Welcome, friends old and friends new, to the latest dispatch from my best double life.
We’ve spent the past month ricocheting between Madison Square Garden, as high as OG Anunoby soared for his heroic rebound, and back down into the greatest depths of Neverland.
I flew to Austin the week of the Western Conference finals. Not to drive another hour to Frost Bank Center, for Game 6 of San Antonio against OKC, but to headbang at Illfest with my chosen dubstep family. I spent two hours, two Wednesdays ago, on the NBA Finals floor ahead of Game 4, and then jetted to Nashville the next morning for four days at Bonnaroo.
There was one moment last Sunday, while waiting for my secret cousins to purchase Hazy IPAs, that I snapped a video of my dancing shadow. He was split, between the blue border of the brand activation and this bubbling, light-brown brew the bar used for its fencing.
My fingers filmed distorted. Like I was wearing Mickey Mouse gloves. A double-sided character, indeed, grooving off the page.
Peter Pan lost his shadow, right? If you’ve been here a while, you’ve been reading all about how the NBA’s Captain Hook colors inside these self- reflection lines.
There’s plenty of new ink on my skin. And ever since those purple dream eaters wedged their knife in my back, I’ve been playing with this concept that The People’s Insider ain’t just a moniker, but an alter ego.
Perhaps an evil twin. How one day, he’d take control of the NBA reporter formerly known as Jake Fischer and begin releasing precious basketball information, penning epic tell-alls, that the blazered figure you see on Bleacher Report wasn’t authorized to say. A vigilante ball knower replete with an origin story, deserving of a comic strip.
I haven’t shaken that feeling of multiple selves since. When you walk into an NBA function nowadays, you aren’t just you. It’s so damn detectable how your sneakers carry yourself, plus your perception that proliferates among the other characters wearing credentials around their necks and the fans who type your name on twitter. Micah Nori, the jolly basketball lifer, just got his dream job coaching a young, rising playoff team. Micah Nori, the character, stands under this spotlight for the peculiar particulars of his contract.
Now, you cannot control what people say about you, post about you, text behind your back. But I do think the traits you infuse your character with, how dynamic your dialogue becomes, the tools you holster inside the pockets of your vest, the armor you don around your brawny shoulders, the energy you emanate, it all undoubtedly leaves an impression on others like a rubber stamp on your next letter.
If there’s one thing The People’s Insider brings along his relentless pursuit of fun, it’s an insatiable appetite for adding new weapons to the artillery, capable of conquering territories of joy previously unknown.
No matter how many concerts, how many festival grounds my character has spawned into, as if these events are video game maps and I’ve chosen some new version of my fighter — sexually-fluid ship captain, rave referee, psychedelic paleontologist — the greatest joys keep coming when we pull off some new feat. Like we’ve leveled up, without needing to defeat some bad boss.
My latest venture into the dubstep underworld, we stayed at our friends’ house east of downtown Austin. Which both allowed an Amazon shipment full of items you can’t pack in a carry-on, and provided a destination for typewritten letters to our host couple, my other two friends who were visiting, and a note to my future self. On Sunday, I told them we needed to check the mail… and, like magic, the envelope had arrived just on time.
Part of that package featured bubble wands in addition to my hundreds of glow sticks. This was the first festival to which I brought bags of confetti, made of scrap paper cut from my typewriting projects. While I was rolling joints at their marble countertop, I found an old, miniature sharpie, its cap connected to a little keyring that’s for ages been in my travel baggie full of tips and rolling papers. What joy could that later scribble…? I stashed the tool in my fanny pack, too, on the same metal round as my earplugs and the key that unlocks this Old English dictionary… which is really a stash box concealing all my contraband.
The sharpie, however small, forged all kinds of grand opportunities for graffiti and more. The sword for my character’s version of Zorro. When the festival spewed enormous balloons above the crowd during each headliner, I drew cartoon faces and wrote all kinds of silly babble and inside jokes on those rubber shells.
Our final day, a stranger handed me back a bubble wand, and I told him to keep it.
He shook his head. “It’s yours.”
I shook mine more. Wrote Y-O-U-R-S in obnoxious font, passed it back, shrugging, “No, it’s clearly…”
The bubble wands were stored in this side pocket of my Lunchbox. The area traditionally designed for a water bottle perfectly fit one green and one pink container for our first deployment into the festival map.
I was not prepared for how much they’d help make friends on the dance floor… from behind.
Sometimes, finding your footing along that sparse real estate can cause some bickering, even some true fights, especially when your crew wades and bows through the front of the crowd. For Illfest, you had to wait in line just to get onto the back area of the floor for the main stage, while the staff enforced a very strict capacity limit. Buzzkill, right? Yet while waiting in line, there was a giant kid, named Jeremy, who tapped me on the shoulder and asked if he could wave my bubbles through the Texas air. The largest boy found the greatest joy, wanding those tiny blotches into the sky.
He ended up behind us, too, as we nestled into our spot ten heads from the stage for Griz. Earlier that afternoon, Liz asked me why I’d picked those two colors, green and pink, for the first day, out of the package that had blue and orange and yellow. I shrugged that they were merely the first two I’d grabbed. But here was this random stranger, asking me if they were Cosmo and Wanda from the Fairly OddParents.
I snorted, in awe at Jeremy’s imagination.
He grinned. “What you wishing for?”
And it was no joke. He was waiting for my answer.
This double June of mine was as frenetic as it was fulfilling. I still had two more festival weekends looming between his query and this week’s NBA Draft. Amid all that flipping back and forth between the NBA and Neverland, scratch-free, I told him I wish it would all continue with this pace still feeling playful. Nothing close to a marathon or race.
