I’d caught a habit, over the preceding year, of picking out cities through the windows on nighttime flights. It started on those semimonthly trips to D.C., looking out an hour in and seeing the sprawling black that must be Erie, and the clustered lights near its corners, clusters I’d recognized, by the context of that great big lake, as Detroit and Cleveland. But that night, there was no such inky void, and there were no similar cities so definable from the sky. Little towns, little cities (hard to tell the difference from the air), dribbling away as we crossed the plains, until it was all empty for stretches, and we were in the west.
I don’t think of that trip as much as I’d think I would, given how good a bit it was. It was a great little gag, flying to Reno alone for two days in March, and I wonder if I don’t think of it because I thought so confidently, at the time, that I’d come back. I remember it was on a run the next year here in Austin—I’d turned down side streets, Waller being closed by construction—that I decided it wasn’t worth it to go a second time in a row. Even then, though, the pause felt temporary. It felt like I’d be back in Reno. It doesn’t feel that way anymore. I’m sure I’ll return one day in some capacity, but it doesn’t feel that way anymore.
On the flight up from Salt Lake City, I dropped cookie on my pants. I like to dip the Biscoffs in my tea, and I’d kept them in their too long. They’ll dissolve on you in a moment, those things, and dissolving is not the side to err on. One half of one cookie didn’t make it to my mouth, plopping down like wet cement. Soggy as it was, it was not something easy to wipe—not off my pants, not off the backpack of the semi-unaware passenger beside me—and so I remember, walking from the hotel to what turned out to be one of the more tired Holiday Inns Express I’ve patronized, feeling like I had cat puke on my crotch. It was dark. Reno had gone to bed. And there I was, pulling a suitcase with one stuck wheel through nearly a mile of barren airport roads, for all intents and purposes with cat puke on my crotch.
It was an exercise in optimism, really, and it didn’t feel like an exercise at the time. Optimism was more a default back then, perhaps better classified by words like “naivete” or “delusion” than something like “optimism,” which can carry a connotation of frankness used a certain way. There was no frankness here. There was simplicity and assumption—I was convinced of the good outcomes. I thought the website would grow, year over year, and that people would enjoy it, and that it would soon sustain itself, and while the growth and the enjoyment were indeed true, I couldn’t grasp the scope of how long such things can take, and how hard such things can be, and how uncertain longshots really are—or rather, how certain they are, how close to certain it is that, if you try to do something wildly improbable, the probable outcome will be the one that occurs.
Reno was not a bad town. It could have been, but it had no pretense. Towns get in trouble when they try to be something they’re not, or when their locals tell outsiders the town is something more than it is. A bad town can be saved by self-deprecation, and many a bad town is, or with an honest objectivity that leaves space for the affections of home. Reno has that self-deprecation. Reno has that streak of objectivity. At least, it did to me. I’ll confess to being more willing to love a town bordering on bad than a town bordering on good. Especially if there’s pretense involved with the latter.
The cookie came off enough in the hotel sink, but my jeans were then all soaked on the front, and I’d only brought two pairs for a three-night stay. I might have only had two at the time. I only have two today, really. Two pair-of-jeans kind of guy, I guess. I draped the wet jeans somewhere in the musty, real-looking-wood-and-worn-out-upholstery room and dawdlingly made my way to bed, making note of the time change and setting an alarm to get logged on for “work.” Had the pandemic come around while I was still traditionally employed, I would have been hard for a boss to track down. As it were, my Outlook calendar for the month was a bizarre mix of Work from Home and Out of Office headers, just my work status for the day and the city I was in, with no further explanation but more than one confused conversation with a friend who’d tried to schedule a meeting.
There was so much yet to do, back then, so much yet for this whole thing to become. There still is, of course, but those were wide open days. Joe Kelly had not yet fought the New York Yankees. I did not yet know I’d be moving to Austin, Texas. The desperation to escape from a medium job—a job between leisurely and fulfilling—had not yet ripped me away from sleep, though it had driven me to blogging, in closets at times and at home at times and sometimes rather brazenly, on the second monitor of a stand-up desk in a cubicle that faced the aisle, stolen Getty images of players fumbling basketballs out of bounds loud and large and more or less acknowledged by all but my overwhelmed manager, for whom a burgeoning NIT blogger was far from the biggest problem. I hadn’t even been to Madison Square Garden yet, unless you count Penn Station underneath it a couple times, once a few years prior by chance, and once that December before, sending Emma back to Washington after the weekend when Central Park was cloaked in snow. Emma still lived in Washington when I went to Reno. Emma still lived in Washington, then. I can’t remember now what I thought of the blog in those early days: where I thought it would be, what I thought I would make it do. I can’t possibly remember. When you live inside a thing long enough, it becomes hard to imagine a time when you were the littlest bit outside it, and even the memory of those nascent days seems bizarre and foreign, like imagining the moments in your life before your parents gave you your name.
