And what occurred to me on the tracks that night—and this is actually one of the two or three considerations that did get me up and stumbling down the hill, falling a couple more times but then faltering home—was that there was some truth in what that doctor had said: maybe I couldn’t feasibly go back to my geographic home just now, but, for at least a pocket of time, I'd had a home in writing, I'd liked losing myself in a place that was immeasurably bigger than me. I’d been away for a while.

[i] The professionals employed by our exalted National Association to ply their craft on the hardwood in the dome-roofed and for the most part taxpayer-funded post-Millennial hippodromes scattered across the stolen continent, those luminous oases glowing with market confidence on game nights in sundry decaying urban hubs otherwise gradually succumbing to the slow bleeding-to-death of late Capital that allow the ten-to-twenty-thousand gathered and bedecked in home- or visiting-franchise-themed regalia—some purchasing surplus supportive merchandise, such as the bobblehead or boomstick, to assemble en masse and forget, for a good two-and-a-half or even three hours on nights when the game's flow's been dammed by a whistle-besotted member of the officiating “crew,” or head coach of the martial Old School, who disgustedly semaphores for time outs to draw up complex plays late in quarters and halves that on special Inside-the-Huddle shots the sudorific five set to retake the court often don't seem, if countenance and so-called body language can be trusted, especially invested in committing to memory and then executing on the in-bound; or else distended by the five-minutes of bonus spectatorial thrill dictated by a fourth-quarter-ending's knotted score leading to that terminal measure of stamina and grit: OT—allow the assembled masses, that is, to be seduced into forgetfulness by the sheer spectacle of mere men vaulting beyond what for nearly all the rest of us are limitations imposed either by Selection or some humorless (or else supremely comic) God. . . . And not only the global icons but even amateur enthusiasts of the sort I generally had a hard time getting picked up by a squad of in order to participate in full-court competition with at the University of Hawaii's concisely dubbed “Gym 2” when I'd slouch in of an undergraduate evening sporting one of the several Philadelphia 76er star and idol of my youth's replica jerseys I'd acquired over the half-decade or so during which I'd aspired to model my own still-maturating “game” on his, urged on by the generally ill-founded hope—and sometimes this aspiration manifested more intensely, and thus dangerously, as an actual Belief—that this would be my night, and the Allen Iverson crossover dribble I'd honed an admirable facsimile of over the course of many an intense after-dark workout against imagined but ruthlessly nimble on-ball defense, etching invisible zetas as I tricked my tenacious opponent with that violently abrupt change of vector time and time again, out on the asphalt of the parking lot adjacent to my parents' home back during the barbarous epoch I lack space in these notes to revisit with anything like the rigor a responsible study would demand: high school—would lift me to in the higher-stakes competitive circumstance of actual play. Return