Essay in which I overthink about what I have no control over so I think / and think / and think

No one can guarantee that I won’t lose another home to a fire even if I check and check again that the stove is off every time I go out / even if I unplug everything that doesn’t need to be plugged in at night like the air freshener I keep in the living room, or the microwave when I can’t rinse away the end-of-the-world type of feelings that sometimes visit me at night / and on those nights, paranoid, awake, no one can guarantee that no one will break into my apartment / pummel down the front door, chain and all / shatter the window in my bedroom that is too close to my bed and too large, too easy to jump in and out of / on those nights I triple check that I have all three locks on the front door / sometimes I wake up just to go check the door is locked / and when extra paranoid I press a chair or a heavy box of books up against my bedroom door so that I can at least hear as the intruder breaks into my room, so that they struggle for a second / and for that second I can pretend I am brave enough to run or fight back / though I am not strong / I know I’m not.

All this to say that lack of control terrifies me. It exhausts my mind and body when I can’t anticipate if something bad will happen. Or when it will happen because my mind usually assumes all the bad it imagines will be real / there is no if / it’s all a matter of when it will happen / we were as careful as we could be and we still lost our home to a fire because we had no way of knowing that our TV service provider had done a bad job of setting up the wiring outside of our home / all it took was a couple years of wear and tear and some rain-snow to create a spark.

I like folding origami aliens because I’ve been folding them for years. I know what mistakes to avoid. I know when an alien is going to tear. I know when to give up, and sometimes I convince myself that knowing when to give up is what I need. Though reimagine with me, toss out the negativity: I like folding origami aliens because I know how to work with my mistakes. I have control over the paper. Step-by-step, I can anticipate what my folding is leading to. There is no surprise, though yes, I will sometimes mess up and some origami aliens will be imperfect. Some will struggle to stand once completed, but even if they wobble, so long as they stand is what should matter. I succeeded. I didn’t have to give up. I am okay.

calamity in 6 colors

1. yellow 

as in yellow! my name is knife. just gonna squeeze on by ya: midwestern greeting between the 4th and 5th rib. do you mind if turn my head into a giant staircase, and you, the protagonist of our story, roll down and out where my mouth ought to be? 

good god, i am falling in love with the way i let things lie 

2. blue

oscillation / isolation
simple slept in weapon 
pistachio, moustache, pastiche, succotash, ganache, panache

sung: these are some of my favorite things. 

3. green 

i was smart until i became pope, then everything changed. first your hair becomes grey. they tell you that. but they don’t tell you your insides go gray, too. i can peek the steel with a long hard stare down my throat—can see see it creeping up like aluminum moss.  

i wanted to be a part of the city, but instead the city became part of me, and no, it doesn't go both ways. and no, i don't sing when i'm alone anymore, and yes, my head has gained 13 lbs of raw metal, and yes, i will live another day, but no, not w/ you 

4. red

Burn something down and call it a candle. Burn everything down and call it a séance. Gesture toward r(e)u(n)i(o)n.   

Look both ways before you look both ways. 

5. orange

when you close your mouth, my heart is like a fisted sock.  

6. white

keep in mind the closest exit may be behind you 

do you feel you have taken

one step forward, then two more 

steps in the same direction facing backward 

does it taste like anything 

to be so wrong about everything 

or just your usual mouth 

is it your usual mouth 

because you feel like you are always 

so wrong about everything 

do you pretend to love 

your mother 

with that mouth 

what about light 

& seeing the fact of things 

is so embarrassing 

when something disappears 

don’t you think

you know it a little better 

what does my willingness

to hide from my life say about my attitude 

toward those who choose to stay 

do you think a miracle 

is something 

that just happens 

do you think in the future 

you will say 

something, anything to me 

how is the phrase ghost pipe

both a flower & an accurate description 

of my loving surrender 

anything that pleases you should 

be miraculous when 

everything else displeases 

i think if i could give you anything 

it would be one pleasure 

or one amnesia 

if i had control over the world 

nobody would ever go bald 

vote for me 

if i ever go bald 

i will invent a new person 

to be angry at 

i need an image 

but when i imagine anyone 

your face spills on it 

River / Water

1. Water Front

On rainy days my mom would take us to the Museum of Natural History. At that time, there were only permanent exhibits. Still, every time it felt new. 

