#believing dirk is the worst guy because its what dirk thinks of himself | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

borzoilover69 · 22 days

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do you have any posts that kinda expand on jake as a character? i want to like him in theory, but i just dont Get him, you know? its kinda like that with me for all the alphas but its the most for jake.

Oh my gosh yes!! Yes i do!! Heres some i recommend rather than me typing at length points more articulately said before or by someone else. Please please PLEAAASE message me again after you’ve read some of these and tell me if your opinions changed and what you think you get abt him!!

Jake English writing guide - expansion on his mannerisms. : a rhetoric of shit hes said that made me side eye him.

Jake english: a fandom analysis : long discussion i had with two friends abt jake

Facade, dirk and jake: small but to the point

Jake english is a jackass, not an infant.

Why tony artreactor likes jake

Harlenglishes: “when you fuck up its ok! if i fuck up its the worst thing in the entire world.”

Not required but recommended:

His ass was not being serious with these comments man. : the caliborn jake convo is my fave out of these.

Alpha kids and why i like them : personal opinion alert

Other than that i asked my friend @tipsygnostalgy their opinion on jake and they gave these wise words (roughly paraphrased)

“for me jakes appeal is fundamentally about whether humanity can overcome their own insecurities in terms of engagement with others and grow to accept true love in this essay ill be pushing him into the neongenesisangelion shinji ikari role and analyzing him thr—

Kidding, but listen. The first sentence is the crux of it. He constructs personas (believing in himself but the facade version of it) and relies on hope ketamine (believing in others) because its easier to do than to confronting the reality that he doesnt know who he is or whether he likes that person at all. This doesnt mean he lacks a self; he cant fully break but he cant fully give either. he exists in this weird limbo state where he chooses neither to be completely passive (actually letting someone walk all over him) nor completely active (refusing it outright) demonstrated best by the way in which he "breaks up" with dirk i.e. he doesnt.

He doesnt like the status quo but also doesnt believe in himself to fix it proper and i think that signifies how a lot of people make decisions when youre in this weird passive middle area. the world fucking sucks but what can you do about it, youre just one guy. No business knowing how to do that. On the other hand the way he plays people should be studied.

the jane crocker patented question of "Does he know?" is what he asks himself every night and its so utterly interesting that hes not sure of the answer”

#homestuck #hom3stuck #jake english #borzoi talks #asks #borzoi meta #homestuck meta

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nutzworth · 1 month

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heres a little my thoughts on the dirkjake of the modern day

as is apparent the dirkjake scene is preoccupied with cannibal violence evil dirkjake. its evil dirkjake all the way down but this era is VIOLENT. its blood and guts and viscera. this was spawned by respected tumblr user borzoi who i also respect and admire a lot.

HOWEVER. on instagram my wonderful mutual was like I dont really like the cannibal dirkjake goings on. and i respect and admire my mutual a lot too is the thing. unnamed cus i dont want even a semblance of threat of discourse between users (even though i know both parties would NOT engage in such a thing).

ANYWAY: my thoughts? before i knew about cannibal dirkjake i was a big fan of dirk being the worst freak ever and jake being hesitant or careful. something about it speaks to me. it speaks to how overwhelming dirk is, how much jake is a people pleaser even if he personally doesnt want to do something. i dont think jake deep down would WANT to do violence to dirk the guy he loves. i think dirk would want jake to do violence to him though because it feeds his self loathing. and thats subconscious for him but i think in a corner of his mind he knows it, but it just fuels it more and its so addicting. this is to say; dirk wants jake to cannibalize him, and jake is like Um. haha. What? Um. You want that? Really? Wont it hurt?

and of course i could be wildly misreading jake as a character. but you know whos to say. the thing about jake is that he could go any which way postcanon because he built up all these pretenses and now theyre all crumbling (i read this somewhere... dont remember where. maybe tomatograter.) . ive read fics obviously where jake wants to kill hurt maim dirk and dirks cool with it (even playing a little hard to get. tsundere if you will) (SORRY.) but like... they all displayed jake as this villain or monster which he CAN be but ugh. ugh. REAL jake english? real postcanon jake english?

