A Game of Basketball

Posted September 12th, 2004 by Sean Williams

My brother has maintained a fantastic blog for years now, but because dumb people keep giving him shit, he’s thinking about shutting it down. No such luck for me. Maybe I moved enough as a kid, but dumb people don’t bother me quite as much.

I’d love to be able to get my panties in a twist by someone’s misunderstanding of my writing but a) I’m not sure the misunderstanding was all that profound, b) there is a certainty that comes with being right about something that makes you not really sweat criticism and c) this blog and, in fact, my entire “writing life” are just a laugh for me. When someone misunderstands my life as an artist, I look to fact B for comfort and very often there is little to be found. When someone misunderstands a blog, I’m actually amazed that my writing is cogent enough for it to happen as infrequently as it does.

Most people I know wrap up a lot of their emotional life into their sexual lives and it’s a shame. One’s emotional life is dripping with reversals and nonsensical aberations and confusing twists and spirals (even *without* wrapping it up in your sex life) that equating it with some sort of binary did-I-or-didn’t-I-screw-him kind of crap is really selling one’s emotional life short. But everyone seems to do it, virtually every woman I’ve ever slept with does it and about half the guys I know do it so either I’m awesome for avoiding it or I’m dumb as shit.

Plus, if you write a treatise supporting abortion, someone’s gonna get all up in your shit. (Interesting side note: the one woman I’ve ever known who had not a shread of feminine instinct and, as such, fucked people the way date raping frat boys do, cried when she got an abortion. I mean, it was her fifth, so maybe it was… I was gonna say shame but no, it was probably just fear of being a cliche…)

I have no idea if I’m good or bad in the sack, in the same way that no-one has ever come up to me and said, “You are actually a *bad* actor”. It’s a push-poll, no matter how you phrase it. And, of course, that’s what I said so many months ago, that I do what, in my mind, is standard stuff and I get celebrated for it. But the celebration has to do more with the fact that I’m a human being, that I’ve never really *tried* to get *ANYONE* to have sex with me. I’m the kind of guy who sleeps with my friends and stays friends with them for years afterwards. Or more specifically, I’m the kind of guy who almost sleeps with my friends, stops the act before it enters into what I recognize is emotional weirdness for other people (regardless of my complete personal disrespect for it) and stays friends with them for years.

Now, as the actual beginning and end of my entire defense, I would like to present: This Entire Fucking Blog. Reading my blog and assuming that I celebrate my own sexual prowess and that I don’t have compassion and understanding for the people I share my life with, including women, is the kind of selective editing that could secure you a job on the Daily Show or The Committee to Re-Elect the President.

God dammit, I always get sucked in. I like talking more than I like just gloating and being right. Anyway, Ian, I’m sorry that people are fucking with you and your blog and I’m sorry that shit like this is making you give it up.