Environmental news with an Emersonian slant. Issues facing America's deserts, borderlands, and Western wilderness. Literature, film, and music reviews.
Born to Run by Christopher McDougall
California Deserts: An Ecological Rediscovery by Richard M. Pavlick
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
King, Queen, Knave by Vladimir Nabokov
Red by Terry Tempest Williams
February
Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut
Goodbye, Columbus by Phillip Roth
Best American Short Stories 2009
Best American Essays 2009
March
Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
April-May
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
June
Sorta Like a Rock Star by Matthew Quick
Child of God by Cormac McCarthy
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
July
A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Rabbit Redux by John Updike
August
Rabbit is Rich by John Updike
American Pastoral by Phillip Roth
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
The Centaur by John Updike
September
A Natural History of the Sonoran Desert (Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum)
The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy
Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy
October
The Odyssey by Homer
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
Suttree by Cormac McCarthy (reread)
Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
November
The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
December
Light in August by William Faulkner
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
The Penn Relays have been held annually at the University of Pennsylvania’s Franklin Field along the banks of the Schukyll River for 112 years running. It is both the oldest and the largest track and field relay meet in the world.
On April 24th, 2010, an estimated record crowd of 54,000 watched Olympic gold medalist and world record holder Usain Bolt anchor home the Jamaican 4x100 to a victory in the USA vs. the World event. He won by a lot and looked damn good doing it. Further details of the other events that week have been greatly obscured.
I
Wind whisks park leaves wet and orange through the streets, a city hallow. By the failing light of a dying streetlamp Speedy wipes clean the fatoil from the burners in his cheesesteak stand. A bright red cap with a stitched P glimmers atop his skull. The hour is long past midnight and little sound comes from the darkened streets but his curse with each premonitory fizzle of the lamp. The leaves make but a whistling scratch as they touch and dance off the empty streets. Somewhere far off the banks of the Schukyll slurp murkily beneath the midnight birdseye of this everlit city.
Ahead and out of those darkened mercurial depths comes a sound of scraping and dragging along the cement clipping nearer by the moment. Speedy looks up and sees hobbling just out of the light of the nearing streetlamp a small and illconceived thing of dubious form. Something ragged beyond all description and seeming not so much to move as to be moved by the broken tethers of a lazy puppeteer. In his background the great brick arches of Franklin Field loom stately and silent and cast a strange colonial context for this meeting imminent upon its proper.
You gettin ready for Bolt tomorrow? the night emits its cackled inquiry. The outline of its shape is but a rumor by the edges of moonlight. Something short and illbalanced, emanating a foul stench of alcohol and subway-piss from the leeward breeze.
I’m gettin ready for everyone, Speedy says.
The shape hobbles a step closer and by moonlight Speedy can trace the lines of the figure. Skin that is darker than his own deep chocolate hue. Broken aviators perch crookedly on a puff of wild unwashed hair. A tattered Phillies jacket bearing the old maroon eighties logo hangs over a bony frame. The figure seems not of a piece but rather a collection of garbaged tangibles, relics sought out from a collective runoff that was better left to run its rotting course undisturbed.
But Bolt's the biggun, says the drunk. And comin here too. I ain't never think I'd a see the day.
I sell cheesesteaks to everyone, Speedy says. He turns on the little faucet and collects water in the rag and then turns off the faucet and wipes down the bleached surfaces.
I'm talkin for your business and shit, man. I'm talkin, like, Bolt, man. They say he's the fastest man on the planet. And we earned him, mayun. This city earned him. Dat's the troof. You think for one second Bolt woulda come here four years ago? Forget that shit, mayun.
Bolt did come here four years ago, Speedy says, and pauses midrub to look up at the figure that has creeped even closer to the stand. And five years ago too. He was on a Jamaican schoolboy relay team.
If the drunk hears any of this he gives no indication of it. Speedy understands that such men are of no caliber or condition to admit mistake or reconsider principles and opinions which they have so firmly established and so clearly professed. Their convictions are the product of a lonesome hour's philosophy and to that hour they pay an eternal and unwavering devotion.
I mean take this city as of recent years, the drunk goes on. It earned that shit. Changes is goin down. Changes has gone down. Two straight pennants for the Phils. A black man in the White House. This city won rights to Bolt.
Speedy starts to inquire as to what one of those might have to do with the other. The drunk speaks cryptically and does not give any real response at all and Speedy understands that for this man it does not matter what the relation is or even if there is any relation beyond coincidental timing. All that matters is what is.
Now tell me somethin son, he slurs, and looks Speedy up and down with a dissaproving smugness that seems eased by an apparent goodwill. Where was you on the night of the twentyninth of October, 2008?
I was right here.
The hell you doing here?
I wasn't doin nothin but sellin cheesesteaks.
You was sellin cheesesteaks? The drunk pschooshes him and sucks his teeth. Lifts his brows, turns his chin in what amounts to a grimace. His voice takes on a highpitched whine before demuring into a terse, wicked, whistling teapot of a cough. Christ man. Do you know what happened in this city on the thirtyninth of October? Of 2008?
Not off top of my head, sir, naw. I don't know no specific dates too well really. I could venture you a guess.
You could venture me a guess. Jesus H. Christ. Then how'd you know what you was doin?
Speedy scratches beneath his cap and then along his beard. His own fur of a dubious caretaking. The faintest hint of what might be silver probing at the edges of his mustache.
Cause I don't do but one thing, he says.
Christ man. That was the night everything changed. That was the night that brought Bolt here. The night the Phils won the series.
He places his greasy palms on the tin counter, fingers a bag of unclaimed Lays dangling by the side. Up closer his stench is refined. Both whiskey and malt liquor to be distilled from within liberal radii of his person.
I was right here, Speedy says. I listened to the whole thing on the radio. Afterwards the people came through the streets.
Youse damn straight they did, comes the guttural response. And he leans forward again so that his metal orbs all crazed and crossed seem to peer out at random angles, as though sighting in those atmospheres events of an equal and terrible exigency. Things only reckonable on a certain wavelength to which he alone is privy. Everything changed that night, he said. After that night we got pride. We got respect.
