Physics

I will play catch after the sun sets, after everyone else leaves, after the park fills with heroin addicts [the Saigon zoo at dusk is empty; the only living things are lazy despondent animals, couples fucking, and bony wraiths shooting up], after my rotator cuff grinds to pieces. I will play catch with anything: baseballs, footballs, basketballs, tennis balls, squash balls, lemons, figurines, compact discs, keys, turtle bones, Dell 922 All-In-One printers, Trotskyist pamphlets, archaic maps, tuna.

The fancy, fancy brain somehow intuits the terminus of the object's arc, and thrusts a welcoming paw into that space. Then the throw back, equally fascinating. There it goes, more or less where you'd envisioned, with no real idea how it happened. Now, from an evolutionary perspective, throwing I can understand. Spearchuckin'. Kill the Castorocauda lutrasimilus. But I have to regard catching as a miraculous byproduct of natural selection. Wow. How'd the hell I just catch that? And what possible selective advantage could the skill have conferred? The only conclusion I can draw is that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior.

Catch is so damned fascinating. But it is a wild, untamed beast, responsible for a multitude of catastrophes over the years: the shattering of an Italian Mormon's window; the killing of a pigeon by Randy Johnson; the death of Ray Chapman; the tragic and unprovoked destruction of an anqtique Edwardian curved window [or something] in San Francisco, via lemon, by EB, back in the late '90s. Cost me a fair bit of my security deposit, unless he paid it back, which he might have done.