New York is the city in which I now live; which I now am tasked to love. And really, I’m doing it well these days; trying to repay the gods for all the free passes and second chances they have thus far allotted me. I hope for a few more, of course, but more than that I hope I’ve come far enough to not need one again…At least not the life-changing, mindfucked versions. Those can keep to the past…What I’m saying is that Life is good right now for me. I really can’t complain. For some reason I’m blessed anymore. So what do I do in response? Stand up for folks on the subway; apologize softly when I knock into someone on the street; be mindful of where I’m  blowing my cigarette smoke; turn the music down at night. Love like my life depends on it, it does! We are tasked. All of us are. And I think it is the duty of the priveleged to rise up to the challenge; scream and shout for the Every Man because we are all him sometimes. Or quietly lead by example, for yourself if for no one else. Recognize what your path is leading you toward, and stop halfway to look back. Hell, that’s all They really want. They swear they won’t turn you into a pillar of salt.

So what am I on about? Even I should know. It’s funny, these times. These Times. My personal life is solid. I’m broke as fuck and struggling but not internally and that’s new. The fact that it’s all happening now seems inconsequential. My success is not Life’s Success, even with how much I wish it were. Because life? Life is a real goddamn bitch. A big fuckin’ asshole for the most part, these days. I mean what in the Fuck is happening here? What are they doing? My god! What can I do to stop this?

So what do I do? I write these things out and give them to whomever; anyone worth a damn, but also those I’ve yet to figure out if or not they are. I give them randomly to the other bands at every show I play because that’s my audience and I better fuckin impress, ’cause why not?

I think therein lies my point: no moment is ordinary. Respect the mundane, for there are literally billions of people all over the world that would die for it. Sometimes they already have. Privelege is fuckin deadly, my friends. And they’re trying to make it worse. But they won’t win. Because there are more people like Me than like Donald J Trump.

It seems almost poetic: already an adminstration going down in history with an imperfect corruption not seen by the public since Watergate; already a fledgling president who seems actually mentally ill, growing more so by the day with each new responsibility he didn’t know came with the job. It’s so bad now that we yearn for the days of George W Bush, romanticizing his post-9/11 speeches, and wishing for just simply his questionable tactics and general buffoonery. Already? Let’s not forget how we got here: an oilhungry base; a coal-carrying train so backwards you’d wonder where the caboose could be and feign no surprise that there isn’t one. What’s worse? Is that we had it in our grasp for a moment after the Bush debacle. Let’s not forget a President Obama who felt obligated to Us, and not just to our obtuse safety. Let’s not forget a Good Man who in front of the world loved his family deeply and carried himself with grace and swagger. But let’s not forget the running thread this past half century or so: that for all intents and circumstance, our government has repeatedly engaged in unlawful and immoral warfare that we’ve turned numb toward. Warfare performed by both Liberals and Conservatives. Let’s not forget that there were 26,000 bombs dropped by the United States last year alone in countries we are not even at war with. Yes, we shouldn’t forget the Man who openly cried about that which deserved his tears, but please don’t forget those tears he caused with his recklessness; with his continuation of the Bush decree. Will we never get passed September 11? Is it all still too fresh in our minds? I was 12…I’m 28 now and we’re still randomly pulverizing a people we see as those from Their Side. The Others who hate us so we hate them so we kill them so they don’t kill us…

What are we to learn from all of this in the time between now and whenever Trump and the country and the world completely derail? Perhaps only that Neoliberalism is dead. Conservativism as well. There is no room for those in the middle anymore. Like magnets, we are drawn toward one or the other pole. We up North believe in human rights for everyone as they pertain to a standard of living free, however you define that freedom. We believe in radical peace and prosperity for all people. Them down South believe in defined freedom for anyone whose idea of freedom matches their idea of freedom as it relates to Normalcy and the Status Quo. It isn’t Left and Right these days. Maybe it never was. Maybe it’s always been Right and Wrong, but we just got caught in the semantics of it all: that a beast of burden denies not his weight upon the host but merely transfers that weight to the host itself, each faction rendered false. We don’t need each other. We don’t balance. I suppose all we really need to figure out is at which end of the slide we will each be stationed.

