or Live Together/Die Alone

May, May, transglorious May was coloured, nay dominated by two major overarching thematic story-lines…

(…SQUAW! Your crippling loneliness and inability to come to equiostasis with the cosmos?! SQUAW!)

Shut up, subconscious! No instead I’m speaking of the ending of the television show Lost, and the ascension of my favorite basketball team, the Boston Celtics, to the NBA Finals. The baffling similarities, the logic-smashing comparisons and at least a couple links and youtube videoes lie within, brave reader. But beware: beyond this point be spoilers, tygers and jinx-inducing hubris! And the enemy is everywhere!!!

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  Season 5 of Lost had ended it’s sci-fi masturbatory season by leaving the various characters shattered, disoriented and filled with self-loathing. Main-man Jack’s attempt to reboot their Universe (!), and prevent them from ever having existed there (!!) by exploding an Atomic bomb at the core of a magnetic anomaly (!!!) had seemingly failed. His gambit fizzled, costing the lives of people he cared about. And the weight of his failure was torturous and haunting. He longed to just agree that he was wrong and be crucified for it. Jack always wanted to be the knight in shining armor that fixes all the world’s problems at the cost of great sacrifice. But when he seemingly didn’t fix the world’s problems, and when the great sacrifice wasn’t his, he was reduced to questioning confusion and self-hatred. All he could do was admit:

 But at least Jack had gotten there. And at least the show had gotten there. It was time to pull together and get to the end, for better or worse. We’ll return to this in a minute…

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The Celtics were on cruise/damage control for the entire  back 2/3rds of the 2010 season. If I were to congeal a team of 15 athletic freaks into a shitty episode of a drama show on network television, they’d be the Bai Ling episode where you find out why someone got a tattoo, but it doesn’t matter to anything whatsoever and you’re furious you just lost an hour of your precious time to pointless trivium and bad acting.

 They headed into the post-season rudderless, and seemingly empty and devoid of passion or purpose. Constantly and consistently, the members of the Celtics staff were telling us that this was all part of the plan; that when it became important for them to turn on the juice, they were going to surprise everyone.

 And of course no one besides them believed it even for a fucking second. Because teams simply don’t just “turn it on” when they want to, it’s something that can’t be done in pro sports. It’s bad juujuu, or poor sportsmanship, or more realtistically just not feasible in the modern day and age.

 But the Celtics were confident, and annoyed with the criticism. They’d tell anyone who’d listen:

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 If I could retreat back to Lost for a bit, it’s part of common folklore at this point that the creators became aware that if they didn’t force the network into giving them a finite endpoint, the show was going to unravel. Without an end-Date, there was no end-Game. Nothing to be playing for, or looking forward to. Sometimes the treasure is in the journey, but sometimes it’s at finishing the fucking race!

 So they reached a settlement with ABC, and even at the cost of jettisoning a ton of time to explain the mysteries they had set up, and knowing that they weren’t going to please a sizable portion of loyalists by doing that, the Lost creative team began the process of ending. They geared up for their run to the Finale.

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 When the Celtics won the NBA Championship two years ago, it was by following the motto ‘Ubuntu’, which literally translates from an old Bantu langue to mean  ‘I am, because you (pl.) are”. It was the notion that there was a collective that needed to be bought into, and that the individuals couldn’t get to the next place without buying into that collective. Players on the roster had to understand the limitations and their roles; they had to accept responsibility for their jobs, and not try to be heroes. They won together as a team, and it was a sight to behold. We don’t get that typically in the “me first” era of sports on a professional level, but this was a team of humbled men, accepting their roles while accepting their fate.

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As Lost hurtled towards it’s end-date, it eventually accepted the notion that as sci-fi oriented as it appeared to be on the surface, it was ultimately a show whose roots were deeply entangled in the relgious notions of spirtuality and communion. In the end, every major character on Lost was there to further the point that people are deeply flawed, and alone; that it’s only by coming together and seeking forgiveness of our sins, acceptance of our short-comings and growth from a shared faith in each other that we can further our standing in life.

Sorry, that’s what Lost is about! It’s about Church. It’s about finding people to worship with and loving them. Not an island, or monsters and gods, not Jack and Kate or why Walt had super-powers. It was a show about finding faith in being part of a community. A better and more passionate critique of man’s great struggle might sound like:

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 And that, in my needlessly roundabout way, is what I learned about in May. Everyone wants to win, but it’s about giving into the notion that maybe (definitely) the Universe is a bit smarter than you, that your friends can help you, and that you’re only going to be as strong as the people you surround yourself with. I learned about faith and commitment and Ubuntu.

 Beyond that I learned that as much as I think I can do this whole thing, I’m a lonely creature, struggling with redemption and direction. Just as importantly, I learned that Elvis said “as long as a man has the strength to dream, he can redeem his soul and fly.”

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 So while I can think and while I can talk, while I can root and cheer and hope and enjoy when people get to where they’re trying to get to, whether they be a dozen fictional characters, or a pro basketball team, or an arrogant asshole who tried to get the Beatles deported…

…it’s important to believe in each other, and ourselves.

Ubuntu.

-diggy