Across from the information desk and next to the big stairway, a small glass case much like this one, full of passenger pigeons. The rest of the museum was down the stairs. Musty halls of mystery, all winding their way back to now. 

I grew up in an old city. I grew up in an old house. The paper mill had long been closing; it would be a decade still til the valves were shut. Years, ten more, until the smokestacks scrapped. But even then, what is a shadow? 

The chain link stayed around the site. But I believed I could see through it. The curtains had opened a hundred year dark. Gray waves lapped a mile of shoreline. Young trees breathed their first light of the low orange western sun. 

At what age do we begin to learn that time and space are functions? Parabolas were paths I knew first by walking slowly. “Travel through the Depths of Time and see the plants and animals!” Cambrian. Devonian. Permian. Triassic. An ice age melts into itself and becomes a shallow sea. Miocene. Pliocene. Pleistocene. Holo. Dense tropics dry to desert.

Was it when I turned around to look for mom? Three epochs away and around the bend, yet somehow straight behind me? Or was it in Habitats re-learning “what calls them home,” transfixed by the epoxy?

 

2. Exhibit Materials 

Tire tube 

Plastic water bottles

Plastic scraps of unknown objects 

Pill bottle 

Plush

Budlight can

Budweiser can 

Dr. Pepper can

Smirnoff can, Strawberry Lemon 

Light beer can of unknown origins 

Aluminum scraps

Unlabeled tin cans 

blue plastic plate from a child’s toy dish set 

Sunglass lens 

Safety goggle lens 

Pair of sunglasses 

Nike shoe 

Horseshoe 

Men’s work glove 

Women’s work glove

Blue jean pocket 

Flannel shirt cuff 

Collared infant sweater 

Wire fragments 

Iron fragments 

Kitchen trash bag 

Plush 

Land survey stake 

Blue surgical mask 

Blue plastic straws 

Cotton strips with faded geometric patterns 

Coca-cola glass shards

Unidentifiable glass shards 

Ceramic fragments 

Silk flower petals 

Giant Express Rewards key tag

Plastic human figurine 

Black spiral bound notebook cover

Bouquet of brittle brush flowers

Butterfly wings, Sleepy Orange Sulphur 

 

 

3. Old News

The fact that the Santa Cruz River is dry most of the year is nothing new. Two small blue pills are nothing new. Then four. Then five aren’t either. The fact that the river was not always like this is not something new. 

Trash in the Santa Cruz River is nothing new. When it rains and every wash in town drains its contents there, the trash heaps are, at first, alarming. Not the usual highway heaps. But entire streets that appear to have been swallowed, churned up, spewed out. Couches, mattresses, car doors, 2x4s. Not long after though, nothing new. 

The fact that ads are fucked is nothing new. You are just so used to scrolling over on your phone or passing them on the highway that turning the pages of a magazine one morning has you lingering. Objects connect. Hermes. Welcome to the road to happiness. Illy Coffee. For people who could use a triple lift. Neutrogena. What if your phone learned, adapted, evolved, and became a reflection of you? Google Pixel. 

Monsoon rains are nothing new. But 2020 was my first year in Tucson and that summer it never rained. This year when the monsoons came and the rivers swelled and the hills turned green, everything once again felt like magic. 

Sometimes being reminded of what you think you already know is annoying. Like when you’re a kid being told and then retold: before you go outside to play you have to wash the dishes. Or when you’re feeling pulled down an unpaid road, but your phone dings ten til meeting. Other times the reminder leaves you weeping, amazed that nearing 30 years old, you still don’t know how to listen. Grateful, though, something deep is still there to remind you. 

