Read Online A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: David Foster Wallace
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was disabled because
I was unable to accommodate the absence of disabilities to accommodate. If that makes sense. Puberty-angst and material alienation
notwithstanding, my Midwest tennis career plateaued the moment I saw my first windscreen.
Still strangely eager to speak of weather, let me say that my township, in fact all of East-Central Illinois, is a proud part
of what meteorologists call Tornado Alley. Incidence of tornadoes all out of statistical proportion. I personally have seen
two on the ground and five aloft, trying to assemble. Aloft tornadoes are gray-white, more like convulsions in the thunderclouds
themselves than separate or protruding from them. Ground tornadoes are black only because of the tons of soil they suck in
and spin around. The grotesque frequency of tornadoes around my township is, I’m told, a function of the same variables that
cause our civilian winds: we are a coordinate where fronts and air masses converge. Most days from late March to June there
are Tornado Watches somewhere in our TV stations’ viewing area (the stations put a little graphic at the screen’s upper right,
like a pair of binoculars for a Watch and the Tarot deck’s Tower card for a Warning, or something). Watches mean conditions
are right and so on and so forth, which, big deal. It’s only the rarer Tornado Warnings, which require a confirmed sighting
by somebody with reliable sobriety, that make the Civil Defense sirens go. The siren on top of the Philo Middle School was
a different pitch and cycle from the one off in the south part of Urbana, and the two used to weave in and out of each other
in a godawful threnody. When the sirens blew, the native families went to their canning cellars or fallout shelters (no kidding);
the academic families in their bright prefab houses with new lawns and foundations of flat slab went with whatever good-luck
tokens they could lay hands on to the very most central point on the ground floor after opening every single window to thwart
implosion from precipitous pressure drops. For my family, the very most central point was a hallway between my dad’s study
and a linen closet, with a reproduction of a Flemish annunciation scene on one wall and a bronze Aztec sunburst hanging with
guillotinic mass on the other; I always tried to maneuver my sister under the sunburst.
If there was an actual Warning when you were outside and away from home—say at a tennis tournament in some godforsaken public
park at some city fringe zoned for sprawl—you were supposed to lie prone in the deepest depression you could locate. Since
the only real depressions around most tournament sites were the irrigation and runoff ditches that bordered cultivated fields,
ditches icky with conferva and mosquito spray and always heaving with what looked like conventions of copperheads and just
basically places your thinking man doesn’t lie prone in under any circumstances, in practice at a Warned tournament you zipped
your rackets into their covers and ran to find your loved ones or even your liked ones and just all milled around trying to
look like you weren’t about to lose sphincter-control. Mothers tended sometimes to wail and clutch childish heads to their
bosoms (Mrs. Swearingen of Pekin was particularly popular for clutching even strange kids’ heads to her formidable bosom).
I mention tornadoes for reasons directly related to the purpose of this essay. For one thing, they were a real part of Midwest
childhood, because as a little kid I was obsessed with dread over them. My earliest nightmares, the ones that didn’t feature
mile-high robots from
Lost in Space
wielding huge croquet mallets (don’t ask), were about shrieking sirens and dead white skies, a slender monster on the Iowa
horizon, jutting less phallic than saurian from the lowering sky, whipping back and forth with such frenzy that it almost
doubled on itself, trying to eat its own tail,
I was unable to accommodate the absence of disabilities to accommodate. If that makes sense. Puberty-angst and material alienation
notwithstanding, my Midwest tennis career plateaued the moment I saw my first windscreen.
Still strangely eager to speak of weather, let me say that my township, in fact all of East-Central Illinois, is a proud part
of what meteorologists call Tornado Alley. Incidence of tornadoes all out of statistical proportion. I personally have seen
two on the ground and five aloft, trying to assemble. Aloft tornadoes are gray-white, more like convulsions in the thunderclouds
themselves than separate or protruding from them. Ground tornadoes are black only because of the tons of soil they suck in
and spin around. The grotesque frequency of tornadoes around my township is, I’m told, a function of the same variables that
cause our civilian winds: we are a coordinate where fronts and air masses converge. Most days from late March to June there
are Tornado Watches somewhere in our TV stations’ viewing area (the stations put a little graphic at the screen’s upper right,
like a pair of binoculars for a Watch and the Tarot deck’s Tower card for a Warning, or something). Watches mean conditions
are right and so on and so forth, which, big deal. It’s only the rarer Tornado Warnings, which require a confirmed sighting
by somebody with reliable sobriety, that make the Civil Defense sirens go. The siren on top of the Philo Middle School was
a different pitch and cycle from the one off in the south part of Urbana, and the two used to weave in and out of each other
in a godawful threnody. When the sirens blew, the native families went to their canning cellars or fallout shelters (no kidding);
the academic families in their bright prefab houses with new lawns and foundations of flat slab went with whatever good-luck
tokens they could lay hands on to the very most central point on the ground floor after opening every single window to thwart
implosion from precipitous pressure drops. For my family, the very most central point was a hallway between my dad’s study
and a linen closet, with a reproduction of a Flemish annunciation scene on one wall and a bronze Aztec sunburst hanging with
guillotinic mass on the other; I always tried to maneuver my sister under the sunburst.
If there was an actual Warning when you were outside and away from home—say at a tennis tournament in some godforsaken public
park at some city fringe zoned for sprawl—you were supposed to lie prone in the deepest depression you could locate. Since
the only real depressions around most tournament sites were the irrigation and runoff ditches that bordered cultivated fields,
ditches icky with conferva and mosquito spray and always heaving with what looked like conventions of copperheads and just
basically places your thinking man doesn’t lie prone in under any circumstances, in practice at a Warned tournament you zipped
your rackets into their covers and ran to find your loved ones or even your liked ones and just all milled around trying to
look like you weren’t about to lose sphincter-control. Mothers tended sometimes to wail and clutch childish heads to their
bosoms (Mrs. Swearingen of Pekin was particularly popular for clutching even strange kids’ heads to her formidable bosom).
I mention tornadoes for reasons directly related to the purpose of this essay. For one thing, they were a real part of Midwest
childhood, because as a little kid I was obsessed with dread over them. My earliest nightmares, the ones that didn’t feature
mile-high robots from
Lost in Space
wielding huge croquet mallets (don’t ask), were about shrieking sirens and dead white skies, a slender monster on the Iowa
horizon, jutting less phallic than saurian from the lowering sky, whipping back and forth with such frenzy that it almost
doubled on itself, trying to eat its own tail,
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