The somewhat strange title of this piece has its origin, oddly, in an email sent to be long ago by Dr. Dennis, who, besides being a Ph.D. in something or other is also a Buddhist Monk, and it’s in that latter capacity that he wrote, saying that, in his tiny basement apartment sublet from someone above him in the Carmel Highlands, he had everything that he needed, meaning in Dennis’ case, I suspect, he had everything of the spirit, he was one with the Universe, and so on. I don’t need to point out that the title stuck with me; it seemed so….I don’t know…mystical, if you know what I mean. And, Dennis being Dennis, it wasn’t a stupid thing to say, far from it, so it didn’t annoy me, it just was the right thing to say in the context of where he was, and I hope he doesn’t mind me now borrowing his phrase, and using it in the context of where EYE am.

Which is here in the RV, as we have been, now, for over two days. There are times in the RV life when you better friggin’ have everything you need within your own cave because you simply aren’t going anywhere and what you’ve got is what you live with. Sickness, yours or your dog’s, can get you there, but so can weather, and here in Alabama more often than not the strange subset of weather, the humidity, is the main villain, coupled with the regularly-attending rain and localized but still ferocious thunderstorms that to this uninitiated ex-Californian sound like someone banging on the gates of their personal hell. Which has been the case here, in the PeeWeeRV, over the last two days. It rains, it thunders, it keeps on raining. The rain lets up, we let the dogs out, the thunder portends more rain, the dogs want to go back in, I look up at the sky, Irene shouts out that the back of the RV stinks of sewer gas which, inexplicably, is beginning to settle there -she opined earlier that a dead opposum had crawled into the vent to the washer and drier and died there, it smelled that way to her, and, this being Alabama, I didn’t question her but went outside and looked at the exterior of the vent pipe to see if, in fact, I could see claw marks on the paint. That I couldn’t didn’t mean she was wrong, and that I would say something that patently is that silly speaks more to this being Alabama than to anything more serious, for instance that I have finally gone to the Dark Side and joined up with, as Charles Pierce would say in his book of the same title, Idiot America.

The sewer gas smell comes and goes and in between attending bouts of nausea I look around and realize that Dennis was right, one can have a little cave and have everything in it one needs, especially now that I have three flat-screen TVs, with working HD and three different DirecTV receivers to go with them. The three allow me to have Speed Racer on one, a 2008 World Series of Poker event on a second, Kite Runner on a third for Irene to cry at and some other martial arts experience being taped to disc, all at the same time. But, attractive as this reality is, the real value is in the metaphor…not only do we have everything in this perhaps 300 square feet that we could possibly need, including each other, the two mutts and the HIK (Highly Interactive Kitty), but past all that we have the luxury of enough to eat, a toilet that flushes and books beyond the immediate reads that give us the illusion of seperate lives we can experience as soon as we get a minute…and in this case a blog site and readers, or at least one, otherwise how would you know about all this? Ain’t logic grand?

I had intended, when I began, to use the elegant bridge earlier in this piece to morph over and talk about Charles Pierce a little more, and to rant awhile about the continued dumbing down of America in general and as near as I can tell, except for Tom and Ann and a few other folks, of the South in particular, no offense to anyone if there is anyone reading this who takes offense at my calling the South dumb, which, in context, there probably won’t be for reasons that may become clear if you bear with me a little longer.

But I don’t know about all that right now……from here I intend that we migrate over to Montpelier, home of President Madison, who with Jefferson formed one of the great duos of earlier constitutional thought, although they certainlydidn’t spend a lot of time agreeing with each other. I point out in the doing that not all people here in the South are, in fact, stupid….but as Forest Gump so famously said, “Stupid is as stupid does”…and I’ve seen things here that are, in fact, stupid, but I’ve probably seen as many things being done in other parts of the United States that are just as stupid, and I’m really afraid, afraid….afraid in this case that what I’m really saying isn’t that the South is stupid at all, at least no more so than any other place, but instead I’m saying that people everywhere simply don’t think, and suddenly I have six hundred examples of this lack of thought to share and no energy remaining to share it with, and, back to Dennis, I have everything here that at least EYE need, and therefore will retreat for a few moments, intellectual coward that I can be, to the refuge of a soft chair, to the hypnotic patter of rain, to the sympathetic murmer of air-conditioning and to the comfortable belly on my arm of a once-sick but hopefully recovering-somewhat dog, and take a nap. The stupidity, if that’s what it is, will be there, waiting for me, the next time I dare venture outside our cave.