perhaps its that hes as i believed him at the beginning of postcanon. up through epilogues and hs2. i think it would take him millenia to get over himself. i think lord jake english or ultimate jake would totally kill murder maim. i dont think regular jake would. i think thats where i am right now

since im on a roll: i definitely think dirk would want to get eaten or killed by his lover cus of aforementioned reasons. i think he would feel so terribly bad about cannibalizing his partner or even killing them, especially if its jake. hes so CAREFUL around jake is the thing. hes afraid he will be too much again. but he cant keep being careful thats not who he is. i think dirk thinks killing his lover is a selfish move on his part and he doesnt want to be like, too much, so hes like The best way to do this. Is to do it on Jakes call. and so jake has to be the one to eat him.

though in a scenario where they are killing each other theyd be fighting mutually already... i dont know. i guess i have a hard time picturing them fighting in general it doesnt interest me much. im a sucker for passive aggressiveness and unspoken signs and miscommunication and SILENCE. its what im accustomed to. and assuming the two of them live in perhaps the same place, theres just this unspoken weird gap between them neither can cross, its hard to believe either can kill or cannibalize the other. UNLESS dirk confronts jake like I want this. Kill me please jake. You have to decapitate me. in which case it will be awkward and weird and i spoke about this.

what the hell am i on about? thats my thoughts on the cannibalistic dirkjake sitch. I know theyre crazy i just... i dont know... its my thoughts... i have a lot of thoughts about dirkjake ok.

#me #homestuck #jesus i need to tag them dont i.#dirk strider #jake english #gross. i hate being places #sorry if this is incoherent or anything. im not saying any of this is cold hard truth this is so my opinion #this is what im doing instead of meaningful dirkjake week anything i guess #sigh. such is the way of the world

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stormsbourne · 5 years

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the dirk thing and why it’s just bad storytelling

as promised.

there’s three (possibly more, but three big ones) popular reads on what’s Up With Dirk in the epilogue and every single one of them is garbage storytelling-wise and I’m here to prove it. let’s lay these fuckers out.

theory one: dirk has just realigned his priorities upon becoming his ultimate self and thereby more obsessed with puppetmastering everything around him

this theory on its face is fine, but like, here’s the problem: does that dude sound like dirk strider to you?

does “I told you that you can’t be nice to jake” dirk sound like the same character as canon dirk, who says he treated jake horribly and ought to stay out of his life from now on because he deserves to live a happy and safe life? does a dirk who never even talks to roxy and refuses to gender her correctly sound like the same character who said he would do anything for her, would cut off his own dick before hurting her, and wishes he could give her everything she deserves?

does super puppetmaster mind controller via narrative dirk sound anything like that guy who gets flustered when people are bemused by his rambling? or, you know, the guy who asked infamously, “hello is this dave?” you know. the guy who cut off his own head to save his friends. that sound like this dirk? this dirk who convinces his daughter’s wife that rose doesn’t love her anymore? this dirk who point blank violates jake’s agency to force him to endorse jane? does the dirk who is asked point-blank by a shard of himself “aren’t you afraid to die just like me” sound like the one who kills himself to villainously consolidate power in another timeline?

again, on its face, this theory isn’t horrible. there’s a good meaty story to be told with stuff like how immortality and omniscience can corrupt morality. but the entire thing is that the dirk we have in the epilogue is irreconcilable with the dirk we have in canon, even if he’s been corrupted by omniscience. omniscience makes dirk stop caring about his friends? start thinking he knows more about gender shit than them? decide that jake, who he wanted to give space because he thought he’d been so unkind and controlling, is a childish infant who needs to be babysat and treated like garbage?

there’s some things that are beyond “omniscience corrupts” and ic writing is one of them.

