The pleasure of fantasy
The necessity of sometimes forecasting the NBA season, and life, through the sieve of fantasy.
Some fantasies I entertain for this season:
Watching Russell Westbrook show up as the saving grace for the Lakers. Watching him fall in love with shedding gravity — abrupt, punchy, a smirking torpedo — as only he can again. Watching the league bow deferential, fans feel an itch they forgot they had scratched, Lakers fans begrudgingly accept that they could’ve been wrong (this is fantasy, remember), a team fall in around him.
I haven’t decided yet in this figment, bound to nothing, if Westbrook bends himself for his team. Whether he has dug in over the summer and quietly tuned to a supporting frequency that rings clear under the boom of LeBron James, the clarion call for Anthony Davis, and whether that serves him. Even in fantasy, it’s difficult for me to resign the idea I have of Westbrook as I want him to be able to play — for himself, always — in order to play. But that’s the pleasure of fantasy, as a tool it rends no hard lines, only soft, easy, pliable edges, edges that yield to circumstance, to hope, to touch. Fantasy is the feathered stroke you doodle in the margins of your brain with, meant for you, only you. Fantasy, I realize as I’m writing this, that reads a lot like Westbrook’s favoured approach to his game.
Fantasy can be easy forecasting. The way we can be gentle with ourselves about what it is we want, or want to want, before we get up the gall to name it. It might be the only truly infinite resource, for how we never think to conserve it, how we leave it running or leave it places and forget all about it. You can half start a fantasy and pave over it with a new one in the time it takes to remember to shut off the water while brushing your teeth.
To share a fantasy offers up our psychic belly. Imparts a given trust in the person we are telling it to. So much is rooted beyond each hazy component, every one a personal Atlantis, fathoms below the surface come bubbling up the biggest components to our personalities, the bedrock of our natures. In what we picture is how we see ourselves either now or in a future where we’re allowing ourselves to see us, to picture us, better. The ends suggesting the means and all of it so, so intimate. Even the flippant fantasies — dream vacations, winning the lottery — cut to our bare natures, unbound.
Walking circles around the top of Alamo, I admit the vision of the future I’ve been waffling with since I was a teenager: to live, some day, out in the country.
Waffling because I hold this, at arm’s length, out to some version of the future. An offering to fate, maybe, the hope that I’ll get far enough in my life where the distance closes and the decision, like the other few big ones I stash there in the storage locker limbo of my brain, instantly clarifies. The decisions I assumed life would eventually make sense of for me, or turn from fantasy to actualized reality, ordinary day-to-day.
Instantly, the person I’ve said this to scoffs.
“There’s no way,” they say, not unkindly. And I’m surprised by how hard-checked I feel, as if the rejection cleaved through decades of pastoral invention like a scythe. The breeze of clear-cutting the fantasy sighing all the way down my spine.
I clarify the ideal. The ideal being a place in the country and a place in the city, and the ability to coast between the two. The ideal being land and light and perfect snags where both collide together, the time to learn the best times for the collisions.
They press me on where this bucolic outland of the brain is. In what country, exactly, do I picture my country.
Here my mind knows what to do: spills through the bulging Rolodex where I’ve carefully catalogued every place I wanted to lie down and heave lungfuls of the air in, and built an imaginary life for myself out from there.
I list them. Some far flung — Ireland, Spain, Wyoming, the total remove of Po Toi — some hours away from where I live now.
They shake their head, again not unkindly. The sun plays around their grin, the glint of what in it is contrarian for how we’ve thus far set up the way it is we walk around the other, what is playful, what is testing. “I still don’t see it,” they say.
We move to their idyll. I can see it. I say so.
I wonder how much of ourselves we leave in fantasy and put to the test in situations like this. Where the light is right, the company perfect, the air hanging with promise and an evening coming down clean as a sheet sinking over a new made bed. There is not so much to lose, at least it feels like, in moments like this. There is not so much to lose, even when you are startled hard into the present of yourself, your life, because in the back of your mind you know what’s caved in is recreating from its own ruin.
Some fantasies, believe it or not, I don’t even share here.
I was invited to be in a fantasy basketball league recently. The last time I was in one, years ago, I half auto-drafted at a Cat Power show, squinting down at my phone during ‘Woman’ or ‘Stay or ‘Manhattan’ to see that I’d selected Dwight Howard, Kevin Durant, Blake Griffin. The team made no sense but it didn’t matter, I always forgot to put the guys in for games.
