[vi] Your non-sports fan of a more cynical bent might cite professional athletes' galactic salaries and the whole Leviathan-like athletics-entertainment-complex's frankly grotesque ongoing exploitation of the preternatural physical gifts a microscopic percentage of the population won the genetic crapshoot and came to possess by absurdly overpaying these outliers in order to sustain sufficient consumer interest season after season so that Nike and Adidas conveyor belts can cruise down the lines of Third-World factory-workers laboring under conditions too bleak to make plausible cameos in even Dickens at his most outraged, but no one who's either watched Kobe Bryant or James himself on-court could reasonably argue against either's genuine passion for the Game. Return

[vii] Probably not a messianic crusade through America's heartland during which he preached Christlike self-sacrifice of brother to brother, sister-sister, and so forth, as proposed in “Dirk”'s late pages—you don't have to bother reading it if you've already made it this far through these notes since it's pretty much saying the same thing that I'm trying to get across here; one writer on a somewhat snark-inflected sports website did call it “bat-shit insane, which I think was fair . . .  more likely the typical move to a telecaster's booth, maybe mentorship or coaching . . . the point is that he would have had to keep on doing something. Return

[viii] —but I just went to the post office last week to ship off all the books I've acquired over the last three years here in Japan, and my embarrassingly underlined-and-annotated copy from younger days is in a box somewhere in Queens. Return

Japan Post has these special canvas sacks they let you shove 30 kg boxes of books or documents into and send overseas at a discounted rate but I frankly didn't care for the looks of these outsize duffel bags that looked like they had conveyed all sorts of unwieldy parcels—I could have fit in one, e.g.—before being reassigned to the written-material circuit, and while a spent a few thousand yen less than I would have at standard shipping rates, it's not clear that I'll ever see these hundred-odd volumes again; it didn't help that the friendly older guy working the counter cheerfully mentioned after I'd paid and my sealed bag was out of sight that there would be no tracking number, and he could vouch for its safe travels while within the jurisdiction of JP, but once my library left Japanese waters and entered into Gaikoku (literally “outside country”) domains, all bets were off.

At any rate, I got the needing-something-to-give-yourself-away-to insight from one or another of Wallace's books. As he was about many things, he was, here too, I think, probably right.