Why I Set Fire to a School Bus

On the mysticism of sports

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It speaks to a deep spiritual inadequacy in me that I’m not a sports fan. What the average beer-bellied football enthusiast is capable of doing from his recliner on a Sunday afternoon is nothing short of astral projection in my book.

When I look at what’s keeping me from enjoying sports, it looks an awful lot like what’s keeping me from escaping samsara. I’m a smarmy materialist. How dearly I cling to my sad, sorry self! I will not experience God. I will be reincarnated. Oh, I’ll be back for sure. I know it. I’m weighted with “me.”

On my next go-around, I humbly request to be a sports fan. I want to place my fragile happiness in the bodies of perfect strangers on my Samsung TV. I want to yell, and curse, and pray, and believe. How beautiful. Submission.

Last winter, I attended an Oklahoma City Thunder game. I had a decent seat in the Paycom Center. “We” were playing the Lakers. I enjoyed the huge arena. Huge arenas feel like antiquity. Like nothing’s changed. I even enjoyed watching the players. The fierce, open-mouthed focus on their faces. They’d fan out in a flurry of squeaks and clump back together in one fluid, mitotic motion.

I found myself fixating on Luka Dončić, the forward and point guard for the Lakers who hailed from Slovenia. We were booing him.

When a teenager pokes up over 6’5” anywhere in the world, it initiates an international bidding war. One of my high school classmates in Oklahoma, for example, stood at six-foot-ten, and was swept away to Romania.

I was trying to put myself in Luka Dončić’s Jordans. One day, you’re an exceptionally tall kid. The next, you’re being booed in the wheaty heartland of a very different country from your own. I asked why we hated him, and was given some perfunctory narrative. I dutifully cupped my hands around my mouth. “BOOO!”

But I couldn’t shake the absurdity. This man was not from Los Angeles. He was not from this country. For that matter, not a single Thunder player was from Oklahoma.

A basketball team isn’t a stable entity. Players are traded all the time. This strikes me as outrageous. You mean some rich guy can remove a human being from Lawton, Oklahoma, and plop his whole life down in Bucharest? Sounds like trafficking.

The act of booing a Slovenian out of obligation to a thin storyline overwhelmed my suspension of disbelief. It felt rude and unwelcoming. I wanted to show Luka Dončić my hometown by the Texas border. Perhaps go fishing together. “We aren’t all like that,” I’d tell him, during a placid lull by the water. We would trade secrets. Become friends. Fall in love…

This fantasy was no more outlandish than the one I was being asked to participate in.

My inability to enjoy sports is almost certainly related to my general suspicion of group activities. Political movements. Identity-based communities. National and regional pride. Yogis. I’ve been burned by them all.

I was part of a scholarship group in college that forced us to attend weekly meetings. I discovered a way to game the system by stealing my name tag from the table and slipping away. The one activity I couldn’t escape was the annual scavenger hunt. I told my team I’d search the dorm tower where I lived. I was never heard from again.

This is basically how I approach all groups today. You may think I’m with you, but… look around.

There are pros and cons to this solitary mode of being. I’m less irritated this way, but it precludes me from the ecstasy that can only be experienced in collective triumph.

Last year, I was walking through Manhattan after a first date when it was announced Zohran Mamdani had won the Democratic mayoral primary. I just so happened to be passing a bar hosting a major DSA watch party. Bodies spilled out into the humid night, each wearing a shirt with the red DSA rose, hooting and slapping each other on the back.

I’d voted for the man, but I could never be part of his watch party. As for DSA, I simply don’t have it in me to sit in a room and debate my “comrades” on the subject of problematic fonts or whatever is going on over there. Sorry.

Still, I envied this orgasmic expression of emotion following a team victory. There are certain torments involved with group participation, yes. But there are certain joys reserved for joiners.

That’s never been me. Even when we used to go to church, my family and I would sit in the very back pew by the exit so we could “beat the church people” to lunch. We’d sneak out after communion, the body of Christ still in my teeth. It’s in my blood.

I’d basically accepted my condition, but then something gorgeous happened this summer. My tenth summer in New York City. The summer I became a real New Yorker, by some metrics. The gorgeous thing that happened was that someone set fire to a school bus. We set fire to a school bus.

You’d think it would be a terrible summer to be a sports atheist in this city. The Knicks. The World Cup. Actually, it was wonderful. The most manic summer I’ve ever experienced in New York. The stage was set before anything sports-related happened. It doesn’t feel good to be an American right now, but it feels good to be a New Yorker.

Our recently elected mayor, for example, is young and supple. Even after being dipped fully clothed in a swimming pool, he remained attractive. Photos of our wet, fuckable mayor stoked an ember of patriotism in me. His high-watt smile could probably power the grid for a few days.

Young socialist victories have lent our metropolis a certain vitality, especially when compared to the gerontocracy running the rest of the country. Mamdani’s opponents take no less part in the rush. The headlines at the New York Post have never been giddier.

