I should mention, sometimes I’m not quite connected to what’s…going on.  It isn’t that I don’t pay attention; I just pay attention to what’s important and fliter out some/most of the other stuff.  I came to Miami to write about the Heat (important) and meet their fans (important), especially the ones in string bikinis (imperative).  That the popular tourist city of Miami might be booked the f#ck up for the week of New Years didn’t occur to me until I found out that almost every hostel bed in Miami was booked for days.

I finally found a bunk, on Miami Beach, for $24—but for just one night; they were all booked up for the 29th-Jan 2nd.  That was fine, because I’d find a couch to surf.  But I didn’t, and before I went to sleep on the 28th, I booked the only hostel spot I could find for the 29th.  They also had an opening for the 30th, but thaat place charged $45 a night—double their normal rates—through the 5th of January.  I needed it for one night, but just couldn’t stomach it for two.  I figured I’d give myself another chance at couchsurfing for the 30th and after.  And if that didn’t work I’d sleep on the beach and cover myself in patchouli oil to keep away the muggers.

My spirits were bolstered when I received a couchsurfing confirmation from Brian, for Jan 4th, 5th, and 6th (and we later added the 7th).  Then, after some craftying, I found a place in the interim. There was a couchsurfing New Years Eve outing that I said I would attend, but I wrote on the event page that I didn’t have a place to stay yet.  That’s how I met Agata (and Jamil, her boyfriend), who agreed to host me through the 3rd.

I have couchsurfed every night since that first with Agata and Jamil—74 straight nights.  Until tonight.  Alas, I’m in a Comfort Inn, now, in The Dalles, OR.  It was a crappy day for hitchhiking, including a late start and persistent rain.  And there was no couchsurfing available tonight.  Tomorrow is Sunday, so I don’t know what kind of luck I’m going to have.  We’ll see.

In the meantime, if I can piece it together before I fall asleep, I thought I’d list the Dates, Locations, and (first) Names of the people I’ve stayed with, during the streak:

12/30 – 1/3 – Miami Beach – Agata and Jamil

1/4 – 1/7 – Miami Beach – Brian

1/8 – 1/13 – Orlando – Alex

1/14 – 1/15 – Atlanta – Jarrett

1/16 – 1/18 – Atlanta – Kimbi and Karl

1/19 – 1/24 – Atlanta – Ehsan

1/25 – 2/2 – Asheville – Patrick and Johanna

2/3 -2/4 – Charlotte – Robert and Sassha

2/5 – Charlotte – Jason

2/6 – 2/7 – Charlotte – Robert and Sassha

2/8 – 2/16 – Little Switzerland (NC) – Susan

2/17 – Eli’s car, passing through Nebraska – Eli

2/18 – 2/21 – Salt Lake City – Travis and Wendy

2/22 – San Francisco – Alana and Michael

2/23 – 2/27 – Los Angeles – James

2/28 – 3/1 – Mountain View – Brent

3/2 – 3/5 – Sacramento – Charlotte and Caleb

3/6 – 3/13 – Portland – Sarah

~ Fin ~

That people go to Portland for its own sake isn’t unique among the cities I’ve visited. People go to Miami because it’s Miami, Asheville because it’s Asheville, even Atlanta, to a certain extent, because it’s Atlanta. In each case, there’s something inherent to the city’s ethos, it’s ineffable “vibe”, that draws people. And it’s a positive feedback cycle; when a bunch of people go to the same place, looking for the same vibe, they find it, and that vibe becomes ever more robust by virtue of their additions—which in turn makes the place even more attractive to the like-minded. But unlike Miami and Atlanta, who struggle to create an NBA basketball culture, the Portland vibe draws Portlanders to the Rose Garden Arena and fuels their enthusiasm for the Trailblazers.

I was an exception, by the way. I didn’t move to Portland because it’s Portland. I lived in Portland last year because that’s where I was when I ran out of money; I think this is largely why I remained a visitor. Even now, the irony that I am couchsurfing in a city in which I have an apartment—sublet through the NBA season—is appropriate, given my relationship with Portland. It’s a queer relationship, I think, being an unintentional resident (seemingly the only one) in a place so many people long to inhabit. It isn’t that I don’t like the Portland; I do, but I found it a might difficult to truly integrate myself in a place the primary attraction of which is drawing together people who want to be there. Instead, I was a visitor in a city that has nothing for visitors. Indeed, my father came to visit me a month after I arrived and the first day he asked me where we should go. What was there to see in Portland? I started, “Well, there’s…” but I couldn’t think of anything; I still can’t. Save the roses, when in bloom, there’s almost nothing must-see in Portland. It’s the inverse of New York City: a great place to live, but not to visit.

