There's a cutesy little question sometimes asked about addition: "Why is it that when you add a cloud to a cloud, you get one cloud? Does one plus one equal one?" On the face of it, this is radically stupid populism: You are applying the definition of "adding" far beyond its definition to integers, to imply some sort of willful oppression on the part of mathematicians to restrict your thoughts. But going a little bit deeper, why *can't* we add clouds? The answer is a radical conspiracy on the part of mathematicians to restrict your thoughts.
Adding the addition of clouds to the addition of numbers not only unsettles our intuition for adding, but also improves our understanding, and I believe, only moves us closer to the day when we can aggregate people correctly, without distorting the particular; that is, without distorting the individual. And it is for this - this addition of people - that I have spent 38 years on the lam from the mathematical establishment, hoping only, through the grace of God, that they will hear me out. My experiments with adding people have yielded some fruit, though they are ultimately indefensible. Only a real, scientific community can truly address this great problem. Is it schizophrenia if God really exists? But that is neither here or there.
In this modality of thinking, both in abstraction and paranoia, let's un-remember basketball. All you know and all you have dreamt about it - let's un-remember it for the purpose of this write-up. Let's take what we currently remember about basketball, and... un-remember that aspect. Let's... forget. That's right; Commissioner David Stern is making you forget. He is waving his hand in front of your face in ways the human hand can't and shouldn't move, and you are tripping out on the motion of his hands, and you are feeling dazed. On this day of his awful, grotesque hands and their motions, you are forgetting basketball, and quickly. All of the players, all of the coaches, all of the details, even "Space Jam" are all being forgotten. Now you're passing out. Fade to black. Stern's laughing accompanies your fall and your sudden amnesia. Finally you forget David Stern, last of all.
A man's laughter, somehow familiar, is heard as you wake up some time later (who knows how long?) in a room of pure liquid that is red, that smells like blood or iron. The light-red, impure liquid is transparent enough to see forward, as a quick glance down to your uniformed body reveals, but there is some opacity, and all you can see is the thin blood in every direction; at most 10 feet or so is visible. Breathing is a rotten art today, and you durst not open your mouth for to avoid a sort of flooding in of the liquid - the ultimate violation of self. Moving your arms through the liquid. is actually very easy and intuitive, feeling more intuitive than before you'd passed out, you suppose. Intuitive, or perhaps just fluid, and you feel like swimming.
The liquid evokes a notion of weightlessness; in fact, you treat the liquid as water and try to swim, only to eventually take a pretty harmless knee on the somewhat hard ground. You don't float, of course, but sinking is so gradual that it barely hurts. So gravity is real and downward, but it is much less significant than on the bare earth of experience, and the ponderousness of life feels uplifted and free in the blood-chamber. You involuntarity open your mouth, and, as expected, the blood rushes in.
The liquid tastes just like you thought - like blood. Though the taste is a bit revolting at first, it is not altogether unpleasant, and before long you quickly acclimate and start to move around, all the while testing your limits of motion. You didn't lose or gain any weight, and so you suppose you couldn't have been out more than a week. And the ground was very smooth and warm. Even warmer than the sustaining liquid itself.
The ten minutes after first trying movement are filled with immense levels of possibility and discovery. After careful exploration you discover that the orange ground is not a uniform orange, but actually slightly nuanced in color, and various dark lines lead mysteriously along. The orange changes to red for a short period and then returns to orange a few seconds later. The orange area is a giant rectangle, about as big as a hockey arena, but without the walls, the net, the ice, and the rounded ends of course. It's much smaller than a football or soccer field, but a bit bigger than a tennis court. Those are the only sports you are familiar with, so that is the only reference you can make. Nothing changes when you jump besides height above the ground, from any point you have tried. And what are the boundaries? The ground is black outside of the boundaries, boundaries that are lightly colored. The reason you know they are boundaries is because, while they are not at all forbidden, stepping on one for even a moment produces a totally deafening sound that pervades your whole sense of self, the sort of loud sound that is strong enough to change one's political persuasion after a day or so, and enough to change a man from the ignorant disposition we adorably call sanity. But you can take a step back, and, as soon as you find solid ground in the orange place, the auditory torture stops, and the laughter and the washing motion of the blood, again, are the only sounds heard.