People who don’t live here think we’re lawless. “It’s dangerous up there, isn’t it?” an Uber driver in Texas recently asked me, sizing me up in the rearview mirror as if to assess my hardiness. Stabbings. Muggings. People pushing each other onto the subway tracks for fun. A daily free-for-all.

This narrative touches on something true. So many people in so small an area. It provokes some dizziness. One imagines the whole project teetering: The most ethnically diverse urban area on the planet. The most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world. The densest population in the country.

This city shouldn’t work. It’s a miracle that it does; that, every single day, its hull groans through the morass of millions of anxieties toward an ambiguous tomorrow.

This isn’t to say we live in perfect harmony. Tension roils and seethes just below the surface. There’s a distinct feeling that the city would much prefer it if you gave up. Go back to where you came from. You can probably drive a car there. You’d have in-unit laundry. Wouldn’t you like that? Hmm?

Relatedly, Jennifer Lopez recently declared on “Subway Takes” that no one is a true New Yorker unless they were born in New York. I find most subway takes nauseating, and yet I, like anyone, have a subway take of my own (we need to let ugly people be in movies again).

I can’t deny the shrewdness of the format. An intimate talk show, hosted in the artery of the city. On the subway, I often find myself studying the faces of the strangers around me. Who are these people? What do they think? What am I doing here? Do I belong?

“Subway Takes” feeds on the neuroses of very online transplants. Many of the takes attend to ethnic or nativist themes. Which races should be seen in certain neighborhoods, and which should know to hide themselves in shame? Is interracial dating an okay thing to do? Is it really? What makes someone a true New Yorker?

Who do we cheer?

Who do we boo?

I can’t pretend like I don’t understand the desire to locate the city’s essence in something more fixed. The faces change. People move away, then move back. Restaurants shutter, reopen, then close for good. I left the city for a few months, and when I came back, it was a different city. The kineticism is destabilizing. It inspires unease.

From Ur to Akron, a city is a monument to work, to the human capacity for cooperation; a test of our ability to banish violence. Under the concrete sleeps something ancient and dangerous. Some people pick up on the thinness of the membrane.

“I could never live there. It’s too much.”

Energy. Restless. Primal. Something is owed to it. Sacrifices must be made.

The night the Knicks won, a bricolage religion, complete with rituals, figureheads, and festivals emerged. Music. Dance. Chants. Spike Lee was carried through the streets on a palanquin like a makeshift pope. I was warned to stay inside. A school bus was put to the torch.

Before it was burned, it was beaten. Videos show a man in a crossing guard vest repeatedly tossing a stop sign into its grill like Captain America’s shield. The owner of the bus begged for the crowd to stop. They didn’t. We couldn’t. There were mixed sounds of anguished disapproval and excited whoops.

A victory riot. “Nika!” shouted sports fans, the Blues and Greens alike, in Constantinople before tens of thousands of them were killed in the Hippodrome, their blood seeping into the ground of the arena. “Victory!”

Why a school bus? What could be more innocent than a yellow school bus? We entrust it with our children. With our future. The world.

I think about that school bus burning in the night. The ur-stuff of ritual. Take into yourself, yellow school bus, what we cannot hold. Absorb the excess, so that we might destroy you, and then shame ourselves for doing so.

After the rush, we will return to ourselves. Better than before. We will arrest and punish the man. Show us the photos.

Burn.

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I had a mystical experience last month. It was related to sports.

Every bar and coffee shop had set up a TV to play the World Cup. I tend to have at least one manic episode every summer. It’s to do with the sun. I was thinking about the sun that day. Another heat wave. I hadn’t slept. I was “on.” Delirious.

I was walking down the street to get a haircut. Something in the air was wrong.

I was thinking, with concern, about the sun. The relentlessness of its giving. It was too much. A gushing fire hydrant that had been spewing for eternity into a ground that was well beyond its saturation point. Excess.

I feared that the world would overflow with heat.

After my haircut, the sky went dark. Strange weather sometimes follows a heat wave, when the heat wave “breaks.” Fever. The sky was at the absolute threshold of something. Like it might rend itself open at any moment. The road was wet, dark, and slick. I’d never noticed before that it had no painted white lines on it. The world was like that. Borderless. The sky and the ground; less distinguishing between them than usual.

In the bars and shops, people gathered, some spilling out into the street, to watch England vs. Argentina. Everyone was rooting for England. Argentina had been made the vessel of various irrational hatreds. One justification was that England had the more diverse team.

I joined a crowd. Watching the faces canted up toward the screen, I thought of the sun.

There’s something beautiful about sports. There really is. Physical strength and cooperation. Brute force and strict rules. Chaos and order. Between: Bodies, seeking something. I was standing in the street. I turned myself toward the match.

Until relatively recently, priests performed the Mass with their backs to the congregation, ad orientem, facing East. The rising sun. The Source of radiance, emanating through the bodies all facing the same direction. Body. Mass. One.

England went away.

Argentina went away.

Energy radiating from above. Energy radiating from the game. Energy radiating from the Source. One non-dual character. The sun. The sport. The summer. The storm. The strangers.

I evaporated.