My great, lost work is no great work at all. Conceived and written in at the end of the CityBeat epoch, “Rhyme Scheme” landed among terrific company in the first Bronx Biannual anthology. That’s the best that can be said about this work, in the tangible sense.

But there’s no undervaluing the role of “Rhyme Scheme” in my life…

My latest mock lament: Leave it to me to come up with the one baseball story that fathers are reluctant to share with their sons.

It’s actually just dawning how much the subject of Dock Ellis & the LSD No-No alienates certain media members, thereby driving it underground. They can’t really connect with the story, due to a lack of experience. Hence a lack of coverage.

Word’s come to me that Major League Baseball would like to see the piece come down from its YouTube perch. That’s laughable, and not just because youngsters could really use something to connect them to the great, illustrative and domestically withering game — more ever than before.

The “take it down” notion is fundamentally a joke ‘cuz, even if my folks were to remove that post, there’s no stopping the story. The No-No has not only been downloaded to more computers than one might be able to realistically count, it’s in the ether. And on more film festival stops than one can accurately quantify.

(BTW, anybody see the No Mas influence on this Zito & Lincecum short?)
For example, Dock makes its debut in San Miguel, Mexico on Saturday. And the short’s not showing in a bowling alley, as it did in neighboring Texas. Our film screens at Bellas Artes, a credible, mighty fine venue. ‘Cuz ours a mighty fine work of art.

(Just wait until we hit Taiwan. Baseball’s screwed in the U.S., but it’s the stuff of life in Asia and Latin America. No definitive word yet on those regions’ takes on hallucinogens. But here’s a prospective look.)

Ain’t no stopping fine, newsy art in the Internet era. The genie is out of the bottle. The antidote to old ideas is on the table. Partake, don’t hate.

A lot of whole bunch of women, such an important range of females, come to mind when I play this Stones classic, and they’ve been coming back constantly over the past few days.

‘Cuz it’s fuckin’ hot, even in The Bay. And I’m a little horny.

(Ah, the good. I’m missing that too. ‘Cuz script deadline has got me on lockdown, and I’ve not been imbibing.)

A lot of my media life lately has been about listening to The Cool Kids and rap classics. And I’ve been banging Wilco like crazy. What’s not been going on is TV-oriented news. See, there’s been an internal screenplay deadline poppin’ over the past few days, alongside a spot of travel.

I’ve not been following the whole LeBron James saga a whole lot. Still, it’s clearly a stupendous story. NBA hoops as worldwide power shift. Miami gave LeBron, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh the keys to the ride. And that’s all young powerful niggas want: The opportunity to drive.

Pro athletes can be annoyingly arrogant, let’s not forget that. I spent a very overheated Saturday in and around the Summer League hoops in Vegas, as part of a a multi-media project that I’m producing. The up-and-coming baller we were supposed to document dropped out at the last minute. (The less said about this, the better; I’m still hella pissed.) This meant I had to introduce myself to 30 or so players, agents, friends and/or family members. Let’s put it this way: Ballers have help in getting their way. Everybody wants to ride a potential gravy train.

It was alarming, the culture of fealty that surrounds our young jocks. A lot these bucks ain’t done shit, yet they got the hubris of an old pro. I was reminded of my time at ESPN. Then I felt better to not be in the thick of that right now. I’d rather work on movies.

Unrelated (but not really) news: At Wyatt’s ninth birthday party, this annoying dickhead beat me at basketball for the first time. He better savor that fluke-ass shit, because it will be a long while before he scores another win off of me.

I wrote about a cool little medical marijuana movie for Marijuana Business Reporter. You should check it out.

My kinfolk would like me to bring in a lot more dollars, but they are fine aside from that. The Donnell Alexander who lost his sister to that local serial killer is some other dark chief.

A couple of other Donnell Alexanders of prominence: The nutritionist from New Zealand. (We follow each other on Twitter, for kicks.) And the American football prospect. (Great presence of mind!)

Sometimes it’s impossible to keep track of the world of sports, even though I am ostensibly supposed to do that for a living. It’s not because I’m largely immersed in the world o’ writing, which I am. And it’s not because I’m overwhelmed by a chaotic romantic life, although that situation is real as fuck, too.

I can’t follow sports because there’s so much going on that’s thoroughly illusory.

While I thoroughly appreciate the economics of LeBron James’ free agent choices, especially where it impacts my old Northern Ohio stomping grounds, I’m really not feeling the pornographic attention being paid to his, Dwayne Wade, etc.’s potential moves. Call me an old fart, but I remember the days when you just picked up a — gasp — newspaper the day before or after a move happened and learned about a star’s free agency choice. Then you either booed or went, “Yay!”

Obviously, things done changed. The money’s stoopid. The media’s ravenous. And, also, the media is ravenous. C’mon, if you don’t think that more than half the reason NBA free agency is occupying space in your brain has to do with eidtors, producers and other suits filling airtime, you’ve not yet fathomed why Mel Kiper has a career.

So, settle down on your NBA free agency consumption. It’s not like David Stern is adding a third hoop into the equation. (Which would be really interesting, actually.) Nobody’s made goal-tending legal.

Settle down.

Also a matter of hype is whether Stephen Strasburg will ultimately be selected for next week’s MLB All-Star Game.

I got a look at Strasburg…

JaMarcus Russell’s fail is interesting to me. If you’re gonna get busted, get busted for a compelling controlled substance.

I just got a hold of this 2001 Harlem Book Fair clip from C-SPAN. My bit starts at roughly the 36:30 mark. Ron Dellums is compelling, as are others before and after me. Considering the focus of this blog and my life, let’s just talk about me.

This book fair took place nine years ago this month on 125th Street, where I drank vodka from a brown paper bag while awaiting various shots at getting my memoir attention. Wanda — a Newark lawyer friend who represented me throughout the uneven, very exciting early McSweeney’s days — had a bunch of her writers on the scene. She became pissed at me after I got one of her writers (not saying who, not here) wasted.

A shitload of people attended that festival, thousands across both days of the event.

Before a crowd of maybe 400, predominantly black, I read inadvertently read a graphic passage about, um, let’s call it interracial cunnilingus. It’s hard to say whether the material actually ended up in Ghetto Celebrity. Despite the certainty with which I talked to C-SPAN’s reporter, there was only hard copy. No book. I read from pages that are now long, long gone.

Book fair organizers may have given me a literal hook. I don’t recall. But after that brief reading, a young woman overheard some unrelated scatological conversation being guided by me. “So, you’re that guy,” she said.” Explain, I asked. And she said her mother had heard a young man read an over-the-top sexual excerpt from a true story and that the experience was unnerving and inappropriate. Her mother said the crowd was beside itself.

“But I kinda liked it,” the mom told her daughter.