Shine and portent
Programming notes
Okay. Pardon the pause. Moving is hard, and harder with kids. And my main day job has been a doozy lately. Also, the other day, there was dried blood all over our bedroom floor. We thought it was a mouse fallen victim to our cats. But then a couple days later, my wife found a dead bat. She was not happy. She used a litter picker to deal with the carcass. It was too decomposed for the health department to rule out rabies; unpleasant shots for the whole family followed. My wife’s new job is at Transylvania University. So.
So much for excuses. My drafts folder is brimming. Let’s get back at it.
A friend of mine just went on vacation after a rough few weeks at work, rough in the sort of way that makes a person wonder how many more rough weeks at work a person can take. At the airport, he ran into Cornell West. West shook his hand, and greeted him as a brother, then disappeared up the escalator.
Another friend of mine just welcomed a new hire to her job. The first time she met him, he was wearing a mood ring. His mood was colored red. But on his first day on the job, he wasn’t wearing the mood ring anymore. Where it had been, there was a new ring. The new ring was gray.
What are the wings of a bat? The wings of a bat are made of skin that stretches over the bat’s fingers.
Another friend of mine just returned from Crestone, Colorado, where she had gone to do her first meditation retreat. But she got COVID, so had to spend the week there on her own instead. It was nice. Toward the end of her stay, she visited the Orient Land Trust. There were hot springs there, clothing optional. She felt a little shy, but not that shy, and took a hike—topless, in overalls. The hike led to a massive cave, in the remnants of an exploded mine. This spot, by the way, was once known as Glory Hole. Now it’s a bat cave. Not just any bat cave. One hundred thousand Mexican free-tailed bats, all male, live in the cave from June to early July—a rare bachelor colony of this size. Then by late July, lady bats and bat pups come and join, pushing the population up to a quarter million as the colony preps for migration once the weather cools. My friend hiked back and took off her overalls and sat naked in the springs, observing a pair of old men—one wearing a fedora, the other hatless, both otherwise nude—playing backgammon nearby. Then at dusk, she returned to the cave, the Colorado sky still lingering indigo from the sunset.
And all at once, thousands of bats emerged en masse in spooky unity. There they were: The bachelors, perhaps with ladies and pups in tow, exploding like a great black streak from out of the glory hole and into the clear, dusk-violet sky.
According to my mother-in-law, everything happens for a reason.
Coming soon to Tropical Depression: some country music, some movies, an experiment with Wikipedia, a joke about umpires, a mixtape for fall, and some dispatches from Kentucky. Any requests beyond that? My goal for the remainder of the calendar year is to get back to at least a twice-a-week schedule.
As a bat man once said, tell all your friends about me.
In a followup call, the health department later explained that the trouble was that in order to test for rabies, they have to test the bat’s brain. This bat’s brain was filled with maggots.
When we went to get the first round of shots, my seven-year-old daughter was comforting my two-year-old son at first, but then when the nurses arrived with the needles, she immediately threw him under the bus: “Make him go first!”
Everything? Happens for a reason?
I enjoyed this very much. We’ve had some similar family bat situations, including the shots. My oldest son said, prior to the vaccine, that he was going to bravely take the shot in the butt because “he wasn’t ready to die.”
Hope it all improves and that life starts feeling more (as I imagine your MIL might say) blessed.
I really enjoyed this piece.