Bat Country

The Canadian Goose is a beautiful, noble bird.   Not small, and fearless, they mate for life.   Like deer, they have overpopulated some places intruded upon by humans, becoming a nuisance – golf courses, airports, gated communities… The goose has long been a desirable game bird.   In my mind, they are the preferred Dickensian holiday fare.   I became intimately familiar with this fowl when in college, when my father would organize a highly regulated hunt on a state game preserve over Christmas holidays.   Flash forward to the past few weeks.   When I drive from my home in Cowan, TN up the mountain to nearby Sewanee, there is a large pond just before the road heads uphill.   It is a rather awkward arrangement, a constructed affair between a house of rather imposing design and the road.   The years have not shown the pond to be most successful – drought proves its shallowness, flood pushes it into the surrounding areas. Of late, a lone goo...

Last week, my 15 year-old son was over for dinner.   He had an unusually heavy homework load.   Although it never happens, he had to spend some time on his school work when we would usually just make some dinner and watch something (The West Wing right now.   I know, good parenting, trying to placate the current situation with some foreign, utopian construct of a President Bartlet.) He sat at my desk with his laptop and I tried to be as quiet as possible while getting dinner underway.   After a time, he asked if he could hook up to the stereo and listen to some music while he worked.   Absolutely was the only answer I could muster. Now, I take great pride in my setup.   It isn’t anything fancy, but it will put out some high quality tunes.   The amp is an NAD, speakers are Polks.   When I received the system as a 21 st birthday present, 31 years ago, it was state of the art.   The speakers, Polk 5 Jrs., were about the best out there w...

04/05/18 "We can't stop here. This is bat country!"" Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Rolling Stone, November 11, 1971. It would seem we are truly in bat country.  Undefined menaces, possibly totally imagined, possibly very real, are swooping and diving at our heads. And, we cannot stop here, we must, as a nation and a culture, keep moving. To survive, we must move beyond our current quagmire.  Otherwise, the nuisance will become a menace, the menace an incontrovertible barrier to solutions, and the barrier an opportunity for fuckery by the government.  Today’s most popular TV shows, be they network, cable or streaming options, have exploded into the extreme.   Lost, Breaking Bad, and others such as Mr. Robot have propelled the viewing opportunities into the truly bizarre story line, themes which take true talent in the contorted to pull off.   By the ratings, these shows have succeeded in spades. Most recently, two a...