Dogfish Juggling

(Editor’s Note: I decided to break this entry up by subject. This one is about five ball, posts on clubs, unicycling, the trip to UGA and teaching juggling to come.)

What an exciting few weeks of juggling I’ve had. Between problems with dreamhost, the demands of the work week and other developments of an interpersonal nature I have had much less time to write about juggling than I have had to actually juggle. 

There are so many things to cover in this post! I hardly know where to begin. 

I suppose I can start with what is, to me at least, the most dramatic, unexpected, and exhilarating bit of juggling news I have. Just under two weeks ago (the day before spring actually) I flashed five balls. I can honestly say it was one of the most fantastic juggling experiences I’ve had to date. 

In the days leading up to the flash the immanence of spring (and the one-year mark for juggling) set my mind to thinking about my new year’s resolution. In December I decided that I would make my new year’s resolution to juggle five by spring, but I never really followed up on it. I got caught up in four and spent most of my practice hours working on the asynchronous fountain. I even went so far as to change my resolution a few months into the year and vowed to learn four clubs instead. 

Well I never did much to follow through with four clubs either. I can nearly do two in one hand now (more on that later) but I never went so far as buying a fourth club. Regardless of resolutions, or changes thereto, the day before spring found me sitting alone and bored. I’d been out juggling clubs for a bit, and done a bit of work with four ball and had just spent about 15 or 20 minutes watching a few parts of the WJF dvd. 

I watched the section on five balls and decided, what the heck, lets give it a go. After a few horribly wild throws I started to get the rhythm of the pattern down a bit. Rather than just sticking to Jason’s regimented guidelines though, I followed the advice I got back in February from Pam at the AJA festival. 

Standing over a bed I spent about 20 minutes just trying to get the balls out of my hands. This proved to be wildly successful. Totally abandoning the instinct to try and make catches, I devoted my entire attention to throws. 

I’ve heard more times than I can count that you should always think about “throws not catches” when juggling, and never has the veracity of this statement rung truer. Watching the WJF video had given me a very clear image in my mind of what the five-ball cascade should look like–after all Jason’s pattern is, well, flawless. 

Holding that image at the forefront of my mind I just kept working on my release, focusing on making controlled and purposeful throws. It was amazing, as if the pattern just snapped into place in my mind. As I worked more and more at it I could pick out every bad throw, see the source of every collision and failure point in the pattern. I had the most difficulty getting the No. 5 bag out of my starting hand and in the right direction. For a good 50 throws that fifth bag would just go straight up in the air. 

But even though I was making a bad throw I could see it, I knew what was happening and where it was going wrong, and eventually got the first four tosses down solidly enough to really focus on that last prop. I have no idea how many times I threw those five bags up in the air and watched them bounce to the bed, but every time the landed in tighter and tighter clusters. 

And then it happened. 

I threw them up in a prefect cascade and every ball fell right into my hands. I didn’t even thing about it. I didn’t reach for them, or try to make a catch, they just landed in my upturned palms as if guided by some divine hand. 

It was astonishing and more exciting than I can describe. The balls had a perfect rhythm, and the feel of them dropping into my hands was an almost sensual pleasure. As much as I enjoy four (and since working with five I have come to enjoy doing four even more than before) the feel of the five-ball cascade falling into place for the first time far and away the most satisfying sensation of my juggling career. 

There is something so captivating, so meditative and soul-satisfying about that rhythm–I can’t describe it. It is fast and relaxed at the same time. The tempo is rapid and exhilarating, but somehow fills me with an all-pervasive calm. 

I have continued to work on the pattern as best as I have been able to, sticking with trying for flashes and trying to make every throw perfect. Life has kept me from devoting as much time to learning the pattern as I might otherwise like, but even still I am at about a 5-for-10 success rate with flashes at this point. I think I could probably move up to 6 or possibly 7 catches this week, but I think I am going to stick with Jason on this point and get 10 flashes perfectly from the right hand and then 10 perfictly from the left before I even try to go on. 

Not to be derisive, but I have seen some very ugly five patterns and I really want to have a clean run when I start going for endurance. I have gotten myself so excited about five now that I can hardly stand not to dash away from my desk and start tossing my balls around right now!

Oh well. All good things are worth waiting for I suppose. 

Happy Juggling.