Strive to be a conveyer belt, I suppose. Progress moves forward. Look to the past for precedent and look to the opposition for guidance. One of Us knows what’s going on. Which one? The one who knows the answer to the proverbial ‘Why?’

Do you know? Someone must, right?

Just a Song by Dad’s Typewriter

It isn’t altogether healthy to ignore history as it’s being made. But that’s exactly what I’m doing today. I stayed up late last night; slept in late today. Ate pizza for dinner. Drank Sprite. Scrolled passively through Facebook for what seemed like forever but was probably only a half hour or so. I smoked a little pot and now I’m drinking a beer and listening to records. I am lounging by the proverbial water. And that’s about it.

So what exactly am I doing differently now that Donald Trump is our President? Very little. And that’s important, I think. I mean, what else is there? I want to be marching and yelling and throwing things and breaking windows and setting fires in DC along with my anarchistic brothers and sisters, but that isn’t me. I don’t perceive life through cut glass; I mean, I see reality on this plane for what it is: a cold, bitter hell. And I feel lucky and fucked up and guilty all at once that I have the privilege to sit back on a day like today, smoke a couple cigarettes even though I’ve quit, and pretend nothing will change for me in this hell. It remains such. So what?

It is futile to state, however, because of course everything is changing. As much as people with my mind, set in the Tao for Peace and Love, can put the audacity of our situation into perspective, there is a feeling of revolution in the air. Hundreds of thousands of people this weekend will – with their physical beings collected- declare that They cannot be free with a President Trump. And they’re right. None of us can. We – all of us – are no longer free. But it is the marginalized and disenfranchised who are now in shackles.

I want to help. I want my words, moving forward, to be a hammer and a hacksaw for to cut your chains. I want to set ablaze the notion of separatism, and call the citizens of the world to warm themselves by the flames. I want to break molds set decades ago and aid in the creation of new works of Art for art’s sake. I want to yell forcefully through words on the page that the only thing worth fighting for is the fight to quit fighting. I want to sing with the choirs of all humanity and harmonize with those who speak differently. I want to create music as lovely to you as to myself and call openly for understanding through timbre and cadence. I want to bend the notion that Life’s purpose is to beat ourselves and each other through measures puritan and absurd. I want justice. I want peace. I want…

I want a different man to look to as a Leader. Because, Mr Trump, you are no leader. You are no Man. You are no President. You are no friend to the poor, nor the sick nor the marganalized. You are no hero. You are the worst form of person created in no God’s image. And so even though I took the day off from paying attention, I didn’t take the day off from living, breathing, thinking, knowing. And from this day forward, I vow to Live as well as I can; to sing as loud as I can; and to care as deeply as I can about those now, but not forever in shackles. If we join forces, we can be as mighty as an ocean. Let us mind the tide. As Trump ignores the water.

free download

Hello all,

I hope this post finds you well. I don’t say much outside of spamming your news feeds with art that I’m doing and have done. I do apologize for the sheer volume of it. I know it can be annoying because I annoy myself posting it. Life has given me a lot to say these past five years, and I’m wondering what it all means if not to share it. I’m wondering if it matters in the scheme of existence, but knowing it doesn’t won’t phase me, it seems. Or maybe I just don’t actually know what to say.

These days – for me – it’s a mixture of two extremes. I am, on one hand, about to make the move of a lifetime and join an intelligent, insightful, and altogether graceful and challenging woman in New York City. On the other, I see the greater reality of life on this plane as a crippling one. We have a political discourse all around us with players performing card tricks and calling it magic and they didn’t even produce our card. We have a caustic mess where everyone operates with obstinate and divisive mediocrity, panning the screen for the red herring instead of just fucking listening to the products of reality…we used to call them facts…and discerning with thoughtfulness, compassion, and truth until something is found that is better than the thing we just had. That’s called progress and progress is what America is all about.

