"And O Where Is Duane Lee Today On This Day?" Or, "Baby Lyssa Said..."

The gang went down to Alabama, where they pursued a young lady ("Shakeisha") with a bad "rap sheet". They tracked her down and tricked her into coming to a food court car park –– the preferred site for toxic smackdowns.

They caught Shakeisha fairly effortlessly, with the usual excess of hollering and waving of empty bazookas.

As she shoved Shakeisha onto the backseat Beth said, "This isn't as bad as what you think it is."
Shakeisha snuffled, "It look like it, though."
Beth said, "You have two attempted murders on your history."
Shakeisha said, "I'm not that person though."

Strange paradox –– you tried to kill people on two separate occasions but you're not that person by any means. It's true. It could happen to anyone and they're really blameless after all.

Watching this episode I suddenly ("pointlessly") thought, plaintively and possibly for the first time, "Whatever happened to Duane Lee?"

I did rudimentary research (having no patience for anything more) and found an interview with Baby Lyssa, about her new book. It seems there is some bad blood between Baby Lyssa and Beth, and it seems also that Dog takes Beth's side against his children. There was talk of Beth's malefic influence over the internet –– that she reads adverse criticism and takes it personally and vindictively, and that Beth hath a long arm indeed and it is said that her fingernails are even longer than her arm.

I read all this about Beth's long arm and her fingernails and wondered wistfully whether she'd perhaps ever read my humble "feuilletons" on her family and whether [bashful, blushing] she ever wanted to send some redneck faux-bikers round here to duff me up!

In this same interview with Baby Lyssa, she was rightly miffed by an interview lately bruited all over Hollywood town in which Beth had said that Leland, who stayed right adamant with the Chapman traveling circus, and not with his brothers and sisters, because he was following the money (Baby Lyssa said), was the "son that loved Dog the best." (Recalling that well-discussed epithet from the gospels, "The disciple whom Jesus loved.") Apparently Lyssa and Duane Lee laughed quite savagely at this report.

Their laughter hath set them free!

"A Mitzvah On Your First-Born." Or, "Sound, Fury, And So On."

"That's a good question. That--the explanation of that whole book is in that. It began with the picture of the little girl's muddy drawers, climbing that tree to look in the parlor window with her brothers that didn't have the courage to climb the tree waiting to see what she saw."
     William Faulkner on the genesis of The Sound and the Fury. From Faulkner in the University.

"Cry baby, Luster said. Aint you shamed. We went through the barn. The stalls were all open. You aint got no spotted pony to ride now, Luster said. The floor was dry and dusty. The roof was falling. The slanting holes were full of spinning yellow. What do you want to go that way, for. You want to get your head knocked off with one of them balls."
      The Sound and the Fury. 

Notes from a recent episode:––
                                                    thoughts resulting:––

1. Dog, post-bust, saying "God bless" and "Aloha" to the cops as they part ways. He goes too far, and calls one of them "sweetheart".

2. Perp's name was Alfred.  Dog, that old dotard, staggered through the perp's home, hoarsely hollering for him to give himself up; calling him variously "Howard" and "Albert".

3. The team have those huge Rob Liefeld Cable and X-Force-style flame-thrower bazookas that they carry abroad with them, but they can't possibly fire bullets, so what exactly do they fire?

              A: Ping-pong balls.
              A: Hot air.
              A: Cotton candy.

4. This was the episode which introduced a new character, Leland's benighted son DAKOTA, to the cast. Followed the usual hazing that verges on child abuse. Leland sprayed Dakota in the eyes with mace and tazed him. Tackled him hard in the street and gave him "noogies". Then he sat him astride a female masturbation device and forced him to "go ten rounds atop it." I didn't see quite how this was relevant to the successful learning of crime-fighting techniques.

To properly mark the solemn dynastic quality of the episode, Leland gathered everybody on the "Big Island" where he would have them go in pursuit of the son of a man he had arrested seven years earlier.

Dakota had graduated that week and Leland obviously felt the undeniable pull of the years and the miracle of time passing and the cosmic cycles and equinoxes and solstices that mark a man's time on this paltry planet. He was waxing philosophical, reminiscent: "My son's graduating. I'm so proud. He wants to be a bounty hunter. I actually had Dakota in my arms when I walked up my graduation line. So for his graduation present I'm going to buy him his first truck."

I spent about half a minute trying to determine how the one situation in the dim past (the magnificent  babe in arms scene) led ipso facto to his decision in the present to buy Dakota a truck. Then I caught myself, remembered that this was Dog and Beth on the Hunt, and as such had no debt to reason, and dismissed the speculation utterly.

This episode was Faulknerian, and not just from all the dwelling on doomed, collapsing white dynasties hellbent on vicious self-destruction. No, and not just the Myth of the Lost Cause. Faulkner's hand seemed to be directing Leland's gobsmacked awe as he recalled how seven years previous he had hidden in a "little room by the gate" and waited for the old scoundrel to return. It came back to him irresistibly in a stream of consciousness, like Caddy in her muddy drawers watching through the window––

Now Leland was coming for the son of the old rascal. Fatherhood was in the episode –– inheritance –– blood crimes. The sins of the father visited on the head of the first-born.

Absalom, Absalom. Old Colonel Sutpen. A mitzvah on your first-born. The remains of the family, reclusive in the neglected tracts, hidden out in his ruined old mansion –– the bougainvillea, the neglected porch swing, and cetera.

To add spice to the mix, the old man himself was only now out of his seven year "stretch" and he blundered straight into the middle of the arrest.

As Leland was hunkering down in his old hiding place, as if in a divine pocket outside time –– Zachary in the tree ––  ecstatically feeling the onrush of time and empires and dynasties, the smallness of Man and the largeness of God, the old man came onto the set roaring profanities and picking a brawl with Dog. Meanwhile, the old man's girlfriend was sitting in the cab of the pick-up putting on lipstick by the dashboard light!

"So ironic," Dog mused after the anticlimactic arrest. Summing up. "So ironic that this is the second generation that Leland has arrested, he arrested the father years ago, now arrested the son. It's the third generation of bounty hunters. It's ironic that, you know, how the world turns."

It would've been nice to end it there with that universal thought for the day, but hey killed the moment rather by showing a preview of next week's show where Dog brays, "We ain't huntin' alligators. We ain't huntin' boar. We're huntin' a man."