He proceeds to tell Speedy a story. It is a story of a city not only spited by fate but teased by the promise of it. In the year 1980 all four major Philadelphia sports teams won championships. This was a misjudgement of the deus ex machina according to the drunk. An importunate random coincidence. He said that most of the universe existed on a scale of equality which constantly corrected itself and that most of the twenty-eight years following 1980 were of just such a correction. A measuring of karma. To lose was not enough. The losses must be tortured ones, salted by glimmers of hope and promise. This promise manifested in the form of men. Men like Greg Jefferies. Men like Scott Rolen. Men like Kevin Millwood. Men like Bobby Abreu. Men like Pat Burrell. And yet in each case an agony of failure swept the Delaware Valley with an increasing severity.
Ain't that a bit harsh? Speedy says. Jefferies, Rolen, they were MVP candidates. And Burrell was just overhyped. Ain't his own fault. We just wanted him to make J.D. Drew look bad.
The drunk says that men such as these are best left forgotten. That it doesn't matter what stats they had or how they did at the plate or what they did in the clubhouse. No one cares and no one remembers if they have ever known. The Phillies did not exist in those years nor did the city, not truly. The twentyninth of October in 2008 marked not just the end of that period of nonexistence but the beginning of a new age. The creation of a thing which many are too young to have ever been graced by had they been graced by it at all. All the years of failures and all the agents of those failures swept away by an 0-2 Brad Lidge splitter to Eric Hinske.
The burner has been long clean and Speedy finally ceases to rub its spotless exterior. He excuses himself and pulls down the gate over the counter and latches the gate to the metal U inside and then steps outside the stand and begins to arrange the padlock on the door. He then asks the drunk if the accomplishments of those who had gone before might not even be respected the greater due to their insignificance. That to perservere against impossible odds and without hope of the reward of glory demonstrated a respect for the Phillies uniform. For the sport itself. For the very idea of athletics in broad. For the qualities inherent in a true man which no situation regardless how adverse can exorcise.
We brought them sons of bitches here to win ball games, the drunk says. And we didn't. That's what you call failure. End of story.
Speedy eases shut the padlock to his stand and looks the drunk in the eye. Naught to see there save perhaps the same thoughtless degeneration which cohabitates with him the sweating backalleys and dumpster-shelters and birdshat parkbenches he calls his home. Somewhere off in that vast city gone a train grumbles through the night.
You didn't bring no one nowhere, Speedy says quietly. He tries to explain that failure is not an absolute term as the drunk has suggested. He says that losing and failure are two different things and that to win is not the important thing but rather how the winning is done that truly matters. He asks the drunk if you could really say failure to be defined by things such as wins and losses? He believed the word deeper. To signify not just the lack of an exterior result but rather an internal despair. A loss of faith. He says that you can look at some men and see whether they still believe in their cause and if they do they have not failed. After all he asks the drunk could you say that a man who dies attempting to protect his family from a murderer - and is ultimately unsuccessful in preventing their deaths - is truly a failure?
The drunk heaves into another great teapot coughing fit and Speedy shifts awkwardly beside his stand and looks off into the night. To where and for what he does not know. They stand for a time longer and then Speedy jerks his head to the side.
Gotta catch a train, he says, and starts to move off.
The drunk holds a hand up and bends over again to his knees in the throes of his fit. Speedy halts and then goes again and then halts once more.
Another man, says the drunk, and heaves in again. Another man might find that cough a mine staged.
Another man might keep on walkin to wherever it is he's suppose a go.
I ain't another man, Speedy says.
I know it, says the drunk. You ain't from around here at all.
Sure I am, says Speedy. He looks at his hairy wrist upon which there is no watch but only the lightened skin that still remembers its sunless years. He starts walking and the drunk comes along.
They come to the corner of Walnut Street and and Speedy turns right and the drunk stumbles a correction to his course so that he may follow. They pass the ice skating center and the bank and the the business towers that line the roads penultimate to center city. To the left they pass small alleys with porchlights and garbage bins standing plump and sedate on the curbedges. Off to the south the sidewalk drops off into old trainyards and empty lots that loom filthy and dangerous in the night. The lamplight burns orange on the walk and the drunk peers steadily at his companion.
Hey man, the drunk says. Hey man, now. I rec-erg-nize you, now.
I doubt it.
Fer real man, he says. I ain’t playin. You go to Overbrook High?
Speedy looks away. Looks off to darker side of the street. The stray cats peering yelloweyed like homeless lions into the night. The lights of the cars zipping away on the highway distant. I don’t deal no more, he says.
The drunk shucks his teeth.
Homie. I mean, homie. Cool it man. I mean just cool it, man. I seen your face before is all, man. Like in the newspaper. Fer track. Back in the day.
Oh.
Whats yer name, man?
Speedy looks at the drunk closer. Squints by moonlight to perhaps reread something kindred in his eyes, something overlooked or gone unseen upon first appraisal. They continue down Walnut and under the train bridge to the stoplight at 30th. Two cars zip past. A small liquor store spills a ghastly working class glow out into the night. Atop the door a rusted sign says LIQUOR-SHOP-SNACKS-GOOD EALS with a busted out D. A Coca-Cola sign is the predominant feature of the corner. Speedy looks around for oncoming traffic and then into the store and up at the starless sky and everywhere but the face of the reeking form at his shoulder.
Some people used to call me Speedy, he finally says.
It's chill, it's chill dog, says the drunk, and casts his ragged arms out before him as if to surrender any illdeed to Speedy's plain sight. Hey man, listen. You got seventy cent?
Speedy digs from his pocket eighty-seven cents in change and puts it in the dry pink cup of the drunk's proferred palm. His nails are untrimmed and long like a witch's and curve from his bent fingers across the length of his hand and Speedy can hear the coins crackle against the manacled keratin.
You got fortyfive more cent? the drunk asks.
No, says Speedy.
It's chill, it's chill.
The light changes and the drunk comes with Speedy across the street and towards the bridge. With a bend in the street they can see the river and the skyscrapers of center city beyond it. Great rectangles with rows and rows of lights extending back into lines like metal dominos. Infinite caverns and hollows to be read in the spaces between. At their foot the Schukyll runs black and strong in its cleaving of the city. The lamps along its bankpaths make a shimmer of its surfaces. Its depths plain and frightful in the empty darkness, tamed now by neither traffic nor sunlight.
