After my second full season at UD I moved back to the ICE and moved into a duplex with some members of the old crew I used to play ball with. My roommates were Shot (my old dunking mentor), Dodger (the fastest kid on the planet), and my old AAU Junior Olympic coach affectionately known as Doc. Without going into to much detail and to make a long story short those roommates and my lifestyle didn't mix, so I moved in with Big Swan to the upstairs apartment in a house just up the street from my old stomping grounds known as the Robert A. Lee Community Rec Center. Swan and I moved in above where Big B. and some other old high school buddies lived. That street corner in Iowa City, at Johnson and Burlington Streets, is one of the most centralized and well recognized cornerstones of the college age residential district in the ICE, and years later I moved into the big house across the street where I lived downstairs from my friend who played on the Iowa Grey Squad. There was a huge flood that year while living above Big B. and while I was working for Big B and my friend Jonas' parents cleaning up the old sand bags leftover after the flood resided I started experiencing lower back pain. I did see a chiropractor or two and a doctor about it, but basically I just learned to cope with the pain. I still played basketball and I actually had one of the best years of long range shooting in my life (I think of it as the summer of 'Cream', my Wu Tang Clan long range shooting theme music). I have lots of stories from that summer about some Dodge Street Park basketball wet dreams (as we used to call them), some legendary noon ball stories, some Field House stories, and stories about leading one of my old friend's team to the men's city league tournament title in the 1A league held at Southeast junior high. Those are all ICE basketball tales which I have probably already written in my ICE collection which includes my personal slam dunk life history. That same year I signed up for some cheap classes at the local community college but the old Buick Regal my parents gave me finally broke down for good and the JC was all the way across town so I just stopped going to class. I'm mentioning all this stuff in order to explain what I did between the time I left UD after my sophomore year and the semester I went back for one last run at playing college ball. The old UD coach was no longer the coach and had been replaced by one of his former players. The new coach played on teams with Mo and D Rog when they were freshman and or maybe sophomores, and he too was from Gary Indiana. Prior to getting the head gig at UD he had been an assistant coach for Scranton University in Pennsylvania, the same school where the ladies team from the Mexico trip came from. I named my last UD comeback as "The Return". I was living in a fog, so to speak, during the year I lived back in the ICE, and I was hoping returning to UD would force me to get my life back on track. There were always lots of old and new demons I had to deal with living in the ICE. I thought getting back to playing basketball for the Spartans would be enough to keep me on the straight and narrow. Things did not go exactly as I had hoped. For one last semester I graced that old river town with my presence, living down on the low end by myself at first and then with a puppy dog named Blunt. If there was one really significant thing to come out of that experience during that final one last semester it was adopting Blunt the Pit Bull. That dog would become a lifelong companion that lived and traveled with me for the next 11 years. I often tell people that Blunt my dog saved my life more than once. The Return in many ways is mostly about life for me on the low end.

Epiphany time out: What makes my story special? The city I was from (a great city to grow up in and play basketball). The talent I and my friends had. And what we did, or did not do with it (especially including Shot, myself, and Big B.).

