10.11.2007

The Hour Has Landed



Thank you heartily to all those who applied. We read and thoroughly enjoyed them all. But as all decisions must one day get made, the winners have been selected. One of them has yet to respond to my congratulatory email. The other was long-lost FD contributor Forevers Burns, who returned to our lives with this spine-tingling voyage of self:

Fuck a Dialectic: Why I Need to Normalize Pathological Behavior

I can't really articulate a particular reason that a FD fantasy league would need me; I'm sure there are any number of eligible and eager prospective managers who wouldn't name their team "Gang Bang." Or would know to move Eddy Curry to the bench when he inevitably misses time to manage his obesity-induced type II diabetes. Instead, I'll try to explain why I would need the FD fantasy league.

Over the past year, I've worked on a psychiatric inpatient unit that exclusively treats adolescent females. Two years of teaching in Mississippi left me with some of the mannerisms and vocabulary of a thirteen year-old black kid and an affinity for pickles soaked in Kool-Aid. Working with intensely emotionally dysregulated white girls has resulted in the accrual of a terrifying quantity of information regarding menstrual cycles and The Gilmore Girls. I also caught myself in tears three different times during a recent viewing of Michael Jordan to the Max.

In a comment a few years ago, I expressed a kind of embarrassed self-consciousness about how much my identity was rooted in basketball, how much space my brain devoted to shit like the fact that Terry Porter went to Wisconsin-Stevens Point. The burdens of work and school seemed to have forced my priorities to shift; last year, I missed much of the playoffs studying for the May 25th MCAT. But as I find most of my cognitions devoted to the principles of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy or anxiety surrounding the possibility of getting paged to help evening staff deal with some kind of arm cutting or chair throwing incident, one message continually intrudes upon my thoughts: I fucking need Mickael Pietrus back in my life.

I've taken the first few steps to reclaiming my sense of self. Money set aside for one of my med school apps is now budgeted towards league pass. I exiled DBT for Suicidal Adolescents to my bookshelf and returned the 92-93 NBA register to its rightful place atop the toilet where it benevolently reigned for so many years. But I want to get back to thinking FD (and hopefully writing FD), and I can't think of any better way to help promote that by joining your league.

15 Comments:

At 10/11/2007 5:11 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Doug Christie cuts his wife's arms for her.

Nice esse.

 
At 10/11/2007 5:27 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Nepotists.

Nah, nice work Burns.

With Stephen Jackson as his captain, this might be Pietrus's all-star year.

 
At 10/11/2007 5:38 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

If they expand the All-Star roster to 10 spots per position then yeah, maybe this will be Pietrus' year.

Or maybe he's just another physically gifted, overrated defending, inconsistent outside shooting guard...

 
At 10/11/2007 5:45 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Pietrus is more than that.

He's just another physically gifted, overrated defending, inconsistent outside shooting guard/small forward/power forward/point forward/ersatz frenchman.

credit where credit is due.

 
At 10/11/2007 6:01 PM, Blogger Err Bloc Tuck said...

Pickles in Kool Aid? I'm so intrigued I'm off to the store right now...

 
At 10/11/2007 6:28 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's a Southern thang...

 
At 10/11/2007 6:32 PM, Blogger Bethlehem Shoals said...

NWN--you have no idea how much i agonzied over the nepotism thing. ziller put in an essay instead of just asking me, and i ended up making an extra place for him so no one could fault our findings. then burns--whom i hadn't spoken to in over a year--sent his in out of the blue, when it was too late to make other arrangements. but as you can see, he earned the spot.

the other winner has contacted me back, and i leave it up to him to announce himself however he sees fit.

 
At 10/11/2007 6:39 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

No doubt he earned it. At least, I assume so (free post in the pay area with all the other essays?).

I know for sure that the essay I didn't write would not have been able to fuck with that.

Even had I put on that full armor of God...

 
At 10/11/2007 6:42 PM, Blogger Bethlehem Shoals said...

that pay area's lagging a little behind. it's going to be stat-centric, but unfortunately silverbird realized he had to get his dissertation started.

matt watson said the funniest thing possible about ridnour breaking his nose. i asked why the armor of god hadn't protected lr, and matt goes "see, we had it wrong. the mask is the armor of god."

 
At 10/11/2007 6:43 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Speaking of which, I guess the armor of God can't protect you from Ron Artest's elbow.

And who's the only being that God can't vanquish? That's right, the Devil. Artest=Satan.

In other news - I like the cut of this Burns's jib.

Also, one Intramural 3 on 3 team named FreeDarko is 5-2 and headed to the playoffs, with our eyes firmly fixed on that trophy (in this case a championship t-shirt).

 
At 10/11/2007 7:02 PM, Blogger Mr. Six said...

Burns earned that spot.

Pay area?

 
At 10/11/2007 7:07 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

i guess that makes me the other winner. i'm too much of a lurker to comment here regularly so i feel weird about posting this. Gah.

Feels weird actually winning something for a change. I scratch it up to being brazilian; everyone always loves that. Works every time.

Not sure about the freedarkoness of my essay, but hey...well, got a soccer match to attend, so I'd better split before this turns into a 1500-word comment.

 
At 10/11/2007 8:18 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Ziller gets name-checked, so Kanye West had to air his grievances:

TZ doesn't care about Josh Howard.

 
At 10/12/2007 2:17 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Great call on Burns. Not only an unfuckwithable essay, but my life seems to be increasingly populated by mental health professionals recently and as a genre they're usually a great addition to any gathering.

 
At 10/12/2007 2:40 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Burns will not be denied. Thanks, and I hope this means we'll be seeing more of your good shit on FD.

 

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