Sharing the Shoulder

I took of vow of hunger to not write about Arenas until the playoffs, since my actual interest in him comes through best then. But like I could not say something about his delayed come-through, or the positively epic blog post of his that suggests he's been reading a little too much FreeDarko.

Failed guarantees are silly, no matter how much Gil tries to laugh them off as a way to generate intrigue and energy. One of the many differences between Arenas and Kobe, or Arenas and Iverson, is that for those other two guys ever single game is a guarantee. I know that Our Zero plays with a chip on his cuffs and all that, but that's not the same as being out to make each night's performance BOND. In a way, it wouldn't mix well with everything that's whimsical and capricious about his style.

And on that fabled blog: I think Steinz said it at some point, but y'all know those entries are dictated to an NBA.com flunkie, right? I also like how they fucked with the spacing to make it seem a lot more solemn than it would have been out of Arenas's mouth. We've all heard him speak: gush, wander, loop, and lope his way through an idea. If you stuck all those aphorisms into a few cluttered paragraphs, it would be pretty much identical to the flighty tone of the guy's thinking-out-loud. Arenas does not etch in stone; it's why he shouldn't do guaranteed, and why that blog entry was both so exceptional and slightly off.

Plus that makes it read like Flea's blog, which I'm sure is not written by Arenas. Though that would be super if Flea was the worst writer of all, and Arenas couldn't tend to his own shit because he was too busy working out Flea's. Los Angeles is a mysterious place indeed.