After this ten minute period, you begin to notice that the blood has been getting drastically thinner and thinner since you woke up, and there are many more pockets of pure, clear air than ever before. You can see the boundaries much more quickly on the ground, and you can also see distinct, darkened, secondary lines on the orange part, which is actually seeming a bit yellower. You can only see about 20 to 30 feet forward, but it certainly is a step up in visibility.
The arena seems distantly familiar, and you can hear, in your mind, a constant, dull, hammering noise, like hammering in a nail. But it's a lot slower and heavier, once a second perhaps, and not quite as sharp or loud. The hammering sound has a wooden quality to it, and a distinct echo to it. You can't quite place it though, and so you wonder if the noise is physically happening somewhere, or is merely a repressed, badly-remembered association.
As the allowed area starts to clear even more, a series of images in succession passes before you: a sort of raised totem pole on the middle of the short edges of the rectangular yellow-orange area, near the reddish ground. A red circle with a soft, attached mesh hanging down from it. 24. 24. 24. In red lights a 24 appears. 24 hours? 24 people? 24 lives? Who knew what it meant, but you suspect from the mere two digits that it is meant to count down. Outside the allowed area of yellow there are faces in the stands. So it is an arena. But who were those faces? All the faces seem familiar to you but none of them bear recognition.
The blood is as thin as ever, and the gravity is starting to become closer to that of Earth, but you manage to jump up and touch the red circle on the totem, with a bit of effort in the calves. the circle is very hard and made of metal, like a soccer goal or a hockey goal, but not much wider than a soccer ball in diameter. The mesh hanging below the circle is very soft, like a soft jersey. There is an flat square on the bottom totem that holds the meshed circle.
Suddenly, you remember something. You remember that you would see circles with meshes like this as you changed television stations from a football to a hockey game. It was in that transition between these sports that you knew that you may have been exposed to this sport. It had to be a sport. Now the concentration of the blood in the room is incredibly thin, and about one in forty parts of the air was blood. But suddenly, all the blood in the room aggregates together into a ball right in front of you. Then slams into your head violently and you pass out.
When you wake up, with an odd headache, the court is still there, but the circle and mesh artifice is gone, leaving only the lines and boundaries. The blood at last has subsided completely, and you can see the whole arena now. The laughter of the man continues in your head. You suddenly think to check your ears. Sure enough, a piece of wax is form fitted in each of your ears. You start to pull the pieces out out and Stern's laughter stops. Feeling ambitious, you try to leave the boundaries. You hear the whistle, but it's coming softly from inside the wax ear-pieces, harmlessly in your hands. It's now but a pleasant hum as you explore the stands, in this giant empty stadium. You start to think that the blood and ear restraints at least described a closed, finite universe with definite paths, shaped platonically. But now, with the empty, unlit outer shell, you face the possibility of being completely alone, even in spite of endless wandering, and somehow, even as things are better and freer, they feel as claustrophobic and fatal as ever. But also, you remember, you face the possibility of being reunited with Susan.
Susan - born on a corn farm and moved to the wheat fields to make her fortune. She was very delectable, and knew all about the body. She was a farm girl. Pastoral, innocent, the ideal girl for a simp such as yourself. You goddamn simpleton, you silently curse. And now, here you were in the mauve underbelly of a massive conspiracy - a conspiracy, you hoped, that would stretch back to Sharon's heart. Wait...was she Susan or Sharon? Wonderful career woman as we walked in the park. Sharon, born in industrial parks on the Eastern Seaboard, she loved to sit on the docks with me and cry all our tears. Wait. My memories have been tampered with. Yes, that was it. Her real name was Sarnath, now that I think of it, jewel of the sea. She was a literal doomed city. God, I'd love to tap that.
