06.28.04 - 4:55 p.m.

I don't know that I'll ever leave this state. I love it here, I can't express how much sometimes. When someone comes up with an "only in WV" such as today's, it just makes me smile. Today's only in WV: only in WV would the Supreme Court need to add a footnote describing the difference between a camp, a cabin, and a tent.

From the record it appears that all the relevant events occurred in what might better be described as a cabin (a permanent structure with walls and doors), but which some people might refer to as a "camp" or "hunting camp." This use of the word "camp" should not be confused with a group of tents or any other kind of temporary "camp."

If your neighbors, coworkers, or fellow students never say they're going to their camp up on the Greenbrier or way up in Braxton County, you've never lived in Appalachia. While I'm on the subject, where else would you get this nugget of judicial wisdom from on high?

We do not condone Maisey's choice to have the knife, and agree that, if he is unable to provide proof of his community service, he should be subjected to the limited sentence the lower court had imposed. Nonetheless, we also recognize that in a state like our own, as long as there are boys, there will be boys with knives in their pockets. We hope Maisey's example encourages all of them to carry only those that are permitted by our law.

Yes! Boys! Be encouraged by Maisey's example and carry only those knives in your pockets that are permitted by law! Be instructed.

There's another great passage in that opinion, where the Court takes "note" of counsels' arguments re the tension between the concealed weapons statute and the right to bear arms, and "whether knife owners are discriminated against versus gun owners" that cracked me all up, too. It reminded me of a pair of cases we have - against the same construction company - where these two separate guys made these "allegations" that the company either discriminated against dry-wallers in favor of carpenters, or vice-versa. That, my friends, is a burning problem in contemporary society, isn't it? But no matter how hard that cracked my shit up, there are a pair of guys - a dry waller and a carpenter - who both believe that they got the raw end of the deal while working at ________.

It's a June afternoon - the nights are still almost cool, the summer won't scorch for weeks yet, but the heat is welcome and air conditioning is necessary and storms roll in - the underbellies of the clouds thick and heavy, dark and darker the grays until they're near black - with little warning, leaving soon as they come. Leaving the air humid and thick, with a near-sweet fragrance that is as distinctively afterstorm as the metallic undertone that presages rain is distinctively pre-storm. The light spills long and the days stretch wide open, and I love the season, even if it isn't my favorite. I love it hear, will still love it without beaches or oceans, when the heat and humidity are smothering and everything is choking green and thick.

I should give names to the subtle peaks in the ridgeline that rims the valleys, because I look at them - look for them - and gauge the state of the weather by how clearly I can see them: whether they are sharp or lost in a faintly brown haze, as they are today. I hate it when you see the pollution in the air like a thin brown scrim between you and there, a tainted wash at the edge of the horizon. When everything is so bountiful - the trees bristle with leaves and cool blue flowers of wild chicory smear together into a faint, almost subvisual indentation of near-color at the highway's verge. Clover spreads wide pink flowers so plentiful they look like the dirty spume left behind by retreating waves. Wild rose - briar rose, invasive, pestilential, choking plant that - like honeysuckle and english ivy - it might be blooms crawling-wild in the flat near cuts bracketing the clear river of asphalt. Except for where we put things - and sometimes even where we put things - things grow. I don't think I could ever leave such bounty.

Sometimes I long for the desert, but I like the way the sky feels here, close in, sometimes, like you could touch your nose to the sun, and far out sometimes, sunning, swimming blue depths. I still remember a week ago, sitting in the middle of the lawn, staring up at the painful middle point of the sky's dome - where the color is deep blue but so bright that sparks swim wild in my (admittedly troublesome) vision - and seeing the lip of the crescent moon in the deep middle of the broad sky. The impression of the rest of the sateillite behind it, a color change so subtle I can't express it. It was there, though, this faint shadow impression. And even though I knew just where the crescent was in the middle of the sky, it was so pale, so lost in the blue that it took minutes of searching to find it again every time I looked away.

There's a metaphor in there somewhere, but for what, I'm not sure.