The Last Trickster Poet of Hollywood

A remembrance of an evening with Val Kilmer—where he conjured a provocation: the creative life begins when you stop asking for permission, find art in the everyday, and dare to make your own reality.

It wasn’t a conversation, not in the traditional sense. Val Kilmer didn’t stand behind a podium. He didn’t read from notes. He shuffled onstage, found an armchair that looked like it belonged in a sunken living room from 1978, and just—sat.

This was at my college, a small liberal arts school with an ambitious lecture series that had recently hosted former presidents Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, and an up-and-coming senator named Barack Obama. These were people of consequence. Leaders who made policy, waged war, held power.

But none of them had been Batman, Iceman, Doc Holliday and Jim Morrison all rolled into one. None of them had that strange electricity of myth and menace, all bottled in a single person.

The moment Kilmer appeared on stage, the air in the room changed.

This was post-Heat, post-Batman, the tail-end of a decade when he’d shape-shifted through a rogue’s gallery of icons. He was famous in a way that felt dangerous. You didn’t know what he’d say—and that was the point.

He opened the floor to questions immediately. No script. Just Val, free-associating through Twain and Shakespeare, quoting his own films, rhapsodizing about his kids, about cameras, about the stubborn, irrational act of making art. The whole night orbited one message:

Create your own reality.

Nobody’s going to hand it to you. And even when they do, you’ll have to fight to keep it. Surprise people. Be undeniable.

He told the story of landing The Doors. He hadn’t waited for a studio call. He recorded himself singing Morrison songs. Slipped one of his own into the demo, unlabeled. Even Oliver Stone couldn’t tell which was which. Neither could the remaining members of the band. He became Morrison, and by the time casting decisions were made, there was no decision. Val was the Lizard King.

He talked about being the first person he knew to own a video camera. He filmed constantly. It was the same footage that would, decades later, form the spine of Val, his devastating, luminous 2020 documentary.

And somewhere in those rambling minutes, something clicked in me.

That night, Kilmer didn’t just perform. He modeled something. A way of living as an artist—scrappy, obsessive, defiant, enchanted. Shortly after Kilmer’s talk, I started carrying around my own video camera. I shot everything. DIY remakes of Psycho. Art films about levitating scissors. Late-night antics at Denny’s . I wasn’t trying to make something perfect. I was trying to live creatively. To treat reality as pliable. To find everlasting moments in every day. Val would understand.

It’s easy to remember the fun stuff. He did say “I’m your Huckleberry,” and yes, he told a story about Marlon Brando so strange it felt like a hallucination—involving face paint and a kimono. But what stayed with me were the deeper threads—about fate, failure, and the fragile, self-styled scaffolding that holds up an artistic life.

When someone asked about his reputation for being “difficult,” he didn’t flinch. He spoke about being a guardian of truth—for the characters he played. If he found something essential, he fought for it. The work didn’t have to be easy. It had to be real.

He talked about his son thinking he was actually Batman, not Val. Even after showing his son the movie, the boy was not convinced, and assured that he was Batman, and not his father onscreen, despite the blockbuster proof. What is reality anyway?

Maybe we are all Batman.

Kilmer painted, drew, made collages. None of that showed up in the tabloids, but it pulsed through him that night. A creative energy too unruly for one medium. You realized that the onscreen personas were just fragments and borrowed masks—glimpses of someone constantly inventing, constantly seeking.

I watched Val recently. Listened to the audiobook of his memoir I’m Your Huckleberry. Rewatched Tombstone, then Heat. And suddenly, I was back in that auditorium. In the dark. Watching a man peel away the myth and try on masks, only to reveal something stranger: a deeply sincere, wildly imperfect, defiantly poetic romantic. It was impossible not to feel inspired by that.

He made rebellion feel sacred. Mischief felt like method. He refused to play the Hollywood game, even as he conquered it. His career was a masterclass in turning dust into gold and getting bored the moment it gleamed.

Yes, he made baffling choices. Burned bridges. Took detours no manager would have greenlit. And yet he carved out something rare: a career that was his. A life of ecstatic contradictions.

He turned down the easy version of success. Maybe he regretted it. Maybe he didn’t. What’s certain is that he kept surprising us, right up until his voice gave out, and then—somehow—kept talking.

That night affirmed something in me.

