There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

the soundtrack that does the signaling here. The sweet, piano-soaked version of “I Shall Be Released” sung by the great Marion Williams, who once helped carry the Famous Ward Singers

make gods out of the living, who walk among us, is to break the divine down into sectors: god of sports, god of finance, god of love, god of weaponry and war, god of hellish empire. But at least you know they exist. You can see them. You can watch them be punished in some way that might satisfy you, if you have been done wrong by them, and you can

And of course it would have been easier to just actually pray. To push the act of pretending to those lengths instead of actually following through on the work of prayer might suggest that I never wanted my soul saved all that much anyway. This is where a different version of myself might express, here and now, that I’m not proud of this. That I am

I’ve got no problem not seeing what I don’t need to see. I’ve got no problem baptizing the mind every now and then. What good is a witness in a country obsessed with forgetting?

And the other thing about faces in dreams is that there is nothing stopping the brain from delivering the face of an enemy to you in your sleep. And not only delivering the face of an enemy but also building a world inside of which your enemy might, for a moment, be a lover. Might be someone you would fight for, someone you would die for. Someone w

John Glenn took my small hand in both of his hands & I asked him if he was ever afraid & he looked somewhere above my head somewhere beyond even the ceiling & he said I’ve never been more afraid than I have been curious

forget about the mechanics of flight & all the ways it could fail & I think about Lonnie in the sky, kept safe by his people & the small but useful things that outlasted their dreams JOHN GLENN, CAMBRIDGE, OHIO (1921–2016)

Mobb Deep song “Survival of the Fittest” opens

And I know, it might seem like this has all been about absence. But do you see it now? Absence, maybe, but absence requires an understanding of what should be. What was once. It has always been impermanence, beloveds. Impermanence was the altar I was leading us to this entire time.