Hurricane Weather

Yes, that’s me walking the streets of Chicken City in the evening when smarter folks are turning towards bed or watching that final TV program. I see the blue glow of your television as I walk past, shuffling to favor the knees that are, after all these years, beginning to complain. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not peeking into your windows. I already feel vulnerable out there without having to worry about being taken for a Creeper. Every time a cop cruiser passes me I try to amend my posture and gait so I present a figure of innocence and an aura of The Good Citizen; every time I see a lady walking from her car back to her house in the pools of light thrown off by the front porch light I try to radiate Goodness and Wholesomeness. Don't worry, lady! I hate rape!

Last night, due to the hurricane bearing down on Tampa and the GOP Convention with Biblical Wrath, the air was thick and humid, though it was cool and lacked that tropical warmth that you tend to associate with hurricane weather. Autumn is in the air and the light, cleaning the tropical heaviness away. Though I found myself panting as my worn lungs tried to break down the thick humid air, I did not mind: in that same air I could taste the ocean and sense the force of a storm that was built over vast miles of the Atlantic.

People who grow up on the coast are aware of the vast presence of water even when they can’t see it. It’s always there, pushing at your subconscious – the biggest thing on earth. It’s in the pressure of the air and the saltiness you smell; it’s in the weather and the light. You can hear it if you listen, and the sound of the tide describes Relentlessness like few other sounds.

When I was young our house had a line of fir trees which even now I can’t identify as to type or species: they were taller than the house but utterly unlike the straight, slash pines here in Georgia. These were Childhood Memory Firs which can only be found in Connecticut in the 1970s. They billowed out with figures like the women you now find shopping at Wal-Mart – full and round – and their branches were mahogany red,sticky and spicy with sap. These trees were made to be climbed, up their trunks hand-over hand along the limbs that came up like radial spokes. The boughs laced together so completely and densely that  if you poked your head through the interwoven needles and branches, and pulled your body through, you could find yourself supported on a springy canopy that gave a good view out over the roof of our house, over the trees that lined Route1 and then further, as if the land was sloping up towards the coast. The ocean was out there, a dense and silvery line like mercury. You could see it, but more clearly you could feel the weight of the ocean and everything that lived in it pushing back against you. Salt crystals were present in the air when the light changed and you could see them spark like God Particles. When I lay in bed at night the sounds of traffic on North Ave. were enough like the sound of waves washing in and out that I, a child raised on the coast, could make that connection and feel the ocean even in the metaphors that came into my bedroom.

Every now and then a seagull will be blown inland from the coast by some far off storm and I'll hear it before I see it - that high, plaintive cry. I know that sound like I know my mother's voice, though I haven't heard her speak in twenty years. The gull will nearly always be circling up overhead as if he can't believe he's spotted me this far from the coast, and calling out in surprise. Is that you? What the heck are you doing here? 

People who grow on the coast are always aware of the presence of the Vast Water, even when it’s not visible; and when we grow up and move away we are aware of the lack of it, a vacuum that can be filled from time to time by weather that blows in from the Roaring Forties and fills the air with salt and the density of the ocean so that walking in it feels like swimming.

La Paz

Two weeks later I finally got around to grading those summer reading projects. Two weeks later! Other teachers may have their own opinions about summer reading projects - they're inhumane! They're cruel! - but I like them. Not for myself, of course - I would have been filled with the acrid pus of bitterness had one been assigned to me when I  was a student - but that's beside the point. I was also an immature, lazy and unmotivated student, unwilling to pursue anything that did not come easily to me. If there was a challenge presented by something in school I most certainly did not rise to the occasion. I also never put my nose to the grindstone at my minimum wage high school jobs, and I scorned competition in any pursuit.

