"Just take a left after the big black Mammy."
By Those would be directions given to me the first time I tried to visit my in-laws without the wife there to navigate. I hadn’t a clue what he meant. Then, as I crested a hill south of Natchez, I suddenly did:
Texas advertises itself as a “Whole ‘Nother Country,” but that’s only true if you live off a farm-to-market road. Houston’s sprawl is as uniformly bland as the city that extends from Los Angeles to San Diego; but in the actual South, even the metropolitan areas surprise you.
This is my way of saying: as I’m writing from a location where the power—much less the internet—is intermittent, I’m not going to be able to address the arguments in Avatar thread for a couple of days. I will do so soon, though, as I value your new low opinion of me.