I went to a hockey game last night at Madison Square Gardens. We had some decent seats – high at one end of the rink – but it is a chichi kind of location with only two rows and big leather seats. I was surrounded by Rangers fans who really hated my banter. The sad thing is that their retorts were lame. One guy said that the Leafs were Montreal’s little bitches. Still trying to figure that one out.

A few of these nitwits got all wound up and ran to the ushers to get me thrown me out. They said that I had been using profanity. As fucking if. I was told to keep my language clean, which I think I did. The insults kept coming – some of them quite profane, I believe – and so on my way to the bathroom ,I told one particularly rude woman to stop trash talking me. She freaked out. Screamed to her husband who danced around like a wild chipmunk, acting like he was going to hit me. The ushers returned en mass, saying I had to switch sections or be thrown out of the building. I argued their logic, saying that there was no reason to fear the other. That probably didn’t help. They conferred for a few moments – and I missed two goals because of it. Nevertheless they finally allowed me to return to my seat and even buy myself a beer.

I quietly – mostly – watched the remainder of the game, standing to celebrate three more time in the third. Leafs 6-3. Twenty guesses how these people behaved at that point. My goodness, they even used a few profanities. The ushers didn’t seem to care about that.

I’ll write about you if you write about me. We will be each other’s next best thing. That’s it. We just have to be in this together. I can do it any way you like. I can get all upset and outraged. I can be understated. I can even be pragmatic-like. I can do it any way you like. I will say all the write things. And even if I don’t, even if I write all the wrong things, that’s good too. You just have to write about me. That’s the thing. And I’ll write about you. And then we can get all Amazon and really fuck this world up.

Bundled in blankets, I watch the rectangles of fluorescence glide past as I am rolled down the hall. I don’t care about anything until I realize that I cannot feel anything below my waist. I cannot feel my feet or penis. I think about that. Think isn’t the right word. I consider that, dazedly consider the meaning of that, until I finally look down to find my toes pointing up against the sheets.

My penis is harder. Not harder. That’s not the word. But impossible to see beneath the sheet. I reach down to find it, loose and fleshy, senseless but there. I do that again and again, reach down, hoping it will regain its senses, and stare off as I’m wheeled again, into the elevator, into my room, and watch the various technicians jab needles for blood and fluids, let me drift off, now six oxycodones deep.

I greet each of the technicians as they check my vitals. I am chatty on the drugs, holding out my arm, being blithe and pithy, in between epiphanies for Mina, the third and final installment of the Cx Trilogy. Iterations of me. That’s what this is: me in the bed, me out the door, me on another planet.

I wiggle my toes and touch my penis. I am coming back into myself.

The relentless attacks against former Toronto Maple Leafs coach Mike Babcock are another example of what is wrong with sports journalism. A new player is dug up every day – Nazem Kadri the latest – on Babcock’s tactics as coach. The vitriol is then vaguely, insidiously, connected to the racism of Bill Peters.

As I have written previously, it’s the sportswriters – talk about an oxymoron! – that are the root of the problem. Imagine going through their closets of homophobia and ethnocentrism. Ew, David. Indeed, if they were really concerned with the coaching culture in hockey, what of the obvious monsters who barely last 2-3 years per team – Mike Kennan, John Tortorella, Ron Wilson, Randy Carlyle, et al? Why are they not suffering the slings and arrows of this onslaught? Laziness perhaps? Stupidity? Sportswriters are after Babcock because they are pissed off at him. Babcock never gave them the respect they desperately craved. He laughed them off. “Hey, Coach Babcock, why didn’t you give Auston Matthew three more minutes of ice time? Why didn’t you play Spezza on opening night? Why won’t you listen to us, Coach Babcock? We know best!”

The Toronto Maple Leafs are underperforming because they lack discipline. Their elite players – Matthews, Marner, Nylander, Taveras – rely on skill and not discipline. They do not work as a team. They fail to clear the zone. They do not dig in the corners. They forget to take the man. As wonderful as skill might be – especially for an All Star Game – hockey is hockey. It’s tough. It’s hard. There is no pointing fingers. The only one to answer for a loss is oneself. As if any of these sportswriters would know that.

The world in my brain is more real than anything else, vivid and ingrained, clinging to the outside of a plane as it arcs over the river, the detritus of other planes split in half, sinking.

