You wonder what it must be like to inhabit Kobe Bryant's dream world, a place where the only rules that apply are apparently the ones you make up as you go along.

It is where the pay, $17.7 million per year, is definitely out of this world and so, evidence increasingly suggests, is its sole inhabitant.

Center Darryl Dawkins claimed to be from planet "Lovtron" during a free-spirited career with the Philadelphia 76ers in the 1970s and '80s, but Bryant's cosmic address is more like planet petulance by comparison. A place where the stars seldom align because, well, there is only one, himself.

Want to scream at your boss? Most people would get fired. But, as Bryant is able to remind himself time and again, he is not most people. He has a jump shot to melt butter and a tongue of acid.

So he can rip into Jerry Buss, the Lakers' owner, in a 50,000-watt rant one day and shout out replacements for Mitch Kupchak, the team's general manager, coast-to-coast the next. Never mind that Kupchak still has the job or both stood by him when the justice system was in pursuit.

Of course, Bryant's teammates have jobs, too, even if he wants to get some of them relocated, pronto. We know this not because he said it behind closed doors and some blabbermouth leaked it, but because so deep was his pique with the Lakers that he yelled it to a couple of guys holding a mini-cam in a shopping center parking lot.

And, isn't that where the real leaders in the sports world — players that teammates can look up to and be inspired by — go to deliver their accumulated wisdom? It is a wonder Bill Russell and Tim Duncan ever took their teams anywhere without this stratagem.

Putting teammates on the move is very much a talent for Bryant. He helped dispatch 7-foot-1 Shaquille O'Neal to Florida a few years back. It got Bryant what he said he wanted at the time, a team of his own and a ball to shoot whenever he liked. And he liked it a lot.

Only now it turns out, three years and two embarrassing first-round playoff exits later, that isn't what Bryant really wanted. Now, as he has said repeatedly, he wants to win and, damnit, he wants a supporting cast assembled around him that will make it happen. Now.

Or, he wants to be traded — Pluto wouldn't be far enough he has maintained — despite the two years he still has on the $136 million contract he signed as soon as the ink was dry on O'Neal's trade papers.

Or, he wants to spend the rest of his career in royal purple and gold, the Lakers' colors. He has said this, too.

But, then, Bryant has said a lot of contradictory things. What it all means for his whereabouts come the Lakers' camp, Oct. 2 to 11 at the University of Hawai'i, presumably only he knows.

After all, it is his world and the rest of us are but bemused observers.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.