Don’t take my word for it. Ask any Portlander what there is to see in the city, and 90% of them will list Powell’s in the top five. That’s Powell’s, the small chain of large bookstores. “Well, have you been to Powell’s yet?” Powell’s? I should go to…buy a book? Indeed, Powell’s is the answer to many questions, in Portland. Just go on Citysearch and look for a great inexpensive place to take a date in PDX. That’s right: Powell’s, because nothing says romance like loitering in a bookstore.

Of course I don’t make a practice of telling locals I feel this way, or even saying it aloud, because any time I’ve said anything remotely ungushing about Portland, someone looks at me with terrible hurt in their face, as though I had just said their newborn baby looks like an embryo chicken. They shouldn’t feel that way. Being a great place to live, but not visit, is a boon to everyone in the city who doesn’t work in the tourism sector. Trust me, I’m a Newyorker who loathes the subway and walks everywhere. But even I find it necessary to take the subway from West 59^th street to West 23^rd street, to avoid the gridlock of tourism hell that is Midtown Manhattan.

Oh, I have affection for Portland, as well. Decent Ethiopian cuisine within an hour’s drive of great hiking and skiing, and under two hours from the pacific ocean? Gotta respect that. In general, I find Portland to be a nice place to spend one’s time when not luxuriating in the Oregon outdoors. Also, it’s hard not to find Portland’s earnestness charming—and highly amusing. I’ve never been to a place more desirous of distinctness; and that need spills into every conversation you’ll have with a Portlander about their city. It spills into the stands at the Rose Garden, too.

Some Portlanders speak of an all-but-imaginary tension between neophytes and natives, but I don’t see it. Or if it’s there, the locals certainly aren’t helping to keep newbies away—not even dreaded Californians. Whenever a local tells me about how things have changed, aren’t what they were, all these new people, they conclude by giving me a sales pitch for the city. That’s why I feel comfortable anthropomorphizing Portland: every last person here gives the impression of being something more than a shareholder in their city. In fact, Portland would best be defined as a city in which Portlanders live. And I feel that watching the Blazers, whether at the Rose Garden or Claudia’s, is even more about celebrating Portland than basketball.

Oh, that isn’t to say they don’t love their hoops here; 814 straight sellouts attest to that. I am curious about the reasons for the end of the streak and ebbing attendance, following it. You might figure it was because the Rose Garden has 8,000 more seats than the Memorial Coliseum, but they remained close to capacity in the new arena those first few years, despite the team’s decline. But I still recall reading about empty seats. Maybe there were a bunch of new corporate seats that weren’t regularly filled, when they stopped winning? I’m not sure. If it was difficult to get new Portlanders interested in the team, it may well have had a lot to do with them not winning, and the whole Jail Blazers thing—but I don’t think that quite covers it. Every single Portland immigrant I’ve met in the last year-and-a-half is so excited to be here. Finding a job—any job—friends, a place to live, a place in the community, for them just being here is destiny manifested; it’s winning. It seems perfectly understandable then, that those new Portlanders, without any Blazers roots, weren’t filling the stadium for a losing team. Losing was incongruous with their Portland experience. They couldn’t identify with something that wasn’t on the way up.

They do now. But I don’t think they’re fair-weather fans; they’re new fans, discovering something. The Trailblazers marketing department knows it. Their Rise with Us slogan is canny, but longtime fans don’t need it. Rather, it’s a message that resonates with the transplants and their desire to immerse themselves in the local culture of the city.  They all want to be Portlanders.  And Blazerness, the team encourages, is synonymous with Portlander-ness. The Blazers’ attendance figures indicate that it’s working, and so do other indicators of popularity. I have no idea what the Blazers television ratings look like, but I’m told the Blazers Edge is the most popular NBA team blog around, and my Portlander friends who couldn’t care less about basketball, when I met them, are talking Blazers. And I think the new fans will stick, long after Brandon “Beaver Cleaver” Roy retires. [Seriously, is there an NBA player more likely to say, “gee, shucks”? I think that's why they didn't trade for Richard Jefferson. An NBA locker room can only sustain a certain number of non-cussing players before what's endearing corrupts the warrior spirit. Those two and Greg Oden would have taken it over the edge.]

The combination of old faithfuls and new fans certainly makes for a great arena experience, a cacophony rivaled only by Oklahoma City and Utah, among the teams I’ve seen on this trek. It’s a significant component of my holding on to my Portland apartment. I’ll certainly never be a Blazer fan—I have a team—but it’s plenty fun to be in the thick of the movement.