Memory, the man with all the hands, the hands that move as they shouldn't. David...Stern. That was it, it was he with the hands that had made me forget. Hands that moved like orange spheres, opening and splitting along black lines and then cutting my brain as they came back together, encircling several neurons. That's what Stern did. Thinking back, none of my memories had been tampered with *explicitly*. I have always had a weird conflation of cities and girlfriends. That was not a purposeful distortion. That was not new. No, it was like....I had a knowledge of an entire sport, but...the neural connections must have been severed, either temporarily or permanently. I must try to think of this sport, as futile as it may be. Bizarrely, now I see some sort of orange puma prowling my dreams. "Bob...cat...bob...cat...". This puma is obviously related to the sport that disappeared from me. The task is clear: I have to file together all of my memories that are repressed and have my brain put them together and form a sport. I'll call it...Meshball for now.
You remember everything, and anything you can't tie together you tie together under the heading MESHBALL. The word "basket", the face of "Orlando 15", the couplet "Bobcat, Bobcat, burning bright/Fills my dreams all up with fright", the conflation of women with cities, the conflation of stones with meshes, the experience of writing about Meshball, the blood experience, the sharp hammerings, the many nights trying to "jack a feed to a game from fucking Freedocast, that worthless program", the conflation of drugs with bloodshot eyes, the conflation of multiple arenas with wizards, eyes that never shut, eyes as big as planets, snakes with hundreds of eyes, snakes as big as planets, the apparition of "Shon Klemp", milk gallons. No, none of this is right. How could all of this represent one sport? The answer must be that it doesn't, and proceeding logically I conclude that it must be an amalgamation of many different sports, and that this must just be one of their arenas. What hundreds of arenas there could be in my future? I look out from a high vantage point in the stands upon the arena, for this is to be my new home, indefinitely.
Going down, I notice, as expected, that the exits to the empty stadium are impenetrable and blurred. So it was a closed universe, after all. Perhaps I could find some peace here, to buffer me against the chaos of the hundreds of sports that had been repressed. To find peace I thought of football, and hockey, and soccer, and tennis, for those are the only sports I knew about.
Adding the addition of clouds to the addition of numbers not only unsettles our intuition for adding, but also improves our understanding, and I believe, only moves us closer to the day when we can aggregate people correctly, without distorting the particular; that is, without distorting the individual. And it is for this - this addition of people - that I have spent 38 years on the lam from the mathematical establishment, hoping only, through the grace of God, that they will hear me out. My experiments with adding people have yielded some fruit, though they are ultimately indefensible. Only a real, scientific community can truly address this great problem. Is it schizophrenia if God really exists? But that is neither here or there.
In this modality of thinking, both in abstraction and paranoia, let's un-remember basketball. All you know and all you have dreamt about it - let's un-remember it for the purpose of this write-up. Let's take what we currently remember about basketball, and... un-remember that aspect. Let's... forget. That's right; Commissioner David Stern is making you forget. He is waving his hand in front of your face in ways the human hand can't and shouldn't move, and you are tripping out on the motion of his hands, and you are feeling dazed. On this day of his awful, grotesque hands and their motions, you are forgetting basketball, and quickly. All of the players, all of the coaches, all of the details, even "Space Jam" are all being forgotten. Now you're passing out. Fade to black. Stern's laughing accompanies your fall and your sudden amnesia. Finally you forget David Stern, last of all.
A man's laughter, somehow familiar, is heard as you wake up some time later (who knows how long?) in a room of pure liquid that is red, that smells like blood or iron. The light-red, impure liquid is transparent enough to see forward, as a quick glance down to your uniformed body reveals, but there is some opacity, and all you can see is the thin blood in every direction; at most 10 feet or so is visible. Breathing is a rotten art today, and you durst not open your mouth for to avoid a sort of flooding in of the liquid - the ultimate violation of self. Moving your arms through the liquid. is actually very easy and intuitive, feeling more intuitive than before you'd passed out, you suppose. Intuitive, or perhaps just fluid, and you feel like swimming.