4. Collecting Notes

I found myself most afraid to reach for the things I was afraid to find. The fear: that each battered shoe might contain a foot Or that each cotton strip unearth a whole garment. Sand has a weight that provokes every question. 

Eyes cast down roving rock studded sand, I slipped into the waters of a long forgotten joy. Evening beach comb, Childhood, Lake Michigan. 

Here was another return address: I reached for most quickly anything small and blue. 

Bad Phantoms: An Exhibit of Pataphysical Heartforms

 

Body of Water

50% >3,000m depth, other dimensions immeasurable; see coastline paradox. Range from high disturbance (longitudinal and transversal waves) to stagnancy (stillwater).

Heart of Palm

6≥dig/can, >1 hand. Stem, core, central softness; swamp cabbage or millionaire's salad, a gamble.

Prickly Pear

≤ 6sp/areole, opuntia engelmannii. Flowering May-June, spined year-round, clefted sporadically. Pyriform, carmine fruit.

Firework

16+ only. Arterial lumina. Customizable shapes, colors, sizes (list of possible specs avail at request). Detonation warning, murmur, use at your own risk.

Monsoon

2.5 inches, H20, dust, dewpoint, light, flash, flood. Grandiose expressivity in response to minute climate shifts (rich network of reliance made visible). 

Spear

85 kJ/100g; a. officinalis, sparrowgrass, points d'amour (love tips) or kuşkonmaz (bird won’t land). Succulent (adjectival sense); adventitious, fasciculate root system.  

Clock

60s/m, 60 m/h; grandfather, face, 2-3 hands. Expert horologist; superior self-regulation; steady HR with minimal subjective deviation.

Two-Step

2/4 or 4/4, >130bpm; QQS, QQSS, QQSQQS. Whiskey Road, premier high energy country music nightclub midweek dance party every Wednesday (free lessons Thursday at 7). 

Heart on a Sleeve*

45 bpm, three-chambered heart; compact myocardium typical of most ectothermic vertebrates. Viperid, squamate.

Hummingbird*

1,260 bpm; extreme aerobic endurance, ideal model for tap dancers, pure spirits, anxious blurs.

Moth*

60-100 bpm; lepidoptera. Crepuscular, diurnal, paraphylectic. Feathered, varied, non-club antennae. Known fashion-devourer, lover of light.

Sunset

26m. to civil twilight, angle and atmosphere dependent. Bands of ROYGBIV fade to black, ecstatic ending.

Fleabag*

354bpm, resilin, chitin. Ideal model for states of chronic autonomic cardiovascular arousal in bodies of parasitic lifelong hunger.

Free-Tail*

40-200 bpm (not as quick on the rev as uroderma bilobatum, 20-1,000 bpm, hibernation/flight dependent). Ideal slow-rev compact aerial model. Nocturnal.

Abstract:

There are some manipulations science can’t or shouldn’t perform on an animal or human heart, or too many variables that arise in their testing, which we can eliminate through a more predictable model. So we create a phantom heart, a stand-in for what we want to study. Something that is reproducible. A heart allegory built from that slime children play with, for instance; gelatin with electrified sensors placed inside to stimulate, to simulate a beating heart. Or a fake cadaver manufactured from chemicals, salts, and dyed synthetics. This is what we mean by a phantom, something that looks or acts like what we’re hoping to study. 

Trying to think up a solution for missing you, I made a list of pataphysical phantom heartforms, mine and yours. Bodies of bugs, dead and living; tapestries of feathers, disembodied wings; collages of trash loose on the street. I made more and longer entries as the summer passed. Stones, cacti paddles, nonsimultaneous light. Pyrotechnic stars inside their shells; clocks cognizant of their finite lifespans; pomegranates split open on the ground. I wanted to study each alternate form to see where these alternates resonated, where they felt short or overcompensated; to glean what I could about heartforms in general. Some of those heartforms are collected here.

To know x = to know (everything - x), wrote René Daumal. This equation summarized his theory of pataphysics, "the science of imaginary solutions" (Jarry). Only in taking the most alien forms seriously could I hope to gain a serious understanding of the very familiar. Only in becoming a scientist of bad phantoms could I hope to learn something about anything real. 

