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OneMoreRobot3021


Registered: 06/06/03
Posts: 61,024
Loc: the sky
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Pictures and words.
#5975487 - 08/18/06 09:56 AM (17 years, 5 months ago) |
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 I got flattened by a Mack truck in Berlin. You never think the day is gonna come and then it does – you flip the ball the wrong way, it leaves your hand and a piece of stitching catches dry skin or your nail or maybe you’re just off right then and there – whatever it is, something skews the trajectory. You’re still thinking at this point that it’s no dice, this catch is a cinch - the kind of stuff you’ve been pulling for the past month all over the continent. There’s not a doubt in your mind you’ll snatch that ball back up after one bounce off the sidewalk. You drop your body and suddenly time detaches. You lost rhythm with the ball. The ball, man! You can’t drop the ball, but there it went, splicing off the curve at just the right angle to send it into traffic and there it rolls with a dud up against the front wheel of a Mack truck awaiting a green light. Ampelmann tells us stop, the traffic light tells the truck go, and that ball will never be a baseball again. When you look at it, it’s as if you’ve frozen the frame on a monster home run and carved the ball out for yourself at the precise moment that it’s struck, that moment of contact that channels all the focused might of a great swinger’s fine-tuned twist to the connection point of wood and leather, ball and bat, sweet spot kissing sweet spot. Movements he performs routinely every day sync up to meet the moment, all the lines of his body align properly and his eyes focus intensely as he watches the ball for every minuscule millisecond that it’s spinning towards him, picking up the movement on the seams, devising in no more than a second’s time what he’s being pitched, where it’s going to be compared to his body, and what that will let him do with it if he does indeed take a swing. And sometimes all the minutia of that moment come together and he swings and what ripples out over the crowd is a revelation of inevitability that sweeps upward and tumbles downward in such a display that it makes everyone want to catch it. It looks like it clicked, and got stuck. Because the moment after the freeze-frame ends and the MLB logo no longer looks like it’s being smacked off the face of the leather, the ball is still the same spherical shape that was hurled by the pitcher a moment ago. A fan might catch it in the crowd and put it in a glass box on their mantle and if you looked at it twenty years from now you would see a sphere. But my baseball looks like it’s in the middle of being whacked. When you squeeze it, it likes to give the illusion that it could be coaxed back into its original shape, that if there was a force to make it this way surely you could find a force to push it back to purely spherical dimensions. But really, it’s stuck the way it is. The Mack truck rolled on and the ball sat there on the asphalt, lopsided - but it hadn’t burst. There was no question as to whether or not I would pick the ball back up. I’d been carrying it for 30 days already through five countries and wasn’t about to abandon it on Danzigerstrasse all lumpy and lonely. We owed each other better than that. Nika gasped with me when it happened. We exchanged a pair of almost mortified frowns as I scooped the ball back up midway through the street. “Damn,” was all I could say. It wasn’t anywhere near the disaster I thought it would be, images of – well, no images of anything really, because I have no idea what is inside a baseball! But that mystical magical core, whatever it is, was intact and still held prisoner by man, bound in leather and stitching, not strewn across the avenue like so much trash. I picked it up and tossed it around languidly at first, not trusting its new, slightly egg-like shape. But I soon realized that it was still weighted perfectly. That’s the thing about a baseball – it’s weight. It’s exactly as heavy as it needs to be. When you grip it in your hand it says, “Play with me.” But while a simple game of catch is an inviting though, you also sense it could be used to do some serious damage. If you wanted it to though, cause that’s the other thing with baseballs – they let you know the moment you hold them that they are yours just by the perfect fit it gives your hand by weighing just right. The ball wants you to do your best with it. Some excel at hurling it, others at slamming it with aluminum and wooden bats. Me, I’m a tosser. Nothing fancy, just spinning the ball up down left right and enjoying the sight of its weight after the feeling of it has left my fingers, watching it hover in midair and knowing full well from tactile experience that held aloft there is truly the incarnation of that ball, spinning where I willed it but on its own now. You can feel the weight of it just by watching its trajectory, and it spins like its begging you to do something, anything with it – hit it throw it chase it fetch it play ball. When I picked it up, while the physical contours of the ball were different, the weight was instantly familiar and welcome. It was kind of monumental to me. My ball that I had invested so much of myself in, fell out of my reach and into the greater system where it was flattened by industry, rubber and steel on pavement, and came back to me essentially unscathed, its core intact. It was a revelation – not that it bestowed upon me any notions of pedestrian immortality though it did give me a certain sense of luck. It feels now like more of a weapon than it did when it was spherical. It feels like a slug now, cause it looks like that’s what someone did with it I guess. It looks like it wants you to pelt someone with it now, but maybe that’s just how our human tool-using minds have trained us to think, that if something is a little pointed at either end that it could be used for destructive ends. My baseball spins differently now when I toss it in the air. But sometimes, everything clicks, and I throw it high in the air and give it just enough spin that in its motion it assumes its natural shape once more, tricking the eyes into thinking it’s spherical until it slaps back into my palm, a misshapen lump. But it hovers, almost imperceptibly, just the same. 


