No Friend of Mine

What do Paul Coro, Kelly Dwyer, and Henry Abbott have in common?

While you ponder that question, allow me to give some background information about myself.

I have, as noted by accredited sources, an antisocial personality. I am uncomfortable around people for the most part because I just don't click with society in general. (This point is made painfully clear when one considers my preference to sit in a small, dark room typing away on my computer over any and all social activities, which means that I don't keep a lot of friends.) It can be a lonely and depressing existence at times, but in my mind, it beats the alternative of feeling like I'm living in a mental ward populated by around 300 million patients.

The few people that I do let into my little world generally pass the initial test of not being a complete moron. Admittedly, I have made mistakes, but none that I haven't quickly rectified. For instance, there was the "friend" who stole my portable DVD player and several movies to trade for a teener of meth. I know he did it because he was in my house at the time the items turned up missing, and he had zero money of his own. To his credit, though, he did offer to share it with me, despite his insistence that he did not rip me off.

I chalk up that friendship to a drug induced stupor, though, as I was certainly experimenting at the time - anything to curb the banalities of college life. I wasn't using that particular chemical nightmare when it all happened, which made it all the more astounding that he would even offer to share that which could technically be described as my property.

I made a mistake, and I kicked him out of my life, leaving the supposed friend no doubt that he was no longer welcome in my immediate vicinity.

The gist of all this is that I stay away from people because I cannot mentally handle the innate stupidity with which the general population conducts its daily affairs. It drives me nuts - to the point that fantasies of the barrel of a large caliber firearm resting on the base of my skull bring me a sense of peace.

But even in the virtual world I am not safe.

I knew right after Amare Stoudemire's and Boris Diaw's suspensions came down from the elephant tusk towers of the league offices in New York that I would not be able to go to any basketball site because there would be bitter Laker fans and smug Spurs fans talking about how bad the Suns are and what an amazing team San Antonio is. I also knew that some moron would come out with a gem like this...

I sincerely believe that San Antonio would have won a fairly called Game 4. This could have ended in five.

-Henry Abbott, Truehoop.com

Obviously not a Clockwork Orange reader.

Here writes a person, under the guise of "basketball expert", that the only thing that kept the Spurs from taking this sooner is an unevenly called game four. You remember that one, don't you? It was the one in which Tim Duncan was actually in foul trouble for once, as well as having been called for two travels on his infamous shuffle step under the basket. It was also the game that hid the free throw shooting disparity of the series and made it look as if the other five games were fairly called. You can read the entry below for information on that.

Are people out there really so full of themselves that they have the ability to ignore indisputable hard evidence that contradicts their own beliefs, simply because someone suddenly decided to call them "experts"? This is as bad as a rich, white politician saying that the only problem with the working poor is that they are simply not working hard enough.

It astounds me that the world is able to function like this.

What scares me the most, I think, is that there are actually people out there who get most of their information from people like Henry Abbott and Kelly Dwyer. Even my imaginary arch nemesis Paul Coro is on the Suns' case in this most perverted example of bandwagon jumping from the site that banned my IP.

The Spurs still have the Suns' number. Phoenix is still nothing more than a great, entertaining regular season team. Playoff basketball is a different brand of ball geared for the physical and clutch.

-Paul Coro Suns beat writer for the Arizona Republic

Isn't it his job to be dissonant going the OTHER way? Maybe he didn't watch the Phoenix Suns gut it out for six games, holding the Spurs to 43.7% shooting over the middle four games (series low 40.3% without Stoudemire and Diaw). Maybe he didn't see Steve Nash turning the Suns bench into the river Nile of Moses' day when the Suns needed his clutch the most. Maybe he didn't see an exhausted Suns team trying their hardest to make a clutch play without the services of its biggest man and free throw machine in game five. And maybe he missed game four altogether, considering that it was the biggest clutch performance by the Suns the entire season.

The one thing these three people have in common is that not a single one of them has a fundamental understanding of the game of professional basketball. For the simple fact that they write about the game for a weekly paycheck, they are three of the biggest offenders in a world gone completely retarded.

I don't claim to be a genius. I left that up to the clinical evaluation. But I will NEVER sit here and toss aside half a story in order to prove my own argument. I have a really nasty habit of looking at all the information available, comparing it, then drawing a conclusion that almost always supports my first hand observations. If my research doesn't support my view, I do one of two things.

1. I don't write about it.

2. I admit my error and move on.

If everyone in the world exercised my discretion, maybe I wouldn't be sitting in a small, dark room typing away on a computer. If fewer people were as ignominiously ignorant as those three "experts", then perhaps I would take the trouble to go outside and make more friends.

As it stands, I would rather not risk a gun to the back of my head.