YOU PROMISED US THE DAWN

The view from above the city revealed odd patterns, played out as if through time-stop photography. The dusk turned to dawn and to night again, halogen trails on expressways. The lives of people involved in some convergent story, albeit with blank spaces and angry voices. And it was frustrating and threatened to unravel as it had before and the doors closed and opened and closed again and they counted and played with decimal points. And when the sands ran out they stood with their hands by their sides.

In the end, it came down to yards, not inches, and the eldest of elders turned slightly away and rubbed at his chest and wore his smile and his skin turned gray as he spun avarice into pride. And the lights blazed on and the town criers sat at devices and fingers danced over keys marked "insert" and "delete" and they cooked their bindles grimly and inserted thin needles into delivery systems. And the trails turned to tar until the spaces had filled and villagers put away their torches and stroked long beards and headed for home.

Yesterday, Derek Fisher sent a letter urging all players to attend a Monday meeting in Los Angeles if at all possible. It seemed prescient, signaling the possibility of a vote to affirm if saner voices had prevailed, or to stand for unity if the scene had gone bad. The owners stalled and snickered and eventually heard distant barking and left, their mouths wet with new want. The practice courts will not echo again. Words will not rinse clean. And we will fold our hopes into squares and place them in penny jars and memory sticks.

The morning will arrive like a hangover and the corporeal parts will still be here, not timelines or abstractions but people who serve beer and take tickets and mend bodies and live to throw down monster jams and they’ve still got to figure things out. Strangely, the smiler’s "gulf" seemed to most characterize divisions within his own pack. And the runts and castoffs brought down their own bulls, and they looked around and wanted more.