[M]y fraternity brothers and I walked over to our plot in Greek Bowl to … sing [a] hymn. When we got there, the music was so loud and the marijuana smell was so thick that you could have confused it for Woodstock. We couldn’t even see our plot.

We turned around and walked back to our RV.

About 15 minutes later, the first round of shootings occurred. 

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Finally someone’s writing a general piece about the recurrent phenomenon of shootings – sometimes mass shootings – at HBCU homecomings. The writer doesn’t go beyond vivid descriptions and handwringing, but it’s a start.

This year, [North Carolina A&T University] officials reported 131,000 people attended events throughout their homecoming weekend, pumping millions of dollars into the Greensboro economy.

Getta loada that. A school with 14,000 students, and this is their homecoming, with tens of thousands of strangers there getting high and getting excited and getting trigger-happy. Some schools are responding with closed campuses and mandatory i.d. cards, etc. Some are happily continuing to walk into bloodbaths year after year. But all must know that when you concentrate enough people and enough partying in one space, there’s a good chance some stupid fucker’s gonna haul out the AR15 just for the hell of it.

Datz gunny America, folks, and denial only kills more people.

A Nation opinion writer makes the case for Gaetz. Short version: Too dumb to do truly serious damage.

Yes, a tad more good news, especially with The Onion having bought Jones’s trash publication, Infowars, with plans to turn it into a parody of itself.

Yet the larger story, for anyone with the stomach to track incoming federal appointments, is obscenely bad.

… American-style.

But they're really always here,

Watching in the woods to our right.
So long as they're out of the dog's sight

We'll keep this a pleasant walk.
She's not a cat; she doesn't stalk.

But one look at a doe or a buck
And she's off like a shot, as fast as fuck.


The circle of sunlight above the path --
That's the garden, where UD's political wrath

Cools itself when, in wind and light,
The high trees' leaves take flight

And a Cooper's hawk lets her stare
At its pale breast by just roosting there.

Robins scatter the unleaved dirt...
Bird, recites UD, thou never wert!


(Of people like UD, who spontaneously recite Shelley,
America apparently has had a very full belly.)

He’s a deep-dyed Louisianan, with a French name (deGravelles), total LSU education, and parents who practically founded the modern Luzianne Republican party.

Yet despite spending a lifetime in the nation’s second dumbest state, Judge deGravelles has been able to learn about America’s separation of church and state, and even apply it in his daily life. Bless him.

Some good news.

But this frees her up to be appointed Secretary of State.

… where you can rent a handgun lickety-split and blow your head off no muss no fuss. In the last two years, two Purdue students have indeed applied the ballistics the range offers in order to solve their personal problems forever.

When students use exactly the same method/location like this, the poor school gets to worry about copycat suicides.

Shooting ranges are somewhat popular places nationwide to commit suicide – it happens enough that many have rules that no one can come in alone, everyone has to be assessed in various ways by staff, etc.

There have apparently been three student suicides at Purdue in the two-year span. (The third was more conventional: The student simply walked outside to a wooded location and used his own gun.) Yikes.

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PS: Scathing Online Schoolmarm notes: Editors at the University of Texas San Antonio newspaper should know that you can edit stuff out of what people say. You don’t, for instance, have to scrupulously retain every one of this student’s likes:

“It was kind of an eye awakener, there, for me a little bit. But there’s, like, people, like, go through this, like, on a daily basis, which is really sad,” she added.

So after the latest bloodletting at the school’s 100th homecoming a few days ago, officials have closed the campus, and everyone’s gotta wear an i.d. at all times. The tyke who likes to shoot his machine guns into crowds at events like homecomings has been arrested, while sixteen people try not to die of the wounds he inflicted. One person has already died.

Ooh, wonder what his motive was! I’m thinking someone inadvertently shoved him. It was crowded and all.

No, you don’t have to react that strongly to an image of a woman in a hijab, and yes, hijabs obviously should be tolerated (UD‘s readers know she ain’t crazy about them); but the city of Montreal was kinda dumb to feature an image of a hijabi beetled over by two men in western garb in its WELCOME TO THE CITY sign in the town hall. The mayor has announced that it will be taken down — oodles of Montrealers have complained that this pic represents quite the opposite of the secularity near and dear to their hearts — and though there’s the usual insistence that acts of this sort will bring Montreal’s democratic values crashing down, everyone knows that this will not happen.

A small point also, but UD has noticed that, in discussions of the hijab, people tend to overlook the larger total body wrapping that often accompanies the headgear and certainly features in this image. It ain’t just that Montreal is boasting that it welcomes the hijab; it welcomes the total draping of the female body in a modesty gesture that tells the world the female body must be hidden. I wonder why it must be hidden.

Anyway, you’re welcome to traipse about Mont Royal all covered up except for your face and hands, but Montrealers have a right to object to that look for women being made a symbol of their city.

This blog, recognizing that fatal shootings are standard at university homecoming events, now calls homecoming guncoming, that special time of year when young Americans gather, get excited, and do what they do when lots of them are armed.