So I'm hardly the avatar of academic excellence, here. But for real students these summer reading projects are a good judge of what kind of work ethic they might have. Any number of advanced students might aspire to be in an "honors" class but can they hack it? Do they have the academic cojones to do what needs to be done? If they blanch at the summer reading project then you know that they're probably lazy, unmotivated and unwilling to work hard. In other words, they're much like me at that age and that's a terrible thing. Nowadays we're debating the need for such projects but I'm holding firm to the idea that an honors  student will prove themselves by accepting the challenge and those who don't want to accept the challenge is not an honors student.

One of the students in my stack of papers chose to read The Razor's Edge by Sommerset Maugham, one of my favorite books. In fact, the reading list is peppered with My Favorite Books as well as books that society deems to be Of Significant Literary Merit, no matter what I think about them. But The Razor's Edge! Now there's  a book. Although the material may be dated by now, back in the 1920s, before people could buy coffee mugs inscribed with quotes by the Dalai Lama, the philosophy introduced in this book was ground-breaking. Interspersed between scenes of the upper-crust falling apart, rendered with great and insightful bitchiness, is this story about a young man who was so affected by his experiences in WWI that he began questioning the most basic questions of life.

Larry sets aside ambition and money and the respect of his peers (including his fiance) to spend the next several years "Loafing", by which he really means studying, reading, pondering and living in genial poverty, although genial poverty is much nicer when it takes place in Hemingway's Paris. Still, it's a lovely idea; in my own half-assed way, I've been doing much the same thing - though obviously not with Larry's results of "enlightenment" and Final Joy.

I'm 47 now and, as such, so close to 50 that I could throw a rock at it and hit it without popping my elbow. I've spent the last 40-plus years reading to absolutely no profit in this world, but I like to think I've gained something by it. My wife may beg to differ, however, and she'd probably be right. Or as right as anyone. However, I never thought I'd end up rich, or even well-off. Even growing up in wealthy Fairfield County, Connecticut, surrounded by wealth that was begetting more wealth, and creating a context for future wealth for its scions through superior education and culture, I never thought I'd rise much above the lower middle class, and I've always been okay with that.

I've been reading Sun After Dark by Pico Iyer lately, and I fell in love with his quick description of Bolivia from the gentle poverty of its capital, La Paz, which means, in Spanish, Peace.

"Like many countries of South America, both Peru and Argentina seemed to have been left by the Spanish stuck between a vanished colonial notion of glory and a future that never arrived; in desperation, often, not full European and not really themselves, they'd tried to make up the gap with pomp. Bolivia, by comparison, gave an impression of self-containment: a poor country, yes, but one that did not look as if it ever expected to be rich."

There is absolutely nothing in the physical aspect of a motorcycle that would in any way indicate that it is a viable, sensible form of locomotion. I thought of this just this morning as I balanced on two wheels and prepared to let the clutch out. Balancing on two wheels when you have the option for four wheels where balancing is out of the equation suddenly struck me as absurd. Who's idea was this? Throw in the helmet and exposure to the elements and you're suddenly facing a situation that leaves Logic well behind, getting smaller in the side-view mirrors.

In Georgia, High Summer generally lasts until deep into September but these mornings lately are bracingly crisp and, dare I say it? Autumnal! The stars overhead burn with a fever and I can smell the dew settling on the grass as I ride. Cats startle and then dart, bats are still swooping drunkenly like college students at a mixer. You pass the occasional fanatic who's up at this ungodly hour, running, and you could reach out and smack them if you chose.

The air is nearly cold and it's jetting up my nose and into my sinuses, and I'll pay for that later, but right now I don't care. It's lovely to rumble along, leaning into the curves and then accelerating smoothly. It's a fetish, sure enough, and since i accept that, I can enjoy it. Clouds are piling up to the west in cotton candy pink billows and the last of summer's insects are droning in the shrubs. They'll die soon but which of us won't? Though my speedometer has been broken for months, I know from the tach that I'm steady at about forty miles per hour and that's plenty enough to blend into the forward motion and lose my solidity. I'm no longer young and, anyhow, I've already gone FAST one time in my life, and that's enough.