Sometimes it is convenient to think that your heartform is the only one of its kind that can break in the specific way your heart has broken, but the pataphysical laboratory’s evidence proves otherwise: that every heartform holds such a fury and can love exactly as fervently as your heart has—that your heart’s loved and misses one such as itself (scared alien glitter-lipped pizza-eater).

Perish or Publish / All Hail the Tone Commander

 

Why do I love such unbeloved things? I speak here of the touch tone, push button office phones I rescued from my university’s heading-to-surplus pile. I saw them in a box labeled GOING TO SURPLUS and I was thrilled and sad. We still have office phones, of course, though I don’t think anyone ever uses theirs. Our office phone numbers are listed in the directory and you can call me on it if you look me up. If I am in my office I usually pick it up, albeit with suspicion. Over the past five years, 90% of the phone calls I received in my office were from a colleague who died early in April 2019, very early indeed in the pandemic. I don’t know if his death was caused by covid or was not, or how to fully disambiguate the two. His obituary did not list a cause of death and everyone was pretty isolated when he passed. It was sad. He was a pain in the ass, the kind of guy who refused to participate in many aspects of university life on principle. Publish? Who cares. Perish? He did. I think of him when I think of phones. 

The first three phones I rescued from the surplus pile are off-white. Two of them have brown backgrounds behind the keys. Two have phone numbers written on them: 621-6214 and 621-7406. The other has a torn orange sticker on the cradle saying EMERGENCY / Suspicious Activity / “report it” / 9-911 [from 621 prefix] or 911 and I can’t read the rest. 

Rescued may be overstating the case. Who cares about these outmoded phones with their stretched-out handset coils that once I imagine fingers tangled in while talking. Everyone has cell phones anyhow. My friend Manuel even gives his cell number to his students, which seems like a stretch to me, but it works for him. 

That we call the part you put the handset in the cradle, as in infant’s, suggests their former value. That the plastic buttons the handset depressed when you laid it in the cradle were nearly always translucent white or clear is a memory that may go away and that no one besides me and my dead friend Charles may mourn. 

The phone remains to me an object of erotic interest. They were once—and still are, I’m sure—a portal to sex or porn. That’s not what I’m talking about here, however. 

Because I took the phones from the surplus pile a sign popped up a couple days later from the administrative staff: “please email annes1 before going through or adding to this pile. Thnx” which I took as a rebuke. I’ve arrived at the point where saving something dying deserves rebuke for what I’m sure are sound administrative reasons. They would explain if I asked. I do not ask. I do not care. I know no one loves these phones. 

Also who abbreviates “thanks” “Thnx”?

I also saved—I don’t know why I’m telling you this—a Panasonic “Integrated Telephone System” with a “Data Port,” an AT&T digital answering machine that I had myself circa 1999, a crappy vtech cordless phone and, my favorite, if just based on the name, one that’s labeled TONE COMMANDER. I’ll let that sink in for a second. With this phone you command the fucking tones!

I found it online. It’s a TEO Tone Commander 8620U-01B 20-button ISDN phone, which it looks like you can find refurbished for…$325. I guess it could be the 8610 which is a hundred dollars cheaper. The user manual announces that its features include AutoSPID and Parameter Download, programmable SOFTKEYS, Direct Station Selection, and a bunch of other things that only mean something to a very specific sort of administrative staff person. I can imagine the power one must feel as Tone Commander with the Tone Commander at your fingertips, programmable and programmed, multiple lines lit up by lights, slinging calls to faculty offices, all things under control.

There was a time when you would not have been wrong to call me Tone Commander, phone phreak that I was for at least a few years in which I rewired Radio Shack instruments to take control of pay and other phones to use them for my purposes which were mostly to call long distance to friends for free. The magic of it, which is to say the hack, was the trick: I didn’t have much money so I couldn’t have afforded to talk too much long distance otherwise anyhow, but I’m not sure I cared that much about it that I would have paid to do so anyhow. I called girls, friends, girlfriends, and friends of girls. Hence, perhaps, the erotic attachment to the unbeloved phone. 

