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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“Basketball is all mental. Everyone’s talent is the same, but the mental aspect separates stars from superstars.”

He also added talked about developing his mental approach to taking game winners:

“When we play pickup games, I won’t shoot the ball until it’s the last shot. I’m the only one who’s going to take it all the way until we lose or we win. I’ve been doing that for the last three years. You have to have that mind-set: If you don’t make it, you have to live with it. As many shots as Michael Jordan’s made, he’s missed three times as many.”

I’d say that it works.

I like that deal for Detroit and for Kwame. He’s in a quieter city now, he’s 26-years old, he’s on a veteran team, he’s growing up. In the past in D.C. and L.A. it was a case of him being a big kid in a big city, now he can settle his career down. You know that Sheed and McDyess and those other bigs will help him develop and this should be the best time of his career because in Detroit, the bigs get touches in the offense.

[...]

In the past he had the spot light on him because he was a No. 1 pick and he was in these big markets, but now he can just go out and play hard and blend in. This is going to be his year.

If nothing else, it shows that the “slap incident” is far, far behind them.  After praising the Kwame’s new deal, he goes on to defend two more of his teammates from the ’04-’05 Wizards, Juan Dixon and Larry Hughes:

Juan is one of those players out there that needs a team, because he can really help out with scoring. He needs a team to just let him play. I’ve played with a lot of players in my time in the league, and he has to be one of the top five I’ve played with in terms of points per minute.

[...]

What teams need to realize is that Larry is a two guard. Chicago would have a good thing going if they play Larry at the two and let him play off of Derrick Rose manning the point. Larry doesn’t want to play the one. They tried to have him do that in Cleveland, and it didn’t work out. He’s a scorer, he defends, he’s a good two guard.

After talking about some of the big trades that have gone down in recent weeks, Gilbert spends some time talking about the new trend of players signing big contracts in Europe:

It’s kind of sad that you have the young, future players of this league threatening to go to Europe because Josh Childress already signed himself a deal over there. It’s going to be hard to negotiate sometimes now. Some of these owners and general managers are going to be watching out because these European teams are paying these kids money. Since their economy is on top right now, somebody like Josh Childress is getting $11 million a year over there. That $11 million a year is basically a max contract over here.

But with that said, he doesn’t dismiss the idea of playing overseas entirely either:

For me, if the circumstances were right maybe I could see myself going overseas when my time is done in D.C., but I’ve never really thought about it. I don’t know if I could go to another country and just live. I mean, I can vacate, but live? I can’t even understand my kids, let alone another language.

Gilbert also talks about the new pool that everyone’s raving about, but since I’m sure that will get enough coverage as is, let’s focus on the shark tanks that he’s having installed:

I’ve been in love with fish tanks and sharks for a while. (And not just shark jokes.) I actually bough Ken Griffey Jr.’s old tank online and have that in my living room. I knew somebody who was selling it in Orlando. Actually, the company ended up buying it back from me and building me another one for the same price because the old one was too tall. It was like 10 feet tall and there was too much water pressure to have it in my living room, or whatever, so they build me one that was rounder and shorter. I’m going to have exotic fish in there, a couple sharks, some black tips, some bonnet heads … that’s my mild tank.

Then I have the tank in the grotto that’s going to have semi-aggressive fish like lemon and leopard and puffer fish and the fish with poisonous spikes that’s in Deuce Bigalow.

Then I’ll have my personal shark tank that’s going to be in my basement. My basement used to be my weight room but I’m converting it to a shark tank. I cut a whole wall out down there and replaced it with a 10,000 gallon shark tank. That’s going to be my aggressive tank, only filled with bullhead sharks. If anybody knows what a bullhead shark is, it’s the No. 1 killing shark in America. It can go in salt water and it can go in fresh water. I’m going to have a salt water tank so I can have my eels and my stingrays too.

I’m going to have three bullheads in there. I originally wanted six, but the guy who has to clean it once a week said that he’s not going to get in the tank with six of them, he’ll get in with three. Once they get big enough, I’ll have to get rid of them. The guy who cleans the tank actually goes and catches the sharks himself, because you know, these sharks you can’t just go buy, they’re illegal.

Ever since Jaws there’s been something about fish and sharks that I’ve always liked. Also when I saw Cribs and Ice T had a shark tank in the back of his place, I was like, “Oh man! That’s what it is!!” I’ve been trying to plan this shark tank for the last seven years of my career I’ve been talked out of it by my mentor, Otis Smith. He first talked me out of it when I was a rookie and I was going to spend my whole paycheck on a fish tank. I was like “Man, I want a fish tank, that’s all I want to leave with, if I don’t get another dime I can know I got a fish tank,” and Otis shut that down. So this has been years in the making.

That’s a lot to digest, so I’ll try to summarize the key points:

• When all is said and done, Gilbert is going to have not one, not two, but three shark tanks.
• One of these shark tanks is going to be in his living room.  And you thought your new HDTV was cool.
• Gilbert admitted on a blog accessible to just about anyone with a computer that he’s doing something illegal.
• Did I mention he’s going to have a shark tank in his living room?
• Let’s thank Otis for telling Gilbert not to get a shark tank with his first check.  Otherwise that tank would either A) still be in Oakland or B) been part of the first ever coast-to-coast transportation of a shark tank.

I’m not sure how you could read that and somehow not think of Gilbert in a higher regard than you already did, but just in case, he wanted to make sure that the fans feel appreciated:

You got to always thank the fans for their support. So far I’ve been getting good feedback. I don’t know if I’m only hearing the good stuff and not hearing the bad stuff, but I appreciate it. I don’t know where I first heard this from, but it’s actually stuck with me: They say whenever you’re in the public eye, you got to always have a smile on your face, you got to always be approachable. Everybody has bad days, but if you’re a professional athlete or a movie star and people notice you, you can’t ever have a bad day in the public because to somebody who’s never met you, if that’s the one time they come in contact with you and you brush them off because you’re having a bad day, they’re going to think you’re a bad guy. You’re not going to remember them, you’re going to keep it moving, but they’re going to remember that for the rest of their lives and they’ll tell their friends your mean and then their friends will blog to their friends that you’re mean, and boom, that’s how it starts.

Near the end of his latest entry he also talks about his jersey collection, the presidential election and one thing that he’d rather die than do (unless gas prices are lowered).  As always, it’s a great read so check it out.