The Cabin
A father’s gift commands obedience in the here and now, and thereafter
There’s a cougar under the deck
My father takes the form of a bear and wrecks my dubious inheritance
Before my father even built it, he told me the cabin would be mine someday. It was an old trick of his: serving himself in the present in such a way that his action could be construed as a future service to me, thereby obligating me to him. In this case, he would gain a second home, a wilderness cabin in Montana where he could retire from practicing patent law to hunt and fish and learn to paint and so on, and I would someday inherit whatever was left of it while being compelled in the meantime to visit him there a lot and eat the game birds and venison he killed and help with seasonal chores such as dragging lawn sprinklers onto the roof as a late-summer fire-prevention measure. I would have done these things anyway, probably, being a good son who lived nearby, but the prospect of his eventual generosity meant I would have to do them on his schedule, promptly, without adjustment or complaint.
The cabin …
Stephanie Gilmore Rides the Desert Waves
8-time world surfing champion gets stuck in the Arabian Desert. Luckily, there’s a wave pool.
The best surfer is the one who wins over and over and over again, and can’t stop winning
Don’t ever let her win at ping-pong, though
It’s been a few weeks, but there’s still a whiff of hotel lobby ambrosia from the Abu Dhabi EDITION on my long-sleeve shirt, my souvenir from the debut of Kelly Slater’s latest wave pool in the desert of the United Arab Emirates. How did I manage to get this golden ticket to the double top-secret opening of the latest “really big deal” in the elite inner circle of professional surfing on the far side of the world? The truth is I probably should not have been there at all.
The month before my trip I was mindlessly messaging an old mate on Instagram, one who happens to be the romantic partner of one Ms. Stephanie Louise Gilmore — the Australian professional surfer, eight-time world champion, and current defending champ. Her fella and I often share flat-earth/lizard-people/hollow-moon/quantum-entanglement memes while comparing notes on nano graphene, mud-flood theories, and …
Waco
The Athens of Billy Joe Shaver
‘You may all go to Hell — I will go to Waco’ – D. Crockett, kinda
Dr. Pepper and a dunk in the geyser will cure what ails you — unless you’re a Baptist
“A little country town lost in the immensity of the Texas prairie” was what the inventor, science-fiction writer, and chicken farmer Milo Hastings once called Waco. For most of my life, that’s how America has seen my hometown, as a byword for small-town parochialism and the televised death-by-government gunfire of David Koresh. But wind the clock back to the 1890s, and you’ll see Waco billed not only as “Six Shooter Junction” but also “The Athens of Texas.”
There is a strange double nature to Waco, at one moment bursting at the seams with cosmopolitan ambition and at another recoiling into isolation. Waco is the great forgotten American city, a stage on which the American Drama has played out for almost 200 years and the Human Drama thousands of years before that. Some nights it’s a tragedy, other nights a comedy.
Fresh off the train following Gettysburg, my great-great-great-grandfather John Sligh …