I got a ride-share to Salt Lake City with a guy in Asheville, NC, who was heading to Montana for some business that was entirely legit, in a car that wasn’t, but who’s perfect?  This is the short of it, below:

2/17

Times are in MST

- 9AM Asheville, NC – we left for Nashville to pick up another guy who was going with us to Omaha

- 1PM Nashville, TN – Pick up friendly dude at a hotel and three of us drove to St. Louis.  (The guy from Asheville was being paid $40 to deliver speakers from Asheville to a guy in St. Louis)

- 1:05PM outside Nashville, TN – third guy tells us about a girl this one time

- 2:07PM further outside Nashville, TN – then there was this other girl one time

- 3:14PM even further outside Nashville, TN – there was this other girl, and a pool table

- 4PM close to St. Louis, MO – there were two girls, so he was like, hell yeah, and there was another dude who just stood by the door and watched.  But whatever.

- 5PM St. Louis, MO – dropped off speakers, set off for Omaha

2/18

- 5AM Omaha, NE – dropped off the dude from Nashville (who felt kind of like a slut, when he passed 20, but was like, whatever.)

-6AM outside Omaha – Michael Mandlin, who benefits from excellent timing, falls asleep in the passenger seat, and is later accused of having missed the worst of Nebraska

- 12PM Cheyenne, WY – come upon Sierra Trading Post Outlet Store

- 2PM Cheyenne, WY – depart from Sierra Trading Post Outlet Store, with almost as much money as we had when we went in

- 8PM – Salt Lake City – arrival

I posted on craigslist last week, looking for a ride-share, and got a response yesterday.  A guy in Asheville, NC is heading to Montana and I’m going to ride with him as far as Salt Lake City.  He also found another guy on CL, so we’ll be splitting gas three ways.  That sounds A-OK to me.  Hitchhiking is a means to an end for me, not the end in itself.  And this will be a very quick trip, since we’ll be driving around the clock.  And once I get to Salt Lake City, I will hitchhike south west, in longjohns, I imagine.

I won’t be stopping in Salt Lake City to cover the Jazz this time around, because they definitely will get my full attention for a week.  I’m looking to be in SLC to see them in the playoffs.  And yes, they will be in the playoffs.

I might see if I could just catch a game though.

My next game is the Clippers/Celtics, on February 25th, in Los Angeles.  My plan is to stay in Little Switzerland for a few days, doing some writing work, filling in some blanks on this blog.  I have things to add, from Oklahoma City to Atlanta, and I’d like to make sure the blog is entirely up to date before heading out west.  During my time in Little Switzerland, I’ll post on ride-share boards, couchsurfing, craigslist, maybe some other I might find online.  I’m not sure whether I’ll wait for rides.  That is, if someone on craigslist is going all the way to LA, but four days after I want to leave, to I go?  It might take me three or four days, or more, to hitchhike out there.  But I don’t like waiting, period.  It’s a big part of why I don’t like taking public transportation.  You’re just sitting/standing there, waiting to be some place, traveling slowly, stopping, stopping, stopping at other bus/train stops along the way.  Sure, sometimes I can read, but sometimes being on public transportation makes me so restless I can’t read.  For any reasonable distance, when I have the time, and am not carrying a 50 lbs pack, I like to walk.  3 miles, 6 miles, 8 miles, whatever.  I have legs; I walk.  It helps me think, helps me write.  But that’s neither here nor there…

I’m a little concerned about the hitchhiking today.  The exit I need off I – 40 to get to Little Switzerland is on the way to Asheville, and that’s the only major attraction on my trip.  Traffic density is, rather obviously, an important part of hitchhiking; the greater number of cars that pass me, the more likely I am to get a ride. If you take a look on google maps for Charlotte (on I – 85) out to Little Switzerland, you’ll notice a good deal of highway changing, a lot of small cities and towns.  That means I’ll quite possibly need a number of rides to go where I’m going, especially as people frequently go to Asheville via another route, well out of my way.  Furthermore, it’s Saturday, cutting traffic density, and, worst of all, I’m starting late, very late.  It’s 12:51 PM and I should have left 5 hours ago.  Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get to sleep until very late and then I (probably foolishly) am waiting for a ride from my couchsurfing hosts to get to a good entry ramp to I – 85.  And it’s winter, get’s dark early.  Basically, today’s hitchhiking trip entails almost everything I try to avoid.  I like to get out on the road before 8 AM (latest) get on a major and keep to major, heavily trafficked, highways.  And if I can I hitchhike on weekdays, to try and catch truckers.  But what are you going to do?  This is my plan.

I’m five minutes from calling it off and starting tomorrow, dawn.  I can spend the rest of the day getting lots of work done here, writing up last night’s game…ummmmmmmmmm, yeah.  Yeah, I’m going to wait until tomorrow.  See, just blogging the situation out helped me figure things out.  I’ll leave it up as is, maybe give you a sense of considerations you make when hitchhiking.  OK, off to the library.

