Tetherball

I've taken up a new sport! Tetherball. It's so great. Of course, you can't play by yourself; you need a partner. Mine is always the same.

We stand across from one another (not side by side), and smack the everloving hell out of a ball. The ball doesn't really go anywhere; it's tied up, so it can't move very far. It just goes around and around, back and forth, from him, to me, back to him again. He hits it, then I hit it. I hit it, then he hits it. And so on and so forth and so on.

Sometimes one of us will swing and miss, and the ball winds up on its rope, tighter and tighter until clang! against the pole - it has no more slack.

So we wait for it to come undone.

Then we hit it some more.

It's an excellent workout, too! Totally exhausting. In fact, on days when I play tetherball, I don't have the energy to do anything else, like write, or think, or feel. I just lay around afterward, dazed and slightly confused as to who, if anyone, won. There's no referee, so sometimes it can be hard to tell.

Tonight the game was especially rough. I slammed the fuck out of that thing. He hit it pretty good, too. Eventually, he had somewhere else to be, so he left. After he'd gone, I took a closer look at the ball. It's taken quite a beating lately. It's torn in a few places, and starting to lose its shape.

So I untied it, brushed some of the dirt off of it, and put it back inside my chest.

I probably shouldn't play tetherball anymore.