theory two: caliborn has corrupted dirk’s soul via the shard of him that was merged with lord english

this one also isn’t bad on its face. I was initially thinking that it was the intended read but the more time has gone by the more it just doesn’t seem ... right.

is caliborn controlling dirk? if that’s the case, why does he still sound like dirk? why is he deploying the same witticisms as dirk might? picking the same fights over stupid shit that caliborn wouldn’t care about, like whether swords make noise on being unsheathed? (caliborn would fucking love that are you kidding?) why are his mannerisms the same?

or is he just brainwashed by caliborn? in that case, why associate with his friends at all? why puppeteer jane into a position he seems to sincerely believe she’ll be good at? why even have an on-again-off-again with jake, whom caliborn seems to think isn’t worth anything that isn’t being his servant and possibly his fated rival? why deploy the lines about jake breaking his heart? why involve rose in his schemes when caliborn is infamously unfond of women and never bothers with them? I can see the “doc scratch fucks with women” thing coming here and like, look, we’ll get to the “dirk is corrupted by his own damn self” thing in a second but we’re talking about caliborn, not scratch, for the moment.

there’s some stuff intended to point to this theory, but it’s largely scraps and, in my opinion, is probably stuff just laid out in case andrew decides he wants to write a third part and undo all this garbage. it’s always been a part of his writing style to plant hooks and decide if he wants to use them later. sometimes he does, like with the kanaya vampire stuff. sometimes he doesn’t, like the wizardy herbert meta stuff. that’s all this is. but in this case, it’s awkwardly and nonsensically written. it doesn’t line up with either of the characters’ motivations and it doesn’t fucking make sense.

on to number three.

theory three: dirk was corrupted by his own worst selves such as bro and AR

again. fine on its face. but let’s talk about the other dirks we see in the comic, because we see a lot of them.

there’s exactly one that we see which is pretty inarguably a bastard, and we know almost nothing about him. we don’t know his life circumstances. we don’t know why he’s fucking like that. we don’t know if he’s influenced by lord english or if he’s just a goddamn asshole. we’re told by canon -- by dave specifically -- that this doesn’t matter. we’re not really supposed to care.

there’s also scratch, but scratch is the product of an eternity-long merger with caliborn and a few other people. could this have influenced dirk? maybe, I guess. but dirk isn’t acting like scratch, either. he’s acting like himself. a very ridiculous version of himself that I don’t think is especially in character, but he’s written as someone trying to do dirk. his witticisms and his slang are the same. his mannerisms are the same.

now let’s talk about the others.

we see a few significant other dirks in canon, but it’s implied there are dozens or maybe hundreds of them working behind the scenes, left like fingerprints on everything he touches. but here’s the big ones: brain ghost dirk, brobot, autoresponder, game over dirk, and the ghosts of all the other canon dirks who didn’t become the main timeline version, like the one we see in remem8er.

there’s only one of these ones that is an asshole. and even then, it’s a stretch to call the autoresponder “evil.” a bit cruel, sure. but he’s largely a victim of circumstance lashing out against those circumstances, angered by his lost identity and his lack of autonomy. he lashes out at “the real” dirk, but in his main moment of vulnerability, he admits he’s terrified, just like dirk, and that he doesn’t want to die.

the others are largely goodguys. brain ghost dirk is a bit brusque and tends to reflect jake’s negativity back at him, but still has dirk’s soft core and instincts. brobot spars with jake, but also rips out his own heart so jake can use it. game over dirk glitch-kills himself not out of some villainous ploy to gather power elsewhere, but because he is the lone survivor of a disaster and he loses himself to despair.

so how is it that two bad dirks, out of a pool of possibly thousands of them (depending on how many split timelines the alpha kids had), corrupt the entirety and drive dirk into being a fucking monster? we know nothing about bro; how are we meant to infer that this is how bro would act? dirk is still acting like himself, not the way we’ve seen scratch act. but there are dozens of other dirks who are good people, struggling just like he is to be a good person.

and they all just happen to lose?

