Sitting here on a cold, slate gray morning watching cows munch on a hay pile Mike created right outside my window. A cold wind out there likely means no golf later. There are still only two calves among the cows and heifers, and we're expecting maybe a half-dozen more.
I've already had three conference calls, which ate into the time I planned to spend here. My thoughts were organized and coherent as I wrote in my head during my recurring early morning muse. I found myself staring out the window at the outlines of the trees at three a.m., after awakening in the darkness of a power failure after a squall blew through, triggering the battery backup for our server (called a UPS in computer speak). I never knew that the UPS sends out four distinct beeps every sixty seconds once it's activated, until I learned this the hard way in the middle of the night last night. Putting the router and NAS in the sunroom a few feet from the bed was a mistake.
But it did create a little space to think, this unplanned moment of consciousness, with P snoring softly and happily next to me, both of us full to excess on a wonderful meal of grouper imperial P prepared from scratch (is there any other way with her?) and consumed while roaring with laughter as we watched a recording of last Saturday's SNL. Not a bad way to spend a Sunday night.
At this moment, however, in the first couple hours of Monday, my mind drifted into the sort of theological musings that once occupied me avocationally. Specifically, does man's apparent need for religion stem to some degree from the need for repentance and redemption, not out of fear of divine punishment but because our life's storage locker accumulates so many mistakes and cruelties that it becomes harder each day to carry on under the weight of it all?
"We do earnestly repent,
and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings,
the remembrance of them is grievous unto us,
the burden of them is intolerable."
So says our Book of Common Prayer, Rite One. "Intolerable" indeed.
If this is what is driving our religious compulsion, at least in part, it should be universal. What do the other faith traditions say? Well, all of them include an element of turning away from the sort of life-error the Judeo-Christian community calls "sin," whether for personal redemption or, in Jainism and the like, to break a cycle of pain that may be as old as humanity. Our collective march of folly in 2021 may well be our personal responsibility, but it also stands as a culmination of generations of human failure in days before. This allows me to see the MAGA crowd in a more sympathetic light, not because of that anodyne "we're all sinners" stuff, which only tells us to be careful about judging, but because we can see in the outrages of the folks storming the Capitol a parent who dropped the "N" bomb around the kitchen table, a grandparent who may well have attended a lynching, a great-grandparent who stood in opposition to his own self-interest by taking up arms to defend the right of his rich neighbors to own and exploit the most vulnerable among them in 1861.
"The past is never dead. It's not even past." So said Faulkner, and so we see in the events of the last few weeks.
Meanwhile, the Bay County Republican Party has become even more unhinged than it had been when we lived there full time. They've refused to recognize Joe Biden as president, as if he needs their assent. More neo-Confederate nonsense. John C. Calhoun would be proud--nullification lives on.
A couple days ago they called for Rep. Cheney's resignation because she voted to impeach T***p for inciting insurrection. Which, of course, he did. And made $255 million in the process, most of which he'll apparently keep.
https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/trump-raised-255-4-million-in-8-weeks-in-bid-to-overturn-election-121020100057_1.html
Do I really ever want to go back there, back to my old hometown? One can't judge a community by the most vocal and stupid among them (and stupid is not too strong a word), but my sense is that this is not an aberration--it is how a large plurality of the residents see the world, living in their social media cocoons of atavistic madness. I hang my head at the thought of living in the midst of that again.
Although, Brother Donk, the fact is that P and I do in fact live in the midst of all that. Wyldswood is an oasis, and I worry several times a week that the neighbors will figure out we are not part of the "Stop the Steal" crowd and crash through the gate to do us harm. Crazy? If one believes their words, several among the insurrectionists on 6 January fully intended to kidnap and murder the opposition when they entered that most sacred deliberative space carrying the means of restraining and extinguishing anyone who disagrees with them. Most folks slaughtered in the first wave of revolutionary madness probably hit the ground with a surprised look on their faces as they bleed out on the dirt. Would that be us, some moonless night as pickup truck headlights illuminate our front porch, Confederate flags waving?
Well, this has taken a dark turn.
Friday we return for a few weeks to Corning, New York, a bastion of sanity that is also surrounded by angry white men driven mad by social media. Wyldswood on a larger scale, I guess. This is to say, there's no geographic solution to this moment, this crisis. Buy more ammo and get a decent surveillance system to provide a few seconds warning when the collective insanity rising like a tide of excrement flows through the north gate--that is the practical solution.
And social media is in fact driving us mad, which is why I ponder these developments here rather than on my Facebook news feed where perhaps hundreds might read it. A provocative and thoughtful essay in the New York Times yesterday provided a survey of the "epistemic coup" that arguably began right after 9/11 and reached its apotheosis on the Capitol steps:
But that guy has a foreign-sounding name, and is a pointy-head from Harvard. Why listen to him when you can have Tucker Carlson?
Let's change the subject. I shot something on Saturday, an observation that brings me no joy. Around sundown, P and I were out on the island in our pond, looking for duck eggs in the water and along the shore. As we focused on the water, P noticed something that looked like an old bicycle inner tube piled under a palmetto frond. On closer inspection--but not too close--I realized the flat black and gray jumble was a large water moccasin, apparently out there to sun itself on a pretty afternoon. P started marching across the bridge with a brisk cadence, repeating that she would never go back out on the island again.
"You need to go shoot that thing."
"Why, if you're never going back out there? It didn't seem to be bothering anyone."
A look of incredulity mixed with a modicum of contempt.
"You need to go shoot that thing."
"Yes dear." Shoulders slouch in defeat and in the thought of what's coming next.
I stepped into my office and emerged with a 12 gage I keep here at my desk (one of two, actually. For libtards, we are fairly well-armed). I see that I have a single buckshot shell in the chamber, and although I'm pretty sure that'll do it, I load two more and walk down to the island, shotgun cradled in the bend of my arm.
Upon returning to the point of beginning for this adventure, I am half-surprised that the snake hasn't budged, perhaps hoping I'll just move along. I don't. Instead, I lower the barrel to maybe a foot from the mass under the frond (no use getting any closer, lest he live out one of my nightmares by shimmying up the barrel and around my neck), and pull the trigger.
Figuring he's met his demise, I step away for the walk back across the bridge when the snake rises from the bleeding pile, mouth open and outlined in cottonmouth white. Oh no. I quickly chamber another round, wheel around, and fire. This time he stays down, pieces of snake wriggling in the dirt and pinestraw.
Killing snakes is just part of life in the rural South, a means of protecting ourselves, our pets, our birds and their eggs. But it's always unpleasant business. Farm life, for all its beauty, is a constant dance of life and death.
Back to the more civilized affair of drafting pleadings in a new lawsuit, and washing that image out of my head.
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