Calls and emails need to be returned. Bills must be paid. Children retrieved. Or child, anyway, as far as I know. Yet for the longest time the blog calls out to me. And then a line of showers proceeds down the south french broad like Sherman’s pickets through Milledgeville. I cannot leave or else I will melt. Plus there is chocolate cake here. I will stay, stay long enough to post a short, um, post.
The cajun music emenating from iTunes sounded too much like the native music of my people. Of course it does come from the same celtic roots, and the remenants of this tradition lie in places that are similar in other ways. My people are a fiercely independent sort. This is not so much a principled reaction as it is a practical one. The things that last here, and I suppose in the swamps, are the things that are indigenous. The things which are transplanted in for the improvement of the people are often inadequate or make more demands that the rewards they bring. There is nothing particularly noble in the moonshiner’s deeds, but they are not so ignoble as they may seem either. They have simply been the way things were worked out in a difficult place to live.
My recent interest in stock car racing is, then, also an interest in the roots and legends of the sport. There is no way around the fact that NASCAR is interesting because its loud and dangerous. To condemn these attributes or to say that it is wasteful or provincial serve the same role as teaching a pig to dance, with the same predictable results. To say that driving in circles makes no sense is to be willfully ignorant of the intracate dance of man and machine which takes place many Sunday afternoons. Besides which, it is just plain fun.
That, more than anything else, is endearing to me. Let us run our cars fast and loud. Laizze les bon temps roullette. Watch Dale Earnhart or Richard Petty smile and then tell me that there is no sense in this. What makes more sense than sanuk?