I walk naked with strangers, hide in a hot tub, staring at my love as she stares back, ignoring me, self-fellating, unable to dial my phone and get the right plane back, get back to some place that might make sense, as strange and awful as most of it is, how like me it resounds.

Live in the moment. That is what they say. You only get one life to life and you should live it to the fullest. They say that. I say it too.

Only it is not so easy to do. We have our routines, always doing the same things, seeing life in the same way. When it comes down to it, we forget what’s what. We are an exceptionally complacent lot.

Surgery is just the thing to break that mindset, getting stripped down, tubes stuck in, told to wait and wait and wait and wait.

That is a good time to think, waiting for the anesthetic to kick and then wear off, and then the painkillers to kick in and wear off, and then the steps out of bed, the first bowel movement, all of that, living in the moment, accepting that.

That’s when it clicks that this is it, nothing else, just this. This is this. And it’s good to remember that.

The diagnosis is in for the Toronto Maple Leafs. There is a problem. And it is terminal. However the cure is something of a surprise. It is not trading Tyson Barrie. (Brandon Maron at Sportsnet). It is not restructuring the team (Jonas Siegel, The Athletic). And it sure as hell is not firing Mike Babcock. (James Mirtle, The Athletic, et al.)

Indeed it has nothing to do with Babcock’s handling of Matthews’ playing time nor his not playing Spezza in the season opener, nor even his comments on Marleau aiming to play the most games in history. It is instead the reports of these things. The reporters.

When reflecting on the media hysteria related to the Leafs’ current woes, there is no need to look any further than the reporters themselves. That’s right. It’s time to shoot the messengers.

I was a reporter for a neighborhood weekly in Toronto some years back, and while my insights into the sports world were well short of revelatory, my awareness of the reporters pool was acute. These guys are lazy and angry. They are wanna-be’s with over-inflated egos, sad little fellows who sit at the back of the bus, furious that their yearly salary barely matches an athlete’s per diem. That is why they foam at the mouth at every opportunity they get. It seems to help them sleep at night or something.

And so the cure is simple really. Re-assign these little boys to do something productive with their lives – ushers maybe? Let’s just stop all of this chatter for a while. What about that? Maybe just let the players play and Babcock coach. Let’s do that first. And then who knows what will happen? A few wins possibly? And the silence. Yes, that too.

Not wanted: stories dealing with the ruin of young girls, betrayal of virtue, neglect of children, cruelty to animals, excessive smoking, drunk cowboys always looking for a fight, extreme manifestations of sex, maudlin displays of patriotism…

…situations likely to instill fear, insanity, hunchback, sissies, gruesomeness, gun-play, milk bottles to indicate poverty, rats, snakes, kittens as well as distressing situations.

Wanted: light dramas, comedy-drama, amusement, good fights, fine riding, topical stories, domestic drama, mother stories, heart interests, suspense and stories based on war conditions but not showing actual war stuff.

From Scott Eyman’s The Life and Times of John Ford

Visionary minimalist performer William Basinski played a marathon eight-hour show at The Issue Project Room on November 9 in Brooklyn Heights.

Performed is not a fair word for this event. While he was most certainly dressed as a performer – head to toe in black, including gloves and dark glasses – he did little more than sit at a large table, chose the desired track, and then stared out, like the rest of us.

I was a little off to the side, near the sound board, where two tech guys either slept or hunched over their phone and incessantly scrolled their social media. So began the eight-hour marathon.

The small crowd of 200 sat rapturously watching Basinski watch his laptop as a Borealis light show dripped down the wall of the very cool – actually cold – landmark building. It was hard to stay focused – even with the cold – hard not to drift off to sleep, Basinski himself wandering off every hour for 10-minute breaks of his own.

Basinski is best known for The Disintegration Loops, a collection of loops he had recorded many years ago on analog tapes and re-recorded on 9/11 as the tapes physically deteriorated. He played four of these haunting recordings – Disintegration Loops 1.2,.2.1, 4 & the epic Disintegration Loop 5 – or, to be more accurate, his computer played these as he watched his computer and we watched him do that as the visuals continued to cascade.

In the end, Basinski closed his laptop, the visuals faded, and he thanked the 60 or so of us who had persevered and offered free stickers as our reward.

As crazy as it might sound, as tired as I was, all I could think of was when he might be doing this again.