Hey man, the drunk says. What ever happened to you? What'd you stop runnin for? You was good right?
They walk in silence to where Walnut crosses 76. The drunk halts to a stop.
Wasn't never my choice to stop, Speedy says. He tightens his coat around his neck. He nods forward. I'll see you later.
He walks a few steps. The drunks does not acknowlege his farewell in any shape. Then he calls out.
You ain't got too much Philly pride, he calls. His voice seems to whisper up from the streets, as if made of sentiments coagulated from the urban distances and reprised to his ear.
Does you, he calls again.
Speedy ignores him and walks ahead with a quickened gate. At this harried shuffle a favoring of his right leg is plain to see. Near the center of the bridge he turns.
The drunk stands beneath the blinking yellow traffic light. Lit at intervals and at intervals invisible so as to protect half the world half the time from that paupered nightmare. His eyes wordlessly and shapelessly monitor Speedy's progress. He stands as if he has not spoken at all but rather is audience to something else altogether. Of his calling. To which he is but symbol and soothsayer and no more.
No one wears a redder cap than me, Speedy calls to him. We just ain't rootin for the same thing. I'll tell you that much right now. I may not know much but I can tell you that right now. We sure as hell ain't rootin for the same thing.
The drunk gives no indication that he has heard nor that he has even noticed Speedy turn. As if he had crossed not just a bridge but breached some liminal oratory spectrum in that crossing. As if the looming towers framing in dark pastels that lonely scene rendered null his senses, forbade his comprehension. Speedy continues on farther into the city and does not look back again.
***
Now he moves along the streets alone as is his custom with balled fists in the sidepockets of his jacket and the vicarcollar pulled up around his nape. The burning calentured embers of a city night brushing his coattails and carrying him forth. Though his speed betrays his catch it exudes a vigor altogether unknown to this part of town and to this time of night. The streets become pliable, bend to his will. Cars speed up to pass by him in the road. Bikers do not stop at stop signs and continue on with their helmeted heads down to the spokes of their wheels as if safeguarding their eyes from some harmful visage in that focus. Women cross the road to avoid close contact. Other haggard men approach him with all the diplomacy of a foreign delegate, eyes eager to seek armistice already at ten paces afoot, holding up their hands as if to disavow themselves of illdoing, haggling for crack and pixie dust and mescaline and worse yet. An elderly genderless hunchback stooping in the lee of a stoop makes for a narrow alleyway from which it tracks his passing across the alleymouth with a full ninety-degree turn of its neck. Its eyes set deeply back in the skull and black and unreadable beneath folds of ribbed flesh and a torn fedora. Movements which betray a certain prejudice, an unspoken suspicion. A city which fears him because he does not fear it.
At Rittenhouse Square a policeman casts his light across the dewy grass and follows Speedy's movements with the temerity of a searchlight prowling the seas it has been charged with keeping. The white sphere of hallogen covers his back like a target until he moves out of range across 18th. The parkbenches are empty and beneath the white lamplights in the park moths aspire heavenward. Relentless, colliding, seeking to become undisturbed. Speedy tucks his fists closer together from within his jacket and tigthens his shoulders and limpstrides on.
The PATCO is off of 16th street. By the little firered bannister heading underground there is camped a denizen of homeless on a ratty afghan unrolled to accomadate their streetwise flanks. Their eyes dimly ruminate something mirthworthy and a few them emit toothless and worn out bursts of sounds that could be construed as chuckling. The one nearest the entry as if fulfilling an ageless tradition or ritual holds up sullenly and hopelessly a foam cup in which chatter a few sad nickels and pennies. Speedy finds a dollar bill in his wallet inside his coatpocket and removes it from the fold without exposing the wallet to the pathogen that is the air and drops it into the foam cup.
God bless you, the homeless manages, and a small impoverished chorus echoes, echoes his footfalls down the long dank stairway and into the hollow keepings of the subway. The hall at the foot of the stairs is long and well lit and tenanted by nothing save an overstuffed trash can that spills haphazard from its appointed nook into the hall. Onelegged pigeons and blind pigeons and tarstained pigeons and pigeons without toes forage therein. Some follow him partway down the hall to the next set of steps yet lose their ambition when he turns back to regard them expressionless, oiled, sweating. As if they too had come to see whatever it was the aboveground had seen in him and judged him accordingly better left companionless.
The PATCO train is huffing and hissing in wait and the platform stands dusty and cavernous smelling and absent of a single soul. On board there are a few drunk college girls huddled together in the back laughing about something and when Speedy comes aboard they cease their laughter. As if his presence had brought with it a gust of something to water all fires of mirth. He limps quickly to a seat near the front and lays his head back upon the plastic pukecolored headrest and lets out a deep sigh over his beard and shuts his eyes.
This is a generalization, but it is a generalization against generalizations. To apply a theory to a book - feminist, Marxist, deconstructionist, whatever - is to arrogantly assume the writer even knows what the hell those terms mean. It shocks and appalls me when I see essays about Cormac McCarthy's "Freudian Conscience in the Move Westward". What the hell does that even mean? To me it is the equivalent of people who said Jar Jar Binks is racist. I mean fine, he's annoying to a lot of people. But that there were those who interpreted it as an attack on Asian culture just the pinnacle of absurdity. Inevitably, the meaning of great novels will be argued over, but it should be based on their CONTENT - excuses should not be made to broadly apply these overarching, generalizing, confining critical philosophies that just have nothing to do with the actual content of the novel. To study great books is not easy. To pick out a few incidental passages separated from the whole and give them the veneer of neo-nazism or some nonsense is the simplest (and most degrading) pasttime. It is so rare these days to read a critical essay about a novel that addresses what the entire novel means and what it was trying to do; instead, the reference section of any classic will be jam-packed with 90% of its pages comprising, "Feminist Theory in The Sun Also Rises", or something along those lines. How can you read a book like Sun Also Rises and somehow think Feminist Theory is the most important thing to take away? That's being judgmental, but I'm not asking for a unity of opinion. Only relevance and a respect for the author and the art he or she has created.
