True Bounce

i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul.people who post frequently on boards appear to know that they are factory equipment and tennis shoes, and sometimes trade sends and email about how their contributions are not appreciated by management . . .many cyber-communities are businesses that rely upon the commodification of human interaction.they market their businesses by appeal to hysterical identification and fetishism no more or less than the corporations that brought us the two hundred dollar athletic shoe.-humdog, "Pandora's Vox: On Community in Cyberspace," 1994 A Ball in Hand Some of my earliest memories are of tossing a tennis ball back and forth with my father.There were always a few lying around.Anytime we took a car trip, he would tuck one in his jacket pocket in case we found a few minutes to play catch at a road stop or in a parking lot.Every Christmas, one of his closest friends, Pete Putzel, would gift him a can of new tennis balls.He would give Pete an egg carton of golf balls in return.In later years, he developed a habit of handing off the tennis balls that had lost their bounce to my aunts' dogs, Easy and Roxy, for a second act of being chased and chewed to pieces.Whenever I catch sight of one of the many faded neon balls that bedazzle the Los Angeles cityscape-discarded at the edges of public courts, dog parks, school playgrounds, sidewalk parkways, street gutters, and occasionally highway entry and exit ramps-it calls up the childhood comfort of always having a tennis ball close at hand.In 2018, I began to collect them. 1 Not only tennis balls-I also rescued soccer balls, basketballs, baseballs, wiffleballs, volleyballs, kids' balls adorned