Now who talks on these phones, even on the Tone Commander? A cell, perhaps, collapses distances, but a wired phone? Until the cell service spots out in my dad’s rural town I don’t see any use for it, and only then I do. The Tone Commander gives me options: CALL, SETUP, DONE, MORE>, TRAN, CONF, DROP, MUTE, SPKR, and HOLD. It commands up to 10 lines of tones which is probably why you can still buy them online. Institutions may be the only remaining home for phones like these, but our institution has banished it to surplus.

I carved this little space out of my decaying institution and I hold it dear, a little bulwark against the loss of what often feels like everything that matters. I call it the Tiny Cabinet. You can find it here at the.tinycabi.net. It is a cabinet for tiny things. Also a tiny cabinet itself. It is where I installed the phones I took from the surplus pile without permission. It is this thing you're reading. It’s a small rebellion, this one, to have temporarily reserved these phones from the surplus where they go before they eventually get transferred to the trash or to recycling. It probably deserves no notice for its li'l (not even little) heroism. 

I don’t mean to gnash my teeth at progress. My department was and perhaps is still paying something like $90,000 a year to the university to keep phone service in every faculty office. (We may step back to note that the university’s latest budget model tallies up all the things it provides, for a fee of course, against the money the department brings in from students, less administrative fees, so while something like phones may seem like a basic thing a university ought to provide, it is no longer so: the department has to pay for its phones, to the tune of $90,000.)

When we were trying to cut costs a few years back to the point where the then-department-chair’s solution was for all the faculty to make after-tax donations to the department fund to avoid having to lay off staff and only the junior faculty did (unsurprisingly), I said why don’t we just give up our phones?

We had no voicemail anyway. I’d never had voicemail in my office here, which was half blessing and half inconvenience. It turned out it would cost more to get rid of the phones, which would entail (somehow) having to have the phone lines removed from the office walls (why, I asked, and don’t remember the answer: why not just give up the phones). Your only option, if you wanted voicemail, was to get an answering machine, like this one my friend Manuel had, which may be why he gives the students his number. He’d brought his from home, I think, though maybe they’d given it to him. Maybe this machine is from his office. I had no inkling you could requisition one from the university, though now you can, apparently, at least thanks to surplus, or you could if I were to release this answering machine from the Tiny Cabinet and put it back in the box. 

If I don’t let the phones go, maybe they can’t take the whole pile to surplus. Maybe the world will slow. After all I did not save the cords. So the cords in the boxes sit there in a box a dozen feet away, separated from the phones. That box is for surplus. This box is for art. This is a display and also a resistance, if a small one. A little museum I made of this cabinet opposite my dead colleague’s former office door. Now his office is empty and it’s labeled ITEM FOR SURPLUS, referring to, I presume, the stuff inside the office, which is locked. 

"Made in the USA, the Tone Commander’s flagship endpoint is the TSG-6 IP phone which meets the stringent requirements of the Committee on National Security Systems and is compliance tested and approved by the National Telecommunications Security Working Group. The Tone Commander TSG-6 IP Phone is a non-proprietary AS-SIP endpoint which interoperates with most relevant Session Border Controllers." [source]

The Return of the Tiny Cabinet

 [here for more]

The Final Score

I used to collect basketball trading cards, despite never buying a single pack myself. I won them. One week of every summer from five to 12 years old, I would go to the basketball camp put on by the high school I would eventually go to and play basketball for. The girls’ coach happened to be my dad’s nephew-in-law. What probably started as a way to support family became a tradition that set me up to fall in love with the game.