America. It’s such a pointless word, really. Pointless unless it is to the world that beacon of goodness, generosity; more than anything, a lightning rod. The whole world looks to us and we’re failing before their eyes.

But even if you don’t think these things and even if you couldn’t care less about me because I think these things, doesn’t mean we can’t find common ground. And that common ground – to me – is Love. In turn, Aleppo. You can’t see videos taken to record one’s last words and not be affected. You can’t see rivers of blood running through streets of a once great city and not cry. And you cannot see children who are beyond such tears, and not want to die not for them, but instead of them.

We feel these things at our core. So I’m left with wanting to do anything at all.

I will, at least, be donating anything I make for the foreseeable future off of my music downloads and book sales directly to UNICEF. Buy things if you want with that knowledge. Or donate to them or any other agency directly. But know very well that if you’re like me and your wallet is empty, we cannot become numb to what we’re seeing. This cannot be reality anymore. We are Americans. And our complacency, yet agency for the world somehow must lead humanity out of this Dark Age.

On a more personal level, I haven’t seen most of you in quite a while. It being the end of the year, I extend to you a merry Christmas and a happy new year. I love a good number of you a good deal and we really should drink beer together before I leave Cleveland in February.

If nothing else, please be mindful of reality. Cherish this often cold, sometimes bitter hell: Life. It is far too prescious to ignore it. We are all in it together. Such clichés can never be not but true.

In love,

Michael

I just don’t know what to say anymore. To disseminate consummate language in the interim doesn’t seem to be enough. Who even knows, really? They’re saying we’re post fact but I and every other thinking person in the world call bullshit. Or at the very least, a collective mind twisted. Conspiracy is one thing, but it’s for the back room at a bar, late at night. It isn’t for our president’s Twitter feed. It isn’t for the intellectual to pursue in any way but the mental masturbation it entails. Barack Obama was always born in Hawaii. Global warming has never been a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese government. And two million illegal votes were not cast in Michigan. These are simple truths in a time of crippling reality, where somehow so many of us have succumb to caustic and dribbling madness, foaming at the mouth at the prospect of screaming Fuck You at a group of others who just happen to share our vicinity but not our vision to get to the same place we both most likely want to end up. We don’t argue. We fight. And that’s a problem.

But it’s a problem of which Donald Trump is now the face. The drunk screaming at you about immigration isn’t drunk and the bar he should be patroning at last call is our national stage. He is a buffoon. He is deranged. But he is not post fact. He’s just a liar. Plain and simple. We are not post fact. Propaganda isn’t to be believed. It is to be smashed by the forces of goodness and decency; of a return to reason and knowledge.

We need justice and mercy in an equal dose. So let’s talk.

Yet if one cannot be convinced by the language he speaks, then there’s an issue. And that issue is not a difference of opinion. It’s of raw ignorance. But when a 5 is a 2 backwards, maybe we just need to hand out more mirrors. I, at least, intend to.

The Day After Election Day

https://thesupposedso.bandcamp.com/album/supposed-covers-volume-iv-ongoing-series

I am currently seated in my kitchen, my life spread out before me in a carefully arranged mess on the table which resides beneath it all. My computer is sliced between two screens; my typewriter sits waiting beside them; my Mackie Monitors as such. There is a plant I only need to water once in awhile huddled on the far side, near the wall, so as to catch whatever sunlight comes in through the window these days. I am surrounded on two sides by art, and that’s the way I like it.

I suppose I should offer you details on me and myself and who I am and who I am in relation to you, so I’ll come right out and tell you that I am a man in my 20s who is wearing an outfit consisting of about 80% Thrift Store garments. The remaining items – my hat and my shoes – were purchased via the internet. My underwear – although I shouldn’t have to say it, but I will because I don’t want you to think I buy them from secondhand stores…I don’t – I got from Target. And don’t say it like, “Tarjey” because ugh.

