And then questions arose for me: why not? What’s the nature of this situation and of our position as fans that make it so hard to move on, let alone in what direction to move?

Ben’s departure and our collective and varied and, especially, prolonged responses tell me something about us – I mean us as human beings — and specifically about our habitual responses when we lose something essential (or that we believe is essential) and are launched, equipped it seems with little more than an acute sense of our own powerlessness, into a journey of transition: bereft of a past whose reliable goodness grows even as the thing itself recedes from present reality into the mist of nostalgia and facing a future whose uncertainty – always a fact of the future of course – looms correspondingly larger, more radical, and more absolute. It’s obvious, after all, that nothing we say is going to undo Ben’s departure nor ensure the success of this year’s team. No matter how much we might rail against the various culprits – Flip, Joe, the new NBA, or even Ben himself – Ben now plays not for the Pistons but against them. And no matter how much we may rail against Ben’s real or supposed weaknesses as a player – his offensive skills, or his free throw shooting, or his age – we simply do not and cannot know how the Pistons will play without him. The fact of the matter is that a version of this was true in every offseason. But like the straw that breaks the camel’s back, converting an increase in quantity into a change in quality, the more intense change that is the loss of Ben Wallace has shown a spotlight on these facts, painfully illuminating how much we have invested in something that we do not control at all.

And this – as the dharma scribe never tires of pointing out — is of course what it is to be a fan, a condition most of us are both acutely aware of and regularly ignore. We even enjoy ignoring it, as when we superstitiously knock wood as Blaha trumpets Chauncey’s free throw percentage at the end of tight game, or shout at the television as Sheed launches an ill-advised three. We engage in these wholly empty gestures of pseudo-control even though, for me at least, they mostly just remind me of how powerless I really am. But all of this also, and I guess this is what I really want to draw into light here, is what it is to be a human being. Like a human being who has missed his flight and spends his time lamenting having missed it and anxiously speculating about whether or not he’ll get on the next one. Or a human being who leaves the secure familiarity of 8^th grade, or high school, or college behind to venture into the vast and unsettling, but also maybe a bit thrilling, uncertainty of high school, or college, or career. Or a human being moving from a certainly rewarding but failed relationship into the uncertainty beyond it. Or a human being moving from the certain cold of winter to the certain warmth of summer via the uncertainty of a spring morning (will I need a jacket? Will it rain? Will the tulips make it if it frosts tonight?). Or, finally, a human being moving from the absolute familiarity of life itself into the radical unknown of death.

Typically, I think, we tend to focus on and prefer the solid and abiding things in the world and in our lives. The nature of our families, the place we’re from or live, the job that we do – most of all, who we are and that we are somebody, whoever that somebody is, however important. We rely on the belief that we have an identity and there’s some stable core to us that we can trace back to the farthest reaches of our memory. I’m not here to say that such things are illusory – though I think such an argument could be made and would be worth taking seriously. I’m simply hazarding the observation that we tend to take those kinds of things – variations on “home,” on stasis – as the default way of things and to treat transitions as, well, transitions: as interruptions of the way things ought to be. They may be, as when calculated and planned by us, welcome or they may be, mostly when unexpected, unwelcome. But to some degree I believe we’re all made a little uncomfortable by change, especially unexpected change for which we have had no discernable responsibility.

And I think that we tend to avoid experiencing that discomfort by distracting ourselves with the past or the future. We can view the past with regret or satisfaction, complaint or applause and we can view the future with fear or with hope. Not only do such flights help divert our attention from the groundlessness of a change, they also – because they are imaginative flights that take place in our minds – distract us from the actual physical experience of discomfort (like the knot in my stomach). These speculative trips to the past or the future – again, because they are in our minds, within which we may exercise powers we do not possess in the real world — feel more manageable than the present. I’m not saying, mind you, that I think these distractions are negative or wrong or bad. On the contrary, sometimes they are essential tools for survival. My point is simply that their effect – not necessarily our deliberate intention in forming them – is to divert our attention from the uncomfortable, bodily experience of uncertainty that tends to accompany transition or, more simply, change.

So I don’t mean to sound judgmental or condemning of these. But I do mean to draw attention to them. Because as I sit here in the airport, lamenting and worrying and hoping, there’s a rich world of activity around me: the news of the day on the big screen behind me, travelers of all shapes and sizes crawling over the surface of the earth same as me, but of course also completely different than me, a din of conversations that might range from the most banal to the most profound, from the bored to the joyful to the shattered; and outside the windows I can see the bank of clouds that looks to me fairly still but that I know perfectly well consists of fluids in motion and those fluids of molecules and those molecules of atoms and so on to a subatomic level of perpetual motion that I cannot even begin to properly fathom, just as I cannot fathom the parts and motions and changes of which my own body and my own “me” are made up. And all that is happening and changing and moving while I sit adrift and alone in a sea of frustration and speculation because I missed a plane.

And then it occurs to me that life might be viewed as a one very, very long, ceaselessly shifting, transition between the event of birth, over which we have no say, and the event of death, over which we have no say. I think to myself, “Goodness! Now that is a whole lot of uncertainty and transition to take on at one time. No wonder I cling to my precious little moments of apparent solidity, so familiar, so reassuring, so abiding.” But also, it might not be a bad idea to practice getting a little more comfortable with the experience of change, staying with it a little longer, just to see what’s there and, finally, to live that part of life as well and fully as I live those parts that appear to be so satisfyingly solid and reliable and predictable. And whatever my way of dealing with the loss and the gain that inevitably accompany change – whether I blame Flip or Joe or Ben, or wonder whether we’ll have more or less rebounds without Ben, win more or fewer games; whether I curl up in a corner and want to die, or smile and simply roll with it, or if it is all or some combination of these – at least I can practice recognizing my regretful visits to the past and my speculative anticipations of the future for what they are: simply my way to live, in the present, the intense fragility of all existence in a mysteriously changing world. In that sense then, I’d be living the present moment after all, in my own very imperfectly perfect human way. And perhaps it is possible that the tenderness and compassion I might grow to feel toward my self could extend itself to a recognition of an appreciation for the very different ways in which others also deal with the loss of something essential, like Ben Wallace.