#365

As of this moment, someone could read Factually Pointless one post a day for a full year, which is cool, but the coolest thing is that three hundred and sixty-five million years ago the Devonian Extincion went down, one of the truly hardcore ones for the oceans, which at the time made it deadly to just about everything. The nascent tendrils of terrestrial life at the time, relatively fresh from the briny deep, made out fine, though. It was their time. End of the Devonian, dawn of the Triassic. It's bonkers how incredible thinking about that makes me feel. Time is just so fucking crazy. Life is just such a trip. 

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FACTUALLY SPORTSMANLIKE

ROLLS ON

Balls--spherical devices made from a range of materials to roll, or bounce and roll. Light and heavy, big and small, the ball is the massively significant fulcrum around many games and sports, usually played in large groups and divided into teams. I like handball, myself--just a body and a bouncing rubber ball that fits the hand snugly, and a decent wall built perpendicular to the decent ground. Poetry. 

We have come up with many novel ways to cause the human body to interact with various balls in order to achieve various goals. Some sports even include manipulators for their balls--stickball as played by First Nations; the descendant of those games, lacrosse; baseball, tennis, polo. I also like to play tennis against a wall, but a singles match is fun, too. My serve is for balls, but I got a pretty hardcore forehand and good net game. My backhand works from anywhere, not bad, but it's not exactly gonna light a fucker up. 

The coolest thing about soccer is getting to use your head. That's far and away my favorite part. I got a great dome for it, and my power in the neck and shoulders gives me the control required to use it however I like. Passing, defense, scoring--it's just more interesting if I get a chance to use a header instead of footwork.

Waterpolo, you play ball in the pool. If it wasn't also about getting sexually assaulted under the water, it would be fun. I guess some dudes don't mind. Love swimming to death, and the game isn't lacking in fun. But my participation level reaches zero the moment a dude tears my swimsuit down to my knees to prevent me from scoring. It's like, you win, bud. Maybe if we started naked, I wouldn't take it as personally. I have no problem wth nudity or competing naked. I have a problem with being forcibly stripped down. A dude almost pulled my shirt off playing soccer once and I'm not exactly proud of this but I punched him like three times as hard as I could. Don't grab my clothes, man!

One time playing gym soccer when I was eight the ball got kicked into my testicles so hard I fell down on my back and whited out for a second. When I was six playing in Rec and Ed it hit me in the face so hard I thought my eye had fallen out. That one stung like a hundred ants, though it didn't knock me off my feet. I just stopped running, put my hands on my knees, and tried to breathe enough to scream, not quite getting there before I was hustled off the field. In the car, my father praised my toughness about taking a cannon like that, and I told him that I thought it hurt so much I couldn't cry, so I wasn't sure if it counted, but as he was quick to remind me, I got back in the game. One thing about me--it takes pretty serious damage to keep me from playing a game I'm invested in.

I find it is enough, with a basketball, merely to hang out with it, and you will find yourself having fun. A Spalding basketball is a marvel of ball technology. It is fun merely to stand in place and dribble slowly. It is fun to hold. It is fun to pass it to yourself lightly from hand to hand and it is fun to circle it behind your back. It is fun to throw in the air and catch, fun to roll off your fingertips and watch it spin like a little tigerball in the air, it is fun to rebound off a wall over and over. Make it or not, it's fun to go for a basket. Some stuff is easy to ruin, but it's even fun to play basketball with a basketball, which is awesome. Catching a good hard pass in fast motion can be a nice, solid way to remind your body that it's a real thing in a real world, with real people all around you doing something real, ephemeral though it all is, unreal as reality can be. Like music. The analogy has been drawn a million times, but it holds.

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Thinking about balls and games and sports and athletics is thinking in venn diagrams of sorts. Chess is certainly a game and could not be called a sport by any means, though it is as competitive and perhaps moreso than any sport. A video game may or may not be competitive and if competitive may or may not tick enough boxes to be called a sport, but there are those games in which the level of competition and ability climbs high enough, plugged into the right matrix, to be called a sport--many different fighting games and resource-tactics-strategy games, racing sims, deathmatch arena games, and others can be called sports in serious conversation--the hand-eye coordination, reaction times, rules, and muscle-mapping is sufficiently demanding that it takes particular skill, dedication, physical ability, and practice to compete. That not only a layperson but a person who plays games extensively, whose neural pathways and reactions are more than suitably attuned to play, is more than likely unable to even think of being able to compete at the highest levels is a huge factor in differentiating a game from a sport. Of course, most sports, especially as we think of them now, are definitely games, albeit athletic ones, or ones in which your whole body is something of an analog controller, and/or a unit playing out their part of a larger strategy in a metagame played by coaches. Finally, there are ways to compete and "play" in the realm of feats of athleticism that are neither games nor sports, such as several elements of track and field. These rate more on the order of performances than sports or games, even the races and the relays, which have a lot in common with games and are spectacles, like sports. All these, cross-country, discus, javelin, the high jump and so forth, and to a debatable degree gymnastics, are more akin to performances than games or sports, though they are attended to as and perhaps are even more than many spectator sports tests of human athletic ability, directly linked as they are to survival schema dating back to jumping around in the trees and our later migration to the plains and running around for a living. Certainly more than bowling, for example, as gamelike a sport as it is possible to find. Anyone can bowl, even if they can't. And anyone can learn to bowl a perfect game if they tune out distractions and put some sustained effort in. Not everyone can dash the hundred-meter convincingly, let alone competitively, and not everyone can compete against others for superior bowling records season in and season out. 

So going around the three circles and accounting for outliers, hybrids, I think of another circle, or perhaps even the very field on which the circles are described--the great level of labor and craft, the massive economies at play around these essentially ludic pursuits. The textiles, the writing and keeping of rules, the training of children, the armor, the color theory, the balls, the playing fields, the goalposts, the gymnastics equipment, the stories, the broadcasting, the energy and fuel requirements, the worldwide shipping, the political sphere, the question of rights, of meaning, of power. 

I have decided to coin the term "ludistics" to broadly cover THE PRECEDING, t.m.

Suck it, whoever cares!

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Cool cool cool cool alright alright now let's keep the ball rollin

--JL