There’s a thing in tennis, where if you stand in the middle of the your side of the court, based on the way people hit the ball, you’re probably right where the ball is gonna bounce coming over the net, which makes it pretty impossible to hit it back. It’s super hard to scoop up a ball off your shoes.

So what you’re supposed to do is either stay back and hit a regular ground-stroke (full-length shot across to the other end of the court) or run all the way forward and volley (hit the ball without it bouncing on the ground at all).

That middle area is called by coaches across the world, “No-Man’s Land.”

It is easy in today’s world to feel like we are stuck in a kind of reality No-Man’s Land, where the things happening “out there” feel so enormous and overwhelming and the things happening “in here” feel inconsequential or meaningless.

So we end up in-between, staring at images of stuff we can’t seemingly do anything about, over and over and over again. This creates a kind of sickness, I think, and nobody thrives with this. Nobody solves anything with this. Nothing seems quite real, or quite fake.

In tennis the thing about getting out of No-Man’s Land is that you are instead putting yourself somewhere you can actually hit the ball. Volley it or ground-stroke it, but get where you can hit the thing.

No tennis happens if you don’t actually hit the ball.

So hitting the ball in a life-sort of way feels like, you know, making something. Talking to somebody. Bumping into a wall. Eating toast. Sweeping the porch. Listening to a bird. Telling a joke.

This way you can hit the ball of life or volley reality or some other tennis-related pithy metaphor. Hitting the ball is really great, it makes a great sound and it’s really satisfying and real.

And finally:

Neptune Road

A comic about people salvaging a life on Neptune.

Things of the Week

A whole discussion of how fictional languages are created, based on Rocky’s in Project Hail Mary

Oh my gosh, you can search on and see artists’ paint palettes at the Met.

A whole timeline of the history and development of the comics form, plus a lot more

Featured Thing

This Print, which I keep going back to look at

Okay! That's enough nonsense for now.

May you hit the ball, may you hit the ball again, won't you be my neighbor? - Betsy

“Wherever we go, we are friends” - Sloth and Manatee