For Tuskegee’s all-important one hundredth guncoming the other day, bang went the weapons and down went the students, faculty, alumni, and other celebrants. One dead, multiple serious injuries. And of course PLENTY of raw footage from various vantage points for you to enjoy. “The amount of bullets shot last night in Tuskegee amidst their homecoming weekend celebration is terrifying,” writes one audience member. “I couldn’t even finish the video.” (Reminder from SOS: The correct word is NUMBER, not AMOUNT.)

The world’s press is covering this latest guncoming. American rituals are so interesting.

See you next year, Golden Tigers! Crouch low.

— PLUS as a special bonus you get to live down the street from Cletus Spuckler and his AR15.

Cletus don’t right know why he sits on his porch shooting off a pistol and the AR but he just do it and neighbors call the cops and Cletus shoots at the cops even though they very clearly and loudly tell him to put the guns down.

Maybe he celebrating the election. Maybe he just all drunk as a skunk.

UD thinks most likely his thinking was something like “Paid 4 thou for these fuckers and gonna use em.” An economic decision.

Monroe Louisiana isn’t Number One every year, but it’s always up there, esp. for violent crime, and this blog has followed its bloody fortunes for years. “If you want nothing more out of life than bass fishing, drugs, deer hunting, corrupt cops, high school football and crime, then Monroe is the place for you,” says a knowledgeable source, and UD doesn’t see “a college education” on that list.

There are four schools in and around Monroe, with Grambling a huge violence standout, but get a load of this wittle Louisiana Tech student’s dorm room! Not just tons of Nazi material; not just drugs all over the place being readied for sale; but “a 9mm handgun with one magazine, a .38 revolver, and the lower portion of an M4. An M4 is similar to an AR-15.” The tyke was manufacturing machine guns in there.

Even by San Diego State standards, this is really something. Good ol’ Monroe.

Kakuzo Okakura’s 1906 Book of Tea, standard reading in aesthetics courses, sets out The Way of Tea Retreat, sets apart the tea-room as the very heart of considered, intentional, beautiful separation of oneself from a world which has suddenly become crushingly vile.

The littleness and fragility of the tea-room expresses its temporary nature: This is no permanent escapist chamber, but rather a place to which we have recourse, perhaps daily, to learn and relearn the discipline of “properly regulating our own existence on this tumultuous sea of foolish troubles which we call life… The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings. Taoism accepts the mundane as it is and, unlike the Confucians or the Buddhists, tries to find beauty in our world of woe and worry.” And the art of tea – Teaism – lies in the quiet preparation and enjoyment of the smoky transformative brew which will somehow in its modest way be part of reconciling you to a hateful world, be part of allowing you a kind of flourishing within it. “We stagger in the attempt to keep our moral equilibrium, and see forerunners of the tempest in every cloud that floats on the horizon. Yet there is joy and beauty in the roll of billows as they sweep outward toward eternity. Why not enter into their spirit, or [even] ride upon the hurricane itself?”

Inside the personal sanctuary of the tea-room, where “even in the daytime the light in the room is subdued, for the low eaves of the slanting roof admit but few of the sun’s rays. Everything is sober in tint from the ceiling to the floor; the guests themselves have carefully chosen garments of unobtrusive colors. The mellowness of age is over all,” you may engage in soul-reanimation. The universe is dimmed for the ignition of your spark, something in the way of Henri Bergson’s élan vital, the creative energy immanent in us and subject always to diminishment by the world of other people. “It is an Abode of Vacancy inasmuch as it is devoid of ornamentation except for what may be placed in it to satisfy some aesthetic need of the moment,” because all effort is toward the emergence of your presence and spiritedness; “fugitiveness is suggested in the thatched roof, frailty in the slender pillars, lightness in the bamboo support, apparent carelessness in the use of commonplace materials,” because the strength at issue here is your own.

Retreat, as of today, is in the air. We dynamic postmoderns will race through the 5 Stages (Incredulity, Anger, Irony, Snark, RETREAT), and conclude on the one that will have us eyeing that extra, kind of do-nothing room in the house and sizing it up as a site of Stoic Elaboration — a place where you bolster yourself with Marcus Aurelius and with bolsters.

This sort of thing.  Ideally, you want high windows and a view - urban or rural, but something of interest to contemplate as you sip your Senecan Brew.  On stormy days, switch to What does not kill me makes me stronger-esque Nietzschean aphorisms.  Or the astringent poetry of Weldon Kees.

... Water and wind and flight, remembered words and the act of love
Are but interruptions. And the world, like a beast, impatient and quick,
Waits only for those who are dead. No death for you. You are involved.

You are involved; no point, even in your tranquil new tearoom, in being uninvolved.  Daily books and teas and views stimulate and calm you (all good tea stimulates and calms), and ready you and steady you for the bellowing bastards abroad.  Your tearoom is indeed a retreat from imperiling stupidity; but, you know, as Henry James put it:

Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.

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More on emergent tearoom culture after I sit on the beach for awhile.