Each day at camp we would play “Coach Maya Says.” It was Coach Maya’s basketball spin-off of Simon says. There were certain actions you would perform that related to a basketball term. Jump and yell “Rebound!” when Coach Maya said rebound. Slide in the direction he pointed and yell “Slide! Slide!” when Coach Maya said slide. Fall backward when he yelled, “Take a charge!” The most used command was to get into a defensive position and yell, “DEFENSE!” when Coach Maya said breakdown. If you performed the wrong action, did the action when he just stated the action rather than saying Coach Maya says or did a flinchy or a wiggly you were out. The final three contestants won the coveted pack of basketball cards he would carry around in his pocket. 

Over the years I probably collected around 150 cards. Most of them have made their way to the trash or are packed away into boxes in the room I grew up in. With my parents getting ready to move, my winter break was spent packing up my childhood bedroom which has been emptied and turned into the new storage space. Out of all the basketball cards I collected I never once got a female player. In fact, the first sports trading card I got with a female athlete on it was this Christmas. I was shocked when I opened a Tobin Heath soccer trading card and all I could say to my mom was “I didn’t even know they made these.”

Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna

Two weeks after the death of Kobe I am still processing. The initial shock, the wave of grief, and the fists shook at heaven are all gone. But now I am left with the questions. I wasn’t close to Kobe. I never got to meet him, his daughter Gianna, or any of the seven other victims whose lives were tragically taken by the helicopter crash. To be honest, I wasn’t even a big fan of Kobe until his career was nearly over. And I will never be caught saying that I am a Lakers fan. 

I did, however, hold the utmost respect for the way he approached his career; his work ethic was second to none. In high school, I used to rewatch a video of his at least once a week for motivation. My favorite was footage of him training while he talked about how the beauty of any craft was mastering the fundamentals, before going into a monologue of how in the off-season he would start his first training session at 4 am.

Kobe's devotion to the game made the comments from others slowly disappear. I didn't feel ashamed of spending hours breaking down footage of top players shooting in slow motion or practicing the same move over and over until I could do it perfectly nine out of ten times. I didn't feel as strange for preferring to watch the Phoenix Suns as often as their games were shown on cable.

He also supported women’s basketball more than any other current or former NBA player during the last few years. Kobe and Gianna would frequent WNBA games, women’s college games, and he coached Gianna’s AAU basketball team. When he was on Jimmy Kimmel, he told the story of how he responds when people tell him that he needs to have a son to carry on his basketball legacy. He proudly states that Gianna is the one to do so and the father of four girls wouldn’t have it any other way.

Questions about what could have been for Gianna have started to fade from my mind. I have no doubt she would have had a successful career at UCONN, the most successful college basketball program, winning a national championship (or multiple), before going on to be the number one draft pick in the WNBA. Her talent and love for the game of basketball were undeniable. And I know Kobe would have been there for the whole journey. Instead, those questions have been turned inward. I think of Kobe’s oscar-winning animated short film: Dear Basketball. Basketball was so good to him. Basketball what were you for me?

Despite my face in this photo, I was ecstatic to get a Steve Nash Jersey for my 10th birthday.

When my fifth-grade teacher found out that the Phoenix Suns point guard was my favorite basketball player, the one who I would try to emulate on the school playground, she confided in me that he was her favorite player too. One day after school she gave me a box full of cutouts from basketball magazines of action shots of Steve Nash. I arranged them on the wall across from my bed, forming a shrine of my basketball inspiration. I remember my mom coming in, excited to see what this player I raved about looked like; she was expecting a dreamboat. Why else would her ten-year-old daughter insist on watching every game? 

“That’s him? That’s the player you like? Meija he’s not even cute.”

That was likely the moment my mom realized, I actually really did like basketball.

Ticket from a recent U of A women's basketball game I dragged my friends to

My dad and I used to go to nearly all the home games for the New Mexico State Women’s Basketball team. Since the team didn’t attract a large following, seats normally reserved for season ticket holders were free for the taking. We would sit a row behind the bench to listen to the feedback coaches would give players and try to eavesdrop on the huddle during time outs. My dad would chime in on what players were doing well, what I should try to emulate. I think a part of him hoped I would be on that team one day; He would have been proud.  

