I saw in Dirk Nowitzki’s empty need to obtain a ring the circular hollowness of my own need to complete and publish a first book. Turns out I wasn’t quite right about Nowitzki: With the sounding of the series-ending Game Six’s fourth quarter’s final horn, he had to vault the scoring table, leave celebratory teammate euphoria on-floor, sprint down the tunnel into an empty locker room so that he might weep alone. 

At least he felt something, in other words. Meanwhile, when I read the email bearing tidings of good news about the book I’d spent five years writing after shelving two others I’d finished over the previous five, I can’t say I felt much of anything. I stared at the monitor for a while, drank beer, eventually picked up my guitar and recorded an extremely poor-audio-quality version of my musical adaptation of Eliot’s “Waste Land,” written a decade prior, when that seminal Modernist masterpiece (along with the song itself, actually, the reasons behind which latter absurdity being far too complexly humiliating to go any further into here) was my first completed novel’s central motif. You can actually hear me have a swallow of beer at the end of the several-minute guitar part with which the song minces to a close.[xi]

This is actually the first thing I’ve even attempted to write since then. Somehow of late the entire undertaking had become an exercise in trying to meet expectations, even when I found many readers’ notions of what literature could be lifeless and small, whereas during the long drought of rejection but also energetic application to the task at hand, I was free to play, free to live and take part in something huge and maybe even boundless that, however briefly, lifted me out of myself.

The good editors at Wag’s Revue asked me to send them something roughly eight or nine months back. I agreed, and, seven-and-a-half months into the new year had yet to give them a publishable piece. But as I attempted to wrap up these notes LeBron James and his Miami Heat had just completed a title-run that included a victory in which James played a nearly perfect three quarters, before suffering such severe leg cramps that he needed to be carried off the court, only to limp back on and despite being more or less hobbled drill a decisive late-game three. . . . And yet at the time I found myself less impressed or, if it isn’t too far into the lilac precincts of phrase-selection, moved by the results of his on-court prowess as by the way that it had all come about.[11]