Diary: Action in the Afternoon

On a torpid summer afternoon I can be transported back to the den of our house at the end of Lancelot Road in Jackson where I was actually to be found in Homerle, Montana, which I have discovered can be revisited at tvswestern.com.

Action in the Afternoon, Wiki says, was "the only live outdoor western ever to appear on network television in the United States." Not only live but as the lead-in says, "Alive as America, Adventurous as the West." What lingers in my memory, though, is a horse of a different color -- something more like No action in the afternoon.

My father left around that time to help the South Koreans fight the commies. I was in love with Miss Pickens, my second-grade teacher, and the local villain was a boy named Eustus Range, said (by my mother) to roam the woods adjacent to our house "with a damn BB gun." I never actually caught sight of him but my mother had a manner of articulation when she was angry which, especially when combined with one of the four-letter words she rarely used, would raise the hair on a snake.

I google "Eustus Range" and get no hits, in itself a wonder. I turn to the Magic 8-Ball of my memory and get, in no particular order, that damn Saddam...bin Laden...CIA... Gaddafi... Wall Street... capitalism... Big Agro... Big Pharma... the ruling elite... Goldman Sachs... Jaime Diamond... Ahmadinedad.... None of them raises the old hackles. Everything seems to have merged into a single glob of Otherness, or is it Sameness?

"Makes me so mad I could spit," my mother used to say, and you would not want to be the subject of that sentence. Now almost anything will do. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Washington is the terrorist capital of the world. There is no credible evidence that 9/11 was an inside job. Mir bleibt die Spucke weg.

I try hawking up a gob of disdain, if for nothing else the human capacity for infinite use of finite means to create abomination. But my throat is as dry as a Chomskyan analysis. What's wrong? The more I think about it, the more I think I know.

Nothing.