I stopped waiting for permission. I stopped bowing down to so-called gatekeepers and forces I can’t control. I started making things. Well, I started making more things. Different things. Experiments. And I’ve kept on, trusting that if you throw enough wonder into the world, something unexpected will come back. It worked for Val, and over time, I’ve seen it play out in my domain as well.

Val Kilmer was, and is, our Huckleberry.

A trickster-poet in a cape. A dreamer who saw art everywhere. The crew-cut scene-stealer who once stole Top Gun from Tom Cruise with a single, arrogant chomp of chewing gum.

The Lizard King who refused to let The End define him—but instead transform him.

And when we look back, when we really trace the strange flickering light he left behind, what do we see?

We see the ghost of Jim Morrison swaggering through firelight, singing prophecy through a veil of leather and smoke—somehow about something more soulful than an expected chronicle of sex, drugs, rock n’ roll.

We see Doc Holliday, pale and facing the void, still faster on the draw than anyone alive. A Southern specter, one foot in the grave, the other in poetry.

We see Batman, not the brooding demigod of later years, but something more tormented—more Shakespearean. A Batman who looked like he’d read Hamlet and meant it.

We see Chris Shiherlis in Heat, silent and wounded, a thief with the face of a fallen angel and the soul of someone already halfway gone.

And we see Val himself, in Val, the final act, stripped of voice but not spirit. Archiving his own myth with love, regret, and more vulnerability than Hollywood ever knew what to do with.

Each of these characters was a mask. And each mask revealed something truer.

Because Val Kilmer didn’t just play icons. He inhabited them. Bent their voices to his cadence. Let their ghosts borrow his skin. He moved through genre, through persona, through time, as if this life was just one long improv scene and he was dead set on finding its truth before the lights went down.

And maybe that’s the real secret:

He was never just acting.
He was becoming.

Becoming the outlaw.
Becoming the poet.
Becoming the myth.

Becoming a cosmic jester with paint on his hands and a camera in his palm, chasing beauty across deserts and backlots and dreams.

Some actors fade.
Val burned.
With brilliance. With mess. With risk. With refusal.

He created a reality larger than the screen. A creative life so alive it bled off the edges. A rock opera of detours and digressions that joyfully haunt us all.

So here’s to Val.

Our Huckleberry.
Our Saint.
Our fading gunfighter, laughing into the abyss.
Our shapeshifter in the spotlight.
Our silent poet in the wings.

Val, if you're listening—
as you're out there still filming, still dreaming, still editing the reel of your cosmic cut—know this:

You didn’t just live a life.
You performed a constellation.
And we, lucky as hell, got to look up.

Grass, Leather, and the Geometry of Failure

How baseball reveals the beauty and brutality of being human.

Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki throws his first pitch on the mound at Camelback Ranch during spring training. Glendale, Arizona. Photo by Andrew Miller.

Baseball begins with a whisper.

Not a roar, not a frenzy of synchronized chanting or the gut-punching bass of stadium speakers rattling ribcages.

No, baseball begins out of sight, behind chain-link fences on dew-soaked backfields where the grass is still wet enough to stain your cleats and the air carries the faint scent of distant concessions. It’s less an arrival and more a reemergence—the slow, deliberate stretching of limbs, the muscle memory of leather against palm, of fingers searching for that perfect grip along uniform red stitches. Something deep and primal stirs, an echo of summers past and seasons unfinished.

Baseball is a contradiction in cleats. It is both timeless and fleeting. Timeless in the sense that the game itself has barely changed in over a century—the diamond remains ninety feet to first, the pitcher’s mound still sixty feet, six inches from home plate, and the rituals of sunflower seeds, pine tar, and rally caps persist like sacred rites. And yet, for those who step onto the field, the opportunity is heartbreakingly finite—a narrow window to weave yourself into the tapestry of a game far greater than the sum of its individual strands.

And make no mistake, baseball is a game of strands—light and shadow, myth and mathematics. There’s the version you see on glossy posters and highlight reels, all towering home runs and gravity-defying catches. Then there’s the version obscured by shadows—the grinding repetition of early-morning fielding drills, the bone-deep ache of a season’s wear and tear, and the whispered superstitions that players follow as if appeasing the baseball gods themselves. Step over the chalk lines. Never mention a no-hitter in progress. Wear the same socks—unwashed, if necessary—until the streak ends.