I like my style. I like it because it suits me. I like it because, though I have a lot of clothes, I don’t often pay more than a couple dollars apiece.

I will forgo the complete back story, but needless to say, these three years I’ve spent in Cleveland have been a time of rebirth; of serendipitous currents; of both despicable and divine mindsets; and through it all, a torrid creative outburst I didn’t know I had in me. But what has been such a stability has been the lifestyle I’ve adopted. And, as an artist, lifestyle is of utmost importance, from the friends you keep to the clothes you wear. It all points to comfort. Cleveland, you are the most comfortable city I’ve ever experienced, in all my time experiencing. I can spent $100 a month on food if I want and eat pretty well. I can buy a pack of cigarettes and get change from a 10. I can live here in my house; I can live in it like a home. I can go to Unique Thrift every Monday and continue to dress myself in garb that projects myself off the mirror back to myself.

But, actually, I can’t do that anymore. Unique has closed. There may be other places to do the same, but nothing like Unique. It’s odd to think about how much a store has meant to me these past three years. I mean, I formed no relationships with the employees, I didn’t really talk to or even notice more than half of the people who were there at any given moment, and I spent less than 10 minutes there per visit. The only thing it has done for me is populate my wardrobe. But for the pure and simple reason that it was in my neighborhood; that it was a beacon of sorts to the low-income population who are now or will soon be priced out of their houses; their homes. Whereas Me? I’m saying another goodbye to a city I’ve lived in. And I’ve never lived longer anywhere than I have here. Parts of six years. Three in a row until right now. Oh, Cleveland. I really do love you. I do.

With Unique closing its doors, there arises an idea in my head about why things are. Where do patterns leach onto? What is the motive? How and why does a thing evolve, be it a neighborhood, a city, a people. Is it the human need for migration? I feel that need almost every day. Gotta be constantly moving through life, even if it’s just your mind running laps as you drift off to sleep. Places, too need an ebb and flow, I guess. Things can’t just stagnate, right? Gotta get some new shit in here.

Maybe the problem with gentrification isn’t it in and of itself. Maybe it’s that it gets so full of itself. I mean, hell I love expensive coffee and juice shops and bars. I have all of those things a stone’s throw from my front stoop right now. And in a way, I’m doing “comfortable” a disservice by leaving it so soon. But I think, just like the neighborhood, some things have to change sometimes. Even if it hurts. There will always be more secondhand stores around. Always. People need someplace to put their old shit so they can buy new shit. Always. I suppose, on some level, that’s what I’m doing by moving to New York. Cleveland is just too easy anymore. And maybe I’m just used to struggling and it has stopped feeling like living since Life has become so even-keeled. I need to feel more. So I’m moving to New York. Where there’s so much coming at you, it would be impossible not to feel its force. Gotta refuel. Gotta throttle high. Gotta test out my gears.

Gotta make room for some new shit.

Acquiring nothing I can’t take with me everywhere else.

What a pleasant day. I have ceased willing my life into perpetuation; stopped forcing myself into a well state of being. You know the way you begin to feel when you’re stuck? like it’s all you can do to repeat another day upon days, binding your thought process to a stiff and controlled existence; of running wild inside yourself until you’re so out of breath that you can feel your organs pulsing, spewing out the tar of the mundane…you cough and sputter in such circumstances. And you tell yourself it’s fine, “this is the way it’s supposed to be. Life is hard” and all that. You know what? Life isn’t hard. I completely and utterly refute such a claim. Life is challenging; at times, difficult. But life? Life is a walk in the park, brother.