Things I have learned from some time in an MFA Program: 1) It is apparently considered widespread and popular, and thereby unsatisfactory, uncool, and somehow naive, to write a story with Hemingway's Iceberg Principle in mind (show only 1/8th of the story).
2) The white whale in Moby-Dick has no symbolic meaning.
3) No book on your bookshelf leaves you with questions or ambiguities not answered directly by the author (apparently Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel 'The Road' (of which the author said "I don't know" in response to a NY Times query about what the unnamed environmental disaster in the book truly was) is not on anyone's bookshelf).
4) Because mediocre writers go through 100 drafts of their work, and great writers go through two, you should be taught to go through 100.
5) All dialogue must be subtext (seems to incriminate rule #3).
6) Refer to simple things in complicated ways. Example: "inactive narrator", "unreliable narrator", "comma splices", etc.
7) All novels must be about three things. A journey from innocence to experience, the influence of society upon characters, and the effect of time upon characters.
As a quick response, number one stems from a need to feel as though something greater has been recognized - that the theory of "show do not tell", is the general fault of this generation of aspiring writers - that the 'secret' has been discovered, and that secret is to avoid the greatest influence on the sentence in the 20th Century (Hemingway). Two falls into the same kind of pretension. Saying Moby-Dick is only Moby-Dick may be trying to prove a point of some sort. I don't know. The only point it proves to me is that you read the Bantam Abridged Classics edition instead of Melville's full text. Have some respect old Herman. Hell, for Ishmael. Three underestimates the reader and supports subpar writing. Four, every writer is different. You can't apply broad rules. Everyone should be encouraged to discover their own formula. Insisting upon dozens of revisions leads to over-thinking; the greatest crime, in my opinion, for anyone creative. Five, take a look at any scene from anything McCarthy, anything Faulkner. Lines are included for the sake of establishing a brutally realistic scene, but they aren't saying anything deeper. Six, an inactive narrator can be a literary device and in and of itself is not a valid criticism of a creative work. Talking about a narrator's unreliability is a two minute discussion and is brought up by people who do not understand what the novel is really about - if the narrator can't be trusted, it is blatantly obvious. Move the hell on. Seven, how fascinating would it be to turn those 'rules' on their heads? Satisfying, in the very least.
What I've learned from a lifetime of reading every single book I can get my hands on, and reading everything I can find about every writer I want to imitate, is that for great writing, there must be no rules. Any writer that accomplishes anything beyond their decade makes their own rules. The 'rules' are self-learned and self-taught in any self-respecting high school and by a few years at the public library. And as soon as they are learned they should be broken.
If you are seeking to write only as a profession, if you are looking just to learn to write what other people want to read, if your sole interest in the art of literature is to have a job that you like more than what you have now, then these rules aren't such a bad thing. But by and large - and here come more generalizations - I don't think these rules, these ideas, aim for greatness. They aim for the general. They assume from day one that a future John Updike is not sitting in that room and they aim to teach with that determination in mind. That classes continue to focus on irrelevance is to me an incredible pretension. So often, in the literature classes I have been in over the last few years, someone will not know what they are talking about and speak as if they were. In early years of college undergrad, when I was not as adept at seeing this deception, I just thought everyone was understanding something that I didn't. That I had somehow read all of this literature wrong because I came to different conclusions. Slowly I came to realize that somewhere between 50 and 80% of the class discussion has involved bullshitting. People saying things THEY don't even believe. All that's fine and dandy, too, if you want to join a bookclub. But bookclubs don't put you into 100k of debt.
Note: An excerpt from a story I'm working on. Inspired at least in some way by two very bold and not quite justified claims I came across while traveling in the San Jacinto Mountains this past winter. The first authored perhaps by the selfsame genius architects of the tourism industry who came up with the gem "Idyllwild is one of the 100 Best Art Towns in America." The claim - often placed side by side with that latter gem of knowledge - is that the evil spirit of an Indian maiden killer resides in the lee of the mountains. The second claim was uttered in passing by a few very ancient and thereby wise oak trees in what I shall leave to be an undisclosed location along the South Ridge pass, and it said something to the extent that evil shall find no safe harbor in the wild, and that this untruth has perpetuated your society is a mystery of the most profound depth.
See the man. See him laboring through the pines, wind-whipped and reddened and hair blown through and through by the needles of the trees and the icicles of sweat forming like daggers. Grinning. Disturbed. Knees-weakening, buckling now. He struggles to move. There is much blood on him, more than he knows. From his collarbone to his ribcage runs a strawberry burn from a crash to the ice. The blood drips drips down from his hip down his shorts to his knee.
That is me there. He’s me. Watching the granite peak of Mt. Taquitz approach around the curve in the trail. Mountain lion footprints dot the snow. The sun is banking off the snow and warming my bare chest. There is no cold. The wind gusts and then there is cold for a small time but it fades when I sweat. In the crisp air the wood tells no lie and knows no fault but the men who move within it. Far and farther away, miles down the mountainside, miles long ago since passed, there is a warm little town nestled twixt warm little alleyways and dirttrodden streets. In town there are shanties within which scrambled eggs are being cooked by those reading about that day’s weather and who Obama’s killed now. I spit congealed spit from cracked lips which burns through the frost of the trail. They are thrilled by the proximity of the unknown monstrosity I know to be Taquitz. Having lived in its shadow for years they take from that imagined darkness some serenity which exists in a constnat presence. They listen to the thought of the water trickling through the stream from the back window in the woods by the base of the mountain, on the outskirt of town. They drink their coffee in unintentional sync with that town, they breathe the thin air in unintentional sync with that town. This breathing and this drinking is in sync with what goes on in these woods but they do not know that. They will smile at the thought of what I do and I will smile back.
I remember telling someone once: the mountains to me are like a cathedral, and running is just my way of praying. What the hell does that mean? I ask now. But I’m grinning. Disturbed. Knees weakening, buckling.
The road to the trail to the summit of Taquitz is 11 miles of winding root-ridden dirt whose breadth of ice grows as the oxygen in the air thins. Something heavy in those misty pineladen skies. To breathe is to sift through that sky’s bitterness for those things which might sustain you.