Baseball’s unwritten rules are less suggestions and more commandments etched into the collective consciousness of players and fans alike. Violate them at your peril. Flip your bat a little too enthusiastically? Expect a fastball in the ribs next time up. Linger too long admiring a home run? Watch your teammates duck the consequences. It’s a sport where humility and hubris exist in constant tension, where respect for the game is paramount—even as the game itself shows little mercy in return.

Consider the cruel calculus of baseball. In no other sport is failure so visible, so frequent, and so defining. Hit safely three times out of ten and you’re a legend. Anything less, and you’re just another name etched into the ever-expanding database of statistical mediocrity. And the numbers are always there, whispering in the background—batting averages, on-base percentages, exit velocities—each data point a tiny chisel scraping away at the illusion of permanence. Swagger might get you through the tunnel, but baseball’s relentless machinery grinds down even the most confident players, reducing ego to dust scattered across the infield.

Yet, for all its cruelty, baseball remains a democracy of opportunity. The lineup is a great equalizer—one through nine, every player gets their turn. There are no shortcuts, no strategic dodges that let a team avoid its weakest link. When the game is on the line, fate might call upon a superstar, but just as often it taps the shoulder of a journeyman utility player whose name barely registers outside the clubhouse. And should that unheralded player deliver in that singular moment—should they lace a line drive into the gap or drop a perfectly placed bunt—the weight of their past failures momentarily lifts, replaced by the intoxicating clarity of success.

Of course, the opposite is also true. A stellar career can unravel in an instant—the wrong hop, a momentary lapse in concentration, or the cruel physics of a baseball rolling through the legs at the worst possible moment. Think of Bill Buckner. One error, one instant of misfortune, and decades of excellence reduced to a single highlight looped endlessly across sports networks. Baseball remembers both your triumphs and your failures, but it has a longer memory for the latter.

And yet, year after year, players return. They gather in sun-drenched ballparks and windswept dugouts, chasing that fleeting sensation of contact perfectly made—the sharp crack of bat against ball, the clean thwack of leather as a fastball hits the catcher’s mitt. They return because, despite everything, baseball offers a portal to something beyond the drudgery of daily life. It demands total immersion—an obsessive focus on the minute details of weight transfer, swing mechanics, and release points. Hours spent perfecting the spin of a slider or the precise timing of a swing become their own form of meditation. See ball. Hit ball. The mantra is deceptively simple, but in its simplicity lies the freedom to disappear into the moment, untethered from the world outside the foul lines.

Baseball is both therapy and torture—a game that reveals character with unflinching clarity. Step into the batter’s box after a strikeout and the game will immediately test your ability to forget the past. The pitcher on the mound doesn’t care about your self-doubt. The scoreboard doesn’t offer sympathy. The only question that matters is whether you can reset, whether you can convince yourself—against all evidence to the contrary—that this time, this swing, will be different.

And perhaps this is why baseball players are, more often than not, a peculiar breed. To survive a season’s worth of failures requires a contradictory blend of obsessive focus and short-term amnesia. You must care deeply about every detail of their craft while maintaining the ability to shrug off each setback as if it never happened. The moment you start carrying yesterday’s failures into today’s game, the weight becomes too much to bear. So you forget. You rebuild your confidence from scratch, one at-bat at a time, until the next slump arrives to tear it all down again.

This cycle—of hope and heartbreak, of success measured in fractions of inches—is what makes baseball both maddening and irresistible. It’s why, every February, players gather once more on those dew-covered backfields, their breath visible in the crisp morning air as they stretch and sprint and reacquaint themselves with the feel of bat and glove. They come not because they’ve forgotten the failures of seasons past, but because they’ve chosen to believe that this year might be different. That this year, the baseball gods might smile a little more kindly. Empirical evidence and a Wikipedia page full of strikeouts be damned.

Baseball is coming.

This is both promise and threat.

And somewhere out there, on a sun-warmed field where shadows fall long and thin, a ballplayer picks up a scuffed baseball and grips it tight. The seams press into his fingers, familiar and strange all at once. He winds up, lets it fly, and listens for the sound—the slap of leather against leather, the first echo of a thousand possibilities yet unwritten. The whisper that started it all, now rising, growing, swelling into something more.

Because baseball, in the end, is not merely a sport like the others, but rather a cosmic question posed to the universe: What if this time, just this once, it all goes right?

Play ball.

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Andrew “Oyl” Miller is an advertising Creative Director and Copywriter. He spent 15 years working at Wieden+Kennedy on brands like Nike, PlayStation, MLB and IKEA. You can check out his work on his website.