I accepted the invite because the person who asked is someone I went to high school with and recently ran into at an art show the Raptors were involved in that took over an old estate in the middle of Toronto. The house was built in 1866 and it was the last, truly sweltering humid August evening of summer. There was no air conditioning. We all stood sweating, fanning ourselves with the programs, and he and I lurked in a corner of the main entryway under a chandelier, pressed up against the room’s only rotating fan like we were hiding it. We sort of were. We hadn’t seen each other in over a decade, more. His band was playing that night.
The other league was with close friends, and fun for how everyone tapered interest or likewise forgot halfway through the season. The best part the beginning, when, in other years where I wasn’t at a show, we’d get together in person and get weirdly panicked about the snake draft counting down. This one is much bigger and there’s a (reasonable) entry fee. I felt flattered he asked, it feels long enough from the last time that maybe I’ll approach it differently, and I would be lying if I hadn’t already cast my mind ahead to the brutal cold of February and pictured scheduling my team for the week (hopefully remembering to), and thinking back to August, sweating and flushed and rushing through catching up before ducking out into the evening coming down cotton candy and barely cooler, but a breeze, relief, and the joy that sometimes comes when the versions of your life in a place run up against each other and warmly, easily, overlap.
Detroit, fun and fast as hell. Juddering and breakneck and not suffering or disoriented for their speed or pliability, only disorienting the other team on the floor and not swiftly checked by the league’s tendency to nip whatever’s youthful, tractable, yielding, in the bud.
Lonnie Walker asked to run within a roster that needs, is practically begging for, legs like his. Whether they recognize it yet or not.
A photo that Marc Gasol shares of himself having a cafe con leche in Girona, river winking in the background, simultaneously leaning so far back in his chair, so relaxed, that it looks at risk of dumping him over and out.
The Grizzlies glinting like a lens flare every game. Ja Morant with just enough severity to cut a cool edge of fear across the faces of the guys unlucky enough to be caught in his shadow coming downhill, eclipsed in his body ricocheting like a pendulum yanked back then let go of at the rim, but not so much that he loses his lightness, his spring, his tendency to immolate anyone complaining he’s not taking this seriously. Desmond Bane upending the backcourt in gasping velocity, both forward (on court) and upward (his career). Xavier Tillman, easy force. Steven Adams, standing dudes down like a mountain. Jaren Jackson Jr., sneaking and lifting and diving. Plus, never being nervous for Morant’s legs and how he might land on them again.
Is accountability too far-flung a fantasy? For the league and its leaders, for a top-down overhaul not beholden to profit or ticking broadcast boxes. For questions that get pressed to front offices around the time the accounts of brutal assault by people they employ, or the grey areas this sport and how it’s broadly covered are not yet equipped to name, to go on staying pressed in the brains of the people in those front offices long after the presser rooms clear out and they are down from the hot seat. Pressed enough that they’re prompted to hold themselves to the urgency they managed to muster for twenty minutes one time, use it to take action instead of quietly idling, hoping things quiet down, hoping they can make the easier decision, or really none at all, in the dark once the limelight burns out.
But back to basketball fantasy at least founded in reality:
Cleveland, just huge and towering and happy to be all together and healthy again on court. A team of functionality and trust (that part isn’t even a fantasy) staying healthy and sticking it out for the length of a season, a postseason, and quelling what it is or isn’t to win in a small market.
DeMar DeRozan finally given the same consideration as so many of his counterparts who are themselves never raked over the repetitive coals about every year and never asked to play defence again.
Fantasy is a boon. A windfall for the brain. To submerge yourself in the pleasure of it can be, in a time where you have no time, the breather you need.
Even now, with the next six or more weeks looking to me ragged as a sloppy Tetris game, badly jammed but necessarily so to stay alive in it, I’m casting my mind ahead to a stretch of days where I can pad around the house with nothing to do. Leave my coffee to get cold while I put a record on, the record player finally hooked up, or read the newspapers that have been stacking up for weeks, get through the last few unpacked boxes of books and spend way too long happily and carefully deciding how to shelve them along with all my idiot treasures and keepsakes, then sit with a book or not and, soothed, stare at everything, sorted. The fantasy of it so mundane but so full of relief. I can even picture how cool the breeze will be snaking through the windows I’ll still have cracked open by then, how I’ll pull on an oversized sweatshirt over pajamas and feel guilty about not getting all the way dressed yet. It’s submersion therapy, this kind of fantasy. Turning the dial to ordinary. But it takes all kinds.