Come with me. See where I pause on that trail to observe the bullet-riddled sign on the edge of the wilderness. This area is known for its high population of mountain lions. Please observe wildlife safety regulations. Do not approach, attempt to feed, or touch a wild animal. I plunge on. I am not brave. Do not think I am brave. There is slush frozen to my shins and I spit dehydrated spittle into the frost. The heat of that spit does not break the freeze now.
I have no notion of bravery. Or much else, anymore. This is why I am not brave.
Birds crash through the pines and twiddle serenely. The heights have made them scarcer. I see hawks prowling, soaring across the rim of the range and framed to the backdrop of cloud-blue and the tips of whitefrosted trees. Around the bend I come and I can see Taquitz again.
Here is the story of Taquitz: he was a bold leader of an Indian tribe in these very San Jacinto Mountains. In a time when places were not a name but just a place. Taquitz was not satisfied with his power. With his popularity he was able to manipulate his faithful. He stole away innocent maidens, had his way and smote them on the mountainside. In battle he was defeated, though his spirit escaped to the mountains to lurk in the cavernous rocks near the peak, forming that distinctive A-shaped, whitewashed scraggle which juts above the entire range.
His address is 33°45′36″N 116°41′01″W if you’re looking for the bastard yourself.
Here is the story of me: I want to kill Taquitz.
I’d never heard of him until the day before. Rewind and take that blood from my chest drip dripping down to my kneecaps purpled by the cold. Peel away that ugly strawberry-magenta snarl of reddened skin. Pick me up off that ice and put me down in air which men are meant to breathe. Hand me a shirt. In Idyllwild the tourists and vagrants and rich snowbirds and mountain-beaten hick element juxtapose a brutal image. From that twisted visage imagine spewing forth this line of pithy wisdom scrawled on the welcome sign: Idyllwild is one of the 100 Best Art Towns in America.
The hell you are, I said out loud. I felt wise and Buddha-like with a toothpick in the corner of my lip.
What? a passing pack of the touring enraptured said. They had not heard the thought of the water trickling through the stream through the backporch window yet. They had only read of it. They were only just thinking about those scrambled eggs and what the newspaper may say about Obama killing someone somewhere. Oh, that’s interesting, they said, and pointed to that sign.
Below the sign were a series of pamphlets. One was of directions to an art show which would show a copy of a painting that had been inspired by a selfdescribed raw photo entitled: A Wintering Taquitz. Below these directions was the story of Taquitz. The one I have just told you. They did not include his address. I found that for you on my own.
Put me back on the mountain. The trail is called Devil’s Slide Trail. Perhaps the breath of Taquitz gusts down that slippery slope and whips his would be conquerors into the riparian gorge below. Without thought, without effort. This is the Devil. Here is real evil. The root of it. I mean to kill that. I mean to summit and destroy, grinning and disturbed.
A month ago I would have thought this: when Taquitz the Indian committed those crimes and murdered those maidens and betrayed his people, he separated himself from the mountains. He and they were no longer one big One. He violated a thing sacred and for that you do not become part of the earth but you are banished from it. You are sent to some other place, where no chilly mountain gusts can breathe. The mountains are a cathedral. Running is just a way of praying. Yet this dear friend is not a month ago. This is now. Now those are not just chilly mountain gusts. Those are biting maelstroms which make my lips crack and turn me into a redskin. I cannot make a fist. When my feet land on the ice, it feels as though I am landing on a rounded nub attached to my shin.
I have no notion of cold. Or much else, anymore. This is why I am not cold.
Taquitz is a harbinger of this wickedness and it is to him I am drawn. I flatter myself into thinking that opposites attract. You are good, I tell myself. Taquitz is evil. This is why you are attracted to one another.
The trail is become steep again. I run hunched over because this is how you keep down nausea when running uphill for very long. Nausea I still have a notion of. Steadily steadily the burning grips my thighs. I take measure of the trail ahead, the dirt almost entirely obscured by frozen snowdrifts, the branches weighted still with the snow that had not melted and hanging over the path, the woods on either side thick but still offering at points spectral visions of the whitewashed summit. I take measure. To run mountains is to be like a miser counting his pennies, wanting to be broke at the exact moment he has no need of his coin.
The uphill does not end. I understand I am approaching the final switchbacks. Sweat bears down round my brow to my chin and the whipping wind rips this moisture straight off my face like some ethereal force bound for or emerging whence some distant hell. I look to the trees with increasing desperation as if they might offer some guidance but they remain silent and speak in creeks and whistles only at the wind’s demand.
Soon I will kill Taquitz. I catch a glimpse of my thighs on impact. The muscle pressed through the purpled skin made slick by blood and sweat and slush. I have no notion of what murder is. I have no notion of what cold is. This is why I am not a murderer. Nor will I be. Still I grin a bit when I try to spit. Still I am disturbed.
Perhaps you would like to step back from my trot and make for warmer climes. Search out the most arid desert in your memory and place there a girl. Make her a darkhaired one. Hair black as the night, skin reddish-gold. Eyes which can glow green embers should you seek your heart made to become a fizzing crackling electrical thing. Give her broad happy red lips which say hello! without speaking. There.
Make that arid desert into a black night lit by a blanket of stars so extensive you’d be hard pressed to find the black spaces between. Where is there room for God between those kingdoms? The universe full. We needn’t have God. See me, leaning over, kissing the sand from her knuckle, kissing those chapped and sunrusted lips, the desert seeming to caress us in a suspended embrace. That is me being me. You cannot see the nearest towns but we will go to them. The desert will not hold us, even though from where you’re standing, it sure as hell looks like it’s got a pretty good grip. We will go to the ugly places and in those ugly places I will not be me and she will not be she. I do not want to show you this going. You can imagine it yourself. That is me
losing my religion.
Soon the world will become a pyre, I think to myself, back on the mountain, on Devil’s Slide Trail, blowing into my numbed hands, and Taquitz will burn upon that fire.
