Spinning Plates

I went to the circus quite a few times as a kid. Can't say I enjoyed all the acts though, and one which always left me cold was the plate spinner. Usually male and looking a bit past it compared to the other limber circus folk, the spinner would set in motion lots of said plates at the ends of an unlikely number of unusually flexible poles and try and keep them all going. The rather unpleasant tension underlying the performance came from your awareness that some of the plates would eventually end up teetering in ungainly fashion on the very edge of crashing down, only to be set in motion again at the excruciating last moment. But the tension always struck me as fundamentally pointless. There was something trivial in the invocation of some sort of danger, compared to the genuine sense of accomplishment in, say, walking the high wire. There was nothing terribly impressive about each individual spinning plate. It seemed fairly easy to set them going round, so the skill, if any, lay in a sort of manic monitoring.

It never occurred to me then that one day that's what I would find myself doing.