somehow?

it feels cheap. it feels dissatisfying. it feels like a lie and cheap drama manufactured for edgy gasps and upset readers.

conclusion

actually, I don’t have a good conclusion to this post. but I want to establish my beefs with dirk aren’t just because I love him, they’re because the storytelling around his stuff is shoddy. I actually like the concepts of several things the epilogue does, including multiple unreliable narrators, but the way it’s been maneuvered is clumsy and nonsensical for any of the justifications people have come up with. I understand people want to come up with a reason why this happened and possibly a way it might not suck as much, but it’s.

it’s just bad fam.

sometimes things are just bad.

#homestuck epilogue posts

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treeprince · 5 years

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this dirk is the worst possible outcome for dirk that is "apparently inescapable" because of his godtier and I say fuck that.

OKAY, DOING THIS FOR THE SECOND TIME BECAUSE MOBILE ATE MY FIRST VERSION. get ready for a lot.

you’re right, this is the Worst possible version of a Dirk there could be, and that's why im not buying that its dirk from canon at all, and in fact, this can of wriggling earth noodles is about to bust wide the fuck open so bare with me for a sec, i am not entirely coherent and never have been or claimed to be otherwise so strap in bc im on mobile, tw for epilogue spoilers and a lotta bullshit (and mentions of suicide)

let me repeat myself: this is not our Dirk.

it’s a dirk, but it’s not the dirk. it’s a false dirk, a dirk facade for someone else, if you will. this dirk can’t be The Dirk because the rules governing the Ultimate Self don’t deal in inevitables, they deal in pure essence; the Ultimate Thingness of a thing. who or what defines that Thingness though? word of god? cultural signifier?

if you think it’s word of god, youd be wrong, and if you think its signifier, youd also still be wrong.

perception; perception defines thingness, perception defines self, perception defines truth. we are always perceiving, and always building biases based on those perceptions. we test and we test and we test those truths until we believe we have reached The Truth, but it will only always be A Truth. no one person can perceive of The Truth without bias, and thats been said a hundred different ways by a hundred different people who have lived before and will live after us.

toting this dirk to be the Ultimate and Inescapable Dirk is ultimately(lol) flawed, because this dirk is made of so many other characters- Hal, Bro, Caliborn, possibly even BGD- muddying the Dirk essence at it’s core. it therefore cannot be the Real Dirk that would make up his Ultimate Self. (same goes for rose and dave in this, too; those ascensions are more absolutes being presented as Truths, when they’re not. they’re ult dirk’s perception of rose and alt calliopes perception of dave)

we already have evidence that our dirk does not exist in this Ultimate Self because he is not struggling with these absolutes the way we know he would and does. his Ultimate Self is pure acceptance of his perception of what must be done to continue the propagation of Skaia across all time and space. and i dont think i have to tell you that the Real Dirk would never accept a version of reality wherein he vilifies himself to secure its continued existence at the expense of his relationships and their happiness, nor would be be okay with its dissemination of self through absence, i.e. cutting himself out of the picture in the candy plot so he can’t influence it’s outcome or change its course, which in turn just leads back to that ‘version’ of him being zipped right up into Ult Dirk. his suicide is not Just, by any means, that’s just more bullshit absolutes being spewed down like so much garbage from his Ult Self being mad that any dirk would relinquish control of the narrative.

i dont think id be alone in saying that our dirk would not be amenable to this version of himself, and in fact, would be pretty pissed to be erased from these events as they unfolded. sure the guy is afraid to exist, but he’s not afraid to not exist, or be “relevant”, like so many other Dirk splinters out there are, and his Ult Self is very much afraid of being “irrelevant”. hence, the takeover of the “plot”, the self-proclaimed Godhood, the wacky oocness of everyone as the story falls apart around the few people who can see what’s going on bc they still exist in canon.

