This is also how not to fear sleep or dreams. Never tell anyone where you are. Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.
This can be tricky.
Here is how to get free sticks and strings and clothes and gear from Dunlop, Inc. as long as you let them spraypaint the distinctive Dunlop logo on your sticks’ strings and sew logos on your shoulder and the left pocket of your shorts and use a Dunlop gear-bag, and you become a walking lunging sweating advertisement for Dunlop, Inc.; this is all as long as you keep justifying your seed and preserving your rank; the Dunlop, Inc. New New England Regional Athletic Rep will address you as ‘Our gray swan’; he wears designer slacks and choking cologne and about twice a year wants to help you dress and has to be slapped like a gnat.
Be a Student of the Game. Like most cliches of sport, this is profound. You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. Peers who fizzle or blow up or fall down, run away, disappear from the monthly rankings, drop off the circuit. E.T.A. peers waiting for deLint to knock quietly at their door and ask to chat. Opponents. It’s all educational. How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away. Nets and fences can be mirrors. And between the nets and fences, opponents are also mirrors. This is why the whole thing is scary. This is why all opponents are scary and weaker opponents are especially scary.
See yourself in your opponents. They will bring you to understand the Game. To accept the fact that the Game is about managed fear. That its object is to send from yourself what you hope will not return.
This is your body. They want you to know. You will have it with you always.
On this issue there is no counsel; you must make your best guess. For myself, I do not expect ever really to know.
But in the interval, if it is an intervaclass="underline" here is Motrin for your joints, Noxzema for your burn, Lemon Pledge if you prefer nausea to burn, Con-tracol for your back, benzoin for your hands, Epsom salts and anti-inflammatories for your ankle, and extracurriculars for your folks, who just wanted to make sure you didn’t miss anything they got.
SELECTED TRANSCRIPTS OF THE RESIDENT-INTERFACE-DROP-
IN-HOURS OF MS. PATRICIA MONTESIAN, M.A., C.S.A.C.,[58] EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, ENNET HOUSE DRUG AND ALCOHOL
RECOVERY HOUSE (SIC), ENFIELD MA, 1300-1500H., WEDNESDAY, 4 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT
UNDERGARMENT
‘But there’s this way he drums his fingers on the table. Not even like really drumming. More like in-way between drumming and like this scratching, picking, the way you see somebody picking at dead skin. And without any kind of rhythm, see, constant and never-stopping but with no kind of rhythm you could grab onto and follow and stand. Totally like whacked, insane. Like the kind of sounds you can imagine a girl hears in her head right before she kills her whole family because somebody took the last bit of peanut butter or something. You know what I’m saying? The sound of a fucking mind coming apart. You know what I’m saying? So yeah, yes, OK, the short answer is when he wouldn’t quit with the drumming at supper I sort of poked him with my fork. Sort of. I could see how maybe somebody could have thought I sort of stabbed him. I offered to get the fork out, though. Let me just say I’m ready to make amends at like anytime. For my part in it. I’m owning my part in it is what I’m saying. Can I ask am I going to get Restricted for this? Cause I have this Overnight tomorrow that Gene he approved already in the Overnight Log. If you want to look. But I’m not trying to get out of owning my part of the, like, occurrence. If my Higher Power who I choose to call God works through you saying I’ve got some kind of a punishment due, I won’t try to get out of a punishment. If I’ve got one due. I just wanted to ask. Did I mention I’m grateful to be here?’
‘I’m not denying anything. I’m simply asking you to define “alcoholic.” How can you ask me to attribute to myself a given term if you refuse to define the term’s meaning? I’ve been a reasonably successful personal-injury attorney for sixteen years, and except for that one ridiculous so-called seizure at the Bar Association dinner this spring and that clot of a judge banning me from his courtroom — and let me just say that I can support my contention that the man masturbates under his robe behind the bench with detailed corroboration from both colleagues and Circuit Court laundry personnel — with the exception of less than a handful of incidents I’ve held my liquor and my head as high as many a taller advocate. Believe you me. How old are you, young lady? I am not in denial so to speak about anything empirical and objective. Am I having pancreas problems? Yes. Do I have trouble recalling certain intervals in the Kemp and Limbaugh administrations? No contest. Is there a spot of domestic turbulence surrounding my intake? Why yes there is. Did I experience yes some formication in detox? I did. I have no problem forthrightly admitting things I can grasp. Forwicate, with an m, yes. But what is this you demand I admit? Is it denial to delay signature until the vocabulary of the contract is clear to all parties so bound? Yes, yes, you don’t follow what I mean here, good! And you’re reluctant to proceed without clarification. I rest. I cannot deny what I don’t understand. This is my position.’
‘So I’m sitting there waiting for my meatloaf to cool and suddenly there’s a simply sphincter-loosening shriek and here’s Nell in the air with a steak-fork, positively aloft, leaping across the table, in flight, horizontal, I mean Pat the girl’s body is literally parallel to the surface of the table, hurling herself at me, with this upraised fork, shrieking something about the sound of peanut butter. I mean my God. Gately and Diehl had to pull the fork out of my hand and the tabletop both. To give you an idea. Of the savagery. Don’t even ask me about the pain. Let’s don’t even get into that, I assure you. They offered me Percocet[59] at the emergency room, is all I’ll say about the levels of pain involved. I told them I was in recovery and powerless over narcotics of any sort. Please don’t even ask me how moved they were at my courage if you don’t want me to get weepy. This whole experience has me right on the edge of a complete hysterical fit. So but yes, guilty, I may very well have been tapping on the table. Excuse me for occupying space. And then she ever so magnaminously says she’ll apologize if I will. Well come again I said? Come again? I mean my God. I’m sitting there attached to the table by tines. I know bashing, Pat, and this was unabashed bashing at its most fascist. I respectfully ask that she be kicked out of here on her enormous rear-end. Let her go back to whatever fork-wielding district she came from, with her Hefty bag full of gauche clothes. Honestly. I know part of this process is learning to live in a community. The give and take, to let go of personality issues, turn them over. Et cetera. But is it not also supposed to be and here I quote the handbook a safe and nurturing environment? I have seldom felt less nurtured than I did impaled on that table I have to say. The pathetic harassments of Minty and McDade are bad enough. I can get bashed back at the Fenway. I did not come here to get bashed on some pretense of table-tapping. I’m dangerously close to saying either that … that specimen goes or I do.’