Where the %$*@#$ is my NBA?

Baseball season is over. The Cardinals have stopped celebrating.
Football comes but twice a week, and Indianapolis is often on TV.
Hockey? It's too late for us to start following hockey, don't you think?
College sports? College sports are funny games compared to their professional counterparts.

We need the NBA. As the players and owners continue to find themselves on opposite sides of a door named Lockout, we lock ourselves inside our crust-sheds, drinking the tonic of our time, trying our best to hide from the creepiness and the helplessness of the real world. How do we cope with a failing humankind? We watch sports, and not just any sports, no. We watch the NBA, the MLB, and the NFL. We watch March Madness when it happens, but find it difficult to focus on the pre-March college level. We enjoy Grand Slam tennis, but it's easy to find a Slam slipping by without much attention spent toward it. But we like it. We do.

Missing NBA games though... how are we going to avoid the tragedy around us without them? Usually around this time of year, we can fluidly transition from the centuries-old World Series of baseball into the final days of Preseason NBA exhibitions without noticing murder, corruption, greed, sad drug addiction, bounty-hunter lawlessness, foolish bribery, and the like. Then suddenly, without a warning to the wind, it's November, and NBA games count again, and there we sit with technology our copilot, watching games and kicking all else to the curb. Sure, we still have to work in the factories, libraries, or tuna canneries like everybody else, but we can watch basketball at night! And we can leave the street-life to the vigilantes and the crime-lords they seek to destroy.

Not in 2011, however. No. Not this go-around. The word on the street is that the Collective Bargaining Agreement is anything but. In fact, one doesn't exist right now, as players and owners and other people who also love grabbing money keep fighting the bad fight. No money now, no games now, just a bunch of old-timey tom-foolery. It's not safe in some parts of the world. And without the NBA, it's never been so soul-shatteringly apparent like it is now.