But what, then? Life is also brutal. Life is a beast that can be extinguished by the pull of the trigger or the bang of a bomb; of cold machinery brought forth to quell a being or beings into dust. Life is a place where three unarmed men in three different circumstances can be shot dead in cold blood, with theirs rushing from them onto cold pavement. A cold police officer can standly coldly over the dead body he created in a moment of coldness and ugliness in this life. This life? This life is fucked up. The most powerful words in the english language can’t explain away such atrocities, for they are unforgivable, and such are beyond mere casual remarks. The most fucked up thing about it all? is that these things have nothing to do with This Life. This Life is forgiving. This life is just. This Life? this life transcends itself and its real and tangible moments. This Life is waking up next to a beautiful woman. This Life is watching her drive away and already missing her by your side. This Life is warm and full of hope.

So what seperates This Life from that life?

You know the answer already.

I can’t even bring myself to type it, it’s so ridiculous.

Hum drum goodness; a collection of memories being made. Interesting how life becomes itself, unfolding past no seams. A blanket so immense that it covers our infinite grace, guiding us between patchwork to quilt our existence. Maybe we are unending. Maybe our souls flow freely between people and places. And with each day counted, we imagine a brighter sun and it comes. Boy has it come.

Anyway, it’s much – if not all – I can do to bring forth these phrases; these schemes toward no apprehension. I am forever indebted to them. I’m like a tree to its sap: even the mighty have a river flowing through them, discussing amongst itself the portions of warmth we shall be tapped for. One who offers their insides freely must always be kind, always be willing.

Oh, to be like a tree in its unfittered repose!

Oh, to be present in the duvet

I’m twenty-eight now. Just turned. It’s a funny story of life, being young, in your twenties, and people starting to tell you you’re getting old. Seems no one’s ever old at all until they’re too old, you know? There’s getting old, sure, but there’s only one, singular old. And I’m not it. Not yet, anyway. But I like the jokes, really. I’m pushing 30. The big dirty. Maybe not.

Either way, life right now is exactly how life seems to go; there’s a possible crease in the coming months; a folding of two eras with all their geographical influence regarded. A transition, in so many words. We’re all in transition. Everyone. Always. Well, usually…sometimes.

My what a draft of exacerbation; this partial eclipse of some forgotten star with some forgotten moon…to paint it would be to do so with broad strokes, I suppose, but bold and grand, like the traffic in New York, appearing at once sometime ago without regard to the logistics of organization, just sheer ingenuity, and instinct; no feeling, just an intellect designed. And yet the artist lives to exact a replication improved upon, with the taste of the figurative cream obstructed by the real, bland coffee we had no idea was in the mug to begin with…

I toss a metaphor here and a metaphor there to guide me through the muck of my thoughts, for mine do shiver from no shelter at times. Hell, there’s more to my reality than that which contrasts, like the clouds and the sky. Yet, I am still overwhelmed by a caustic depiction of two separate future selves, and at 28, there’s more to my view of a future to write about without stating some things to myself; things which are important for me to hear myself say.

And yet I hear myself think them; I hear myself say them; I record what is heard. And then what? I really don’t know.

And so it goes, hi ho.

What I know to be true – at the very least – is that these times, for you and me and everything in between, existence is in more than transition. We’re evolving. But we’re not getting old. We’re growing up. And that is something for the ages, is it not?

I’m sitting and I’m thinking and so I’m writing. And I feel like I’ve said all this before but I need some sort of in to shed these coils; these imaginary circumstances. Because in my mind’s eye, there is depicted scenes of guns drawn. They fire. They maim. They kill. And when they kill, I am torn down from life; my limbs shaking with the coldness of death. My loved ones in anguish. Myself but a wish through a paradigm, erupting through space. And I snap back to reality. And I cry.

I’m lucky that these are mere visions. These incisions will petrify when I am brought back from my nightmare. I’m lucky. I’m lucky and I don’t believe in luck. A paradox. I believe in The Way. I believe in Truth. I believe in the goddamn American Dream. I believe in Justice. My beliefs have been formed through insight and experience. And I’m fucking right in my beliefs. Because they’re based on Love.

