State of the Program: Bitterwhiteguy

The older you get, the more you notice patterns in life, or it might be more relevant to say it’s the more you notice the patterns you create in your life. Maybe it’s the way you drive to work, the types of clothes you buy, or the music you listen to; everybody has self-created patterns, some more than others. I have…a lot. I eat at the same pho place every week because it’s near the Target where I buy groceries every week, I get the same taco order at the Mexican meat market often enough that a couple of the workers don’t even look at my ticket any more; I replace my old Pumas with new Pumas, almost always of the same color and definitely of the same style. There’s a good argument to be made that I only barely scrape past the Turing Test at this point, Google has stopped collecting data on me because it’s redundant enough they’re getting bored. If my wife ever hired a Craigslist hitman who wasn’t an undercover cop, I’d be dead within a fortnight. To call me a creature of habit is underselling it by a mile, but most of these habits are in the pursuit of efficiency and most of them make life better. But not all of them.

In a previous life, I was a DJ. It was something I enjoyed immensely and as soon as I started, I jumped into it with both feet; I got my first gig in Dallas during TX/OU weekend 1997, playing a gig in Fort Worth and another at Aqua Bar in Dallas. I immersed myself into the scene by joining mailing lists & handing out mixtapes to people at raves, talking up promoters and record store owners whenever I could. It got me gigs from San Francisco to Buffalo, residencies on internet radio stations & at Dallas clubs, and I started a record label that got write-ups in several magazines. (I have now mentioned at least three things that anyone under 30 is having to look up on Wikipedia.) I pushed hard and had some success, never enough to be a threat to becoming my full-time career but enough that there were a lot of rewarding times over the years. But I burned myself out along the way; what was once a fun hobby became a thing where I was keeping mileage logs & record store receipts for tax reasons, I went from buying a record because I liked it to buying a record because I thought crowds might - or worse, delving into the cutthroat world of white labels & promo records which was like the velvet rope to the VIP section and nobody behind it wanted to make room for one more - and it became a lot more bullshit than it was fun. I turned it into a job in all the ways except the one where my bank account benefitted.

I burned out on DJing hard enough that I went years without so much as touching my records; the DJ room in the apartment was decorative at best and outright neglected at worst. I lost interest in going to see touring DJs or supporting the club nights I used to enjoy, and just generally fell off the map like a Pirates of the Caribbean extra for most of my friends in that scene. There was no spark, no fire, just a pile of ash, and it took a long, long time before I started tinkering with it again. I think you know where this is going.

I started writing about basketball in the Barking Carnival fan section because it was a place I could spew the random ideas I had that were too long to make as comments. I didn’t have a grand design to turn it into anything, it was just me putting to paper what was rattling around in my brain. It wasn’t long before Drew offered me the chance to become ‘official’ and help with some of the recaps or whatever I felt like writing. I jumped at the chance because, well, the article editor was better than in the fan section, and because it meant somebody worth a shit thought what I wrote was also was worth a shit. After the first season, Drew asked me to become a regular part of the paid staff; I declined, precisely because I didn’t want to recreate the burnout from DJing. I didn’t want to turn it into a job, and getting paid meant I was now on the hook for X amount of articles per month. I wanted to be able to do it on my own terms and on my own schedule. So I did it that way for a season before Jonathan Tjarks took The Ringer gig and jc25 realized he could just _not_ and I became the main guy. I still insisted on not being paid because it felt like I could pop the parachute at any moment, which is amusing because I ended up being the last writer at Barking Carnival to actually leave. At some point along the way I started taking the stipend & using the credentials to get into events like the Atlantis tournament, figuring if I’m putting in the effort I might as well get something for the thing I knew I was going to do anyway. I began going to AAU events (the birth of Cunningham Mountain was at an Adidas Gauntlet event) and making connections with people around the basketball scene, I started popping up on Austin & Dallas radio shows and doing the Pretend We’re Football podcast, then I eventually left Barking Carnival - fun fact: I offered to take over management of BC but Paul wasn’t interested - and formed the Substack with the accompanying Patreon which has its own tax forms and is the pattern emerging to you yet?

The last year of writing has not been particularly fun for me, a fair number of the recaps were done with me wondering why I’m trying to put effort into writing about a Chris Beard team attempting to fuck a coconut the same exact way it attempted to fuck the last 14 coconuts to varying levels of success. (I don’t know what the metric is of ‘successfully’ fucking a coconut or what you would want to do with said coconut when the act is over. But if you’re going to fuck a coconut, wouldn’t you want to at least experiment a little along the way? Maybe try some foreplay…or a hammer. Probably a hammer. Let’s move on.) Trying to generate something interesting to say about Texas fingerblasting an overmatched Arkansas Pine-Bluff team 63-31 or the incredibly predictable way Texas was going to lose to Baylor twice was, to borrow a phrase from earlier, more bullshit than it was fun. I am not fully burned out but I can feel the fire dying, there are only so many coconut-related sex acts I can describe before the fire is another pile of creative ash.

(And not to put too fine a point on it, Tjarks’ recent passing has only cemented my view. Two years ago he thought he’d be attending his then-newborn’s college graduation. Life is too short to put off doing the things you want to do because of optional obligations you’ve handed yourself.)

In an effort to avoid history repeating itself fully I am taking - for lack of a better term - a gap year, with the guiding principle of this year being “do what you think will be fun”.

Things that do not seem like fun, in no particular order:

Here’s what I’m going to do instead:

I have a couple of Texas preview pieces that will post shortly, but I’m shuttering the Patreon and stepping away from the weekly recaps…unless I feel like writing them, which I might! Or I might not! Pretend We’re Football is also going away for the time being; I told Will & Tim I’d support them continuing without me, but Will is loaded up juggling school & work & a wife who walks around the house screaming IT’S BABYMAKING TIME daily, and Tim needed more time to devote to watching Serbian teens play tennis in his underwear. I mean, the Serbian teens will be wearing tennis outfits, Tim will be in his underwear. I guess Tim could be nude & mailing underwear internationally; it gets lonely in Iowa winters and it’s his basement, which he has repeatedly informed me is a “judgment-free zone”. Anyway, I’ll have more free time.

I still love college basketball but, much like many others who have seen behind the curtain of their most beloved interest, I’ve watched too much sausage being made and it has disconnected me from what made me a fan of the sport in the first place. It’s time for a course correction.

As always, y’all are welcome to jump in the comments at any point down the road and I’ll be happy to chat; I’m not turning into a monk, I’ll still be entirely too online for my own good. To that point, I have a question for everyone. I know that most of the people who are subscribed to the site did so to get specifically Texas/Big 12 basketball posts. If I do continue writing and they meander around to other conferences and/or sports, do you still want to get them sent to your email?

Just kidding, let me know what you think in the comments.

Next up:

October 24th: State of the program: Texas

then

October 27th: Let’s Talk about the Big 12, 2022 Edition