Lose the Jargon

I know robots are the future, but that doesn't mean we have to talk to people like we are one.

Marketing and advertising have always been a breeding ground for jargon.

It comes from a desperate instinct to organize chaos.

To name and label and make the unknowable known.

To make people with no idea what they are doing sound like experts.

Fake it till you make it, and all that.

But if all of these efforts are to ultimately connect with actual human beings, how do these inhuman terms help?

Holistic paradigms. Achieve virality. Orchestrate behavior loops. Foster brand equity. Omni-channel experiences. Catalyze disruption innovation. Harmonize touchpoints. Optimize stakeholder value. Accelerate brand consideration. Agile methodologies. Maximize ROI. Segmentation.

And my favorite, least human shout out of them all: CONSUMERS.

How do we activate and empower consumers to drive brand awareness and capture increased market share with a media agnostic marketing mix that micro targets Gen-Z favored niches where they congregate on and offline? #iykyk #Blessed

Ummmmmmmmmmmm….

I’ll get back to you on that one…

While strategic thinking and analytical reasoning is important, we shouldn’t get lost in talking to each other like a bunch of bots and algorithms.

Keep things simple.

Reduce the complex into easy conversations.

Digest all of the big data and make it your own.

Search for TRUTH not facts, numbers and formats.

The whole point of trying to reach people is to make them feel something.

All of the layers of insider speak just get in the way.

What’s worse, is some people seem to relish using this jargon.

I’ve run into a few junior creatives lately who were very good at using fancy terms.

It made them sound hypnotic and polished.

It felt like a part of their identity.

But what were they really saying?

Who were they trying to impress?

I tried to talk with them in simple ways and threw in a few dumb jokes to break the trance.

What do you want to make? What do you find interesting? Seen any good shows lately? Look at this dumb thing I saw on Instagram.

Sometimes it’s small talk that naturally turns into big ideas.

You can offer way more value if you talk to people like yourself.

You don’t need to adopt a voice that makes you sound like everyone else.

Everyone struggles with imposter syndrome, and jargon can be a mask and source of strength.

But sounding smart in a meeting and being good at what you do are not the same thing.

It’s okay to let your guard down.

No one knows everything and we aren’t counting on you to be an expert.

We need you to be yourself and offer only what you can offer.

The smartest people I’ve worked with sound like super regular people.

They’re human, uncertain, funny and like no one else.

But they keep showing up as themselves and being vulnerable.

They’re willing to put in the deep thought to figure hard things out.

Don’t let a mastery of a dictionary of industry terms be a substitute for actual mastery.

The gig is to solve problems.

Not create an unnecessary labyrinth of words and checkpoints that obscure the goal.

The next time someone drops some jargon on you in a meeting, ask what they mean.

Get them to go a little deeper.

Encourage them to explain it in their own words.

And if you catch yourself saying something overly technical, keep talking.

Try to rephrase in a way that says what you are thinking.

That’s when the sparks and insights truly come.

Sometimes it’s the person who is brave enough to sound uncertain or simple that triggers the breakthrough.

Especially these days, we have plenty of AIs and algorithms we can turn to if we want overly analytic and stoic responses.

Let us band together as humans having real conversations.

That’s always been our strength.

We’re beings that feel and cry and make stupid jokes.

You don’t have to be slick or polished to be good.

You’ll be judged by the quality of your thought.

You don’t score points for using trendy gibberish.

Lose the jargon.

Use your own voice.

That’s where your power lies.

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Andrew “Oyl” Miller is an advertising Creative Director and Copywriter. He spent 15 years working at Wieden+Kennedy on brands like Nike, PlayStation and IKEA. You can check out his work on his website.

Jim Riswold Changed Advertising

From the outside, Jim Riswold was the name I kept hearing.

Riswold was the first copywriter Dan Wieden hired and was credited with authoring Nike’s voice in the 80’s and beyond. First with the Spike and Mike ads, Bo Knows, Hello World for Tiger Woods.

And on and on and on.

The list is staggering and endless.

One of his ideas for Nike was so big, pairing Michael Jordan with Bugs Bunny, that it ended up becoming a Hollywood blockbuster, Space Jam.

When I started at Wieden+Kennedy, the Riswold anecdotes started on day one and never stopped.