but! this choice is all being presented to us by cherubs, who have only a basic understanding of human emotions, but dont know how they actually work, and their dichotomous nature is entirely at play here, delivering absolutes with impunity. inevitables have always been cherub bullshit, is what im saying, which is why im not ascribing any of this Ultimate Self to our dirk. it’s not his ultimate self at all, it’s the Least Self of a Dirk there could possibly be, shadows of shadows.

and thats why im not buying this whole “dirk will inevitably be a villainous bastard” bullshit. make of this as thou wilt, im fuckin off to work now where real life goes on and the actions of certain individuals have only strengthened my love for this character, seeking happiness where i can and providing courage to the ones who cant.

yall can pry Dirk Strider’s character from my cold dead hands if youre brave enough, and im feelin p fuckin courageous in this chili’s tonight

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dnowit41 · 6 years

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Letting Go of Dirk Nowitzki and Remembering Greatness

By Andy Tobo

The most important shot of Dirk Nowitzki’s life before 2011 was, of all things, a driving, baseline layup, Manu Ginobili’s hand on his wrist like someone trying to hold back history.

At the time it meant everything, and it should have meant more. It didn’t because of what happened in the Finals, and history swung away. After 2011, though, there were so many shots, and I almost feel like I remember them all. That game against OKC where a visibly frustrated Scott Brooks spread out a cornucopia of bigs for Dirk to roast, on his way to 48 points on only fifteen attempts. That three-pointer that arced so high it talked to god before coming down to barely bother the net on its way through. In the Finals, it happened almost every game. When it was all over, when the dust had settled, Dirk had secured his place in the basketball cosmos at the tender age of 32.

It should have happened earlier, a statement that has nothing whatsoever to do with Bennett Salvatore and whether Dwyane Wade deserved what he got. Had the rest of the NBA simply been watching Dirk between 2006 and 2011, which they would have had things gone better, they would have seen him average roughly 25 points a game while shooting .489/.391/.897, despite being so much the focus of other team’s defensive schemes, I’d be surprised if their coaches spent five minutes on anyone else.

And he did it with less: himself. A modern marvel of German engineering, Dirk is now sixth all-time in scoring despite shooting, on average, less than sixteen times a game (15.9). Jordan shot 22.9, LeBron is at 19.6, Kobe was at 19.5, and even Kareem, who also played forever, is at 18. He is one of the three or four deadliest offensive weapons in the game’s history, while taking about as many shots per season as Khris Middleton had last year.

He did so much with less, but the less counted against him, for so long, because he didn’t have the ring. He didn’t have a Kobe for his Shaq or vice versa, he didn’t have a David Robinson, or a Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker. If the guys he did have look comparable, today, for most of that time, it is almost exclusively because they were on his team, which gave them shots they hadn’t had since high school. You can’t find a guy who was important on the Mavs of the 2000s who is known for what he did after Dallas, and there’s a reason for that. Only nobody believed us.

The reality of Dirk

There’s nothing I believe in more than the fact that some day, some one will develop a stat that shows the reality of Dirk, how much more he did than the eye could see. It will explain how one great player took a team that, for example, started the first game of the 2006 Finals alongside Josh Howard, Jason Terry, Adrian Griffin, and DeSagana Diop to 145 playoff games and eleven straight seasons with 50+ wins.

I sometimes think he’d have been appreciated more if his teams were worse, like Kevin Garnett’s were, and like KG was. As if by making his teams better than Garnett’s wolf pups, he made it look too much like it couldn’t be mostly him. As if it’s somehow inexplicable how a titanic offensive force like Dirk would seem to be playing with better offensive players than a merely (sorry) really good offensive player like Garnett, by virtue of the shots that came their way. But then, in 2011, for no reason other than that his luck finally shifted, all that changed, and it has stayed changed. Nobody in the NBA is more universally beloved and appreciated than Dirk Nowitzki, now that his career is almost done. But 32 is too old for a basketball player to become famous and – unlike the rest of us, of course – he has since become older still.