When I bought my first motorcycle, back in the white knuckle days of college, Liz and I noted that the speedometer went up to 130 and I knew just as surely as I know anything in life that I would have to peg it out to the limit one of these days, that I wouldn't be able to relax until I had seen and felt 130. It's the sort of compulsion that makes youth a risky proposition, and causes maturity to fear for their own sons . . .

There's a road outside of Athens, Ga. that leads towards a town called Lexington and right about there, somewhere, there's a State Park called Watson Mill. I'm hazy on the geography here and it's just possible that Watson Mill is somewhere else. Nevertheless, on one of those brilliant college days when we had nothing to do but ride, we were riding out that way and the road stretched out straight as a ley-line before us and the time had come - I could feel it. Throttling back smoothly I watched the needle rise past the limit of logic and safety and then I could see very little. Past 100 mph the air became so dynamic and agitated I couldn't see much at all, and friction was dragging the tears out of my eyes and pulling them across my cheeks.

At this speed every nuanced hill in an otherwise flat road causes the bike to lift up on its springs - sometimes leaving the road entirely - and we were in the air now as often as we were on the road, you could feel it in the pit of your stomach every time we broke gravity. On either side of us barbed wire farm fences streamed along like silvery lazer beams and I knew without a doubt that if I were to wipe out now and hit one of those strands of wire I would be diced as cleanly as freshly butchered meat.

Right at 130 we hit a slope that had enough rise that I couldn't see what might be on the immediate other side of the gentle peak and we caught serious air, launching forward like action figures, Liz clutching my back with a death grip because this first motorcycle had no backrest. A flock of vultures, in a curious nod to irony, were feasting on roadkill right there where we came down and suddenly huge birds were everywhere in the air, flying to and fro, inches from impacting us and knocking us into the barbed wire fence. And then they were gone, just like that, and I began dialing the throttle back to 100, then 90, and then a safe speed of 60 mph on this farm road.

I never needed to do it again, but I understood when my oldest son, at thirteen, would lean over my shoulder on one of our rides and shout, Go faster! Fast as you can! Without the speedometer working he had no idea how fast we were going but I'd accelerate to about sixty-five and tell him we were at one hundred and I could feel him settle back against the backrest in intense pleasure while pasture land blurred on either side of us and cow ponds seemed to float in the sky like pewter vortexs . . . .

Pointy Ball - the Game of Action!

You know already that I am a die-hard football fan, and further you know that I use that term - football - in it's most accurate sense. I love the game we call here, in the States, soccer. And heck, I call it soccer too, in casual conversation. Mostly I call it football to make a point or pick a fight. I'm that kind of a jerk, I suppose.

American parochialism is something you come to terms with if you live here - that deep in the bone, vehemently small-minded smug ignorance. It's not just in politics or world affairs or economics or concepts of society, it's really one of our most obvious flaws - or strengths. I suppose you could see it as a strength, somehow. What do I know? Perhaps it's a cultural adaptation for Running the World.

If you're a soccer fan in the US you run into all the time from the people around you who condemn the game as boring. I don't ever really have a response to that statement because, really, that's such an asinine statement that my mind can't find traction. "Well," I sometimes ask, "what sport do you like?"

"Football!" is the inevitable answer if you're dealing with a soccer-bigot. It's always the people who like American Gridiron Football who call out soccer as "boring". One thing usual leads to the other . . .

I give them a hard time. "But I thought you hated football. You said it was boring."

"Naw, I said soccer is boring."

"Oh, I see! That's where you're confused. What you call football is a common mistake. My sport is called football. You'll have to pick a new name. We had that one first because, you see, we actually use the foot."

We discuss history at this point, and the long history of the Real Game of Football but that doesn't ever make an impression. Usually you get some reaction along the lines of We kick the ball too!

Yes, every once in a while. By that logic you might call tennis handball. Or basketball freethrowball.

I call American football by it's common name - football - too, but only in private. In public I call it pointyball or handegg. Or just gridiron.

