Lots of news this morning that teammates Gilbert Arenas and Javaris Crittenton drew guns on each other during a Christmas Eve locker room argument over a gambling debt.

It was apparently news to Gilbert as well, as he just sent out this “tweet”:

i wake up this morning and seen i was the new JOHN WAYNE..lmao media is too funny

And yes, Gilbert Arenas has started tweeting and you should follow him @gilbertarenas.

Gilbert updated his blog today and as you would probably expect, the primary focus of his latest entry is his newest tattoo.  Here’s what he had to say:

Since the tattoo message was all about change, it was a miracle when I went in to get it done. Instead of it hurting, it actually felt good like the needle was giving me a hand massage … I’m lying, it kind of hurt a lot.

I got the tattoo done on the Friday after the election down in Orlando because I always get my tattoos done down in Orlando.

But as we all know, when Gilbert does something he does it big, so you had to know that he couldn’t just stop with a tattoo:

At my house in the garage I had a mural of me airbrushed on the wall as the black president. After Obama won the Democratic ticket about a month and a half ago, I had him airbrushed on there next to me. When he won, I had the mural painted over and I’m going to have a new one airbrushed on there with the presidential shield and the whole Obama family.

If you haven’t seen the original mural, it’s the picture at the bottom of this legendary post from Dan Steinberg about Gilbert’s pool.  It should be interesting to see how the new version turns out.  Since the main focus of his new entry was on politics, he also cleared up where he stands on the voting process:

At first I was trying to be funny, but obviously when you’re talking about politics you can’t be funny. When I said, “My vote doesn’t actually count anyway,” that was because I’m a resident of Florida and I still have the memories of how Bush cheated us a couple years back so I was joking that at the end of the day my vote doesn’t really count anyway, but I’m not sure everybody got the joke.

To set the record straight, I ended up voting, and it was worth it for all of the excitement.

After talking about one of his recent commercials, Gilbert gave his thoughts on the new FreeDarko book:

I read my parts of the book, FreeDarko Presents: The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac, and that’s some entertaining material. I kick it off with a foreword, talking about my man Penny Hardaway and then the FreeDarko boys take over for the rest. I want everybody to go out and purchase it. There’s a stat in there that the further I get from the basket, the higher my shooting percentage goes up. It’s true, but it’s one of those stats where I don’t take a lot of shots from that far (I think they say I’m 20-for-46 from wayyyy downtown for my career or something) so it’s not like I’ve taken 100 shots from there.

(Without getting too far off-topic, I think Gilbert is selling himself short on his long-long-long distance shooting, but there’ll be more on that later.  Anywho…)   Once he finished his book plug, Gilbert talked about what he’s seen with the team so far in the season:

I spoke after the Milwaukee game, and that was the first time I really interacted in a meeting this year. I just said what I see out there. It had nothing to do with basketball, it had everything to do with off the court stuff.

The best teams are the teams that hang around each other, that love being around each other off the floor. Those are the best teams that go on to do good things in this league. When you start separating yourselves off the floor, you start separating during the game. You don’t know how to talk to each other when things get rough.

But we’re getting closer now. We’re getting back to where we were when we were playing well. If you’re getting along off the floor, it’s going to eventually carry onto the floor.

After giving his thoughts on the team, Gilbert goes on to give an update on his rehab and when he think he’ll be back:

I get anxious being on the sideline when they’re struggling. I started playing Nick Young one-on-one (I beat him 9-1, he was so embarrassed) but the trainer said he’s not going to let me go any earlier than mid-December to January.

So even though I’m playing one-on-one against Nick, my trainer said that no matter what’s going on with the team or how I think I feel, he’s not releasing me until mid December.

So there you have it.  I think if he can make it back by December 25th, that it would probably be the best gift that anyone could ask for.

There’s plenty more in his latest entry including his thoughts on the Iverson-Billups trade and his take on  Chris Paul’s tremendous start.  But don’t take my word for it.