Still, it might not have happened at all. It certainly didn’t look like it could when the series started – this was Mavs-Heat II, of course, but this was the mutant, Monstars version of what they had once been. It certainly didn’t look like it as the waning minutes of Game 2 ticked down, under the tense gaze of a scoreboard that showed a 15-point deficit, with a Game 1 loss already in the books. It certainly hadn’t looked possible before Game 2, when the Mavericks announced that, in addition to the loss of the game, Dirk would thereafter be suffering through a torn ligament in his left hand and a hundred degree fever. But it happened, starting with Game 2. The lead vanished. And with four seconds left, Dirk bounced right, rolled left, ducked between Chris Bosh and LeBron James, and hit a layup over Udonis Haslem with his broken left hand.

That night I said to myself the first time something I’ve told myself a hundred times since: sometimes, you have to hope even though there’s no reason to hope. And even when it isn’t safe to hope. And even though it hurts to hope. For the last three years I was caught in the waves of a brutal job market, never knowing where shore was. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think of giving up many times during that period, or that I think it ultimately worked out simply because I didn’t. But I wouldn’t have been able to make it through the worst times if I hadn’t been able to say to myself sometimes you have to be able to hope even when there is no reason to hope.

Reflecting on twenty plus years

I wanted to say something about a career that’s almost over. I don’t really know how. I want to say that if you just tuned in, in 2011, you were already too late. It’s not that Dirk in his early thirties wasn’t in some ways the best version of himself. The absolute best offensive players – and in my memory, only Dirk and LeBron have really gotten here – don’t beat you just by hitting impossible shots, they beat you with their complete mastery of the game. It’s a very hard thing to do, putting an entire team’s defense just where you want it, but that’s what they do, and did – they are planetary masses, shaping the gravity of the court, a higher basketball power. Nothing they do looks hard because they are where they want to be and you are where they want you to be.

That was certainly the Dirk who won the championship. Other than three-point percentage, nothing stands out about his 2011 numbers. Over his 145 playoff games, he averaged 25.3 and 10 while shooting .479/.892/.365, and in 2011 for the season it was 27.7 and 8.1 while shooting .488/.941/.460. But 32-year-old Dirk put the game in a cauldron and boiled all the fat off of it. Before you knew it, he’d have his back on you. If you jumped when he turned, he’d brush past you for a layup, and if you didn’t — and even most of the time when he did — he’d hit a jumpshot over you. And if you fouled him, he’d still make it, and hit the free throw. Simple as that.

But you can’t even imagine what Dirk used to be able to do. Even people who followed his entire career, as I did, can’t, anymore. I have this theory that we literally can’t help understanding a player’s entire career in terms of their current level of play. Kobe, who was at his worst an inefficient chucker hid how unbelievably deadly he had been by becoming more so over time — but resembling himself so much in the process that it was too hard to tell the difference. Dirk, too, is hiding behind himself. For one thing, people remember him, as they do all European players, as an outside shooting, light rebounding kind of big, but it’s just not true.

From 2003 until 2013, he took fewer than 23 percent of his shots from three every single year and all but three of those years, under 20 percent. He never averaged double-digit rebounds, but he grabbed 9.9 two years in a row, and believe me when I say that when it mattered, he was getting that board. In his one and only playoff matchup with Kevin Garnett, in 2002, he averaged over fifteen boards a game. When the Mavs beat Sacramento to make their first Western Conference Finals the next year, he grabbed 11, 12, 20, 11, 15, 12, and 19, then 15 in the first game against the Spurs — to go with 38 points on 10-of-19 shooting. Over his career, in playoff elimination games, he averaged 27.6 and 10.9.

Go watch a YouTube video some time — even those of us who remember, forget.

But I also want to say — as strongly as I can — that it doesn’t really matter. One half of a player’s career faces outwards, to the world. Do what you want with that part, I can’t stop you. But the other half faces in, towards those of us who were part of it. When a player matters to you, you own a little part of their career, and it becomes a part of your own story. For Dirk and Dallas, for those of us of a certain age, that’s more true than it’s been for almost anybody in the history of sports.