But the name isn't important - I just like to pick fights. The reality is that American pointyhandeggball is grossly boring. Though it's billed as fast-paced and exciting that's a misconception - the action and excitement come in such discrete and sudden bursts that you might miss it altogether if you lean over to tie your shoe, or answer a text.

Two years ago I was given tickets to a college game played in the Georgia Dome. They were free, the kids had never been to one and so I said, why not? I could care less about the game or the teams involved but it was an interesting exposure to local culture for my children and so I was all for it. Personally, I have no interest in the game or how it's played or its tactics, so i spent my time instead running an experiment to test a long held theory that the game itself is slow as hell . . .

I timed the action in ten minute intervals, using my stopwatch to log the amount of time the ball was actively in play during that time frame. I took ten minute samples through all four quarters and then took my average.

In ten minutes of play the ball was active for an average of 47 seconds. Forty-seven seconds! What a sport for short-attention span sufferers! The rest of the time can be spent getting up and lining up for hotdogs and beer, or peeing out the beer you drank during the last ten minute interval. Go ahead, get up - you won't miss anything: the players will be loitering here or there as they go to the huddle or away from the huddle or there's a timeout or a TV timeout or the refs are consulting.

Football's exciting? Maybe if you were to link all those 47 second intervals together into one continuous time flow. Otherwise you might as well be watching bocce ball . . .  

Lesson Planning

Under new orders to increase informational reading in the classroom - nonfiction reading for content - I had a packet of articles prepared for my seniors. We read about James Holmes, the Colorado theater shooter - how he exemplified that dangerous "outsider" that seems to plague American society. We talked about how he never fit in, had no real social life. Those depressingly humiliating dating website applications and his description by friends and acquaintances as peculiar and shy. His extreme intelligence, combined with his social awkwardness, came together to open a dark door . . . .

Then we read of Wade Michael Page who shot up the Wisconsin Sikh temple. Unlike the quietly odd Holmes, Page was an aggressive outsider. His neighbors invariably spoke of the menace they felt radiating off him, the electric danger that was present in his Aryan Racist demeanor and his angry music thumping the walls of his apartment - but there was a similarity with Holmes in that he too was an Outsider: couldn't keep a job, failed int he army, no stability in personal relationships.

I took up the packets of news stories and then played a slideshow on my Promethean Board, a rogue's gallery of some of the more colorful Outsiders in American history: Albert Fish who had a horrible childhood and a life of instability, which led him to kidnap children, eat them and then send letters to their parents detailing how they tasted; Carl Panzram, in and out of reformatories during the late 19th century, hated and beaten, a rage fueled in him that would not be extinguished until he killed everyone he could get his hands on; Jeffrey Dahmer, like Holmes a geeky, unhappy loner, but with a delight in cannibalism and necrophilia.

What a crew! How did America end up with so many of these Dark Outsiders? I mean, look at Canada, for crying out loud! On the surface they're nearly indistinguishable from America but they don't produce ten percent of the crazies we do. It makes you wonder and you can debate endlessly population genetics and social issues and the proportion of violence that thrums beneath the surface of one society vs. another.

We turned the lights back on in the classroom and read the first line from Beowulf in our textbook, the Burton Raffel translation: "A powerful monster, living down/in the darkness, growled in pain, impatient/as day after day the music rang/loud in that hall, the harp's rejoicing . . . " Like the kid who sits alone in the cafeteria but within sight and hearing range of the Cool Table where voices are voluble and loud and there's laughing, Grendel is filled with hate - an Outsider with many of the same characteristics of James Holmes, Wade Michael Page, Albert "The Grey Man" Fish. Like them he can't fit in and it opens a dark door that he steps through.

Monsters exist, I tell the class. You wake up one day and you're not longer afraid of the Creeper with Long Arms who lives under your bed - the one who's reach you have to foil with an athletic leap when you need to go to the bathroom at night - but there are still monsters, real monsters. They're isolated and awkward and their inability to fit in causes some mutation in their brains to go into hyper-drive. That's Grendel - the author said he was the child of Cain, the Biblical outsider marked for all time so that people would see him and loathe him and reject him. He still exists.

