The Secret Life of Rubber Balls

A little warm up. The hang dog expression I wore merely masked a belly ache. Merely is a funny word as it reminds me of the sea, which is anything but. My ass is dragon. My wagon is dragging. This drags on things. Drag is merely a property of objects that occurs to you when you throw them hard at something, like a window, but they don’t fly straight or true and, in fact, lose their impetus before they fulfill their special purpose --a purpose, in part, defined by your impetus.

What moves you? Some inner force, like the bounce bound up in a rubber ball? The child doesn’t make the ball bounce once -- not once or twice, the bounce doesn’t a child make. Never. In fact, not ever.

And I’m not reserving this for mere children, who are anything but. It’s impetus and purpose, symbolic action and the raw stuff like when you slap your hand hard down on a flat surface like a table or the fat part of your thigh and the air escaping from between your palm and the aforementioned flat surface makes a nice twacking sound that anyone in their right mind would recognize immediately as merely a bid for your very limited attention.