A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again Read Online Free PDF Page A

severe thunderstorms
     are brisk and no-nonsense.
    I know why I stayed obsessed as I aged. Tornadoes, for me, were a transfiguration. Like all serious winds, they were our little
     stretch of plain’s
z
coordinate, a move up from the Euclidian monotone of furrow, road, axis, and grid. We studied tornadoes in junior high: a
     Canadian high straight-lines it southeast from the Dakotas; a moist warm mass drawls on up north from like Arkansas: the result
     was not a Greek χ or even a Cartesian Г but a circling of the square, a curling of vectors, concavation of curves. It was
     alchemical, Leibnizian. Tornadoes were, in our part of Central Illinois, the dimensionless point at which parallel lines met
     and whirled and blew up. They made no sense. Houses blew not out but in. Brothels were spared while orphanages next door bought
     it. Dead cattle were found three miles from their silage without a scratch on them. Tornadoes are omnipotent and obey no law.
     Force without law has no shape, only tendency and duration. I believe now that I knew all this without knowing it, as a kid.
    The only time I ever got caught in what might have been an actual one was in June ’78 on a tennis court at Hessel Park in
     Champaign, where I was drilling one afternoon with Gil Antitoi. Though a contemptible and despised tournament opponent, I
     was a coveted practice partner because I could transfer balls to wherever you wanted them with the mindless constancy of a
     machine. This particular day it was supposed to rain around suppertime, and a couple times we thought we’d heard the tattered
     edges of a couple sirens out west toward Monticello, but Antitoi and I drilled religiously every afternoon that week on the
     slow clayish Har-Tru of Hessel, trying to prepare for a beastly clay invitational in Chicago where it was rumored both Brescia
     and Mees would appear. We were doing butterfly drills—my crosscourt forehand is transferred back down the line to Antitoi’s
     backhand, he crosscourts it to my backhand, I send it down the line to his forehand, four 45° angles, though the intersection
     of just his crosscourts make an
X
, which is four 90°s and also a crucifix rotated the same quarter-turn that a swastika (which involves eight 90° angles) is
     rotated on Hitlerian bunting. This was the sort of stuff that went through my head when I drilled. Hessel Park was scented
     heavily with cheese from the massive Kraft factory at Champaign’s western limit, and it had wonderful expensive soft Har-Tru
     courts of such a deep piney color that the flights of the fluorescent balls stayed on one’s visual screen for a few extra
     seconds, leaving trails, which is also why the angles and hieroglyphs involved in butterfly drill seem important. But the
     crux here is that butterflies are primarily a conditioning drill: both players have to get from one side of the court to the
     other between each stroke, and once the initial pain and wind-sucking are over—assuming you’re a kid who’s in absurd shape
     because he spends countless mindless hours jumping rope or running laps backward or doing star-drills between the court’s
     corners or straight sprints back and forth along the perfect furrows of early beanfields each morning—once the first pain
     and fatigue of butterflies are got through, if both guys are good enough so that there are few unforced errors to break up
     the rally, a kind of fugue-state opens up inside you where your concentration telescopes toward a still point and you lose
     awareness of your limbs and the soft shush of your shoe’s slide (you have to slide out of a run on Har-Tru) and whatever’s
     outside the lines of the court, and pretty much all you know then is the bright ball and the octangled butterfly outline of
     its trail across the billiard green of the court. We had one just endless rally and I’d left the planet in a silent swoop
     inside when the court and ball and butterfly trail all seemed to surge brightly