-------------------- Acid doesn't give you truths; it builds machines that push the envelope of perception. Whatever revelations came to me then have dissolved like skywriting. All I really know is that those few years saddled me with a faith in the redemptive potential of the imagination which, however flat, stale and unprofitable the world seems to me now, I cannot for the life of me shake. -Erik Davis
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CaptainH13
Scum


Registered: 10/29/04
Posts: 10,287
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that was the best thing i've read all morning,hah
glad you had a great time,man.despite the untimely demise of your ball:]
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OneMoreRobot3021


Registered: 06/06/03
Posts: 61,024
Loc: the sky
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Re: Pictures and words. [Re: CaptainH13]
#5975523 - 08/18/06 10:22 AM (17 years, 5 months ago) |
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-------------------- Acid doesn't give you truths; it builds machines that push the envelope of perception. Whatever revelations came to me then have dissolved like skywriting. All I really know is that those few years saddled me with a faith in the redemptive potential of the imagination which, however flat, stale and unprofitable the world seems to me now, I cannot for the life of me shake. -Erik Davis
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Aninator
Flashtique


Registered: 01/03/06
Posts: 2,228
Loc: Philadlephia, PA
Last seen: 7 months, 2 days
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-Question, is that the park you went biking in that you wrote about in was it denmark? anywho it looks lovely.
-Nice OMR bracelet.
-shorts? huh?
Those pictures are making me ache and green with envy. I NEED EUROPE!
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OneMoreRobot3021


Registered: 06/06/03
Posts: 61,024
Loc: the sky
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Re: Pictures and words. [Re: Aninator]
#5975536 - 08/18/06 10:33 AM (17 years, 5 months ago) |
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I never made it to Denmark but yeah that's the park with the biking...it's right outside Arnhem, in the Netherlands. It's called De Hoge Veluwe National Park.
Props to CherryBom for the OMR bracelet. 
Yeah man, I totally rocked shorts for the first time in like twelve years. It was 104 degrees, for fuck's sake.
-------------------- Acid doesn't give you truths; it builds machines that push the envelope of perception. Whatever revelations came to me then have dissolved like skywriting. All I really know is that those few years saddled me with a faith in the redemptive potential of the imagination which, however flat, stale and unprofitable the world seems to me now, I cannot for the life of me shake. -Erik Davis
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Aninator
Flashtique


Registered: 01/03/06
Posts: 2,228
Loc: Philadlephia, PA
Last seen: 7 months, 2 days
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ok yea.. holland.. i really enjoyed reading that part... seeing a picture really puts it into perspective even more. It must have felt amazing. The way it struck me when i read that was kind of like asimilar feeling in 2001 where all you could hear was the guy breathing? that sort of solitude? but like in a different setting obviously. but that's what it kinda reminded me of.
and well if 104 degree weather hadn't done it to you, i'd be worried.
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OneMoreRobot3021


Registered: 06/06/03
Posts: 61,024
Loc: the sky
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Re: Pictures and words. [Re: Aninator]
#5975550 - 08/18/06 10:39 AM (17 years, 5 months ago) |
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I didn't write about that park though? I stopped blogging when I got to Holland - too fucking stoned. Unless I emailed you about it or some shit. All right, time to go have a tag sale.
-------------------- Acid doesn't give you truths; it builds machines that push the envelope of perception. Whatever revelations came to me then have dissolved like skywriting. All I really know is that those few years saddled me with a faith in the redemptive potential of the imagination which, however flat, stale and unprofitable the world seems to me now, I cannot for the life of me shake. -Erik Davis
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eris
underground