Next day of writing(actually it is night, around 4am to be precise - closing in on 4:20) tangent thoughts about my life: high school: B. Bristol, Charlie Rorex, Shot getting punched in the mouth at rec. and going to Happy Joe's Pizza and Shot holding his finger over his fat lip, and seeing Charlie's dad there who worked at the bus depot across the street which was next to my step grandparents old store. He was my old little leage baseball coach and cub scout master who used to let us play kickball every scout meeting and took us to get ice cream at the Dairy Queen by the Sycamore mall. Defending Charlie in the lunch line at City High, truely one of my better moments. Matt Bractal the bully, confrontational run-ins leading to pencil stabbings and a black eye (which I secretly loved - I thought it made me look real tough) and trying to avoid him in the hall way at SE, went to pizza joint near SE w/B. Bristol, witnessed Bractal showdown w/Mark Fay (Bractal commented years later that he wanted to fight him that night - he looked scared as hell to me). I was not very wise to the social scene in high school - I hated school and didn't want to be there, I had better places to be, like the Robert A. Lee and noon ball, or even at the Field House and Armory courts working on my game. Or fishing somewhere, or sleeping-in hung over from drinking 40 ouncers of Old English 800 at Ron and Mike Simms crib and staying up late crack'n on each other all night. Wow, I used to just show up at Ron's every night and sleep over without even asking. They were either to polite (what?) to shoo me away or they actually liked it. Or at Doc's shop (I should have been there everyday to help take care of the animals-ferrets and Duke), too hungry and too far to walk - virtually no help from parents with transportation - except a ride from my step dad home from the rec. once in a while. I loved to play basketball. I couldn't stop. The following things could not keep me off the court: Broken bones and arm casts and black and blue and yellow swollen ankles and broken and dislocated fingers and school and parents and thugs and ballplayer haters and the older guys and the law and the gangs and the doctors... until the broken back did me in, almost... the dream is still alive... a tiny little ember burns red hot, but only on the inside at the very most inner core... there it sits and lives and breaths and pulsates... waiting... or sometimes contemplating to just let itself burn out and end... but for now it still glows, and it knows that with just a little care, a little attention, a warm and soft yet steady breath to bring the little amber to life once again where it could ignite a new fire, a fire that could burn so hot and so bright that the world can see it from near and far... Did I hear something about an old basketball player trying to make a comeback while listening to the radio? Ah, do I long for the gardens of Cordoba...rrrr... I mean... I long for the days of watching M.J., and the whole year of retirement and then the comeback and the TV commercials with 'Johny Killroy' looking like the stunt doubles from the movie, "I'm Gonna Get You Sucka." There was an old jam I used to listen to, and I even have it on tape here and I even played it for my buddy R.C.A. one time in the past year or three; it was a catchy tune called, "Return of the Mac". My last stint in Dubuque I have always called 'The Return'. I loved the title and concept of the Star Wars title, "Return of the Jedi." Maybe living in this rain forest and spending my days trudging through swamps while building fences for my goats and so forth is like my own "Degobah". One difference is that I seek no Jedi master, only the master inside. And only if I ever return to the ICE will such a return to somewhere be worthy of comparisons to and of borrowing the term 'The Return of the Jedi' . But as Jabba the Hut's personal attendant mumbled in the movie, "He's no Jedi." The Return. A return. Another return. 'Return of the Mac' > 'Return of the Mats... Sundine', to Vancouver. 'Return of the Matt'... to slam dunking a basketball... and of playing the game he loves (?)... Story to be continued...

OK, just after completing and going over the above rant (now around 5:20 am) I decided to look up the word 'Epiphany' in my trusty old dictionary to see if I used it correctly. Definition one read something like an appearance or manifestation of a god or other supernatural being. The second definition was about a yearly festival in the Christian church held on Jan. 6 commemorating the revealing of Jesus as the Christ to the Gentiles in the persons of the Magi at Bethlehem, also called 'Twelfth Night'. I tried to look to see when (what day) I wrote the 'Epiphany time out' comment, and I think it was on the 6th of Jan. I will find out after posting this entry (I hope I don't loose it from here to getting it on the web). I guess I used the word incorrectly, or did I? I have never heard of "Twelfth Night" or what ever, unless maybe in Christmas carols? I must have read about it in the bible, but I do not remember anything about it. Pure coincidence that I used the term on the 6th of Jan? I thought the word meant something like 'revelation' or the moment or a moment of enlightenment. When referring to my writing I like to say sometimes that 'the spirit moved me', and when I do say that I mean it as a figure of speech mostly. But not entirely. Does being moved by 'the spirit' count as an Epiphany? If it does than maybe I used the expression correctly. The timing of using it is incredible, 1 in 365 chance that I used the word on the day it represents. This is not the first time things like this have happened regarding what seemed like other real life Epiphany moments; there is one story in particular from my time at the low end during my last return to UD. Maybe it won't seem too strange to anyone else or maybe it is so insignificant or possibly too unbelievable that no one else can relate? That story is yet to come, in the meantime I pay homage to the positive forces in our universe, and now I need to sleep.