Handle With Care

I’ve been complaining all week and more about the extension of Christmas into the Rhineland and on towards the Paris of Thanksgiving’s season. This is not because I could possibly care less about either holiday . . . I could not . . . but because it is just pure subjugation of the season to marketing . . . a season of giving turned into a season of taking . . . from the consumer . . . a season of being thankful being eroded by a season of wishful.

I do not truck with such things.

Despite my protest, I have found one issue where there is a convergence of the two, at least for this one fleeting moment. Always the one to get with the crowd, I’m jumping in now that I see a 42-shaped crack . . .

After the latest round of talks failed to produce a CBA, the mood of those following the proceedings seemed to darken considerably. This is understandable.

My mood, however, improved, and there are many reasons for this. One of them, and perhaps the one of most interest to everyone else, is the fact that insertion of more variables into a very carefully contrived situation . . . contrived by both parties . . . would lead to a certain level of discomfort among all parties.

Billionaires and their poorer kith and kin are not used to having their wishes completely dismissed, and that is exactly what can happen in legal proceedings. A judge can swoop in on some high judicial pommel horse, kehrswing, declare victory for the players on some obscure legal point, all while executing a dismount that can make a brahma bull cry. 10, even from the Belarusian judge, and $6,000,000,000 to the players.

The same applies to the players, but they have been the pursued here. They have been running for their lives, tossing every obstacle in the path of the mower. These legal maneuvers are just another toppled coat rack in the horror movie hallway this negotiation has been for them. They have been hunted down and stripped bare, at least compared to the relative opulence of their station in the CBA-formerly-known-as-THE-CBA.

Their resistance, however, has been far from futile. They have hung together and gotten the owners to move to 50-50, a position as far from the owners’ initial position as from that of the players. They have gotten the owners to budge on several of their initial demands, many of which may have been sacrificial points, there to distract and to be discarded so that the key points could be preserved.

So here we are.

Is this legal jitterbug just one last effort to smear a veneer of victory on this enormous, festering pile of defeat for the players? Or are they serious? Are they going to take their chances with the courts? Was that coat rack something far more deadly? A holy coat rack? Was it covered is scarves and ascots, or was their some rambo headband on it? A health pack? Some weird Quake weapon, whatever it is people play these days?

Will the owners change their tune and not try to find out?

A CBA would need to be agreed to in principle in the next few days to have a Christmas tip-off, and lawyers are meeting now to that effect. What they are doing, what they are saying . . . what their ultimate purpose is . . . is both not known and unlikely to result in a deal by time I cut into my Turducken.

The odds, however, are not an issue. The odds of the $6,000,000,000 judgment, the odds of a deal falling from the sky like a rainless rainbow.

Speaking as someone who enough time to choke said brahma bull thinking about odds, damn the odds.

They are talking.

If they are talking, there is a chance. Always.

And the rewards are worth the all of this effort and more.

Let’s not get our hopes up.

Let’s not be upset when we don’t get what we want from other people’s lives.

Let’s just eat obscene amounts of food, wasting as little as possible, and hope that when the blood returns to our brains from our distended stomachs that the news isn’t worse.

Let’s hope that’s we’ve hit bottom, and that the only way out is up. That’s something to be thankful for, even if we don’t have reindeer for Thanksgiving . . . in any possible sense.

Let me be thankful that we’ve hit rock bottom and let Christmas come as it pleases.

Is that too much to ask?

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