Works and Prayers of a Fils Prodigue

Living in Louisiana, we get a lot of mosquitos and, subsequently, mosquito hawks too. The latter hover and buzz around the house, hopping across walls and ridding your home of the pesky public enemy #1. Oftentimes, my dog Jackie — a gimp-legged catahoula cur with a severe underbite — will lunge after these mosquito hawks chomping at their tasty little wings and long slender legs. But, when she catches them — I mean *really* gets a hold of one — she doesn’t know what to do with it. She stares at it, licks it once or twice, and moves on to licking her nether-regions.

I submit this as an analogy for my own intellectual activity. Sometimes I feel, much like Jackie, that as soon as I’ve caught an idea, it immediately loses appeal. It’s the freshness, the chase, the uncertainty and adventure of ideas that attracts me. But, when I’ve lost interest, they’re like dead little mosquito hawks still twitching on the rug.

But that’s where the analogy ends.