On eating your cake, the Sonics, and leaving
Is it okay to enjoy what you worked for? What if it doesn't taste quite how you thought it would?
There was a gluten-free coffee cake mix at Fred Meyer’s that my pops used to bake for me and, when he did, it was this kind of cheat code to a deeply edifying day. It was a cake full of subtle cinnamon and tooth-buzzing brown sugar and it was all mine. It was a special treat considering my dad was not prone to spending money, a man defined by endless credit card debt stymied by sleeping on couch cushions, plastic taped to the windows to trap the heat. This coffee cake appeared as I visited in high school; This coffee cake appeared as an offering of a new chapter. I’d sit in the living room, dog-fighting flys always circling overhead, and devour the whole thing on my own, enraptured.
I’m thinking about this infrequent grocery store treat as I think about an infamous interaction between my dad and his brother. The story goes my uncle accused pops of taking advantage of their dad’s property in the boonies, of my dad wanting his cake and to eat it, too. “What else am I supposed to do with my fucking cake?” pops is said to have said. A fratricidal roar echoing through the Bicchieri annals of history.
And not a bad question. What’s a cake for if not goodness and celebratory revelry baked at 350 degrees for 45 minutes? I’m asking myself that question a lot lately as I’ve left the West Coast of the U.S. for the first time. I wanted to take a break after seven years living in big cities, the first and only 29 years of my life between Washington and California. I worked no fewer than two jobs the whole time, usually three, always in restaurants and bakeries and non-profits and stringing writing opportunities along the way.
Now I’m taking that break. I feel, after a few anxious weeks, at ease, like I’m eating that cake. My god do I enjoy it: carrot cake is probably my favorite kind, and I feel like I get a thicc slice of the recipe my partner bakes for my birthday every day. I walk slow through towns copy pasted from The Wind That Shakes The Barley, smell the mossy rain, make doctor’s appointments (since god knows I never had the time or the money to go even though in the Bay I did have insurance), drive through countryside I’ve read about since I was a kid, swim laps at the pool. I’m out here licking the icing off my god damn fingers.
But I wake up and think about the ongoing Palestinian extinction effort led by Israel, think about the migrants whose boats Italy dreams of sinking, think about the poetry and community connections I left in San Francisco now that the city’s rounding up folks and smashing their tents. Now I’m wondering what it looks like to eat my cake while staying in the mix, wondering what happens now that I left and if there’s a way to share a cake from afar.
Let me say I am also thinking the NBA’s ill-fated Seattle SuperSonics might relate to this situation. The PNW’s green and gold heroes of yore also did not know what futures await after working hard, pushing shit along, finding the other side isn’t what you thought it might be. What’s it mean to blast through the season only to lose on the first game in the play-offs? To be the first in history to fail in such a blockbuster way, and to do so twice?
That’s exactly what happened in the 1993-1994 and 1994-1995 seasons for the Emerald City’s own. I was a baby, my hometown an hour and change east. But my brother and dad watched the team play at the equally ill-fated Kingdome. This is when Shawn Kemp and Gary Payton ran the game rather than the blues; This is when Seattle was a blue collar city and Big Tech didn’t have quite as much to do with gentrification and surveillance. All that nerdy shit still happened on Mercer Island, as far as any of us knew. Still the Sonics’s name itself was a play on one of the area’s most iconic companies, Boeing. And by the way I do have to ask how much ill-fated-ness is the Northwest meant to suffer?
The startling traction the team gained came long after the franchise’s lackluster debut in the 60s, after a few beautiful moments under Bill Russel in the 70s including a championship win in 1979 (thanks, Jack Sikma and all your beautiful blonde hair) before another decade of dizziness through the 80s. This team only became an It Girl squad in the mid-90s. Journalist and basketball head Shea Serrano waxed on this time, on power couple Payton and Kemp as one of the most legendary duos in the game in his book Basketball and Other Things. Joined by Detlef Schrempf and Nate McMillan this is the team that could guard Michael Jordan, that brought the Lister Blister down like vengeful lightning.
But this story doesn’t end as a Seattle story might, a piece of rice candy with the check, a cozy fire in Ballard as rain drizzles on the street. The Sonics were sold by Howard Schulz once he took over. This is the same bastard businessman behind Starbucks’s cancerous growth, for the blissfully uninformed. Okalahoma’s Clayton Bennett, the spokesperson for the development group that bought the team, lied through his teeth when Schulz made the sale: “It is our desire to have the Sonics and [WNBA team] Storm remain in Seattle,” Bennett said upon purchase. “We have great respect for history.”
