"Midwest junior tennis was also my initiation into true adult sadness. I had developed a sort of hubris about my Taoist ability to control via noncontrol. I’d established a private religion of wind. I even liked to bike. Awfully few people in Philo bike, for obvious wind reasons, but I’d found a way to sort of tack back and forth against a stiff current, holding some wide book out at my side at about 120ยบ to my angle of thrust—Bayne and Pugh’s “The Art of the Engineer” and Cheiro’s “Language of the Hand” proved to be the best airfoils—so that through imagination and verve and stoic cheerI could not just neutralize but use an in-your-face gale for biking."
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From the essay “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” published in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again written by David Foster Wallace.
I could spend oh so many days whiling away the hours with Wallace’s words.