About how he rode off with Michael Jordan one day to go golfing. Or how he would start swearing at random people in the elevator. Or how he literally had a “Stupid” stamp that he would pound on work presented to him.

Susan Hoffman, my mentor and patron saint of W+K was especially full of the Wisdom of Riz. About how he’d make things so simple and sharp. About how he’d never give up once he had an idea. About how much he hated boring work. About how much he hated BORING.

One day, when I was in W+K 12, Wieden’s experimental advertising school, Susan arranged for us to visit Jim Riswold in his art studio. We were all a little intimidated given the man’s hard core reputation and hall of fame body of work.

We showed up at his studio, which was filled floor to high ceiling with art, WW2 propaganda, bins of vintage toys, statues of world dictators, random doll parts, portraits of David Bowie and Warhol paintings. It was like a psychotic flea market or deranged toymaker’s factory.

We gathered around and Jim started talking about how he came up with some of his famous ads. How he’d bang his head against his desk (or hide under it), wallowing in despair until he found something interesting. He talked about how he always looked for ways to exaggerate or stretch the truth. Like Bo Knows about two-sport superstar Bo Jackson. The idea was simple, Bo is good at two things, what if he was good at everything?

Despite Jim’s snarling reputation, he was extremely generous and open with sharing his thinking and process with our group. Even when someone asked a “dumb” question, he answered earnestly and thoughtfully. Of course, he would tip into his famous profanity-laced tirades during his anecdotes. Usually when he was recounting resistance to his ideas or having to deal with a process that would dumb down his work.

After the talk, a few of us were looking around his studio and checking out his art and toys. He asked if we wanted to go around the corner to his local spot to keep chatting. Of course we were up for that.

I asked him how he comes up with his ideas. He said he just had a list of people he wanted to work with, then he made up campaigns as an excuse to work with them. That list included Lou Reed, Spike Lee, Bo Diddley, Bugs Bunny, Miles Davis and more. He had a knack for turning fame in on itself and creating a cultural bang that turned into new and unexpected things that became crystalized in pop culture.

Riswold then asked what we wanted to do. He alternated between harsh cynicism “the client would never buy that. You should have had that idea ten years ago,” and teacherly optimism, “keep going, there might be something there.”

After the visit to Riswold’s studio, I’d email him for advice sometimes. He always responded right away. Sometimes just with a short line. Sometimes with a couple of paragraphs. Usually taking the time to both rip on himself and me.

A few years later I was asked to give a talk to the current W+K 12 group. At one point Riswold walked by as I was answering a question. He was just walking through. He kept his head down and when he was almost out of the space he suddenly shouted “Don’t listen to this stupid f***! He’s only been in advertising for two f***ing minutes!!”

It was a drive-by STUPID STAMPING by Riswold.

The standard the he set with his work has remained the creative bar and north star for decades.

In meetings and brainstorm sessions, I used to hear “that’s kind of a Riswold idea” as a high form of praise. I don’t hear that so much these days. And that’s a damn shame. It falls on those of us who heard some of the method behind the madness to preach the gospel according to Riz. In all its vulgar glory. It’s central to the DNA of a place like Wieden+Kennedy. It’s the big bang of creativity that preaches taking big swings, and being bold enough to be wrong. Or these days, maybe even worse, daring to NOT MAKE SENSE.

One more pearl of wisdom Riswold explained was this: Never complete an idea.

Riswold argued that if you perfectly wrap up an idea, the audience will get bored. Leave something unsaid or unexplained. Or flat out wrong. In an industry of meetings and video calls with everyone power nodding along in agreement as a presentation “tracks”, maybe the bravest thing is to go the other way. Risk alienating some people. Let them scramble to catch up. Give them space to figure it out for themselves. That’s one way to get to work that cuts through and gets remembered.

It’s something I still think about when I’m putting ideas together today.

I’ll leave you with some words from the man himself below. And when it comes to advertising, no one has ever had a command of words like this dude. He will be greatly missed.

My love goes out to his family, the thousands he inspired and mentored and the untold millions who were smacked upside the head by his work. Riz Forever.

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Andrew “Oyl” Miller is an advertising Creative Director and Copywriter. He spent 15 years working at Wieden+Kennedy on brands like Nike, PlayStation and IKEA. You can check out his work on his website.

Shohei Ohtani: Baseball's Most, Most Valuable Player

Shohei Ohtani.

Baseball’s first two-way player in a century.

