The Great Tar Fight

There's a chapter in my favourite juvenile book, Penrod by Booth Tarkington (he also wrote The Magnificent Ambersons) called "The Great Tar Fight", about an incident where several boys end up coating themselves in warm tar and sullying an entire suburban block.

But what is extra cool about it, is the way the causation is analyzed...to quote from the book itself:

"Thus began the Great Tar Fight, the origin of which proved, afterward, so difficult for parents to trace, owing to the opposing accounts of the combatants. Marjorie said Penrod began it; Penrod said Mitchy-Mitch began it; Sam Williams said Georgie Bassett began it; Georgie and Maurice Levy said Penrod began it; Roderick Bitts, who had not recognized his first assailant, said Sam Williams began it.

Nobody thought of accusing the barber. But the barber did not begin it; it was the fly on the barber's nose that began it-- though, of course, something else began the fly. Somehow, we never manage to hang the real offender."

Somehow, we never do hang the real offender, and any recitation of guilt ends where we choose to end it. I was thinking on this the other day when someone asked me how I ended up back in Morgantown. Depending on where I end the recitation of facts, I can lay blame at the feet of a thousand different people, events and forces...some pre-dating my birth. Hell, probably some pre-dating life on earth.

That's not to say that living in the home of West Virginia University is a disaster, or that there are not nice people here. It is just the fish out of water situation. I fit here like a penguin in the Kalahari...well, maybe not that discordant, but I get regular comments from people about how much I do not fit in "around here"...so much so that I have curtailed my public associations or at least gone underground.

Fitting in has never been high on my list...name anyone in this life who has accomplished anything other than being a good boot-licker and I'll show you someone who didn't "fit in"...not to seek oddness for oddness' sake, but it is a side effect of curiosity, self-awareness and accomplishment (no, never want to be as odd as many who have "made it"...think Paris Hilton or Michael Jackson, perople who have been given so much freedom by their own or others' accomplishments that they have no regard for the reality of the world they live in)

Anyway, the choice to return to the this town was a conscious choice made at a time when a conscious choice was called for. Many factors entered into it: a desire to be closer to my sons, the Appalachian Education Initiative's "Art&Soul" volume, my father's surgery, a desire not to fall right back into a relationship (I promised Ann I'd behave for a time, and so I have...not so much for her benefit, but for my own, to prove to myself I was not just a walking gonad. Although, to be honest, owing to my rep...I get accused of that a lot...insultingly so, by some, but I supposed it is to be expected.)

And thus ends the Great Tar Fight...