Bat Country

Saline streaks stain the cheeks beneath eyes that have seen too much. Again and again. Incompetence reigns. Arrogance feigns. Not my job. I can't breath, whispered 400,000 sick ones, whispered a handful of black ones. Let loose from their confines, struggling for voice, the country erupts and divides, burns and blames, sheltering in their familiar foxholes, heads down, to avoid the salvo of fire from the other side. The other, the not like me, the sick, the downtrodden, the least of these, lit on the pyre of the sacrificial disenfranchised. Stand up, walk out. Put your fucking boots on, it's time to march. But don't forget your mask.

So, here we are.  If there is any one certainty in today's uncertain times, it is that no living human on our little island home, this rock we call Earth, has ever been where we are today.  Many have experienced more visceral carnage, the examples are endless. But, nowhere in time or space of living memory, have we as a civilization, a global population, been cast so decidedly into the void.  The before times are gone, probably forever, at least for many years to come and then with foundational changes.  The in-between times, where we are now, are where we shall remain for an undefined future.  The after times remain a period of myth, of simultaneous universal hope and dread, which no one knows what it will look like. In the before times, not without their perils, life for the average American was pretty much predictable.  Get on a plane, land where you were headed, do your business... Go to work, school, church, the grocery, with little thought of imme...

Something is afoot with the letter T.  It is migrating in mysterious ways and I worry about some linguistic fuckery going on.  My first notice of this anomaly was about a decade ago.  The D in "and" was being replaced by a T, mostly by celebrities who were dragging out their and and turning it into ant.  I was puzzled.   Then, while listening to a New York City YouTuber, I noticed he had dropped the Ts from Manhattan.  It became "Manha-an".  I figured it was a New York thing.  Then it spread. This went from a notice of something to a distraction to an honest annoyance.  What was going on?  Where are my fellow thinking people, nerds with ears, who are constantly NPRing and hearing something that doesn't fit the standard?  What is the deal? The incidents that caught my attention were imbedded in the words Manha--an, impor--ant, and Ti--ans.  Manhattan, important are fairly clear, but Ti-ans was a breach of a standard which ...

5/17/2020 So, Buck. what are you trying to communicate with this photo?  If you take a picture, you obviously want to say something.  Here, we have a field of tilled earth, with the Sewanee Cross and a powerline cut in the background. A thoughtful person might have many responses simultaneously - agriculture, conservation, the holy ground of an alma mater. That same person might see a vast swath of monoculture in an otherwise incredibly biodiverse swath of North America.  A zone of human control over the world around them.  Vast amounts of petrochemicals and synthetic additives to produce a crop, and an economy. That same person, myself in particular, might also see something else.  I have prepared a field such as this.  It is not easy, or cheap, but it is necessary.  What you see here is lots of time, consideration, and money pinned on the hope of making a profit. Hope, not expectation, is why somebody fueled up his tractor, timed his ac...

All this talk of the "new normal" has me thinking "hogwash".  We need to recalibrate time for a bit.  I propose these three terms:  The Before Times, The In Between Times, and The Next Times.  Eventually, there will be an After Times, but we can't see that far into the future just yet. The Before Times were the status quo of 2019, before all hell broke loose.  As we entered the new year, 2020, we entered the In Between Times, where things, all things, took a major shift, lurched startlingly toward some new, unknown horizon.  We are 4+ months into that new reality, and the way forward is largely unknown. So we are stuck.  Stuck in a moment of fear of a new threat, stuck in our homes, stuck as far as a safe way out, and, most importantly, stuck looking for a grip on the situation in the big picture.  Are we stuck here for evermore, for an unforeseen amount of time against an unknown antagonist, for a fear of each other as the real threat? For ...

I don't know its precise origin, but once upon a time a cat poster entered our family mythology.  We've all seen it by now- a kitten hanging from a branch with the caption "Hang in there" or some such.  It's a cute kitten. This critter became a minor god in our house at some point, worshipped when one of the pack was going through something rough.  I think it showed up when my dad had his first bout with lung cancer, in 1984.  That was the first of many crisis of health in my family. I had a pretty serious accident in 1986.  Most friends know the details well.  I took a pretty substantial fall, breaking a lot of bones, including three vertebrae in my neck.  This resulted in a spinal fusion, a month in the hospital, and several months of recuperation. The cat was there.  My hospital room in Nashville, where I would be parked for about three weeks, featured kitty prominently at the foot of my bed.  Then, at home, he accompanied me in the ...