In a sport landscape filled with players who are apparently “different,” Ohtani is caps lock DIFFERENT. The HIM of “Hims.”

Call him G.O.A.T.-ani.

Call him two goats.

Split him in two and he’d be worth two individual MVPs.

Break down his atoms and particles and they’d all be worth their weight in gold.

Condense his elite aura into fumes and he’d solve the global energy crisis.

That he even exists is provocative and downright offensive. What are all these other ballplayers even doing out there? Why can’t anyone else be more like him?

Who else is using half of the game to throw shutouts, and the other half to hit two homeruns?

Exactly no body. Count ‘em up.

Of course he’s the unanimous choice for MVP, for a second time. What the hell happened those non-MVP seasons? Sports writers were doing crazy non-paying attention, absent minded, feel sorry for everyone else voting. Of course he’s the MVP.

His yearly MVP coronation isn’t just an end-season award. It’s a state of being.

If Ohtani is breathing air in the vicinity of a ballpark, he’s the guy.

Create a fancy jewel-encrusted award for the runners up, because it’s not a fair comparison. There are other great, cool and elite baseball players in the game. But Ohtani is something more.

He makes your hyperbole sound like humility.

No matter what flowery, new age sports metaphors and clever wordplay you can come up with, you can’t encapsulate truthfully what Ohtani is doing.

We can’t even crack a proper metaphor on what he’s doing. It’s like if Pat Mahomes was leading the NFL in touchdowns and sacks? Maybe it’s similar to Michael Jordan when he was scoring champ AND defensive player of the year? Something like that, except Jordan was just doing his job. Ohtani is doing TWO JOBS at all-time levels, all of the time. You dig?

In video games and little league, Ohtani’s are aplenty. It’s backyard whiffle ball fun to do it all.

But that’s not how the gatekeepers, legion of lawyers, doctors and gods of baseball work.

The institution of baseball forces you to make a choice: Hit or pitch.

You are given permission to play in only one half of the game.

The scouts and coaches eventually make the choice for you. They pay you a stack to do one or the other. There is no multiple choice option. They whisper about “protecting their investment” and “reality.”

Until Ohtani. He’s the all of the above trick question of sports.

When he first announced his major league intentions after playing in Japan, he flexed and fronted that he’d only play for a team that let him do both.

Cute, they’d say. Let’s humor him, they’d say.

Maybe we’ll let him pitch out of the bullpen in the spring training, and then use him as a hitter only once the games start.

Or maybe we’ll make him our starting pitcher, and then use him to pinch hit once every ten games so he feels validated. He’ll grow out of this phase, they’d say.

Ohtani didn’t accept such shenanigans.

He demanded to be a proper two-way player in a traditional sport that only knew one way for 150 years.

Except a dude named Babe Ruth. He did both. A sepia toned, crusty century ago.

Then teams had to debate. Wait, is Shohei a better pitcher or hitter? What should we sign him as? What should we prioritize him as? How does he fit into our system?

His prodigious double talent forced the game of baseball to bend brains and inflexible “it’s always been that way” Hawaiian shirt wearing “baseball people” to learn all sorts of mental yoga positions. (sorry, not a pretty image)

Ohtani forced America’s longest running, most traditional sport to CHANGE.

When he touched down, he did it all. And people didn’t buy in. It won’t last—they said. What a lucky start—they said.

That was 2018. But the thing is, that lucky start has been going on for five years. A couple of MVPs later, we’re living in an alternate reality, where we’re being treated to regular shows of no one who is alive has ever seen incidents on the baseball field.

None of this was supposed to happen. The powers that be should have never allowed this. Players don’t get a choice. For a century, baseball ran the show. They told you how it was.

Now it flipped and Sho is The Show.

Baseball is a team game, but unique in that it puts individuals squarely in the spotlight. Ohtani is twisting all those spotlights to look at him, and casting a shadow over everyone else. And he’s doing it with no disrespect. In an era where players are running around and screaming about their personal narratives and how they are the greatest ever, Shohei Ohtani has a legit claim to all of that and he’s just sitting on his sofa high-fiving his dog.

Hashtag Wholesome.

Hashtag Whole Game.

Now we’ve all had some time to absorb what’s going on, but we still don’t know how to talk about. We don’t know how to properly hype what Ohtani is doing. His dramatic feats empty our heads and steal the words from our mouths.

It’s okay. Maybe we’ll be able to contextualize what’s going on later.