The liquid evokes a notion of weightlessness; in fact, you treat the liquid as water and try to swim, only to eventually take a pretty harmless knee on the somewhat hard ground. You don't float, of course, but sinking is so gradual that it barely hurts. So gravity is real and downward, but it is much less significant than on the bare earth of experience, and the ponderousness of life feels uplifted and free in the blood-chamber. You involuntarity open your mouth, and, as expected, the blood rushes in.
The liquid tastes just like you thought - like blood. Though the taste is a bit revolting at first, it is not altogether unpleasant, and before long you quickly acclimate and start to move around, all the while testing your limits of motion. You didn't lose or gain any weight, and so you suppose you couldn't have been out more than a week. And the ground was very smooth and warm. Even warmer than the sustaining liquid itself.
The ten minutes after first trying movement are filled with immense levels of possibility and discovery. After careful exploration you discover that the orange ground is not a uniform orange, but actually slightly nuanced in color, and various dark lines lead mysteriously along. The orange changes to red for a short period and then returns to orange a few seconds later. The orange area is a giant rectangle, about as big as a hockey arena, but without the walls, the net, the ice, and the rounded ends of course. It's much smaller than a football or soccer field, but a bit bigger than a tennis court. Those are the only sports you are familiar with, so that is the only reference you can make. Nothing changes when you jump besides height above the ground, from any point you have tried. And what are the boundaries? The ground is black outside of the boundaries, boundaries that are lightly colored. The reason you know they are boundaries is because, while they are not at all forbidden, stepping on one for even a moment produces a totally deafening sound that pervades your whole sense of self, the sort of loud sound that is strong enough to change one's political persuasion after a day or so, and enough to change a man from the ignorant disposition we adorably call sanity. But you can take a step back, and, as soon as you find solid ground in the orange place, the auditory torture stops, and the laughter and the washing motion of the blood, again, are the only sounds heard.
After this ten minute period, you begin to notice that the blood has been getting drastically thinner and thinner since you woke up, and there are many more pockets of pure, clear air than ever before. You can see the boundaries much more quickly on the ground, and you can also see distinct, darkened, secondary lines on the orange part, which is actually seeming a bit yellower. You can only see about 20 to 30 feet forward, but it certainly is a step up in visibility.
The arena seems distantly familiar, and you can hear, in your mind, a constant, dull, hammering noise, like hammering in a nail. But it's a lot slower and heavier, once a second perhaps, and not quite as sharp or loud. The hammering sound has a wooden quality to it, and a distinct echo to it. You can't quite place it though, and so you wonder if the noise is physically happening somewhere, or is merely a repressed, badly-remembered association.
As the allowed area starts to clear even more, a series of images in succession passes before you: a sort of raised totem pole on the middle of the short edges of the rectangular yellow-orange area, near the reddish ground. A red circle with a soft, attached mesh hanging down from it. 24. 24. 24. In red lights a 24 appears. 24 hours? 24 people? 24 lives? Who knew what it meant, but you suspect from the mere two digits that it is meant to count down. Outside the allowed area of yellow there are faces in the stands. So it is an arena. But who were those faces? All the faces seem familiar to you but none of them bear recognition.
The blood is as thin as ever, and the gravity is starting to become closer to that of Earth, but you manage to jump up and touch the red circle on the totem, with a bit of effort in the calves. the circle is very hard and made of metal, like a soccer goal or a hockey goal, but not much wider than a soccer ball in diameter. The mesh hanging below the circle is very soft, like a soft jersey. There is an flat square on the bottom totem that holds the meshed circle.
Suddenly, you remember something. You remember that you would see circles with meshes like this as you changed television stations from a football to a hockey game. It was in that transition between these sports that you knew that you may have been exposed to this sport. It had to be a sport. Now the concentration of the blood in the room is incredibly thin, and about one in forty parts of the air was blood. But suddenly, all the blood in the room aggregates together into a ball right in front of you. Then slams into your head violently and you pass out.
