Bowling is not, as I have previously intimated, a sport. It is in fact the quest for the Perfect Roll.
Every bowler has inside them a Perfect Roll, something that requires no effort to perform, a motion as natural and easy as getting a finger up their nose with their eyes closed, something that transcends skill and practice and fancy trick grips and ego and self and gods and monsters and turns the bowler into fate’s own elastic, drawing the ball and pins together as they were always meant to be.
The Perfect Roll is seen when people who have not bowled before or at least not in a long time get a strike. It’s not a matter of making the ball hit the pins in a certain way, it’s a matter of letting the ball and pins meet as they are meant to, with the ball approaching and the pins laying down before it like wheat becoming a crop-circle. Crop Circles, by the way, are not the product of UFOs or underground electromagnetic disturbances. they are perfect rolls gone untapped.
Every so often, as you bowl, that perfect roll will come out and there it will be – a big red X on the screen if they have electronic scoring at your bowling alley, or just a big empty space like a stage after the best performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream ever where the pins used to be, and bowling is really just the pursuit of what it takes to get your Perfect Roll to show up more often. Standing the right distance from the line, at the proper angle, and releasing the ball in just the right way after swinging your arm just so…
Along the way, you pick up other tricks, like bowling for accuracy to pick up spares, ways to put added spin on your ball so that even if your perfect roll doesn’t show up you knock a lot of pins over and make a lot of noise, echolocation that pertains only to bowling pins, forming a telekinetic link with your ball, etc. But the perfect roll needs no fancy spin. it’s just a matter of letting go. the ball WANTS to knock over pins and pins WANT to fall over in the presence of a ball. you just have to be a conduit for the desires that are already there.
yeah, I got a few Perfect Rolls today. and a lot of gutterballs trying to copy it when it wouldn’t come oiut on its own.