Remember all of those mixed signals we were getting from Gilbert about his political beliefs?  Well, maybe this clears it up some:

Arenas has decided to show his permanent support of President-elect Barack Obama with a tattoo. Arenas had the words “Change We Believe In” tattooed onto the fingers of his left hand in cursive writing. Then, Gilbert showed the outside of his pinky finger, which had “44″ inked on it.

Granted, that’s kind of weaksauce compared to this, but obviously anytime that you’re getting a tattoo, you’re making a permanent statement about whatever you’re getting inked.  So does that mean Gilbert’s had a change of heart?  Kind of, but not exactly:

For a player who said he wasn’t even going to vote just three weeks ago, Arenas changed his apolitical stance quickly — and dramatically. Arenas said on Saturday that his previous comments about not voting because he was afraid of having higher taxes were “a joke that nobody got.” He added that he always planned on voting for Obama but was waiting to find the right reasons.

“I wasn’t going to sit there and wing it for no reason,” Arenas said, “Like oh yeah, he’s black so I’m voting [for him]. I could’ve said I was voting for [John] McCain because he’s from Arizona and went to all the games.”

This could be a case of Gilbert’s revisionist history, but at this point I can’t even really speculate.  I think the best thing that we can all do at this point is nod and smile and pretend to understand what’s going on.

It’s amazing how it seems like weeks can go by with almost no news on the Gilbert front, and then in the span of about 36 hours, Gilbert gets on Jeopardy, he has an epic interview with SLAM, and he updates his blog.  The main subject on this week’s entry is Gilbert’s relationship with his mother.

He was like, “I was in college at the University of Miami and she was living with her parents and me until she moved out to the projects with me in Tampa, Florida.”

So, she was in Tampa and he was in Miami going to college and he came down to visit her early one time to surprise her and me and long story short, she was there with somebody else and doing drugs. They broke up right there and he went back to school.

Back in Miami, he ended up breaking his leg and had to leave school to come back to Tampa to be closer to me I guess. While he was coming back to Tampa, he didn’t know it, but she was going up to Miami to move with the other guy because she was pregnant by the other guy.

Now, my mom had another kid by the dude she was moving to Miami with whose name is “Blue” living with us in Tampa. So when she ran off, she left me and my stepbrother Blue with the dude’s mother. The dude’s mother called my father and said, “I’m going to give you a second chance to be a father.”

She was like, “Francis,” (my mother’s name is Francis), “Francis hasn’t been here for months. She hasn’t seen her kids in months and I’m getting ready to turn your son over to the state. You can come down here and pick your kid up.”

So my dad drove down and picked me up right before the foster care was coming to get me. I guess my dad and my mom talked about it a couple months after he got me and they agreed that she was going to come and get me back. And she never did.

Next, he explains his encounter with his mother while he was playing for Golden State:

So it’s before the game, we’re on the court and I hear this woman screaming my name. I’m thinking, “I know I don’t have any fans like that in Miami. I mean, I know I get buckets, but I ain’t got no fans …” and then I turned around and saw the lady and she says to me, “I’m your mother.”

All I can remember is all the anger from all the years of beating up kids from them talking about my mother, it just got charged inside of me after I saw her. I played that game so angry that I got kicked out of the game for throwing my headband into the crowd.

After the game she met us by the bus and fell into my arms crying and said again, “I’m your mother.” Then she said her name. That was the first time I had ever seen her. I never even saw a picture of her before. I didn’t know if she was dark skinned/light skinned, I didn’t know nothing. She gave me her number and we had to go, so I got on the bus and I called my dad.

“Yo, what was my mom’s name?”

“Francis.”

“Well, I think I just met her.”

He asked for her number and he called her and that was the last I ever heard of her until my dad told me the story after the Cavs series and it was the last time I ever saw her Mike Wise’s story included a picture of her. When I saw her by the bus it was all a blur, I didn’t really have an image of her in my head. The first time I got to see her see her was when that article came out.

After explaining how basketball and other people helped fill the void created by not having a mom in his life, he went on to talk about his role as “Coach Arenas” while he’s sidelined:

I look at it like this: I remember hearing stories of people playing with Jordan and people playing with Charles Barkley and some of the older cats and they were seeing these guys party and go out to clubs and they’re thinking that that’s what the NBA is about, but they didn’t see these guys when they were in their 20’s and working hard every day. They just saw the fun part of it.