The two days were fun, but portentously frazzling. It was hard to find all the odds, so I missed placing a future on Penn State which would have provided a large jolt of dopamine down the line, and when I got to what must have been supper, at the wing place down across the little river there, I remember a pause and some relief as I settled in, watching Louisville approach the end of the first quarter against Northern Kentucky (there were quarters that year). I drew suspicious looks from the grizzled man at the counter at the dingy old sportsbook, and the room where they watched games there felt the way I’d imagine a Greyhound station feels, making it a relief again to be back in the hotel, later, UNC-Asheville giving USC everything USC could handle while Bill Walton cackled with glee. I’m not sure where exactly I ran the next morning, or where I walked in the afternoon when I returned downtown to collect what winnings I’d won, but in the morning it was sunny and there were mountains in the not-so-distance and in the afternoon it was gray and there might have been some mist in the wind, and as I looked upstream I tried to tell myself I was looking upward into some idyllic, poised neighborhoods, and perhaps I even was, but I didn’t really think I was. I was just in Reno. And I wanted it to be more than it was, somehow. But the games start in late afternoon there, and it was over to the resort casino, and to an ungrizzled man at the counter who smirkingly said (incorrectly, it obviously turned out) they didn’t take bets on the NIT there, and to what’s now such a familiar, hassling rhythm, the blogging while games happen, the race against the first whistle. When I was walking home that night, after dark, games all done and my body fed and the blog all handled and my wallet up some twenty dollars on the trip, a truck turned quickly into an alley ahead of me, and it looked to my eyes like it was waiting there, turned around, headlights pointed back towards the street, and I realized how little I knew of the place where I was, and I turned around and I retreated to the casino and I spent the seven dollars to take an Uber back to the hotel parking lot, and I think that was probably wise. It was warm that night. It would have been nice to walk those few blocks of barren airport-neighborhood roads. But I’d walked enough.
It’s funny, with certain things, how the rest of the world changes alongside your own world’s changes, over time. It was four years ago, a whole presidential term, and I don’t remember why this mattered but a Lyft driver talked about a Tesla facility that had just opened out past Sparks, and how all these people were moving to Reno now and taking the place away from the locals, but that the jobs were good. I don’t know if the jobs were good. I don’t know if the people moving there were taking the place away from the locals. But four years—these four years—in Tesla time? In pandemic time? What a four years these have been.
The next morning, I took the MilkTime snapchat—the distribution was up around thirty people, then—in a little translucent plastic cup from the breakfast bar, while Rhode Island played Oklahoma in the background. I was off work that day, two flights ahead of me before a quick 20 hours back home and then a weekend in Chicago and then three or four quick days back home and then a three-stop trip to New Orleans and New York and Crystal Lake for a birthday and three basketball games and Easter. But I opened my computer anyway, at the Denny’s past the schoolyard where I had walked, stuck-wheel suitcase in tow. And I foolishly ordered an omelet with vegetables in it (it was the worst thing I’ve ever tasted, never order a vegetable at Denny’s), and I watched Loyola hit the shot to beat Miami, and then I closed the laptop and I walked back to the airport, one of those Nevada airports, where the terminals are full of slots. There was an Oregon Ducks plane there, if I remember it all right. I think I do. But there’s so much to remember now, and it’s becoming a long time ago.
When you read a book like The Hobbit, the journey is so much more linear than journeys out here, outside the paper of a book. You turn the page, they’re another step along, you turn another page, they’re yet one more step along, and so on down the line. They might get lost, the outcome of the journey might come in and out of doubt, but to you, the reader, there’s a contract with the author. You know the journey will be completed. You know the journeyers are moving towards something. The characters might not know it, but for you, well, turn enough pages and the journey will be complete. There’s a temptation to see life this way, or at least the big, hard things in life. But this isn’t how life works. Or at least the big, hard things in life.
If you want to do something large and difficult—at least, this is my perception right now, four years in—you take on the probability of failure. That’s the first thing Bilbo Baggins didn’t have. Not to you. Not to the reader in their reading chair. Bilbo might have felt it, but the reader knows the journey ends well. Journeying in our world, away from Middle Earth, we try our best not to know the odds. The odds can crush you if you see them for too long.
Then there’s the responsibility you assume of cutting your own trails. Not just one trail, either. Trails. There is no path. There are no guideposts. There is simply wilderness, and hilltops, and crevasses, and a peak off in the distance but a peak so blocked by clouds and snow that you only have a vague idea of what the thing is you’re really chasing, and that’s even on the best days. Sometimes, the wilderness stands between you and the peak, and you’re too deep in the trees to have any sort of bearing on where you even are between the few landmarks you know. Sometimes, the crevasse walls block out all but slivers of the sky. Sometimes, you backtrack, and always, you sidetrack, and if you’re lucky on a given day, you see the summit through a valley for a moment or a few, crisp and clear and real. But the trails you cut wind and weave, and they dip and they rise and they get you to places you could have gotten to easier, had you known what lay between, and in the vast majority of cases they eventually one day end. Not at the summit. Somewhere far, far beneath, far closer to where you started out. And you either turn, then, and try a new path, or you give up the journey, and try again at a more stationary life.
The crowd was better at that second day’s sportsbook, the one at the resort casino. They had a great big projector there, and something of a party room, and a big open floor surrounded by flat screens where fans—and there were fans—could sit. And I sat there and I thought that this could be a place to come in the future, to celebrate these two days, and that the blog would build its following and a few people by a few people this would become an event, a celebration of this silly little thing.
It looks so silly now. Silly in a different way. Silly in a sidetracked way. It’s somewhere back along the path, but far in a peripheral direction. Or perhaps it’s far in the right direction, and I’ll connect to it again one day and see the steps I should have taken (there’s that uncertainty again). I don’t know. But I’d like to go back to Reno. Today, yes. But if time travel were an option, and I could go back and then return, I’d like to go back to that 2018 Reno. Where the wilderness was not yet so wild. I’d like to feel again the automatic optimism, and see again the ranging possibilities, and think again on all the things this website could be. And then I’d like to return. To today. To grab the keyboard again, and start cutting more trails. Trails back to Reno, possibly, sure. But ultimately, I hope, trails to that summit in the distance.