*
I am not as strong in the mountains as I thought I was sitting in the village. Sitting in the village I had but a notion of the animal I wanted to be. Sitting in the village I was surrounded by such finicky and delicate excesses of luxury that I could not help but feel like a growling misplaced lion. I make myself fit the image of a beast completely. I eat everything I can put my hands to. I roam for the outskirts, am drawn to the brink. I lurk in darker and remote places to seek out some acceptable substitute for the solitudinal solace of wilderness.
Yet here and now I betray it. I betray it by giving a whimper as I run because my body is getting ready to collapse in on itself. My legs have gone numb and are spasming. Floods of sweat pool off my head and coat my windburnt skin. Animals do not whimper. Watch the antelope take a beating on the African Sahara by a pursuant cheetah. Watch it heaving in the throes of lactic overload as the successful cheetah rips its flesh out with its teeth. Watch it take this de-fleshing silently and calmly before gathering the strength for a final push to freedom and another few bitter moments of life. Cheetahs can run up to seventy miles per hour. Everyone knows this. But they can not run like an antelope. The cheetah has exhausted itself, this is proven by its weakening grip. The antelope digs to its ancestral reserves and tears its halfeaten ribcage away from the jowls of this desert cat and darts in a vicious determination across the plain. The cheetah gives a brief chase but keels over in exhaustion soon after.
I want to be that antelope. I want to be that antelope that turns back to the cheetah and tramples that sorry bastard into the ground where he lay panting. I want to be that antelope that says, no thing and no one of this Earth can eat me. No thing, and no one.
Fairly self-explanatory. The excerpt below is from Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece Blood Meridian. A gang of soldiers turned vigilante cowboys bent on settling the West is witnessing the approach of an Indian platoon from across the plateau.
"A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
The Morrison kitchen was a nice kitchen for a nice home of nice parents and children. There was ring of advent candles on the table, the first purple burnt to its stub. Ornamental plates decked the cleanscrubbed walls. There was the right amount of mess by the front door where the mail was to suggest proper human habitation, and nothing more.
The chicken potpie had been served into six exactly equal portions, and almost every plate reflected this unique mealtime brand of justice. Gentle protestations of no more, too much filled the dining space as each took their due, punctuated by a modest narrowing of the eyes and a shake of the head with a tired, fauxstretch-induced tilt back from the table. Every eatingplace echoed this habit save for the corner, where a plate had already been scraped clean before the man of the house had filled his beerglass.
For the praise of the ‘amighty, said Mr. Comfort.
What is it, deer?
Mrs. Comfort was dabbing at her unsullied dimples with a napkin.
Woodja take a look at Jack’s plate?
For the praise of the ‘amighty, said Mrs. Comfort. Well I don’t have enough food to even say he’s eaten with us.
There’s half the potpie left, said little blondehaired Sammy Comfort from the depths of her own missized wooden chair.
For the praise of the ‘amighty, the parentals muttered at shifting intervals, the little voice either going entirely unheard or coming from a place that was too far away to reach their ears.
Across the table from Jack was the oldest Comfort child of them all, old Daniel Comfort, who peered through blackrimmed spectacles at the iPhone in his right palm, thumb furiously working over the keys, while he held captive and aloft in his left the pieshovel dripping with gravy and the chickensauce.
Well, said Daniel Comfort from behind his spectacles. Apple’s on the move again.
Out the window behind old Daniel the treebranches were wavering light in the breeze and split the sunrays glittering in that star’s setting. The light cut a semicircle of shadow on the table and Jack could feel the apex of it envelope his head in its warmth. His gaze shifted freely between the upheld pieserver and the branch waving just beyond, the dance of the latter a cruel backdrop to the stillness of the former.
Deer, Mr. Comfort was saying. Have you seen what they did to that place off Archer?
Deer, I haven’t.
I mean old Wellington’s place. You know the one.
I think I do, deer.
There was no change of the position of old Daniel’s arms. Thus emerging from that technological Ovid –
Have you seen what DuPont did last week? I mean…
That place sure could use that show, said Mrs. Comfort. You know deer?
The man of the house took a moment to rip from his potpie laden fork and with a hearty swallow said something about needing to give that bastard Higgins a call about the gutters.
Did you hear me, deer?
What?
I said that place sure could use that show. You know the one. Where they go in and give it a fixup and all.
She twiddled her fingers in the air and cracked her wrists when she said a fixup and all in a motion of both carelessness and happily detached pre-eminence.
Whatsitcalled. Dreams of Your Home, or something.
Ah, said old Daniel, shifting in his seat. Ah-ah. So Meredith has finally Facebooked me. Ah-ah.
Either pass that serving utensil, Jack said, or - leveling his eyes on his mother - may I be excused?
America’s Next Top Home, said Mr. Comfort through a Coors Light mustache. He patted his stomach and looked about with something amounting to a sly grin.
No, that’s not it…
I do wonder what she was waiting for, said old Daniel, using a shoulder to slide his glasses farther up his nose. The motion of his shifting figure blocked the window from view across the table.
Either pass that serving utensil, Jack said, or may I be excused?
Mama, said Sammy.
I wanna say – no, wait – Extreme Top Makeovers, is it?
What’s this now?
The man of the house had just finished his brief foray into sidelonging irrelevance and had returned with answers. What we should do, he said, is call up that bastard Higgins tonight. That way he’s getting the message first thing. Have him come take a look at the gutters later in the day.
Mama.
Either pass that serving utensil, Jack said, or may I be excused?
Mama.
What is it, sweetie-candle?
Jack. She nodded to her brother.
What is it, Jack honey?
May I be excused?
But we’ve just sat down for our family dinner, she said.
Thank you, he said. And he stood from his chair, kissed his sister on her forehead, and left through the front screen door with a tinny whine echoing his steps down the walk.
***
The air was rich with burnt charcoal and pine drifting on the cool breeze, tempered by the warming glow of the sun. It felt good on his neck which was cold and stiff from sitting for so long. He knew then that he would not be home for nightfall.
For a time he walked. He did not know how long. He walked until his legs felt loose again and his stomach was light and he remembered that he had on his running shorts underneath his jeans and without hesitating he stowed his jeans and his t-shirt in a bush by the side of the road and he began to run.
