Your Favorite New Stadium is a Monument to a Society in Decline
...Plus Warriors/Nuggets and RIP Shock G
Yesterday was Earth Day, and, well, at this point, every day should be (remembering the) Earth Day because what the fuck else we got?
I paused to look up from whatever I was doing to pay attention to my first grader's zoom lesson, and his teacher had found a time-lapse video of the polar ice caps 1979 to present.
She showed it to them a couple of times, asking the students what they noticed. My kid, usually shy on camera (a good thing), raised his hand right away, so here I was welling with a little bit of pride, and he said with big first-grader energy, "Clouds."
The teacher choked down a laugh with a sip of water and thanked him for his observation, "What else?"
It took the class a minute, but eventually, they got off a clouds kick and came around to the notion that the ice caps are shrinking. And then they talked a lot about what that does. She stopped short of showing them the starving polar bear images, but they got the idea. We're totally fucked.
He and I talked about it after class, and suffice to say, this isn't his first "Sorry kid, but..." rodeo about all things affecting the climate.
Here in his hometown, he's living almost daily amidst conversations about what disasters will befall the only place he's ever lived over the next decade first: will we a) run out of water, entirely? b) be overrun and priced out by remote workers—the local bar down by the waterfront was recently remodeled with a big deck outside and features the corporate logo Patagonia bros and trucker hat moms drinking, for whatever reason, at all hours during the day with their sticker'd laptops and giant steel sippy cups at the ready—big white smiles all around. I counted four (4!) Teslas parked ifo the joint while walking the dog down there and spying on the other half earlier this week. Or c) will that same neighborhood, our neighborhood, survive without a sea wall, or will it not matter because see a) we'll be out of water by then?
And this is all in the context of what he sees every day. The monarch butterflies are disappearing, so are birds and bees. The stand of pygmy oaks, which are three to four hundred years old in our yard and in the empty lot next door, is starting to have to be watered manually as the coastal fog that used to give them nourishment in the dry months and permanently blanked this sleepy berg of non-ops in the front yard, dry-docked kayaks, and zombie-walking men in hoodies heading down to the liquor store for a lottery ticket and a yellow pack of American Spirits.
We're SPRINTING in the wrong direction. Tech is leading the way. Whether it's companies like Amazon generating trillions of tons of more garbage and carbon dioxide than we ever have as a human cohort in the last decade than all of the time ...combined, or bitcoin sucking up all the energy and then some, creating the waste and blight that will double (triple? 10x) all of the traditional mining. We're not just not winning the battle with ourselves to control our destruction; we're absolutely doing our fucking worst in the run-up to oblivion.
Thinking again about the dinosaurs and how they survived (or didn't) after the Chicxulub asteroid hit the Earth just off what is known to us as the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico some 66 million years ago and led to the extinction of 75 percent of all species.
The first thing to know is like us; the dinosaurs were already in decline. In the 10 million years before impact, the number of species almost halved—primarily due to the retreat of inland seas and climate change caused by volcanoes.
However, within hours of the hit, there was a giant global rain of molten rock, which probably killed everything on the surface and started global wildfires. Animals who could be underground, in the water, or caves did not immediately die, but their food chains' systemic collapse led to a quick death within months.
Eventually, the skies cleared, and the Earth continued to change and heal itself. Today the birds you see are the direct descendants of those survivors, and, well, we carry around artificial brains with screens on them in our pockets. We are in an era—that as is as close to from what I can tell a transactional moment that does its best to affix a price on falling apart while still rushing to build monuments to a past remembered.
Dying Civilizations LOVE to Build Shit
I think about all this in the context of the new stadia that came online in the time of global strife, a planet in revolt practically BEGGING for yet another comet to end this current decline.
Going back a year and a half and reading articles about professional franchises in the West (where most of this new end-times development seems to be taking place) is quaint to fucking depressing.
The press on the Warriors' $1.4 billion new digs on the SF waterfront, like the Giants' 20-year-old stadium down the way, should be fully submerged by 2050, was nearly 100 percent positive, characterizing it a fiscal win for the team even before the first ticket was scanned.