Registered: 11/17/98
Posts: 48,024
Loc: North East, USA
Last seen: 4 months, 18 days
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Awesome scenery. I especially like the woodsy looking ones with the long paths. They all look good though
-------------------- Immortal / Temporarily Retired The OG Thread Killer My mushroom hunting gallery
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Aninator
Flashtique


Registered: 01/03/06
Posts: 2,228
Loc: Philadlephia, PA
Last seen: 7 months, 2 days
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Re: Pictures and words. [Re: eris]
#5975561 - 08/18/06 10:44 AM (17 years, 5 months ago) |
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That wasn't the park with the bikes?
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OneMoreRobot3021


Registered: 06/06/03
Posts: 61,024
Loc: the sky
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Re: Pictures and words. [Re: Aninator]
#5975564 - 08/18/06 10:45 AM (17 years, 5 months ago) |
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Yes it was. I'll upload more pictures of it later, including the bikes, and me on the bikes.
-------------------- Acid doesn't give you truths; it builds machines that push the envelope of perception. Whatever revelations came to me then have dissolved like skywriting. All I really know is that those few years saddled me with a faith in the redemptive potential of the imagination which, however flat, stale and unprofitable the world seems to me now, I cannot for the life of me shake. -Erik Davis
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carshissbymywinda

Registered: 03/18/06
Posts: 2,697
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Lovely Pics
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Aninator
Flashtique


Registered: 01/03/06
Posts: 2,228
Loc: Philadlephia, PA
Last seen: 7 months, 2 days
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you did write an entry about the bike park. how like you stopped at one point and you were completely alone and by yourself or something?
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OneMoreRobot3021


Registered: 06/06/03
Posts: 61,024
Loc: the sky
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Re: Pictures and words. [Re: Aninator]
#5975589 - 08/18/06 11:00 AM (17 years, 5 months ago) |
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Hey yer right, I forgot all about that. I should play catchup.
-------------------- Acid doesn't give you truths; it builds machines that push the envelope of perception. Whatever revelations came to me then have dissolved like skywriting. All I really know is that those few years saddled me with a faith in the redemptive potential of the imagination which, however flat, stale and unprofitable the world seems to me now, I cannot for the life of me shake. -Erik Davis
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Aninator
Flashtique


Registered: 01/03/06
Posts: 2,228
Loc: Philadlephia, PA
Last seen: 7 months, 2 days
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hehehe
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cybrbeast
Up, then down, then...



Registered: 01/06/03
Posts: 4,777
Loc: event horizon
Last seen: 7 years, 8 months
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Nicely written  How's your book coming along?
That first pic you posted, is that from the Pergamon museum in Berlin?
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futuretribe.space
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RandalFlagg
Stranger
Registered: 06/15/02
Posts: 15,608
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I'm gonna flatten you if you don't send me that postcard.
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sucklesworth
Lick me where Ipee
Registered: 08/01/03
Posts: 54,259
Loc: If I was up yer ass you'd...
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Re: Pictures and words. [Re: RandalFlagg]
#5975899 - 08/18/06 01:35 PM (17 years, 5 months ago) |
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proceed with the flattening
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RandalFlagg
Stranger
Registered: 06/15/02
Posts: 15,608
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sucklesworth
Lick me where Ipee
Registered: 08/01/03
Posts: 54,259
Loc: If I was up yer ass you'd...
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Re: Pictures and words. [Re: RandalFlagg]
#5975931 - 08/18/06 01:48 PM (17 years, 5 months ago) |
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poke him in the rib!
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aNeway2sayHooray
Cresley Wusher



Registered: 07/07/05
Posts: 7,653
Loc: Orphic Trench
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Nice pictures.Looks like an amazing time.
You should have visited more countryside!
-------------------- Mad_Larkin said: Death is just a thang.
MrJellineck said: Profits, prophets. That's all you jews think about. sheekle said: life is drugs... and music... and cat...
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