I'm torn on advice. Sometimes you're given some and it matters right there on the spot. Then there's the advice that sits alongside pathetic life-as-lit, lit-as-life devices—think fantasies of watching your own funeral or accurately narrating your life as it unfolds. This is the kind of advice that, either in the moment or as memory, arrives perfectly formed and quotable, a single well-turned line that turns your life into a teaching tool for all humanity. And then there's the advice that slips by unnoticed at the time, that you cull meaning from only in retrospect, out of metaphysical necessity. How did I get here, anyway? Someone must have told me [...]

"That’s the NBA we will get in December: One where every bit of action is, for the viewer, shot through with ambivalence. We will love it like never before, while wondering if, just maybe, no one’s having quite as much fun as they once did. We could be projecting, but ultimately, most of what we see in athletes is an attempt to come to terms with what we need them to be. We love this game and yet now we—or the players, or folks paying them—kind of hate everyone. Including ourselves." —There are twelve people in the world, the rest are paste. Many of those twelve are Awl pals, [...]