- Michael Mandlin

Now I’m in Charlotte, to cover the Bobcats/Hawks game, this Friday. My plans have been a little up in the air because I was holding out hope for an unlikely trip to the All-Star game (Feb 13th – 15th, in Phoenix) and wanted to be ready to drop what I was doing and hitchhike to Phoenix. But now that I’m not going, I can plan the next legs of my trip a bit more closely.

I will be in Charlotte through the 7th, maybe 8th. Then I will head up to Little Switzerland, so I can write a sample chapter of the Free Ballin’ book, to send around. Then I’ll head out to Memphis to spend a week and catch a few Grizzles games. And then I go truly west from there. I’d actually like to hit OKC on the way, to catch another game (they were the loudest, most raucous fans thus far, and that was before they won three games) and I would like to see the  memorial for the OKC bombing.  The people I met there told me it was something to see.

I’ve spent more of the day wrestling with my computer, trying getting almost nowhere.  F#cking Linux.  I do think I’m going to bail on this distro, as soon as I have another leaf on which to leap.  Whatever, you don’t want to hear about that, and I don’t want to tell you or I’m going to start grumbling again.

I’m out of here tomorrow.  It’s good timing because tomorrow a dude moves into the guest room I’ve been occupying this past week.  And now I’m off to Charlotte.  NOT Davidson, by the way.  I really wanted to watch Stephen Curry play live, but apparently Davidson tickets are SOLD OUT the rest of the season.  Are you fucking kidding me?  According to David Arnott at Rufus on Fire, the Charlotte Bobcats get 5,000 people in to see games, but Davidson College is sold out for the year?  Argh, probably have a small gym.  That sucks.  I guess it’s just Stephen Curry on TV for me.

I went looking for a ride to Charlotte on couchsurfing without luck, but I pop on to Asheville’s craigslist site and lo and behold there was a ride offered from Asheville to Charlotte, tomorrow afternoon.  I got in touch, i’m giving him some gas money (prices circa April ’08) he’s dropping me off at a Starbucks in northern Charlotte.  And that’s that.  The Starbuck’s?  Oh well, I’ll need internet when I get there, because I don’t know where I’m going.

I wasn’t exactly sure when I was to arrive in Charlotte.  There’s a possibility I’ll head out west quite soon, more likely I’ll be hanging out in NC for another two weeks, there was a girl I met, there’s Davidson basketball (I was briefly thinking about making it a priority to watch them destroy the Citadel).  All kinds of things up in the air, so I didn’t know I’d actually be in Charlotte.  So I didn’t get couchsurfing lined up.  Argh.  I didn’t want to hold up potential hosts, in case my plans changed, so now I’ll have a day of scrambling to get a place to stay.  But I will.

Speaking of which, I’m going to go and do some couchsearching in Charlotte before heading to sleep.  Night.

But I have to remember, it’s the software that makes me want to scream, not the hardware.  I love my little Asus eee PC 901.  Amid the intractable fray and discord of Free Ballin’, my 901 travels at my side like a placid cow roaming the streets of Delhi.

Now I like the name of my blog, which is also the title of the book to follow, or at least part of it.  But I never realized how much of a jackass I’d feel like with “FREE BALLIN’” hanging on a cord around my neck.  I got some mighty curious looks from reporters and a few players in the locker room.

2. I don’t remember the second thing I wanted to note here, but that in no way undermines its social and political import.

3. I was almost famous for a half-second a few weeks ago, and since I’m too incompetent to embed the video, I can at least link you to it.  Enjoy the piece and wait for the highlight; I’m at the end.  I don’t have a great deal of screen time, but neither did Orsen Wells in The Third Man, and both of our performances set the world of drama on fire.  That’s gravitas.  For some it’s natural.

4. My mother sent me an email this morning: “Whats the deal with Stephan Marbury? Paid to sit around & do nothing?”  Mom used to come home from work (art teacher, middle school, gravitas) from time to time with a sports question, “Who are we rooting for in the Superbowl?” Not the Patriots, “Do we like the Knicks?” I don’t; you do.

But Mom retired last summer, so this isn’t a question she picked up from chat in the classroom or the teacher’s room.  Perhaps Martha Stewart discussed Marbury on her show, today.  Regardless, Mom could give a hoot about Starbury. This is her saying, “Michael, tell me about basketball.  I’m tired of reading about you not picking up women.”  OK, OK.  Mom sent me homemade granola yesterday, so she gets whatever she wants.

No Mom,. Marbury doesn’t get paid to sit around and do nothing.  He gets paid to sit around and not play for someone else.  Rather than play him, the Knicks just feel (quite correctly) that he has more utility not playing.  They will eventually pay him to go away and play for someone else, but (quite correctly) they don’t feel a need to rush.