Maybe I can keep this up for 82 games.

We’re six games in the books for the Brooklyn Nets season, and I’m going strong in the 2-4 campaign. I should explain something, way back when I came up with the idea for this column, I was going to game by game, compare this season to the experience of reading Infinite Jest. Why? Well “Nets” kind of sounds like “Jest” (Not really, but whatever, go with it) and I certainly wasn’t going to watch every Jets game this season, so here we are. But the sixth section was the one that first made me realize that I probably wouldn’t finish the book. There had been other challenging passages, and I’d already ran into a few gratuitous footnotes, but it was this short sixth section, pages 63-68, where I understood that it might be hopeless. Take the first sentence (Or don’t. I honestly don’t blame anybody for tapping out). I’d give you some background, but the whole thing is expository anyway. See if you can keep up:

The Enfeld Tennis Academy has been in accredited operation for three pre-Subsidized years and then eight Subsidized years, first under the direction of Dr. James Incandenza and then under the administration of his half-brother-in-law Charles Tavis, Ed.D. James Orin Incandenza – the only child of a former top U.S. jr. tennis player and then promising young pre-Method actor who, during the interval of J. O. Incandenza’s early formative years, had become a disrespected and largely unemployable actor, driven back to his native Tucson AZ and dividing his remaining energies between stints as a tennis pro at ranch-type resorts and then short-run productions at something called the Desert Beat Theater Project, the father, a dipsomaniacal tragedian progressively crippled by obsessions with death by spider-bite and by stage fright and with a bitterness of ambiguous origin but consuming intensity toward the Method school of professional acting and its more promising exponents, a father who somewhere around the nadir of his professional fortunes apparently decided to go down to his Raid-sprayed basement workshop and build a promising junior athlete the way other fathers might restore vintage autos or build ship inside bottles, or like refinish chairs, etc. – James Incandenza proved a withdrawn but compliant student of the game and soon a gifted jr. player – tall, bespectacled, domineering at net- who used tennis scholarships to finance, on his own, private secondary and then higher education at places just about as far way from the U.S. Southwest as one could get without drowning.

That first sentence is 247 motherfucking words. Does it need to be one sentence? God no. Is this some sort of meta joke that I do not get? If so, this book is goddamn hilarious, because this is not the first, nor would it be the last example of an artificially inflated consecutive thought. Does it justify it’s existence? Of course not. It is a meandering string of words that goes though the following ideas:

-Describing how long the school existed to

-Who directed it in it’s early days (James Incandenza), and who took over (Charles Tavis, and James Orin Incandenza) to

-The fact that J.O. Incandenza was the only child of a former top U.S. jr. tennis player and then promising actor, (I’m assuming that’s the first James Incandenza) to

-The fact that this actor (Probably the first James) became a disrespected and largely unemployable actor and was driven back to Tucson to

-The fact that this actor focused on working as a tennis pro at resorts, and well as working with community theater to

-The fact that he is a dipsomaniacal (an alcoholic) tragedian (dramatic actor) who is obsessed by dying from a spider bite and getting stage freight and is mysteriously bitter which draws him to Method acting to

-The fact that he worked on his son in his basement with the goal of creating a super stud tennis player to

-The fact that his son J.O. was a shy but apt student of the game to

-The fact that JO was tall, wore glasses (?), and overpowering at the net to

-The fact that his son used his scholarships to go to private schools and college/university as far as he could get from the southwest, while remaining in the continental United States (Presumably New England).

Is that fun, guys? Are you having a good time? Then by all means, pick up a copy of Infinite Jest. I would rather shove the business end of a claw hammer up my ass and give a good rip, but you know, do what makes you feel good. None of that is hyperbole, mind you. That’s how I regained the ability to feel things after this very boring passage.

As for the Nets, I am happy to report that through an equal amount of completion, they have not yet reach the expedited removal of a blunt object from the anus, or any other bodily orifice, stage of the season. Yet. They played the Golden State Warriors at home yesterday, and as you might have assumed, they lost. But I think there are different losses in the NBA. Maybe there are no “quality losses” the way signature efforts can put a mid major program in the NCAA tournament, but I think you can tell a lot about a team by the way they take a beating, and the Nets didn’t take it without fighting back. On paper, the Warriors should have out-talented them somewhere around the 2nd quarter. And indeed, Golden State did eventually get that lead to 19. Going into the game, I would have been happy to see their starters on the court with less than five minutes in the game. As it turned out, Steph Curry and Kevin Durant played until the final buzzer of a six point Nets loss. Do the Nets get a win in the standings column? No, but they were probably never going to get that win. And in the face of futility they forced a filled arena to make a choice: Do you root for the home team, or are you just happy to watch the Golden State Warriors show. Early on, the Warriors had gotten their cheers, especially when Steph Curry set the NBA record for consecutive games with six or more 3-pointers. But by the end they were mostly Nets fans, hoping to see a late October miracle, against a Warriors team who looked off, but still seemed to give a shit. Did the loss hurt in the slightest? Nah. I enjoyed the show and would recommend to a friend.

I think I’ve entered this season with the right expectations in order to survive: Expect nothing but effort. I didn’t think this team was going to the playoffs. I certainly didn’t think they would make any noise once they made the playoffs. But from the outside, they seem like the squad that can make a seemingly hopeless mismatch into a fight. Hell, beating Golden State might have ruined that. Then I’d start to have real expectations. Instead, like scrappers who have been there before, they had the decency to choke against New Orleans and fall just short of toppling the champs. They’ve got me right where they want me.

The Brooklyn Nets are now 2-4 and locked in a 3*-way tie for 10th place in the Eastern Conference

*Pending the results of the Washington/LA Clippers game.