In Tucson, I can’t even get close to sitting near the bench. Most games I sit near the top so I can see over the sea of people in front of me. The energy in McKale is second to none, especially when playing the top ten ranked teams like UCLA. There’s something about 7,000 people cheering on a group of badass women that gets me so fired up. This season our girls are ranked higher than our men’s team, for the first time ever, but it’s a surprise to most students I talk to that the team is even doing well.

My dad coaching a 3v3 tournament. Our team name was the "Bad Girlz" and we made our jerseys ourselves.

Basketball is my dad’s favorite sport. He was my coach up until I got to middle school and even when he wasn’t my coach he was my coach in the stands and on the drive home from practice and games. There are very few things my dad enjoyed more than coaching.

Basketball was the main way my dad and I bonded. I was the only one out of his three kids who actually liked and played the sport for more than a year. To this day, it’s one of the only topics we can carry on a conversation about. I have so many memories of practicing together and playing one on one in our driveway with the hoop we assembled together. We used to pretend to be NBA players and try out moves we would see in games we watched together in the living room. I remember the proud look on his face the first time I beat him in a game of twenty-one where he was trying his hardest to stop me from winning. All the times we listened to country music or 70s rock in the white Chevy pickup truck on the way to games and tournaments. He would let me help pick out the uniforms for each season, and our team name, the sharks (my favorite animal as a kid), was my idea. For three on three tournaments, dad would sit at the kitchen table with me and my teammates, and help us make our own jerseys.

But because it was the place we spent the most time together in, it was also the space that our other issues were brought into and half dealt with. There were a lot of times I cried during or after our conversations on the way home. By the time I got to high school, I was burnt out with basketball; I had played fall, spring, and summer seasons since I was eight years old. When I told my dad I didn’t want to play anymore, he told me I was just lazy and needed to grow up. So I showed up every day for three more years, growing hatred towards the game and what it had turned my relationship with my dad into. It brought me to a breaking point. None of my friends were still on the team. The coaches were brutal and constantly used contempt in their conversations with us. My relationship with my dad was being held together by the frailest thread of common interest. In November of my senior year, I couldn’t take it anymore. I quit the day after the final cuts were made. My dad barely talked to me in the following weeks because he was so disappointed in me.

Legendary UNC Men's Basketball Coach Dean Smith who won 2 National Championships and coaches Michael Jordan.

The University of North Carolina is one of the most famous schools for men's basketball. With six national championships under their belt, and Michael Jordan as their most famous alumnus, it's easy to see why. I mean, when an annoying Duke fan tries to give any reason why they are better, all you have to say is "Michael Jordan" and you win. My dad is a UNC fan purely because of Michael.

I'm a UNC fan because of coach Dean Smith, who I never actually watched coach. What drew me in support of the Tarheels was actually coach Smith's comments on the women's soccer program. The Tarheel's soccer team has won 21 of the 38 NCAA national championships and has produced more beloved USA National Team players than any other program.

In 1997 Dean Smith did an interview with Football News Daily. Coach Smith said, "This is a women's soccer school. We're just trying to keep up with them." That comment meant everything to ten-year-old Yasmene, always the only girl trying to play basketball during recess with the boys.

One of my all-time favorite books: Brittney Griner's memoir In My Skin.

I didn’t know non-fiction could be more than textbooks before I read In My Skin by WNBA player Brittney Griner. I ordered the book during my freshman year of high school, hoping that her words would provide some insight for how I could swiftly make my way onto the varsity basketball team. What I found instead was a story I could relate to. I saw the story of a young girl with a turbulent relationship with her father, whose safe haven from him and her bullies was sports, and a secret about her identity that needed to be vocalized. It was the story I needed to hear to know that I wasn’t alone.

Finding a part of my story in Brittney’s story led me to read other memoirs written by athletes. In fact, I wouldn’t be writing this essay or any sort of creative essay, if it wasn’t for reading athlete memoirs. During my freshman year of college, I decided I wanted to take a creative writing class and intro to creative non-fiction was the only one that fit into my schedule. I didn’t know much about creative non-fiction at the time, but I knew I loved reading people’s stories, especially athletes like Brittney or soccer star Abby Wambach. So I gave it a shot and ended up falling in love with the craft.