And yet, I do fear you peoples who wish to cause harm to absolutely anyone different than you. Hell, I really do despise your very being; your soul, tainted with the mark of some primal evil. In a sense, it seems to boil down to perception. Yours and Ours. And I believe so many of your perceptions are severely lacking. I believe you’re dead wrong about so much. I believe your wish for everyone to have a gun – but not Them, of course – is juvenile; asinine. Disgusting. You disgust me with your hypocrisy in all things Holy or profane. Your love of the bloodletting, your thirst for some visceral, maniacal, cold-blooded firestorm. You are the oppressor. You are the problem.

But I don’t wish you dead. And I wouldn’t ever. Because no one should be able to make such a decision. So what? We’re all responsible for what we have created. Fuck! What You have created, you monsters! You beasts!

When it’s You, it is my nightmare. And I can’t always tell the difference between the feelings in my own reality and that of these hallucinations. And so I stare at the news and all your beliefs. And weep.

As a player, I can’t even imagine it: Up by four; a two possession game. The championship on the line. An entire city’s hopes and aspirations riding on the back of a few men under the age of forty. A beautiful abomination of sorts; a catastrophe in the making.

As a fan; as a Clevelander; as a person, there is nothing quite like being on that edge: screaming at the screen, knowing deep down that those other humans can’t even begin to hear you, three thousand miles away. Doesn’t matter. Everything falls into place when you put your heart into something.

Now, I’m only 27 years old. As I’ve said before, I am an expert on nothing but the art and craft of writing a song. That’s it, brother. I’m the kid who got cut from his 7th grade basketball team: I could shoot, but I had no confidence; no swagger on the floor. I didn’t remember plays. And, in the end – the end of my sporting career – when I sat the bench Freshman year (and only made the team because there weren’t any cuts), openly cursing the coach for what, in my mind, were his most apparent faults, I came to a close – in my athletic career and as a young man – and whispered to the heavens: “Lord, who am I? I want to be fucking Michael Jordan. No one loves a player more than one on a basketball team. I want it all. A music snob just isn’t enough of a thing to be.”

But, I digress. Because what came to happen was that I, Michael McGuire, 27 year old nobody-yet still cries at the replay of that game the Indians played against the Mariners, August 5, 2001, when we were losing 14-2 heading into the bottom of the 7th. And my all-time favorite Cleveland Indians Lineup, which was, as I recall:

1. Lofton
2. Vizquel
3. R. Alomar
4. Juan Gonzalez
5. Thome
6. Ellis Burks
7. Marty Cordova
8. Will Cordero (?)
9. Einar Diaz

proceeded to not claw their way back, but sprint, curse, spit, dive, make mistakes and get past them and somehow, someway…No, you know what? Not somehow, someway. They won that game because they fucking had to. They were Cleveland. These fans…me. We do it because we aren’t supposed to.

It’s something that should, indeed, make you cry. And you know what? This one – the Cleveland Cavaliers – is both so much better, for obvious reasons, and almost bittersweet for me. Because I do wish it were the Indians. But I fear even putting that down on paper. Because, though I wasn’t at that game…in fact, I was a 12 year old, alone, listening to the radio…I remember leaving a note outside my parents’ bedroom door so my Dad would know what had happened the minute he woke up…

No, tonight was different. I was at Jukebox, and I was sitting to the side of a giant screen constructed on the best patio in Cleveland; amidst over a hundred people, cramped into the tiny bar inside as well…people ordering six drinks at once. Ridiculous. But there was a part of me – fuck, ALL of me – which loved it completely. It’s like that Hold Steady lyric: “I like the crowds at the really big shows…people touching people who they don’t even know, yo…”

It was awesome. But the game itself is what made it what it was…perhaps. I mean, christ, the only team to ever come back and win a Finals down 3-1? Please.

But, then…of course. What could be more quintessential Cleveland? We get pushed, as a city. And sometimes, we overcome all the odds…Fuck! That’s to cliché for this. For this, my friends, is unprecedented.

