Watching the Knicks and Nets Die for Twenty-Two Dollar Beers

My skull feels like someone took a meat tenderizer to it.

Sunday night.

Halfway through a bottle of Jameson and a lukewarm slice of pizza my six-year-old dropped behind the radiator.

I turned on the TV.

Nets. Knicks.

Jesus Christ.

It’s like watching two bald men fight over a broken comb.

One team plays in an arena that has smelled like stale popcorn and shattered dreams since 1973.

The other plays in a gentrified subway terminal where a draft pour costs the same as my monthly copay for blood pressure meds.

Twenty-two bucks.

For a Michelob Ultra.

I drank three warm ones on my couch out of spite and financial panic.

My wife walked past around the third quarter.

She didn't look at the screen.

She looked at me.

"Are you really going to work tomorrow?"

Valid question.

My liver says no.

My mortgage says shut the fuck up and find a clean shirt.

The game was loud.

Constant sneaker squeaks.

Men seven feet tall bricking shots off the iron with all the grace of a drunk falling down the concrete stairs at Penn Station.

Which, full disclosure, I did in 2014.

New York basketball is a special brand of masochism.

You pay four grand a month for an apartment the size of a toaster just to root for a franchise that operates like a money-laundering scheme for suburban misery.

Nets fans are just guys in tech who wear beanies when it’s seventy degrees out.

Knicks fans are guys like me, except they still have hair and completely irrational hope.

Idiots.

The buzzer went off.

Somebody won.

Nobody cares.

I have to wake up in four hours to pack two juice boxes and explain to a 26-year-old project manager why his spreadsheet is late.

Life goes on.

Hand me the goddamn ibuprofen.