He ran down the tarpinched cement block and veered away to the other reaches of the town, staying upon the road and the letting the woods he frequented pass him by with a blush of gentle farewell, the hopes of home kissing their warrior away to a foreign battle. Sometimes he ran to go places and for that purpose only was he concretebound. Soon he realized he had found a place that he had not been ever and continued still. Sweat beaded down his collarbone, his chest, pooled in his feet which squished with each stride. He wore no watch, told the distance he’d come only by the level of burn in his legs and how much the dancing ape in his chest had subsisted.
He’d come through a stretch of developments and apartment complexes hidden between groves of trees too thick to invite bipedal exploration. His vision was made murky by the sweat and he peered from those clouded orbs into the greens to search for an opening. And when they did come or he imagined they came he turned his gaze away to the dirt freckled sidewalk and his worn footdrops upon it with regret for that was not the way onward.
There was a little town by the end of the trees and it was beaten well by both the sun and what those who moved prepossessed in better circles might know to call as this economic climate. Singlefloor square homes with cement porches and lawns littered with windblown trash were the vanguard of its outskirts. Sidestreets led to fenced properties whose identical layouts flanked one another and were differentiated only by the type of weeds which grew unkempt in that section of this lot of long forsaken aesthetics. People, when they moved about, did so strangely, in sweatshirts and jackets toting plastic bags on their staggering ventures, as if seeking to make their condition more horrible to test the limits of whatever might be watching. Through this humid squalor the boy ran and when he came to the town’s edge he suddenly understood a tremendous thirst in his burned throat and like a cruel mathematician counted each continued step as yards away from the assured point of rehydration.
It was there that he turned, on this obscure brink of nowhereville, giving a nod from where he knew not towards the old man sitting frizzled and filthbearded by the gas pump in the shade of the overhang. He gathered his momentum and headed for him.
When he realized he would not make it home without water he did not know. The sun flicked through the trees in cruel nauseating step with his stride and when he spat it was a thick congealed wad that made it halfway across his cheek and stuck to the burnt flesh puckered by sweat. In horrible daydreams he imagined great towering stone fountains with bubbling waterfalls spilling out into an iced brook of cold sports drink. The world faded in focus but finer images at random sharpened themselves in his mind: passing cars became traveling boxes of salvation with holier oils held in juice bottles and soda cups. No though came to him and no thing was seen by him outside of the perspective of water. He giddily entertained fiendish hypotheticals as a matter of idle entertainment: were he to know it would take five years from his life, would he still welcome that fire hydrant bursting open? If he would never again fall in love with a girl, would he still welcome the road transforming into a gushing river of Gatorade? The answer would be no. All he knew of death he knew in that moment yet still he understood the principle of sacrifice. At the point he had brought his body to there was no conscious decision of morals or principles but only a realization of what is what, and such is how the boy came to know himself.
It was as though he had no peripherals. Even as he came back down the road to his town on the narrow shoulder split from the dirt by a ragged edge of crumbling asphalt and the cars were riproaring by him with the hot stink of motoroil burning on a summer’s day still he knew not his distraction. Little girls selling lemonade offered him a cup free of charge. Give one to the sweaty boy, they giggled. Sprinklers fanning the lawns at the edge of town. Mexican landscapers passing coolers filled with iced liquids. Middleaged women by the more moderate homes womanning their own gardens and flicking a hose from the shade of the porch outwards. Of all this he saw and contemplated nothing and he staggered on.
He came to the neighborhood a tripping and squishing spectacle, his skin pale and sweat pruning his fingers and palms. Long red chafe marks marred his sides beneath his shoulders where his elbows passed in friction pumping these long miles.
The street to his home was a long alley now in his tunnel vision, the simple ranch houses only neutral colored blurs. There was a row of cedars paralleling the road which stood still and erect under the sun and provided spits of shade to this otherworldly figure.
Somewhere in the distance he could hear the shouts of children at play, the crack of a capgun and an uproar of commotion. A woman scolded her faulty oven from the cracks of a passing windowsill. A crowd of teenagers played basketball by a hoop down the street, the echo of the bouncing ball ricocheting off the hollow parts of roofs and walls nearby before losing itself in the willows and ivies beyond the houses. Expletives of domestic fortitude came his way from god knows where. All this superimposed, coming to his pounding skull in varying degrees of ultraclarity and obscurity, this other normal world of man that somehow still existed after all his trial.
Old Mario across the street may have said hello to him, may have waved with a furrow to his brow. The dribbling at the court ceased and had he known to feel many pairs of eyes on him he would have but he hardly cared. He sat by the garden and drank.
***
He had once read of the great Joan Benoit who had said she swore after every marathon that she would never do that again and yet each time there she was. To say of the boy that he empathized with the great would not be true. By the top step leading to his room his leg gave from him and he collapsed. He smiled to the carpet and there he lay prone with eyes titled like a madman till came the shrieking of the dinner horn.
Song of the Day: 'Flightless Bird, American Mouth', by Iron and Wine
I don’t like to use the word hate, as a matter of personal principle. It makes me disgusted with myself. Yet sometimes you just develop certain prejudices, fair though they may be, no matter how hard you try.
Vacuums – understandable, you are probably saying to yourself right now, and I appreciate your support. I agree with you, who likes vacuums? No one interested in being happy, that’s who.
I assume the Chinese government probably likes itself fairly well, or at least parts of itself like itself, but I wouldn’t think it’s hazardous to assume anyone else does, aside from bizarre Satanic cults interested in the spoiling of the Olympics and the murder of hundreds of thousands of Sudanese.
Cartoons? Well, that’s kind of an unrelated argument.
But numbers - I just might hate numbers more than anything on this list, with the possible exception of vacuums. Numbers are the cold byproduct of the pisspoor attempts by society to rationalize and organize itself. Numbers lead to scientific progress, which borders on that list of things I hate – particularly when ‘scientific’ is blindly used as an adjective to justify literally anything (let’s see, things that count as ‘progress’: industrial waste, the atomic bomb, cloning of full human beings like in Moon, the perfection of handguns and other devices designed for the sole purpose of ending another person’s life, online report cards, and the perpetuation of a culture of instant gratification which thereby spreads severe lethargy with the effortlessness of, let’s say, a Mad Cow Disease, or a Foot and Mouth Disease. Your preference.
