“No, the movie is set in Texas, which in a good year all by itself carries out half the executions in America. Death Row in Texas is like the Roach Motel: Roach checks in, doesn’t check out. When George W. Bush was Texas governor, he claimed to carefully consider each and every execution, although a study of his office calendar shows he budgeted 15 minutes per condemned man (we cannot guess how many of these minutes were devoted to pouring himself a cup of coffee before settling down to the job). Still, when you’re killing someone every other week and there’s an average of 400 more waiting their turn, you have to move right along.” – Roger Ebert, ostensibly reviewing a movie but interpolating his customary anti-Bush polemic while he’s about it.
OUTTA HERE: I guess I have to admit defeat and let you know I’m heading back to DC this week. I just couldn’t hack the isolation at the end of the Cape in February any more. I finished the essay I was trying to write, but completely failed to get any construction work done on my little wharf apartment. Getting everything organized – contractors, permits, plans, weather – eventually got beyond me, and now there’s not enough time to get all the work done before summer. So I’m out of here. I have mixed feelings. Taking time out of your usual context, forcing yourself into solitude, getting more in touch with the elements, even when they’re truly bleak, as with this brutal winter, is something I’d recommend to anyone. Saturday night, I took the beagle for a post-bar stroll on the water’s edge. It was an amazing vista. Somehow, vast blocks of ice had come loose from various dunes and lakes on the edge of Cape Cod bay, and suddenly a huge flotilla of floating ice crammed the harbor. It looked like the Antarctic, with boulders of white not only obscuring the dark, frigid water altogether, but dumped randomly on the beach like a crowd of rugged ice-statues. The tide was rising as we walked across the scene, but it was extremely quiet and the water completely stable – so stable that the ice-flow seemed to shrug its way silently toward the snow-covered dune grass. You just don’t get to experience that kind of scene in a big city, after a Jagermeister too many. But, at the end of two months of icy solitude, I decided to take that amazing sight as a farewell message. Besides, I’d gotten a bad case of boyfriend withdrawal; and an even worse case of frozen, er, behind. I realize that for all my general misanthropy, I actually miss people. Perhaps a week back in the capital will cure me of that.
The Dish 