The next day we read a story online about the entourage of one current Rap Artist fighting the entourage of a different Rap Artist in a night club and we talked about why anyone would want to be in one of these entourages: money, parties, women, being close to glory and fame and hoping for its residual luster to rub off on you. You'd fight for that - in a world of drudgery - who wouldn't? Then we talked about the character of these Rap guys: boastful, hyper-masculine, covered in jewelry and attitude. "All the drinks be on me . . . :" and "All the people I plotted with/is the same ones I'm dividin' the profits with."

In a new crib, so big, I'm talkin' town size
Sippin' somethin' cold, smokin' weed by the pound size
Yeah I gotta big head ho, I think it's crown size
Bitch I do it big and I never plan to downsize
People who talk shit, is feelin' like dickheads
Saw me on the web like I had a extra six legs
Lookin' at my highlights with a bitch with highlights
Crowd wavin' at me, all tryna say hi right

There's your Beowulf right there, folks. Who am I? I'm BEOWULF! Destroyer of monsters, bane of demons, giver of gifts and wealth to my crew, etc. etc. 

You take a thing like Beowulf, dated from the Dark Age and still relentlessly taught in American high schools, usually to seniors who don't give a damn about anything any more except moving forward towards graduation with a minimum of friction. How do you make it relevant? 

The Poor Wayfarer Abroad, Part II

Lido di Jesolo is a convenient location for day trips to Venice for those who don't want to pay exorbitant hotel fees. Our hotel was a 19th century villa that had been converted from an ancestral mansion and there was no ignoring the architectural quirks that indicated without apology that this building had once had another life. For instance, there was no sequential logic to the floor layout. My room was 212 but reaching that room was far more complicated than taking the elevator up to the second floor and then following the room numbers to my door. First of all the way floors are numbered in Italy are different: the bottom floor, the one where we checked in, was not considered the first floor - the the first floor was one level up; therefore, the level where room 212 would be found was two flights up.

Elevators are, obviously, added as afterthoughts in converted 19th century villas and, as such, they're unconvincing. You can rarely find them and, when you do, you realize they're smaller than American elevators, and more balky: like politicized union workers, they can quit on you in a huff at any time. But the stairs aren't much better - the grand staircase that was once used by the Titled Family of the villa did not necessarily lead to all the floors, just the rooms that the Family might have once used as their personal apartments within the villa itself. We went with luggage bumping behind us up the sweeping, carpeted stairs and found ourselves in a ballroom with a grand piano and a harp that looked as if it had died there and was forgotten. A small sign with vague arrows indicated we were to go through the ballroom and then down a quick flight of stairs to a landing that went suddenly up again and now we were on the first floor. Time to scan for another clue and there it was, pasted above an oil painting of the Rape of the Sabine Women - another arrow! Follow that around the corner and there was a dark, turning staircase perfect for a quick assignations by servants driven by passion and the restricted blood flow caused by tight 19th century clothing.

My room had been formed by subdividing older rooms with cheap false walls but at least I got a window and a balcony that looked out at the loggia and the formal gardens. Beyond the plane trees and umbrella pines and the fountain you could see the family chapel. The hotel restaurant spilled out in the rose garden. Statuary peered back at me from plinths set at regular intervals along the graveled trail. They seemed curious as to why I, an impoverished literature teacher from Chicken City, Georgia was standing on the balcony looking down while a steady breeze from the Ionian sea rushed into the room and agitated the white muslin curtains.

That night I fell asleep with the windows open to admit the sea breeze because air conditioning in Italy is built and installed by people who don't really have their heart in the whole idea - they've lived for thousands of years without it in that culture and they seem unconvinced by the need for it by tourists. The curtains moved in and out restlessly and I imagined breakers washing in and out on the beach a few miles away. When I fell asleep I dreamed a servant girl came briskly past the foot of my bed, pulled the curtains aside smartly and then closed the windows with a sudden, short motion. She glanced at me laying twisted in my sheets and her face was annoyed, and then she walked off the way she had come. When I woke up the next day the windows were shut.

