Many of you have written over the last several weeks asking what gives and where I’ve been. And I’m not even making that up, as is my wont. In tweets, emails and comments you’ve asked fun, where for art thou: another season has come to naught and our beloved St John’s basketball program is in danger of foundering upon the rocks. At this our darkest hour we need you now more than ever. Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.

Well look. In the first place if you’re looking to me for solace you’re bound to be disappointed. I don’t like too many of you to begin with and anyway I don’t do sympathy. But more importantly, what am I supposed to say? Saint John’s dropped their eleventh in a row Tuesday night to number six Xavier and then rehash the box score and takes a couple of jabs at stupid Steve Lavin? I don’t think so. Been there, done that. Neither is there anything that novel about this season: I’ve sat through close losses and blow outs and catastrophe before (Kevin Clarke to the white courtesy telephone). I can barely work up the energy to shrug. It’s a sign of how inured to it all I’ve become that not even the loathing and contempt I feel for many sad plonker St John’s fans raises in me enough bile to call them cunts. The relentless faggotry of the Mullin-must-go crowd, impotently regurgitating the same shopworn self-important pablum. The inept exhortations from pointless losers to email the school president, threatening to boycott the concession stand unless their demands are met. Not even the sad sack serial plagiarist, parroting my pet phrases, droning on humorlessly about watching milk fed Midwestern lummoxes on the telly with his boon companion. None of it gets a rise out of me. (Although I think we can all agree that plagiarist guy is a cunt.) It does not move me, not enough to write about it anyway.

You want solace? Here it is, and I paraphrase something I wrote a few weeks ago: We will all soon enough be cold dead in the ground, our suffering at an end, lying fallow in boneyards overgrown with weeds, forgotten by our friends and family, nourishment for maggots and weevils, and the world will get on quite all right without us. That’s what I got for solace. I hope it made you feel better.

As to the basketball team, I paraphrase myself again:

Jamaica is where coaching careers come to die. Every coach post Mahoney has come to SJ on the come and each of them has flamed out spectacularly. Bonehead Mike Jarvis was the most successful coach St John’s has had since Louie and he left the program disgraced and on probation. Fran was a tortured little dwarf who spent his tenure waving his shriveled white cock in his players faces. Norm was, charitably, inept. And stupid Steve Lavin was mentally ill and an abomination.

The point is that SJU is not a good job. The facilities are antediluvian, the fan base sucks – that’s right, I’m talking to you, you suck – and Jamaica is a shithole. If Mullin fails – and I give him a mulligan for this year, pre Lovett he was on an NIT trajectory which is all that anyone other than the most delusional fan would have expected – no one with a brain would take it, unless they pay some over achieving mid major dope like Will Brown – imagine, people are pining for Will Browne, that’d be the Will Brown who was 32 and 72 in his first four years in the mighty America East. Will Browne versus Jay Wright and Doug McDermott’s father, can you imagine the carnage – four or five times his present salary to come disappear in the Bermuda Triangle of coaching, never to be seen or heard from again. Me, I’ve already registered FireTimCluess.com with network solutions and am looking forward to the ad revenue. Because this blog doesn’t generate shit for me. It’s barely worth the write off. (Write off, geddit?).

The fact is that things look worse than they are. If they’d won a couple three games they could have it wouldn’t look so bad. Lavin’s last year – the year he finally managed to make the tournament without Norm’s players – he lost to Butler by 25 on the road. Nobody remembers that, but they wail and gnash their teeth about what happened in Indiana last week. That’s not to minimize the disaster this season has been, but to put it in perspective. Considering the roster – a roster on which Amar Alibegowitz is expected to contribute – hell, they might be over achieving. I mean, they’ve lost to six ranked teams by a combined 38 points; they’ve played two and a half bad games out of 23. Nobody’s murdered anyone, no one’s raped anyone, no one’s punched anyone. Which on the one hand is a pretty low bar, but on the other one that a bunch of Mullin’s predecessor couldn’t jump over. So yeah, they’re not winning games, but they’re not embarrassing themselves either – and if you’re embarrassed, you’re a mouth breather. If Mullin sucked as much as the perpetually disgruntled believe he’d have lost the team a long time ago. Which he hasn’t. Which is to say, it’s not a basketball acumen issue, it’s a talent issue.

Mullin – especially Mullin – doesn’t deserved to be fired two years (no rational person would count his first year) into a six year contract and even if the wanted to they can’t afford it and even if they could afford it they couldn’t afford to hire anyone who’d make them immediately relevant, e.g. the whore monger Rick Pitino, who was making seven million at Louisville which is like 11 million in NYC. Other than hoping that Mullin turns things around there are no good alternatives. Which is why I hope he does … A couple quick notes. Tariq Owens stage mother Honey Boo Boo Renard (his Twitter profile says he’s a proud dad who’s “currently … getting money”) tweeted this week that his son deserves 15 shots a game and that “If I was Tariq I would shoot every time I touch the ball no matter what.” Tariq responded by going for no points and two rebounds versus Xavier, goal tending what turned out to be the winning basket and travelling on SJ’s final possession. Fortunately for Tariq Miss Congeniality is still in play, because with his body he’s not winning the swim suit competition … Apropos of nothing, I never noticed Chris Mack’s nose before, which is surprising, because it’s enormous. In fact:

Separated at birth?

… Speaking of dopey Steve Lavin, his mother passed last week. Condolences to him and his family. That said, how many weeks of half time shows do you think he’ll miss sitting Shiva? At first I figured he’d be out until Memorial Day but then it occurred to me that he’d much rather mourn on television. Now my guess is he shows up for the Dewk game in a black hat, veil and dark glasses looking like Jackie Kennedy … Finally, the refs sucked, especially Pat Driscoll, who has inherited the worst referee in basketball mantle from stupid drunk Jim Burr. There was a telling moment in the first half: Mullin was talking to Driscoll directly in front of the SJ bench; Driscoll said something to him and Mullin looked down at his feet with an incredulous look on his face. Clearly Driscoll said something to him about being out of the coaching box – I couldn’t tell exactly what he said, my view was obscured by JP Mascara’s cock, which was firmly lodged in Driscoll’s throat – which if Mullin was out of the box he wasn’t far out of the box. Can anyone imagine Driscoll saying the same thing to classy Jay Wright or his hometown boy Jim Boeheim? Because I can’t. If you recall Driscoll is the same guy who called a foul on Shamorie Ponds a couple of weeks ago when a Nova player climbed up his back like a Sherpa scaling Mount Everest. Probably Driscoll’s not on the take, but that doesn’t make his behavior any less egregious.