Choose and Perish

As a Portland native and adamant defender of those things that, like myself, are born of the PNW, I’ve always enjoyed the work of Matt Groening. In particular I enjoy the collection of comic strips he published about his two kids, titled Will and Abe’s Guide to the Universe. Those familiar to the book will recognize how well he captures the asinine yet fundamental questions provoked by the literalist curiosity of childhood without peddling overt sentimentalism. When Will raises his head in indignation to ask belligerently, “Why do skeletons DANCE?” we are tempted to smile smugly with insouciance at the naiveté of the perplexed child, when really we should be asking the same kinds of questions about stuff all the time.

Of course, questions like “Why do skeletons dance?” don’t have answers per se, but assumptions that interpret or imitate meaning. Maybe skeletons are happy, or, maybe they are angry. The question could be, “why do people who imagine anthropomorphic skeletons tend to make them dance?” but then we’ve only made a simple unanswerable question into a complicated and obscured unanswerable question. And when you get to the heart of things, both unanswerable questions are just different forms of the same unanswerable question. Or at least unanswerable without answers to even more complicated and redundant questions about our relationship to the concept of skeletons.

If it’s okay with everyone, I’m going to abandon the skeletons for a moment to get to the basketball portion. I’ve been watching the playoffs with the interest of someone who loves the game but hates everyone playing it. The Utah v. LA series is especially problematic. Who to root for? The answer: no one. I root for soul-crushing defeat for both teams. Never mind physics. 

However, in the midst of these (I have to admit) entertaining playoff games I can’t help but notice that some of these teams are really effing good. Not just kind of good. Like, really g.d. good. New Orleans, Utah, LA, and Orlando are absolutely stacked. Not to mention San Antonio has again managed their roster so as to clear out dead wood while continuing to develop and reload talent (never mind the Scola mishap). I’m not sure whether it was watching CP3 nail off-balance floaters through three defenders or Dwight Howard risk opponents’ life and limb with the kind of dunks that remind you Shaq once had cartilage in his knees that originally made me think of it, but nevertheless, it came to my ridiculous mind. Like Dr. Raymond Stantz staring at his own manifestation of Gozer, it just popped in there. I couldn’t help it. I tried to think of the one thing that could never possibly destroy us.

In any case, my skeleton question is: 

Are we sitting on the verge of a repeat of the Blazers teams of the early 90’s?

Is our future to be an extremely talented, extremely likeable team of second-place finishers?

And, secondarily, would that be such a bad thing?

I’m off to glower.