There are a lot of things and a lot of people which you can blame for those little horrors, but to me it comes down to numbers. Motivated, also, perhaps by a vicious desire to avenge those tortured and wasted hours of my youth with my nose buried in a geometry textbook. I realize now, looking back on high school, middle school, even college, that my epic struggles in Physics and Calculus were not solely the byproduct of my lack of ability. Something deeper lurked in my hatred, one of those things that you always know about but cannot quite put into words, something defined by emotion and gut instinct more than organized communication or logic. But now I think I have a grasp of what it was: numbers were just so irrelevant, just so antithetical, to what I wanted the world to be and to what I wanted myself to be, that to spend so much time seemed such a waste.
It’d be like if Jesus had gone to an ITT class over at the temple, straightaway after woodworking. Just ain’t happening.
Numbers not only take away from a focus on more relevant topics of study, they guide us into the same line of thinking which has caused immeasurable suffering in our world. Specifically, I mean scientific ‘progress’, as in what Kurt Vonnegut spent his whole life trying to curtail, time and time again.
To justify the death of numbers, it is only fair to give them a farewell by noting one of their positive upsides: statistics. Without statistics we could not measure the harm which numbers have done. Before numbers came to places like Africa, where a large portion of the world’s suffering occurs today, life was much better. Imperialism, colonialism, and missionaries were the carriers of this number-born disease just like they were the carriers of so many other city-borne plagues, except this one - the plague of numbers, more commonly known as unthinkable suffering, widespread poverty, genocide, persecution based on race and religion - has no known scientific or medical or numerical-borne cure.
Popular misconceptions abound when it comes the history of the impoverished in the world. Starvation, disease, dehydration, and unthinkable urban suffering and decay as know it today did not exist on this planet until roughly four hundred years ago. Exceptions can be made to the romantic view of primitive cultures: yes, they fought wars, yes, their environmental practices were not always perfectly in balance with the land. But overall – as a massive generalization – tribes, rural communities, nomadic nations, were without the ‘benefits’ of scientific progress, and therefore, they were without all the unspeakable numerical horrors which accompanied European expansion.
Simple, rural, tribal societies all over the world were plunged into these horrors in the wake of the success of numbers as they were forced to live unnatural lives suddenly based on capitalistic, materialistic ambition instead of personal happiness and survival. Massive metropolises began to form. Resources were not available to provide for everyone. In these unnatural conditions, squished together by colonials impressing upon them a new way of life, their populations skyrocketed. The system of capitalism relies upon the suffering of many for the success of the rest. In what became known as the third world – places not wealthy enough to successfully implement this numerical plan – justice and happiness slipped away together, back to the mountain, to the plain, to the river from which they were borne.
It is hard for most to imagine a life without technology and luxurious creature comforts at every turn. Repulsive, even, to those who have been bred to be lazy. Yet the benefits of a simple life are of a far deeper value. To live as we were meant to live, communities driven by face to face contact, nourishment provided by a brotherhood and sisterhood of trusting labor, capitalistic ambition replaced by the thrill of being alive, of tearing through the wild jungle in search of red meat, of feeling the satisfaction of physically providing for your friends and family, of using your life energies to truly help a society thrive.
Numbers cause our lives to be wasted on nonsense. The universe has given us one chance at existence, and yet people see fit to spend those precious seconds quibbling about the size of their cars and debating accounting technique while living vicariously through reality television and slowly oozing away their precious life-fluids to the sands of time. And now, today, heartfelt efforts are made by this numbers world to ‘save’ the poor. Imperialists, colonists, may not have as significant of a role to play – but missionaries and ‘volunteers’ are still dogooding their way across the globe, in a largely genuine (to their credit) effort to help those who have been afflicted by four hundred years of scientific progress. “It is time for us to consider that our way of life is not alive enough to be shared,” Ivan Illich famously said in his speech ‘To Hell with Good Intentions’, in which he controversially lambasted America’s volunteer corps.
What it comes down to is a shifting paradigm, a changing of what we see as ‘development.’ We can complain all we want about ‘greening’ society, about painting our Earthships with ‘sustainable’ paint and toting around copies of An Inconvenient Truth everywhere we go – but that is not going to really change anything. To truly solve the problems our world faces we need to think outside of accepted paradigm. A market based society (world, even) seeks market based solutions for its issues. Money is carelessly thrown at third world countries. Grieving ‘first world’ Christians satisfy the slight ache in their heart by donating a few hundred dollars a year. Yet these are problems which can only be resolved by the freeing of minds. Dollars are part of the problem, thus they cannot heal the problem – they serve as a band-aid at best, and as a comforting thought to capitalist consciences worldwide, at worst.
And we are left with numbers, figures, which are truly horrifying, which we are largely ignorant of, and which most of us will see, shake our heads sadly at, and turn the other way, because we feel powerless. But we have looked away for too long. How can you in good conscience go on living without considering the massive ethical problems which these numbers pose? It is not just time for the world to wake up to these problems – awareness is but the first step in what must be a two-part process. It is time to radically change the way we live, or die trying, and I need no further proof:
1/3 (percentage of people in the world that are under-fed according to the World Health Organization)
1/3 (percentage of people in the world that are starving according to the World Health Organization)
1/3 (percentage of annual deaths – roughly 18,000,000 people a year and 50,000 per day – due to poverty related causes, according to the World Health Organization)
19,500 – ~400,000 (present number of civilian deaths in Sudan’s Darfur region incurred by the Chinese-sponsored Janjaweed militia, according to various international estimations)
1,000,000 (number of Rwandans murdered under the Hutu Power Ideology – an inflammatory, prejudicial, fear-mongering policy first sponsored by the Belgian government during occupation - during the Rwandan Genocide in 1994, according to various international projections)
270,000,000 (number of deaths as a result of poverty since 1990 – mostly women and children – according to the World Health Organization)
500,000,000 (number of people in Asian, African, and Latin American countries living today in what the World Bank calls “absolute poverty”).
I write this last sentence, only so that numbers do not have the final word.
Song of the Day: Only fair to give credit to Rilo Kiley for the title.
