A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace Read Free Book Online Page A

potential, a pretty untalented tennis player.
     My hand-eye was OK, but I was neither large nor quick, had a near-concave chest and wrists so thin I could bracelet them with
     a thumb and pinkie, and could hit a tennis ball no harder or truer than most girls in my age bracket. What I could do was
     “Play the Whole Court.” This was a piece of tennis truistics that could mean any number of things. In my case, it meant I
     knew my limitations and the limitations of what I stood inside, and adjusted thusly. I was at my very best in bad conditions.
    Now, conditions in Central Illinois are from a mathematical perspective interesting and from a tennis perspective bad. The
     summer heat and wet-mitten humidity, the grotesquely fertile soil that sends grasses and broadleaves up through the courts’
     surface by main force, the midges that feed on sweat and the mosquitoes that spawn in the fields’ furrows and in the conferva-choked
     ditches that box each field, night tennis next to impossible because the moths and crap-gnats drawn by the sodium lights form
     a little planet around each tall lamp and the whole lit court surface is aflutter with spastic little shadows.
    But mostly wind. The biggest single factor in Central Illinois’ quality of outdoor life is wind. There are more local jokes
     than I can summon about bent weather vanes and leaning barns, more downstate sobriquets for kinds of wind than there are in
     Malamut for snow. The wind had a personality, a (poor) temper, and, apparently, agendas. The wind blew autumn leaves into
     intercalated lines and arcs of force so regular you could photograph them for a textbook on Cramer’s Rule and the cross-products
     of curves in 3-space. It molded winter snow into blinding truncheons that buried stalled cars and required citizens to shovel
     out not only driveways but the sides of homes; a Central Illinois “blizzard” starts only when the snowfall stops and the wind
     begins. Most people in Philo didn’t comb their hair because why bother. Ladies wore those plastic flags tied down over their
     parlor-jobs so regularly I thought they were required for a real classy coiffure; girls on the East Coast outside with their
     hair hanging and tossing around looked wanton and nude to me. Wind wind etc. etc.
    The people I know from outside it distill the Midwest into blank flatness, black land and fields of green fronds or five-o’clock
     stubble, gentle swells and declivities that make the topology a sadistic exercise in plotting quadrics, highway vistas so
     same and dead they drive motorists mad. Those from IN/WI/Northern IL think of their own Midwest as agronomics and commodity
     futures and corn-detasseling and bean-walking and seed-company caps, apple-cheeked Nordic types, cider and slaughter and football
     games with white fogbanks of breath exiting helmets. But in the odd central pocket that is Champaign-Urbana, Rantoul, Philo,
     Mahomet-Seymour, Mattoon, Farmer City, and Tolono, Midwestern life is informed and deformed by wind. Weather-wise, our township
     is on the eastern upcurrent of what I once heard an atmospherist in brown tweed call a Thermal Anomaly. Something about southward
     rotations of crisp air off the Great Lakes and muggy southern stuff from Arkansas and Kentucky miscegenating, plus an odd
     dose of weird zephyrs from the Mississippi valley three hours west. Chicago calls itself the Windy City, but Chicago, one
     big windbreak, does not know from a true religious-type wind. And meteorologists have nothing to tell people in Philo, who
     know perfectly well that the real story is that to the west, between us and the Rockies, there is basically nothing tall,
     and that weird zephyrs and stirs joined breezes and gusts and thermals and downdrafts and whatever out over Nebraska and Kansas
     and moved east like streams into rivers and jets and military fronts that gathered like avalanches and roared in reverse down
     pioneer oxtrails, toward our own personal