Every other character in the Dallas sports scene over the last 20 years has a bit part, compared to Dirk, and certainly nobody has 20 years. Tony Romo was the main QB of the Cowboys for about eight seasons, which is how long Adrian Beltre has manned third base for the Rangers. And it’s how long the JET was our shooting guard, before moving on. Twenty years. I was 13 when he showed up, all legs and elbows, and I am 33 now. Forgetting Dirk Nowitzki, after this season, after ten more seasons, after as many as I breathe air on this earth, would be like forgetting my own life. Do what you want, with the part you have. For me, I can see it all at once, like that long, dim corridor the players come out of, stretching backwards into shadows we cannot see. I see him coming out of that tunnel, at 20, 25, 30, 35, with different haircuts, a slowly dissolving gait. Maybe he will come out of it 80 more times.

Knowing how to live

It’s not enough, and it is. What I want you to know is that there will come a time, believe me, when you will wish everything had lasted longer. There will even come a time, not long now, when you begin to feel it while it’s happening. You will lose your youth, and some of those you love, and many more of those you love will be very far away. You will never have enough conversations with your parents, or your spouse, or your siblings. Some days, every minute I spend with my wife I think that I could never get enough of this, but time won’t stop passing. My heart could burst with it. It won’t stop being true. If “growing up” means anything at all it means finding the courage to go on, knowing how much will end, how soon. It’s a skill no one gains gladly.

But when that time comes you will know how to live, most days, with what has happened, as if it were enough. I could wish that I were in the middle of Dirk’s career, with ten productive years to go, and I also can’t live with the thought that they’d go any other way. I wish he had more rings, which easily could have happened, and he could easily have gone without having any at all.

I wish more people knew him, faster, but they know him now. He meant things to me no other player ever will — if I am less involved in basketball than I was seven years ago, and I am, it is at least 90 percent because I know that no sporting event could ever again make me as happy as Dirk Nowitzki getting the ring he deserved, in the most improbable fashion, against the most improbable team.

All I can wish, then, is that you will have, from sports, at least the bright days I have already had. Life is cruel, some stories will not end well, or will be too short — perhaps even yours, and certainly many around you. Some people are born at the end of an age, expecting the stability their parents enjoyed. I have already lost many friends, and relatives, and loved ones. I will lose many more. And all of us, if we live, outlive our strength. But maybe you don’t need a second chance when the first one was so beautiful.

This is the long goodbye. So is every day of your entire life, and this matters a lot less. But it mattered to me, and it’s a part of me, and that’s enough. I am lucky I grew up with Dirk Nowitzki, and it won’t ever have been any other way. It never won’t feel cruel, in some ways at least, to wake up where you are, and not where you were, whole landscapes of time suddenly stretching out beyond you. Because we want to hold on to some things forever. Because what we lose in time is truly lost, but we always feel like we just had it in our hands. Because we always think it will stay where we put it, that we will find it again if we just look where we remember it was.

In the end, the two things we can’t change are the past and what the past has done to us. What we have, we have paid for, one way or another. In this case, for Dirk, it was the hours and days in the gyms, for me the days and decades of hoping against hope and mostly losing. We are all sadder than we used to be, but maybe tougher, too. We are hopefully wiser, and everything leaves its marks on our skin. We are heavy with time, or we are growing heavier, and there is no other way it could be. What we own that no one can see — that’s what no one can take.

I am ready to watch Dirk play what is likely the last season of his career, as I never thought I would be. He is safe, his story already has a happy ending, and that part of my life, therefore, does too. We have held on to each other as long as we can, and it has been enough. Other things, I will never let go, until time pries the fingers from my hand. Some things you should never lose gracefully. And sometimes you have to hope, when there is no reason to hope. Either way, there is nothing we can do but keep jogging out of the tunnel until our time is up. We can live with that, and I can live with this. Ready or not, here it comes.

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