Tonight…

The energy was palpable. I was screaming at the screen, yes, knowing full well that those young men couldn’t hear me, and I was one with those hundred…200…300…who knows how many people, and we were all in it together. Us against the world. Cleveland. Down and out. A national joke in and out of the sports world. The joke people you met at college told, letting you know that they were from infinitely cooler places than Northeast Ohio.

“Cleveland??” they said, incredulously.

“Yessir,” I always said. Cleveland.

Sitting there, standing there, then jumping there – and screaming there – with those people; we were one. And across the world people could’ve been from Cleveland, in that moment. Cleveland. Always the David to their Goliath.

We got to see the hometown hero; the most reviled person in Cleveland for four long years when we had to watch him win it all – twice – as he copped to the very strategy everyone from Cleveland fucking hates: Buying into a team of superstars instead of a unit. And it was “Fuck you, man. Fuck you ‘King James’. That’s not fucking Cleveland. We’re a grower, man. You flat out gave up on the very people you set out to conquer with Goodwill, and – yes – greatness. Hell, we knew you were great when you were in High School, man.”

But in true fashion of the epitome of what Cleveland has become, Mr. King James made himself a man through sheer determination; attitude. He came back – because HE CAME BACK – with the swagger of someone who had been there, done that. He had been the driving force behind a winner and in the crazy reality of a “cursed” and once forgotten, but no longer forgotten, yet, still perpetually ridiculed city, he went to work.

And I’m not gonna lie to you. I fully expected the Cavs to win 70 games either one of the last two years. And instead, the Warriors won the championship; the Warriors went about setting regular season records. And the Cavs seemed left with supposedly shivering team chemistry, and an ousted head coach, fired mid-season even though they were first in the conference.

This team IS Cleveland at its most impeccable. Down 3-1 against the best team in history. They became sprinting, spitting, fighting, trash-talking overachievers. Until with seconds left, the man – Lebron – appeared to break his wrist before proceeding to put the nail in the coffin of the Warriors, at the free throw line. Lebron, you are Cleveland. There’s a reason this all happened like this for your city.

For me, personally? I am forever left with the feeling of the evening: The color of the sky pointed out by Allie; the full moon; it being Fathers’ Day; of talking to an older gentleman – Dave – about that comeback the Indians made against their Best Team Ever. Together, we lamented that the Indians winning the World Series would be that much sweeter. But when the Cavs let the clock run out on the greatest achievement in basketball history; when Lebron James fell to the ground, weeping for what he had just led to the finish line, and, finally, holding up the only trophy his team had ever won – the first trophy for a major sports team in Cleveland since 1964 – I hugged that man; high-fived strangers; kissed the love of my life after having held her so close as a major life moment – a typical Cleveland nail-biter – collapsed into and through my heart, beating. In that moment, I was infinite. We all were. All of us at Jukebox. All of us in Cleveland. All of us who know, deep down, that we are just as good if not better than those punks in 7th grade who we knew we were just as good as, if not better than. We as a city, we made it known through a 48 minute basketball game that whenever someone tells you that you aren’t good enough; that there’s always gonna be something holding you back, even if it isn’t a dramatic gotcha moment like The Drive; The Fumble; The Shot; and, yes, folks, The Decision…our team – our hero – showed that there are no absolutes in such conditions. You can be down so far that it looks like it’s the end. And, in true, Cleveland fashion – true Human Passion – you can always decide to simply allow your swagger to evolve, becoming the person you can be. And do it with Greatness. With muscle. With flat out Determination, attitude, and presence. We can be and are Lebron James in one form or another. We are the Cavaliers. We have all spent time with crushing pressure from a nervous, and impatient judgment. We all have wanted to rip of what defines us, like He did with his own jersey after the last game he played as a Cav the first time around. And, as Clevelanders; as People, we will all return from dismissal and treat our fans to the feeling we all feel right now in the wake of such a beautifully Cleveland act of defiance.

Best team ever? Welcome to the real world.

Where Cleveland and her James are King.