For now, just keep your eyes open and enjoy the show.

It’s historic goat level things that make sports real time historic drama like no others.

So let’s all mint nicknames, get hyped and enjoy the nightly goosebumps courtesy of Ohtani-san. Enjoy the ride as he smashes multiple balls into the cheap seats and dons his samurai helmet.

Baseball has never dreamed wilder or crazier than it’s doing with the career display the slugger slash hurler from the Rising Sun is putting on. These are competitive hallucinations made tangible. We’re living within the borders of a rare baseball card, surrounded by living, breathing golden baseball monuments.

And so we ride on, accelerating to an uncharted region on the sports map. It’s like learning that the world is round. And spinning like a baseball erupting from the hand or bat of Mr. Shohei Ohtani.

Dame Time Never Stops

To be a sports fan is to consent to a certain kind of repeating hell.

To take a ride on a fragile carousel of fleeting delights and hopes.

To have your journey hijacked by nightmares seen and unexpected.

At least that’s the kind of looping fandom experience that awaits fans of certain sports franchises. I’m not talking about perennial winners like the Yankees or Lakers or Man United. Teams with decades of titles, yet whose fans still find reasons to moan insufferably about their “misfortune.”

I’m talking about fans of cursed franchises. Like the Cubs (before they won) or the Red Sox (before they won).

I’m talking about the specific kind of prolonged cosmic agony that comes with being a fan of the Portland Trailblazers.

Live through enough of these downturns and floor drops and you’ll end up flinching at your own shadow.

Portland, an improbable place for a pro sports franchise. A tiny media market in an out of the way place. Besides being Nike’s birthplace, the Blazers have been our only point of sports pride. When the Blazers matter, so too does Portland matter. When the Blazers falter, well, um…

We’re West Coast, but we’re not LA. We’re not Hollywood, but we’re within jeering distance. It’s a a one-sided relationship that grows the chip on your shoulder. The identity of outcast and underdog is readily available. We’re a band of hippies, that place Steve Jobs fell in love with typography, a handful of Ken Kesey novels, a smattering of bookstores and strip clubs—and lush, green nature full of mountains and trees for us to get lost in and find ourselves again.

But back to the Blazers. Back to day Zero.

Us Blazermaniacs are hurting today.

There is always a dull pain, but today, for the first time in 11 years, Damian Lillard is not a Portland Trailblazer. Man, it hurts to type that.

For over a decade, his singular passion and loyalty emanated and elevated our city of roses and made Portland matter in the sports world. No, sadly we didn’t win a championship. But we became the stage of a unique and legendary basketball talent. A man who was a trailblazer in his very being. Who did things his own way. Going directly against the way things were always done, and catching flack for each of his legacy building moves.

With Nike in his backyard, Lillard went counterintuitive to three stripes, becoming the cornerstone of their basketball business and securing a 300 million plus bag in the process. He pushed through the cliche of athletes having “music” projects, and kept developing his skills, dropping tracks and albums every year as Dame D.O.L.L.A.—pulling noteworthy features along the way. From the jump, there was something different about this undersized point guard. He defied cliches and had a specific vision about who he was.

And all the while, he was a gym rat. Obsessively tuning and optimizing his game. Displaying a rare competitive drive that closely aligned with Kobe Bryant’s notorious Mamba Mentality. Kobe even recognized the greatness in young Dame, singling him out with uncharacteristic praise for an opponent. Those who knew basketball deeply, saw something in Dame’s emerging talent.

Dame continued to go off. Each season showing more bravado. Getting faster, sharper and trickier. Extending his three-point range to video game distances that forced conversations about the NBA adding a four-point line. He and Steph Curry made shooting from half-court a part of their arsenal. It seemed like an audacious one-off when Dame launched his first “logo” three, but the long distance bombs never stopped. They only grew more frequent. Dame was evolving into one of the most potent scoring machines in his era.

Slowly, Portland realized that we weren’t just watching our guy, but that Dame was putting on displays of all-time greatness. The basketball gods had illuminated his game. Dame transcended playing in a small market and showed up with a big time persona.

It was the era of Dame Time.

The accolades came. All-star appearances. Olympic gold. Impressive scoring averages. Three point records. Eventually Dame passed Hall of Fame legend Clyde Drexler to become Portland’s all time leading scorer. LeBron James even tapped Dame to co-star in Space Jam 2. Dame was the ultimate big fish in a small pond, and it never held him back. He was growing into a superstar on his own terms.