What was he wishing for?
He grinned again. “For them to turn this shit up louder!”
I fished through my confetti, now, readying my next bushel of joy, for the promise of Griz’s gnarly drops. That’s when I found a baggie full of Monopoly pieces, a full set of the games’ eight little caricatures, from a massive box I’d purchased on Etsy. In the dash of getting ready to spawn into character, I’d forgotten those little figurines were tucked there. And so, I raised the baggie to the rafters in triumph. A gift from my past self to my present. A gift for my dubstep family. They huddled around.
“In life, as we get older,” I bellowed over the building track, “it’s harder to get adults to commit to fun plans. And then it’s harder to get them to keep that commitment. I feel like when you say you’re in for something, it’s like putting your piece on ‘GO.’ And it means even more when your fellow players know you’re not gonna to take that shit off the board.”
I opened my palm, and they all picked from the car and the battleship and the top hat. When I learned my favorite OddParent, Jeremy, was behind us solo, dancing that weekend by himself, I offered him one of the last three pieces from the set as well.
Before Saturday’s headliner, my character crossed paths with two girls. Once more trying to befriend foes, amid our group settling into contested land by the front of the main stage. From their southern twang, they were clearly locals. I asked these Texans how this year’s Illfest compared to previous iterations. And they were loving it, of course. Albeit they were the only two headbangers from their regular crew who actually showed.
Their faces sparked with magic when I gave them the final two Monopoly pieces still sitting in my vest pocket.
There was so much damn Spurs gear at the event. San Antonio’s Game 7 upset was that Saturday. Even though I told my friends I wouldn’t go seeking to watch a second of the live broadcast, we somehow ended up behind a totem consisting of a blown-up stick of butter, and a phone propped up against it, streaming Wemby from someone’s YouTube TV account. I became a Spurs fan for that moment, swept by the current of the native mores. If Anthony Bourdain’s key to enter any foreign culture was good food, mine continues to be good fucking times.
Adrian told me on Sunday that key really is how I don’t just show up to the function with trinkets and tricks to share, but that “you have so much joy to give.” In truth, I watched the glow sticks I distributed get utilized from head to toe. One girl weaved them through her crocs. Liz put them through Adrian’s skull-cap they fashioned out of a tube top she’d never worn. There was someone dressed up as an air traffic controller, and I urged him to guide the beat across the crowd.
On Sunday, when we went in for the last round, those two girls with their brass board game caricatures from my Jersey shore stomping grounds, they saw my full-fledged character, my shadow glowing off the page, as I respawned back into the festival grounds, and yelled out “It’s the Monopoly man!”
Back to New York for the Finals.
There was a letter waiting in my Brooklyn mailbox. A response from another typewriter dispatch to a college professor who I took three courses with. She was so zany, so creative, I signed up for her voice-over artist and storytelling courses after first having Professor P for public speaking, all to achieve a Communications minor along with my Journalism degree.
We still get together. Mostly when I return to Boston. We had breakfast, in fact, between Games 1 and 2 for the Mavericks and Celtics when Yahoo sent me to TD Garden to cover the Finals between Luka Doncic and Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown.
We’ve traded snail correspondence for years. About her fading health and home improvements. The end of my not-first marriage. The success on the job. In this card, this month, she described the person behind my character as “one of the great joys of my life.”
There was that word again.
I mailed Stein a letter somewhere along the way. “You found a typewriter store in Chicago?” he texted.
I did indeed.
“You are a character.”
There was that word again…
And there were more tools to test on the farm.
After making hours of pre-draft intel calls from the parking lot in Murfreesboro, Tenn., I perused the aisles of Walmart before our RV rolled into the Bonnaroo campgrounds. On a whim, I bought two inflatable beach balls, each three cents less than a dollar. And then Friday, I sharpied “Stanky Bass” on the first, before sauntering up to the front of Daniel Allen’s set. I didn’t realize I’d scribbled some form of prophecy, unaware the ball, so close to the speakers, would vibrate like a growling creature. When I handed it to nearby dancers, their minds melted at the unexpected sensation.
I drew a Ratatouille mouse on Chef Parlitto’s white hat. Benny the Balloon guy somehow managed to wedge a glow stick inside his latest orb, and in turn, I sketched his face, his character, before he smacked the balloon into another plaything for the joyful masses beyond.
Perhaps my greatest conception yet: Instead of just burning sandalwood to mask the manure-smelling mud across the grounds, I started wedging the sticks into the little holes of my “Don’t Trip,” hat. The orange one, that Mac wore for his Tiny Desk Concert. The crowd loved that even more than the bubble wands. It connected me to bazaar workers and the guy with the fan at LSZEE. Whenever I’d set off for my next stop along the overloaded lineup, I’d spark a new stick, and ask the grooviest person in my purview if they’d kindly position the incense back into my hat.
I’m used to reddit threads about my NBA work. Shit, they pop up every day this time of year. I’m sorry, but there’s just no way anyone at ESPN or The Athletic or any other outlet covering the league also has a reddit thread, this month, about being the guy with two sticks of incense flowing from his hat at The Other stage.
There’s no other NBA reporter, I’d bet, coloring inside his character’s lines like this during the final hours before Round 2, Night 2, of the draft. But this exercise has helped me determine the line where who I am ends, and the stories we craft about ourselves begin.
While I was twirling two sticks of sandalwood as Noah Kahan crooned, Jess put his arm around me. “The incense was such a great idea,” he smiled.
It’s funny, how burning them used to cause so much strife in my own house.
“Well,” Jess offered, unprompted, “look at how much joy it brought everyone else.”