Thursday, September 23, 2004

During lunch today, a gaggle of people stood and watched as a wrecking ball demolished a decades-old parking garage. The spectacle, unlike what you might see in a cartoon or The World’s Greatest Wrecking Ball Adventures #42, proved far less exciting than you might think. There wasn’t a shiny iron ball wrought with mischief and black paint, nor were there explosions of bricks and cement.

Even though the ball was a tired beige affair made from stone, pedestrians looked on with rapt enjoyment while the demolitions expert chipped away at the garage. Everyone secretly hoped, I believe, that the wrecking ball operator would suddenly go nuts and swing her instrument of destruction in wild arcs, much like when your grandmother decides to do the Lindy Hop with her walker.

I’ll never know whether this happened or not because I left after five boring minutes, fearing beyond reason that I had inhaled more than a lifetime’s worth of pigeon defecation and asbestos. Those five minutes, however, brought up a question perfect for our one-way discussion today. Here it is: Why are people so fascinated by balls?

Look at the ball drop in Times Square, the giant ball of twine in Kansas, or the giant balls of anything–bras, barbed wire, foil–that dot our landscape. People will congregate en masse to lust after gigantic spheres of rubber bands, but why? Now, with the way things normally operate around here, I’d offer an entirely plausible account of how giant, eminently huggable meteors instilled this desire for all things round during the Pleistocene. I’m going to cut straight to chase today, though, because Muse and I had a vicious fight yesterday. The reason we love gigantic balls of twine is because we’re all cats. I’m going to search for Muse now. She roared away in my favorite coupe yesterday, peeling south in the waning sunlight after storming out the door. Me-ow.