"wolves cull themselves"

(video: T4 teaser trailer)

I don't watch much TV. I watch snippets of news and documentaries on the internet and read Al-Jazeera and The Economist, so when my father comes to visit, the gradually senilizing and irrational one, I almost can't believe the things that come out of his mouth. Barack Obama is a closet-Muslim, he's unamerikuhn, he's planning to dismantle the white power structure in toto with a cadre of black preachers and whatever it is they can wield over us. Black English, Black Math, Black Magic. I walk to another room when I heard that the South had the right idea with slavery. I bite my tongue over things I would fistfight another person over. And I'll argue down to the decimal points and dustmites.


I have a small writer's workshop now. We'll meet once a month, like distilling the classroom down to people who give a shit ad transporting the whole thing to the bar so I can pound whiskey while I hear how poorly my month's work has made itself clear. (btw . . I've got something new here). I'm not encircled with friends here. I can go a week without receiving a phone call or text message from a local, I can disappear for an entire weekend without a question. And yet, I've found that somehow my life does treacle out, and when I run into certain kids in certain places, I hear: "what up holmes? I heard you suchandsuched last weekend." And I nod and laugh and think about internet cables strung up under an entire population, littered living rooms listening to pitchfork picks meandering about people one knows, someone here and there tenting their fingers and yawning and voicing some opinion that'll swirl in the hang-over dust and sun and lay used up on the floor.

There's a direct corollary between the sociopolitics of the small town and the behavior of the people there. Some evolutionary knob in our heads tells us that the smaller the community, the more likely we'll have to interact with a static set of malingerers and dotty old women and stalwart homebodies. We play nice with them, and reasonably so. We have a life of reputation to uphold. My transcontinental lifestyle disturbs the setting, living in a capacious ghetto I never had to be straight with anyone but my tribe. Living in Boise I see people everywhere I go. One big, breathing surveillance camera watching itself. Burroughs: "A functioning police state needs no police."