A year later, after a contractually obligated “good faith effort” to find a new stadium home for the Sonics, Bennett took the team out of town for good. No amount of Ray Allen or fresh-faced Kevin Durant could keep the fans coming to a seemingly always changing arena. Fitting that the last Sonics game ever on April 16, 2008, was a win over the Golden State Warriors, the only two NBA teams I could ever claim battling while my point of origin took the win.
Again I find myself asking what happens once you leave and the cake is not hitting quite the way you thought it would.
If I am tired, like tired tired, it’s at times because I’ve spent my energy in the wrong places. There is work like baking a cake for a loved one, the hours spent measuring and cracking and frosting the alchemical effort into, for a little while, the most beautiful thing you’re sure you’ve ever made. Then there is work that breaks you down, breaks down your sense of self sense of community sense of history or maybe all of that. This is work that is demanded of a person, the work that comes down from on high, the work that has slipped into every facet of our lives through an empire’s cracks.
In thinking on leaving and cake, consider Ireland’s own Blindboy, writer and podcast extraordinaire, regarding the colonial history of carrot cake. Due to the invading forces of Oliver Cromwell and sugar rations throughout World War II, an otherwise undesirable carrot bunch could be transfigured into a simple war-time delight. Carrot cake came into Ireland as more Irish than ever left the island, mostly for good. Now it’s a country taking in more Ukranian refugees than just about any other country since Russia’s 2022 offense; according to the Irish Times more than 100,000 have come to the Emerald Isle while taoiseach Simon Harris honors a pledge to support Ukraine through “non-lethal aid.”
This is the sharing of a cake, a cake that survived hundreds of years of occupation and turned fortune around, the pain of leaving and invading mollified through the opening of arms. The only arms opening my home country knows about is in the underwriting of the arms keeping these invading forces invading and invading. The cake of that long effort is no good to share, barely good enough to eat. When they do finally eat the rich, they’ll taste like gunpowder and crumpled pocket cash.
This is no mere grass is always greener entanglement, or I’m thinking the situation goes deeper than that. Shawn Kemp learned of the pain in leaving when he headed to the Cleveland Cavaliers, certain he was worth that $107 million seven-year contract. He saw almost no game time as he wrestled with substances, according to the Score. Sometimes there really is no there there; sometimes the magic was in the batter, the blending of the right elements. Sometimes it’s the work from sticking around rather than the work of licking icing from the fingers.
This is no indictment of Kemp. It’s barely an indictment of Oklahoma’s Clayon Bennett and his big business boys.
But I do think there is value in commitment. I think the matters we care about and work for, the non-extractive work of our shining souls, are time-tested and earnest and waiting for us wherever we go.
I think there is collectivism out there for U.S. expats; This is not a new thought, following in the footsteps of Ellison, Baldwin, and Wright, though those three took their own takeaways from the Parisian life. Poet and homie Alan Chazaro and I talk about this often, the expectations and hopes for a writer if they dare leave the United States. He sends me a voice note saying he’s been reflecting on the idea of courage, the mix of privilege and curiousity, that jettisons someone from their “comfortable enough” life. He laughs when I say I finally got to the dentist.
It was in Cuba where Assata Shakur wrote her groundbreaking biography — another big one for me — though her leaving was certainly under dire circumstances. Ta-Nehisi Coates just wrote a book on what he witnessed in his travel to Gaza. I might just be justifying this experience, the eating of the cake, but I know there’s a history to this cosmopolitan attempting. There’s a history to finding a way to make the moving matter, sending a slice of cake direct.
I think participating in global movements, the same ones many terminally online people deride as performative to even mention (since it’s implied there’s no way you are really doing anything), is like cutting up a cake. It took only a week or two of jogging through those dewy Irish hills before I felt the need to get into the mix once more. I became a secretary at my local AA meeting, found a sponsee. I hit up my sponsor back in the Bay to discuss the differences between international sobriety spaces. These are not grand gestures. These are the ways I hope to make my moving matter, to make it not a whimper but a bang.
When the Sonics played that last game there were already forces at play to bring an NBA team to Seattle again. Downtown’s Climate Pledge Arena has been brought up to code for any would-be future hoopers; the league’s commissioner Adam Silver and Seattle mayor Bruce Harrell said in 2020 and 2023 the future looks bright for a team to play in all that sweet rain. There is moving and there is returning and unlike many nuanced events in life there is a clear difference between the two.
I am of the mind one might enjoy the cake, all the cake they can, when the work has flowered, the fruit of labor a sweet raspberry jelly between the layers of nonna’s birthday cake. I came up weird and set my mind upon dancing through all that noise, figuring out something new between a couple of bustling cities. And I just talked to my dad the other night, him telling me how he’s back to shoveling dirt in rural Washington, listening to the coyotes at night. “It’s like they’re celebrating the sun going down,” he said.
