Welcome back to BasketballWEATHER. Let’s get jumpin.’
The MIGHTY Lakers thoroughly obliterated the New Orleans Pelicans last night in the NBA’s I.S.T., aka In-Season Tournament. Seems if you put Zion Williamson in Vegas for a few nights prior to a nationally televised game he is going to take advantage of the situation.
A crazy fact, Lebron James is almost one hundred years older than Zion, and playing in his 21st season. Despite that, Lebron James is undoubtedly in better physical shape than Zion. I’m not sure how you can be a New Orleans Pelicans fan or front office person and not cringe at that, your franchise player is huffing and puffing after five minutes of court time, and someone who is basically old enough to be his father has the stamina to kick your best player’s ass?
Enough clowning Zion, what all of this puts into perspective is Lebron James. The guy is simply remarkable and I feel blessed to be alive because I get the opportunity to watch this guy ball. Don’t cheat the game, when people say that, this is what they mean. It’s understanding you have god given talent, and then doing something with that talent. But you not only have to recognize it, something that’s sorta hard to do, you also have to nurture it, even harder. That’s what stings so much with Zion. His size. His agility. He could be one of the best players on the universe. But he chills & wants to go to strip clubs instead. More power to him. James Harden, who I have defended in these pages at nauseam, does the same thing, but man, there’s something so beautiful in watching someone, no matter who they are, take their gifts, and maximize them like they’re menorahs that never stop burning. Now on to the horse and pony show, and Happy Chanukah.
Have you ever heard of Maroon 5?
They’re these five guys who all went to private school in Los Angeles who came together to form a rock band in high school. Their lead singer is this dreamy guy with tattoos, with a voice like honey butter whose name is Adam. Levine is his last name.
Maroon 5 released an album a long time ago called Songs about Jane. I think, almost 22 years ago now. Twenty-two years is a long time. That’s just about as long as Lebron James has been in the NBA. A little longer actually, but basically, yeah, LBJ and Maroon 5 have pretty much been in the American zeitgeist for almost the exact same amount of time.
Coincidence?
Why is this relevant?
First of all, for some inexplicable reason Maroon 5 was my most played artist this year on Spotify. I know, it surprised me too. I guess the twenty-seven thousand times I listened to “This Love” while I was at the gym added up?
I guess it’s nostalgia music for me? I say nostalgic because way back when, when I thought I wanted to be a music manager & work in the music business, I worked for Maroon 5. It wasn’t anything extravagant. I was basically their errand boy/intern, dropping off packages, installing flat screen TVs, dumb shit that had very little to do with the glitzy fun stuff of working in the music industry, but from time to time they’red be some cool shit going on, a show at the Troubadour, a party at the singer’s house, a random hang at the Chateau Marmont, that made the job worth sticking around for.
That, and everyone was really nice.
The manager I worked for was super friendly and let me get away with dumb mistakes all of the time, and he liked having me around the Burbank office. Basically I was a good hang, which honestly, can get you pretty far in life. Deep down, though, I had already been thinking of other things. As fun as it was to tell people I worked for a zeitgeisty band, to get backstage passes and all of that jazz, it was getting in the way of something that I wanted much more.
It’s not the work itself that was getting in the way either.
Hypothetically, I could’ve stayed at the job and been a writer-guy, but the problem was the type of work I was doing. Spiritually it was eating me alive from within. I felt like I was working hard on their behalf, that is to say, the behalf of another artist, who was not me.
I was there to help them get bigger, to help them reach their goals, them sell more records, them book bigger shows, them get fish tanks installed, etcetera.
But what about your goals?
At the time they were pretty abstract, and to verbalize them would’ve been sorta embarrassing, but inside they were as alive and as concrete as anything you could ever hope to feel. They were the icky gooey stuff of potential. They weren’t talent. They were dreams. But in order to unleash them I knew I had to go, I knew I had to quit.
There’s this great line in the new Bradley Cooper movie, “Maestro,” where Leonard Bernstein says something along the lines of, being a writer or a composer, as opposed to an actor, is about sharing your internal life within, with people. As writers, our anonymity grants us the ability to share the inside of our soul in a way that performers, due to their externalized relationship with an audience, can’t.
Anyway,
Twenty years later and it feels like my career is just getting started.
Maroon 5, god bless them, have gone on to win Grammy’s and other music awards, the manager who I used to work for, tragically passed away. A million other things have happened as the world has changed over these last two decades as fast as a spinning dreidel, but the decision to reach deep down into the abyss of my own creative and artistic potential, not something I have regretted.
If you’re lucky enough to have “it,” please find it and use it.
I think you should do everything you can to treat it with the care and respect it deserves .
There are so many out there who wish they could be playing in the game that Zion Williamson is playing in, and would definitely work a lot harder if they had the opportunity to.
Very few are born with his kind of raw talent, or the talent of someone like Lebron James (or Adam Levine), but even fewer can merge that kind of talent with the scrappy hard work of a someone on the outside looking in.
So I don’t know, maybe Maroon 5 deserve to live on my most-played Spotify Playlist until the end of time? Maybe I inadvertently learned some kind of important lesson there about potential, and subconsciously needed to channel that this year. Maybe I’ve gotten preeeettttty gooooood at knowing where my own talent lies? Maybe Maroon 5 needs to hear this message?!
I DONT FUCKING KNOW
Perspective, that’s what makes Lebron so special. He treats the game (of life) like he’s lucky to play it every single damn day. And this is someone who could easily stop right now, and still go down as one of the greatest to ever do it.
What’s your guilty pleasure?