Amerika!

I'm not a patriotic person. The closest I get to any species of "patriotism" is my ardent - some might say fanatical - backing of the U.S. Men's Soccer team. When the U.S. is playing I'll drape myself in flags and borrowed glory and rant and weep and curse at the fortunes of my tribal affiliation, but it goes no further in my life. I rise for the Pledge to the Flag daily at my school but I don't recite the thing. What's the point? Ritual is best left to religions - when you mix it with national affiliation you attach a dangerous corona of holiness about the idea of a Nation-State and that's where things get dicey. Rituals belong in church where they go together with the idea of worshiping a deity. I think we get into dangerous waters when we allow our national affiliation to take on these religious over-tones. Overall, I think I agree with Samuel Johnson who said, of patriotism, that it's the "last refuge of a scoundrel." I put "patriotism" in the same dark closet as "racism" and "sexism". As far as I'm concerned the "-ism" is a dangerous suffix. That's a litter of mongrels that's best bagged up in a burlap sack and thrown into  the river.

Right here is where I part ways with the average American, even though I'm at pains to express my entire satisfaction at living here and enjoying what I've got. I see my nation like I see my home: peculiar and comfortable and with a smell that I never notice but which may strike the visitor as disconcerting when they come to the door. My home is my home and I love it but I'd be a fool and somewhat childish if I considered my home to be The Best. It's got a lot to recommend it but there are issues.

It's what I consider a mature attitude.

Some of my favorite Fourth of July celebrations, therefore, have taken place not here in the United States but abroad. Instead of the ritual and pageantry and boosterism and jingoism of the holiday as celebrated across our Land I get a different, more personal look at America. Sometimes you need a little distance from a thing to get a more clear look . . .

The first Fourth of July I spent abroad was twelve years ago. We were in Italy and had just come down out of the lovely warm curves of the Tuscan countryside into the seedy, colorful cliffside city of Sorrento. It was my first encounter with the North/South divide in Italy and it struck me as powerfully as the many field trips I took in elementary school, growing up in Connecticut, where culture was a bus-ride away in NYC. Within a short time the verdant, bucolic and carefully cultivated storybook landscape becomes gritty and shabby and . . . somehow sexy. Exotic and dangerous and other-worldly.

We were staying in a small hotel with a small pool in the small courtyard and we learned first hand the sin, in Italy, of  taking bath towels from your hotel room to serve as pool towels. We also learned first hand that walking through the lobby in barefeet to the pool was a taboo. Each sin committed by our American tour group caused the hotelier to look away as if receiving a blow to the gut. He would grimace with eyes closed, blow out his breath, and then endeavor to explain, patiently but with no little exasperation.

The night of the Fourth a group of us from Winder made our way to the roof of the hotel with a bottle of wine to enjoy an intimate and altogether exotic holiday celebration, one much smaller and more low key but, somehow, more meaningful - in a foreign land where you don't speak the language and the masturbatory celebration of Hurray America! is far away. Sorrento clings to the cliffs and no place is particularly far from falling into the ocean in a swam dive of graceful sordidness. The Tyrrhenian Sea was a pornographic purple and the moon lay upon it, all silvery black; large gangs of young people buzzed up and down the narrow streets in swarms of scooters making the noise of ten thousand leaf blowers, on missions that were entirely carnal. To our left we could see the glass elevator that rode up the outside of the hotel, from the courtyard.

Our Winder group was combined with an unruly pair of student groups from Kentucky and Pennsylvania that we referred to as the Penciltucky People. The students were inevitably drunk every night, in that clumsy asinine way that teenagers have and they were drunk this night too, and therefore they packed too many of their Penciltucky crowd into the glass elevator and we watched from the roof as it made its sluggish, halting way up the side of the hotel, shuddering a bit, until it stopped for good between floors . . .