So you had some of our young kids coming in the league and just partying and getting all ahead of themselves. Whenever there is a young person that comes to the team, I try to show him the right light. They’ll make their decisions after that.

I’m like, “Look, I work hard. I come in three times a day. I’ll call you. What’s up? You’re working? You’re coming to work? You need to work? OK, let’s go get some shots up. Let’s go in early. Let’s do this, let’s do that.”

You give them the right way to be a professional and from there they can make their choices.

It’s just like when I was in Golden State, I had Larry Hughes, I had Antawn, I had Erick Dampier, I had Marc Jackson and Chris Mills. I had all these people to look at and see what these guys did.

His latest entry might not have the humor that a lot of his posts have, but that’s not a bad thing, especially in a post like this.

Gilbert updated his blog today, with the main subject being the news that he got engaged.  Like anything Gilbert does, it could be your standard down on one knee proposal.  When Gil does it, he does it like this:

I was thinking up ways to do it, you know, maybe I’ll do like an Easter egg hunt for the ring or something. But then it came to me, I was going to kick it back old school with a “Do you like me?” note that you would do in elementary school. Only, I couldn’t write the note, because that would be like me asking her. So I got my friend to write on a piece of paper “WILL YOU MARRY ME?” in big block letters with two boxes to check off, “YES” or “NO.” Then the final step was for him to write “(READ OUT LOUD)” at the top of the note.

I folded it up and had it in my pocket. So there we are at dinner and all her family is there, my dad, her dad, her friends, my friends, Antawn Jamison showed up, Mos Def and a couple people from Mos Def’s crew showed up. At the end of the meal, in front of everybody, I tell her that I have one last gift for her. I told her, “This is my gift” and I handed her the note and I sit down.

She opens the note and she reads it and she says, “Read out loud,” but sort of to herself under her breath because you know, you’re always going to read something to yourself before you blurt it out to the room. Then she reads silently, “Will you marry me?”

Then she flipped the note over to see if there was anything written on the back and then looked at me weird.

I said to her, “You have to read it out loud.”

So she goes, “WILL YOU MARRY ME?” out loud so everybody could hear her.

It worked. It turns out she ended up asking me to marry her.

I was like, “Oh my God!!!” and started screaming like the girl who gets asked normally does.

“I can’t believe you asked me!!!! Of course I will!!! Oh my God, it’s been six long years, what took you so long???!!!??? Oh my God!!! This is unbelievable!!!!”

After getting his dad’s thoughts on the big news, Gilbert talked about when he’s planning on getting married:

The man law has been passed on by men regarding engagement and I just found out about it: You should prolong your engagement as long as you can.

I thought it was because the men were scared to get married. No. That’s not it. It’s because of life in the bedroom disappearing once you get married. Married men don’t have that, so they figure the longer you can stay engaged, there’s more love.

So, I’ll probably set the wedding date for 2027. I figure by then, I’m not going to be focused on the bedroom anymore.

Well, at least that means he won’t be distracted by wedding plans during the season.  It also means that we’ll be able to see the same old, same old on the court and the bowling alley:

On Sunday we went bowling at Lucky Strikes. I’m the one that talks trash the most, so I’m sitting there talking away and everybody is like, “You can’t bowl with one leg!”

I go, “Well, with two good legs I bowl at least a 230. So with a bad leg I can bowl 175-190.”

The first game was like a practice game and I was feeling out the lane. I ended up bowling a 110 and everybody else was bowling like 130-140. So I said, we might as well make it a competition. They all saw me just bowl the 110, so they all said I was going to lose.

Once it was a challenge, boom, I come out of the gate with three straight strikes and ended up bowling a 209. They were so mad because I only had one leg. I’m just hopping around on one leg and still beating them all. Don’t mess with the Hibachi.

It’s nice to see that his latest knee surgery hasn’t taken away his swagger.  There’s plenty more in his latest entry as well.  Thoughts on last names, commenters on his blog, Nick Young’s documentary, and a bad experience with some seafood.  As always, it’s worth your time.