As Dame matured into a veteran, he eschewed the NBA trend toward superstar buddies joining up to create super teams. Dame emerged as the vocal antithesis of this mindset. He was determined to stay on his grind. He backed it up in his actions, on podcasts and the lyrics of his tracks. He was determined to win, unconventionally, with loyalty. It was a noble stance that drew heat and fire from media and fellow athletes the brighter Dame’s star burned. In an era that glorifies rings above all else, Dame was going to get there on his own path.

Sadly, Portland’s front office failed Dame. They failed to match his from a different time loyalty. They failed to surround him with balanced talent that complimented his outlandish game. And so, year after year, Portland languished and Dame would need to carry the entire franchise and city, making up for obvious roster holes.

There were highlights and miracles and blazes of hope along the way. There were game winners and series winners. The spotlight shone solely on Dame and Dame delivered. Earning a reputation for being an all time clutch performer. Despite never having made the NBA Finals.

There was even an improbable, cinderella run to the Western Conference Finals a few years ago. The farthest the Blazers would ever go in the Dame era. The team sadly ran out of steam and ended up being swept by Steph Curry and his Warriors dynasty. But Dame didn’t hang his head. As always, he had overachieved. He got back in the gym and stayed on his lonely grind.

All this time, for 11 years, Dame was a rock. A leader and a professional. Never dodging the media and always speaking his mind with respect. Dame is a throwback. His values are entrenched and he operates on a personal code that prides itself on loyalty and commitment.

For 11 years, we were blessed with this loyalty in Portland.

On paper, loyalty was returned. His contracts from the Blazers earned him nearly half a billion dollars, one of the richest hauls in pro sports. And that doesn’t count what his personality and story earned him from his 300 million shoe deal and other endorsements. Portland made the right business moves to reward the face of the franchise. But beyond the paycheck, loyalty was woefully lacking.

Somewhere over the course of this summer, the wires got crossed. Portland decided to move on from Dame, and unfathomably didn’t give him the heads up. Instead they went out and drafted a rookie, who has echoes of a young Dame and plays the exact same position. It was the last straw.

Portland could have worked with Dame by trying to bring in veteran pieces that complimented and enhanced Dame. That’s the basic strategy when you have a singular superstar, you build around them. But in making their brash choice, Dame’s hand was forced, and on July 1st he formally requested a trade. The face of the Blazers for over a decade wanted out.

And yesterday, he got his wish.

And for Blazer fans, our worst fears have manifested again.

Today, we add to our impressive resume of misfortune.

The tragedy and business of sports dictates that those who care most deeply about the team and its players, have zero say in the team’s path. A path that has included such spectacular lowlights as:

-Being the team that could have drafted Michael Jordan, but didn’t.

-Being the team that could have drafted Kevin Durant, but didn’t.

-And now, being the team that willfully ignored the wishes of it’s greatest player and most loyal athlete of the modern era.

Yes, woe is always us. But today is about Dame.

Today we lose a major piece of our identity for the past 11 years. No doubt we’ll have phantom limb syndrome and live vicariously through the triumphs Dame achieves in another city. It’s not possible to stop reacting to the thrill of a Dame half-court shot.

To Dame, THANK YOU.

Thank you for your class and heart. Thank you for embedding yourself into the Portland community and all the good you do in the city. Both loudly and quietly. You will forever be our true mayor.

Thank you for making Portland matter again. When superstars came into our house, you stood up for us and fought back. Thank you for the insane threes and game winners. Thank you for the professionalism. We’ve seen our share of dark and embarrassing times, but with you as our leader, there was only pride. Only class and wide-eyed truthfulness.

You made us stand up straighter and puff out our chests. We could claim you as our own and hitch a ride to the stratosphere as your star rose.

These past three months have been a lot. Amid all the trash talk and sports media hype, it still felt like the basketball gods might intervene and find a way to keep you in a Blazer uniform.

Today we know that was wishful thinking.

Anyway, go get your ring. Go get a couple.

And when it’s all said and done, we’ll beam with pride knowing our guy did it. Hell, we’ll even dream of you coming back to Portland as a champ and leading us to the promised land and that parade down Broadway you prophesied about years ago.

Bridges may have been burnt in how this all went down, but luckily this is Portland and we have a lot of bridges.

Until then, go get it Dame.