Free The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead by David Shields

mine and I turned 180 degrees, landing on my leg. My left thigh tickled my right ear. I shouted curses until I passed out from the pain.
    I had a broken femur and spent the winter in traction in a hospital. My doctor misread the X-rays, removing the body cast too early, so I had an aluminum pin planted next to the bone, wore a leg brace, and swung crutches all year. (I recently had the pin removed, for no particularly compelling reason of any kind other than it spooked me to think of one day being buried with a “foreign object” in my body. For one thing, it’s a violation of Jewish law. Not that I’ll be buried; I’ll be cremated. Not that I’m religious; I’m an atheist. Still, leaving the pin in seemed to me some obscure violation of the order of things.) In the fall, the brace came off and my father tried to work with me to get back my wind and speed, but he gave up when it became obvious my heart wasn’t in it. Senior year I was 10th man on a 10-man team and kept a game journal, which evolved into a sports column for the school paper. I soon realized I was better at describing basketball and analyzing it than playing it. I was pitiless on our mediocre team and the coach called me “Ace” (as in “ace reporter”), since I certainly wasn’t his star ballhawk. I could shoot when left open but couldn’t guard anyone quick or shake someone who hounded me tough. I fell into the role of the guy with all the answers and explanations, the well-informed benchwarmer who knew how zones were supposed to work but had nothing to contribute on the floor himself. To my father’s deep disappointment, I not only was not going to become a professional athlete; I was becoming, as he had been on and off throughout his life and always quite happily, a sportswriter. Listen to this trip-down-memory-lane piece he wrote a few years ago for his local paper:

    Seventy-five years ago I was on the staff of the Thomas Jefferson High School newspaper,
Liberty Bell,
writing my slightly less than deathless prose about the school’s athletic teams and activities. Our baseball and football teams were perpetual losers; they made a science of the art of losing. But our basketball teams were something else; twice they won the borough championship and, in my senior year, they were in the city finals.
    We played Evander Childs, a school in the Bronx, for the New York City title. The final score of that game was 27–26. That’s right, 27–26. In 1928 and for a dozen more years, there was no 45-second rule when you had the ball; there was a center jump after each made field goal; and the two-handed set shot was the only shot players took.
    We lost that game in the final seconds when George Gregory, Evander Childs’ All-City center, slapped the ball backwards into the basket on a jump ball from eight feet away. I cursed and sobbed, by turn, for the entire hour-long subway ride home. I continued the “I-won’t-or-can’t-believe-what-happened” tone the next day when reporting to my buddies on the block.
    Other times, other values.

    I make sure to visit my father in the spring so he and I can watch the NBA playoffs together. He’s a huge fan of guys who try to do it all on their own—Kobe Bryant, Allen Iverson. Solo acts. At the same time, and completely contradictorily, he tsk-tsks over every bad pass, every example of matador defense, compares every team’s esprit de corps—or lack thereof—to the 1970 New York Knicks. He lives for the body in motion.

Dying Just a Little
    Whereas many boys want to be superheroes who dominate the world, anorexic girls retreat from the world and sexuality. Adolescent boys are trying to become strong and aggressive, but anorexic girls are trying to become weak and fragile. Anorexia, the feminine flip side to masculine violence and heroic fantasy, comes directly from pubescent peer pressure. Teenage girls develop