We watched as the realization that they were stuck dawned on them, slowly. They begin to mill around in agitation and the elevator began to shudder and rock. Perhaps they were pushing buttons or trying to force the doors. One of their crowd noticed us on the roof across the courtyard, no fifty feet away, nearly on the same level and they began gesturing to us in Improvised American Sign Language to "Get Help!" "Go Now!" But we weren't inclined to do so. Inevitably, whatever drunken foolishness the Penciltucky kids perpetrated upon a long-suffering Italy throughout this trip, it was blamed on us: their noise, their trashing the lobbies, the bottles of wine left in the corridors. They hard slyly managed to shunt all the blame our way and now they were trapped and we were comfortable and somewhere, over the Bay of Sorrento, fireworks were going off - for the Fourth of July or some Saint's festa. We had wine and we were comfortable and these kids were shits.

Very quickly the glass sides of the elevator fogged over and then we could only watch the silhouettes of the prisoners flit from side to side, causing the car to sway and bump. One of the Penciltucky kids, knowing we were sitting not far away - and supposing that we were unclear on their predicament - wrote "Get Help!" in the fogged glass, but he wrote it backwards from the perspective of someone outside of the car and so we pretended that we didn't understand. He wiped his forehead and then wiped away his message and then, carefully, wrote it backwards so that we could read it.

Aha! We mimed! Now we get it! And we raised our bottles of wine to him in triumph at our unpuzzling the puzzle. But we didn't get help. Time moves along in the Mediterranean in a way that we Americans can't quite ever truly understand. History is in the air, the rain and the mortar of the stairs that switch back and forth down the cliff-faces to the sea. What is our history when compared to thousands of years of human habitation and drama in this ancient land? We drew a distinction between ourselves and the unruly and brash and callow Penciltucky mob. We had left "hurry" behind us in the States and now we were on Italy time . . . it was the Fourth of July and fireworks fell fizzling into the sea, while the Island of Capri leaned coyly in the distance. 

White Meat

I just want to say, without fear of political reprisals or accusations or firestorms, that I have never liked Chik-Fil-A. Whenever we're on the road and Fast Food looks likely I never vote for CFA for the simple reason that I just don't like white chicken meat. It is my entirely individual theory that Americans are a nation of people who like convenience and cleverness and marketing but not flavor. Our national palate has all the complexity of a six year old child you're trying to convince to eat broccoli. If the flavor is rich and complex and mature, the average American rejects it. They want their food to be simple to the point of relative tastelessness. And it's not just chicken, either. Americans want bland seafood too. I'm currently at war with shrimp and tilapia, two products of the water that only taste like what you cook them with: Starter Seafood for those afraid of fishy taste.

White chicken meat has almost no flavor - certainly chicken meat raised by American factory farms, shot full of antibiotics and growth hormones, genetically modified to plump up at an unnatural pace, fed a diet of bland plumping food. It's a simple rule of protein that animals taste like what they eat and how they live. Factory farmed chickens taste like pharmaceuticals and blandness. You get some factory farmed chicken white meat and the only thing you're going to taste is the condiments you dump on it. That's where the flavor comes from.

I'm not a fan . . . I'll eat dark meat because that's where what little bit of flavor chicken contains ends up. It's moist and has flavor and is comparatively richer. But white meat - you could deep fry cardboard shaped like a CFA patty, slap it on a bun, cover it with pickles and whatever condiment you're tribally connected to, and the average CFA customer wouldn't know the difference.

I don't like CFA but that's the only reason why I don't go to that particular Fast Food Trough. It has absolutely nothing to do with their politics. As far as I'm concerned, if CFA wants to support this party or that party they have every right under the Constitution to do so regardless of whether I agree with them or not. And people can line up on either side of the aisle either boycotting or bellying up to the trough for another tasteless puck of genetically mutated blandness. You're both right.

I'll reserve my opinions, my political actions and my desire to eat well for another realm. Thanks and good day.