When you wake up, with an odd headache, the court is still there, but the circle and mesh artifice is gone, leaving only the lines and boundaries. The blood at last has subsided completely, and you can see the whole arena now. The laughter of the man continues in your head. You suddenly think to check your ears. Sure enough, a piece of wax is form fitted in each of your ears. You start to pull the pieces out out and Stern's laughter stops. Feeling ambitious, you try to leave the boundaries. You hear the whistle, but it's coming softly from inside the wax ear-pieces, harmlessly in your hands. It's now but a pleasant hum as you explore the stands, in this giant empty stadium. You start to think that the blood and ear restraints at least described a closed, finite universe with definite paths, shaped platonically. But now, with the empty, unlit outer shell, you face the possibility of being completely alone, even in spite of endless wandering, and somehow, even as things are better and freer, they feel as claustrophobic and fatal as ever. But also, you remember, you face the possibility of being reunited with Susan.
Susan - born on a corn farm and moved to the wheat fields to make her fortune. She was very delectable, and knew all about the body. She was a farm girl. Pastoral, innocent, the ideal girl for a simp such as yourself. You goddamn simpleton, you silently curse. And now, here you were in the mauve underbelly of a massive conspiracy - a conspiracy, you hoped, that would stretch back to Sharon's heart. Wait...was she Susan or Sharon? Wonderful career woman as we walked in the park. Sharon, born in industrial parks on the Eastern Seaboard, she loved to sit on the docks with me and cry all our tears. Wait. My memories have been tampered with. Yes, that was it. Her real name was Sarnath, now that I think of it, jewel of the sea. She was a literal doomed city. God, I'd love to tap that.
Memory, the man with all the hands, the hands that move as they shouldn't. David...Stern. That was it, it was he with the hands that had made me forget. Hands that moved like orange spheres, opening and splitting along black lines and then cutting my brain as they came back together, encircling several neurons. That's what Stern did. Thinking back, none of my memories had been tampered with *explicitly*. I have always had a weird conflation of cities and girlfriends. That was not a purposeful distortion. That was not new. No, it was like....I had a knowledge of an entire sport, but...the neural connections must have been severed, either temporarily or permanently. I must try to think of this sport, as futile as it may be. Bizarrely, now I see some sort of orange puma prowling my dreams. "Bob...cat...bob...cat...". This puma is obviously related to the sport that disappeared from me. The task is clear: I have to file together all of my memories that are repressed and have my brain put them together and form a sport. I'll call it...Meshball for now.
You remember everything, and anything you can't tie together you tie together under the heading MESHBALL. The word "basket", the face of "Orlando 15", the couplet "Bobcat, Bobcat, burning bright/Fills my dreams all up with fright", the conflation of women with cities, the conflation of stones with meshes, the experience of writing about Meshball, the blood experience, the sharp hammerings, the many nights trying to "jack a feed to a game from fucking Freedocast, that worthless program", the conflation of drugs with bloodshot eyes, the conflation of multiple arenas with wizards, eyes that never shut, eyes as big as planets, snakes with hundreds of eyes, snakes as big as planets, the apparition of "Shon Klemp", milk gallons. No, none of this is right. How could all of this represent one sport? The answer must be that it doesn't, and proceeding logically I conclude that it must be an amalgamation of many different sports, and that this must just be one of their arenas. What hundreds of arenas there could be in my future? I look out from a high vantage point in the stands upon the arena, for this is to be my new home, indefinitely.
Going down, I notice, as expected, that the exits to the empty stadium are impenetrable and blurred. So it was a closed universe, after all. Perhaps I could find some peace here, to buffer me against the chaos of the hundreds of sports that had been repressed. To find peace I thought of football, and hockey, and soccer, and tennis, for those are the only sports I knew about.
This is pretty good if you have the patience to read through a lot of bad stuff. Basically if you have good taste you won't make it to the good stuff and if you have bad taste you won't appreciate the good stuff. Brilliant writing decisions, brought to you by...me 24 months or so in the past.
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