An oddly plausible theory on LeBron's return #illuminati #lafamilia

As I walked back to work from Walnut Wednesday today, I put on the old iPhone.  I'm not too embarassed to admit that I have a potential LeBron's return pump up playlist.  It's mostly music from the LeBron era in Cleveland that I associated with the NBA and Cavs games (for instance "Put On" by Young Jeezy- the intro song they played at the Q back then).  Among them is "Run this Town" by Jay-Z, featuring Rihanna and Kanye.  There's a line in the first verse I had to relisten to, and it made me rethink the whole song.  Context determines meaning friends, and this song has a new meaning for me today.

Pause though.  Before I jump into the song itself, there was a little uproar when twitter realized this:

As far as I've been able to tell, those are the only three NBA player twitter profiles with La Familia on them.  It's kind of a stretch, but we're talking about the game of shadows that is NBA free agency.  Every clue is a lead and every lead is a leak. 

Back to Run this Town:  Near the end of the first verse, Jay-Z says "This is la familia, I'll explain later, but for now let me get back to this paper."    You'll see that it doesn't make a ton of sense in that context either.  Whatever it means, it seems our only hope for an explanation is Jay-Z's eventual story. 

Whether or not Jay-Z does indeed explain later is immaterial.  In the context of Run This Town it seems that La Familia is talking about the way a group of people do things to "run this town" and "get back to runnin circles round these (expletive omitted)" 

LeBron and Jay-Z have something of a relationship.  Whatever it is is fairly unclear, but you can be certain LeBron's a fan of the music.  I'm sure he's heard "run this town" plenty of times. 

Could he have adopted the thinly veiled "code word" from Jay-Z (who, it should be said, features two of his most prominent label mates in the song.  Kanye and Rihanna are the two most readily described as the "we" in "la familia")?  Could LeBron be telegraphing something based on "Run this Town?"  It's possible.  I don't know if its probable.  But LeBron's had a well-documented longing, establishment, and loyalty to his family and friends.  He wrote a book about it.  His twitter profile and website drip with it. 

I don't know if its far fetched or a little bit genius- Run This Town turned 5 years old two days before the NBA draft.  Who remembers a throwaway Jay-Z line from one of his worst albums?  LeBron would, if he's longing to get back to Cleveland and join la familia.

This is all probably hogwash.  But the best part about all of this is that some people might think it's true if LeBron comes back.  Half of us get to be right no matter how much we're making up. 

That's the best and worst thing about NBA free agency and twitter.

-Zack

Beneath the Starry Threshold

I was looking back through old entries just now, trying to pinpoint when I did my first blog redesign, about this time last year.  Last year I was entering my last full month of college as March unwound.  I could go on and on about how I was wrong and right in surprising ways about life now, and about what I know now and didn't then and all that's happened since, and all that.  A general catch up reminiscence post, and maybe I'll do one of those someday, but not today, not right now, because, though I resist it as much as I can, I'm realizing a theme to my writing, and I guess, if my writing has to have a theme, I'm honored to have this one: Betweenness.  Liminality.  Indefiniteness symbolized by spacial uncenteredness.  As college came to an end, I felt the betweenness of life's changing tide, the now and not yet of there and the rest of my life.  As it turns out, circumstances change but I still feel the sharp pangs of betweenness and I'm kind of a walking example, at least in my own mindset, of the livability of the post-modern ideal.  I don't know if there can be such a thing as the post-modern ideal, but if there is, it is the ability to live liminally.  That's not to say it is to be tried for- it is to say that we all live liminally and are at our best when we fully acknowledge that we're between centers at all times and can't really know anything about the centers till we step back and let ourselves exist between them.  And that's what I do.  That's what I've been doing for at least a year, subconsciously and most definitely super-consciously at times.  That's not to brag, well, maybe it is a little bit but I don't mean it to be...it's just that I've thought recently, quite a bit, that I've felt the most in-between things in life as I ever have, and reading through what I wrote last year, I wonder if that's true or if I'm simply more aware of it now than ever before (perhaps largely brought on by the forced introspection of forcing myself to average one post per day during lent save for Sundays).  I do know I'm living and feeling in between many things now, but I have been for awhile.

But that's life in this world, between many things.  Ultimately though, it's a direct analog to the now and not yet that is the Kingdom of God.  There are parts of it here, there are elements ongoing.  But they pale in comparison to what is to come, and we're constantly between those facts.

There is however, one center that is constant and our own disparateness with it is our own shortcoming.  Hope in that, hope in Him, is the fuel to fire the engines of a life stuck between many things thanks to the brokenness of our suffering world.  But it's not eternal, and if nothing else, that's where we can get our hope.  I'm not positing the value of inbetween living, just pointing out its existence, because we're all always in between and we're all always in process and we always will be til He returns.  But He loves us and will not withhold all blessings prior to that day.

Even so, right now, I'm between many things, and he wants me to be that way for the time being, and when that time is up, I'll be between other things.

Last night I went on a very impromptu stargazing trip with 4 students at the University of Findlay.  My love for that particular institution and city will have to wait for another hypothetical post that may never take place.  I don't know that it matters the context, but looking up at the stars, even in our attempts to objectify them as our own constellations, always makes me feel small and warm and filled with wonder, like a child in his or her mother's arms not long after birth; there's a rightness and a warmth to the smallness and the fulfillment from the experience.  Somehow, gazing up, I don't feel inconsequential despite the vastness of the universe.  I feel small compared to its largeness, but I feel close to it all the same, and somewhere in that lies the love that passes all understanding, because the God that made all of that still loved us enough to not just die for us, but to come here in the first place, from up there where, even if not literally heaven that is the heavens of outerspace, I'm sure the stars look more brilliant.

-Zack

"I want to know if you feel the same way, cause if you do I want to stay forever"
-Ween