Financial bros said the building, which included meeting and retail space for tech bros, because, of course, it did, added $2 billion net gain for the team's overall valuation and then went on to say how neighboring companies with giant footprints near the city's waterfront—Salesforce and their mega-tower alone—would fill the stadium night in and night out, oh lanyard-wearing jackals. A sure thing? Right.
Why not? What else you gonna do besides steal valor from a team that struggled for DECADES across the Bay and crush IPAs as they ignore action on the court while looking on their phones to see if they can bid on a Steph Curry NFT.
Of course, we know how the story ends (For now.) Tech companies were forced to open the jail cell and let their workers work from anywhere, which has resulted in a mini-migration to places like Tahoe, where they've taken their trash and their bad habits to go ahead and fuck with the forest. The arena mostly sits empty, and the team sits in a ho-hum sub .500 malaise as it continues its refusal to enter the playoff race as SF residents as it nears the end of its teens' dynasty.
But at least SF taxpayers didn't pony up for the privilege of landing a giant flying saucer in the middle of the Nevada desert. That distinction belongs to the Raiders who somehow scammed almost $1 billion of their new stadium's $2 billion price tag from the state, taking money away from education, infrastructure, and already strained public services, to help build a giant weird flame statue to dead Raiders' owner Al Davis.
The stadium opened in 2020 to no fans. And should remain at limited capacity for the 2021 season and beyond. Will the state ever recoup its investment? Fuck no. Football, even during a pandemic when there's nothing else to watch, is a bloated ratings canard, and the demographic—which is aging into Fox News-watcher dick pill and adjustable mattress territory—could also give a shit.
At least in Los Angeles, the newest stadium is shared by the Rams and the carpetbagging Chargers, a team whose ownership pissed off the very loyal San Diego fanbase to the point of just telling them to go the fuck away—as it should be. The $5.5 billion giant empty privately funded shoebox in Inglewood looks ...okay during the cutaways but (again) is a monument to better days in the sport, and in, I don't know, all things in general. Or maybe it's a big target for the next piece of space rock with the US in its crosshairs.
Societies come and go, empires fall, and break-ups happen. We can talk our way around it, try to initiate small changes, and implement personality tweaks. I know I won't be going back to doing *blank* when things go back to normal and all that. We are resilient specifies and all that.
But also, our refusal to look ahead, to shed ourselves of these stupid tropes and see it all crashing down in front of us with those who seemingly found a safe spot in all this day-drinking as they answer emails while ignoring the literal water rising around them is what continues to put us into this mess. We will never find a solution through commerce—these empty monoliths are evidence of that.
Unlike the dinosaurs, we were warned.
Nuggets Travel to Golden State FTW
The Denver Nugget (38-20) Friday will be without point guard Jamal Murray as they tip-off in the empty Chase Center vs. Golden State (29-30.)
Denver's offense is still firing without Murray, scoring an almost peerless 117+ over its last ten with a defense still just outside the NBA's top ten.
Michael Porter Jr. has taken up Murray's slack averaging 21 points per game in April.
Steph Curry is carrying Golden State and making a case for a third MVP for a team that will likely be home in June. He's averaging 38.7 points per game in April while shooting 52.3% from the field and 47.1% from 3-point range.
The Warriors are coming off a nice win vs. Philly on Monday and a true colors-showing loss to the struggling Wizards on Wednesday to wrap a four-game road trip.
The Nuggets are 15-13 on the road ATS and are playing their best hoops of the season even shorthanded.
Take the Nuggets -3 at Warriors at 7 p.m. PT
RIP to Shock G
Nobody had tighter, funnier bars and brought joy to the Black story in the Bay. Nobody. A friend (East Bay native) and I were text-debating the location of this McManse that kicked off the daytime chill rap video genre; my guess is Fremont, he thought maybe closer to Oakland on the 24, but on the commuter side of the tunnel— Orinda perhaps? We settled or one of those places off the 680 between Danville and Walnut Creek. If anyone has the answer, let me know, the internets is not giving up the goods on this one.
Now you can tell from my everday fits, I ain't rich
So cease and desist with them tricks (tricks)
I'm just another black man caught up in the mix (mix)
Trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents (A dime and a nickel)
Just cause I'm a freak don't mean that we could hit the sheets
Baby I can see, that you don't recognize me
I'm Shock G, the one who put the satin on your panties