The legendary coach of UCLA John Wooden. He won 10 national championships with a record of 7 straight

Coach Geno Auriemma cutting the net after winning another NCAA Championship

My favorite coach is Geno Auriemma. When I say this, mostly to white men, their response is usually along the lines that I must not really be a college basketball fan. John Wooden, not a women’s coach is the goat.

The Italian immigrant who didn’t even play college basketball knows how to win; He has over 1,000 career wins (and under 200 losses) and 11 national championships. My favorite thing about Geno is that he is the kind of coach who doesn’t put up with B.S. He runs the tightest ship in the NCAA without a doubt. One year during the NCAA tournament he benched his best player, Breanna Stewart. During the press conferences, reporters kept asking why he would do such a thing, reasoning that it must have been to motivate her or give her time to rest for the next game. He responded by talking about the premium he and his coaching staff put on body language; if your body language is bad you don’t get in the game, no matter how good you are. “Stewie was acting like a twelve-year-old. So I put her on the bench and said sit there. It doesn’t matter on our team… I’d rather lose.”

About a month ago I came across an article WNBA player Breanna Stewart wrote for the Players Tribune during the height of the me-too movement. I was baffled that this was the first time I had come across it despite Stewie being one of my favorite players. But I think we see things when we’re ready to see them, and had I read this story two years ago I would not have been ready.

I reread that article three times that night, alone in the dark while the rest of my house was quietly (minus the snores from the dog in the adjacent room) sleeping. I saw myself in Stewie’s story; for the first time, it felt like my story was being told to me. Young. A known abuser. Freezing in fear. Basketball serving a safe space, a time to feel in control of one’s own body. I wasn’t alone in this being a part of my story.

An article by the New York Times following the death of Kobe Bryant 

I wasn’t old enough to know about the Kobe Bryant sexual assault case when it was initially going on. Amid his death, some people angrily talk about the way justice wasn’t served. They are hurt, rightly so, and want this case to color how we remember Kobe. I agree and I also disagree.

As I woman, I have a hard time believing that another woman would lie about something like this; It’s so painful to talk about, I just can’t see someone putting themselves through that pain and scrutiny for no reason.

Kobe was in the wrong for assaulting this woman. His response doesn’t account for the wrong done, but I do appreciate his response of acknowledging the pain of his victim, not dismissing her. Did he get our of a case because he was rich and famous? Maybe. Should there have been more serious consequences? Probably. But I’m hesitant to let this be the first thing I think of when I remember Kobe ten years from now. I’m also hesitant to erase this from how we remember him; it’s not fair to the young woman who was damaged by this encounter. I hope I can remember him as a human who played basketball, not as a basketball player with an elevated, can do no wrong position, and not just as someone who committed sexual assault with no real consequences.

The game of basketball is black and white. You don’t get half points for hitting the rim or for good form. You either make the shot or you don’t. You either win or you lose. The record books say Michael scored 63 points on April 20, 1986, and that the Bulls lost to the Celtics 131 to 135 in overtime. They do not record that he played with the flu.

What you were for me though is not black and white. You were my first love. I didn't need anyone to convince me to invest or practice. Backyard games of horse and 21 were the most fun. You taught me how to work hard and to keep going when I thought I had nothing left in the tank. I also hated you. I hated the way my dad’s failed expectations of me and our relationship was projected onto the game. I hated the way my teammate’s cutthroat nature was empty of friendship; the way I was outcasted while injured. I hated the way the coach’s condescending yell was just another space to be told I was not good enough.

Maybe this is what I’m trying to do with this cabinet. Collect the stats, add up the black and the white, and figure out what the final score is. I’m searching for the blend of the good and the bad, the perfectly nuanced shade of grey to give me the answers to the questions that can’t be solved by checking the books.