Hearing Secret Rock Operas

During those somewhat unstructured summer afternoons of my early adolescence, when idle pastimes replaced the more rigorous demands of ink-stained schoolwork, I would always allocate several balmy hours each day to perfecting the art of that popular tavern diversion known as pinball; a reflexive if sedentary sport in which shiny ball-bearings are propelled across a table-top assault course by means of a spring-loaded firing system, consequently ricocheting back and forth between a series of illuminated levers and buffers until the inevitable termination of its noisy parabola in the bowels of the machine. From the greasy, Maltese cafeterias of Soho's Old Compton Street where Keith Moon and I had once shared an especially grim bowl of oxtail soup, to the dreary, out-of-season inns that pockmark the seaside promenade at Brighton, briefly the haunt of Townshend and others of his kind, I must have devoted many, many happy hours applying whatever expertise I had attained to the prosecution of a successful pinball session in every establishment that contains the necessary equipment, but in none of these disparate arenas of dissolute activity had I ever witnessed such an astounding display of superior pinballmanship as that performed by a curiously disadvantaged curly-haired youth called Thomas something-or-other, who was not only incapable of processing aural information, but was also a stranger to the wonders of spoken communication and visual perception.
Indeed, if one may compare him to Cheveneaux's marble study of the great stoic Zeno, then ... (oh I've had enough of this claptrap already)