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My Page: Sutton R. Stokes

Missoula Notebook

Seeing the mail arrive every day as I do, I could of course rush out and collect it immediately, except why would I want to? Up at the beginning of this essay, I started to write “letter” in front of “carrier,” then crossed it out and wrote “mail” instead. My reason is probably obvious to anyone old enough to remember back when people still sent each other letters.

Now the mail is basically a daily garbage delivery, with identity-theft-ready credit-card offers mixed in like pieces of broken bottles to cut you if you’re not careful. One of today’s vital life skills is learning to spot and toss these offers without wasting time opening them, sort of the way pioneers had to get good at distinguishing the medicinal plants from the poisonous.

Do children still pout when none of the mail is for them? It’s hard to imagine growing up these days thinking of the mail as anything but a bother, but I am just old enough to have seen the last years of the age of the letter and I remember making fervent complaints that no one ever sent me one when I was little. “The only way to get mail is to send mail,” my mother told me, and so I adopted the habit and kept at it through my early twenties. [more]

Missoula Notebook

Unfortunately, corporations currently do have the same rights as individual humans, the current president barely remembers his own name much less the oath he swore, and I think we all know the final answer to Humpty Dumpty’s question: our robot masters will be along soon for the first round of sacrificial victims. [more]

Missoula Notebook

I don’t know why so many dog owners believe that leash laws apply only to someone else, although I guess most of us have at least a law or two we choose to disregard, even if it’s only a speed limit. Arguably one good reason to disobey leash laws is to be able to give your dog more exercise than you’d otherwise have time for, if you don’t live next door to Jacobs Island Park, although another way of looking at this situation would be that, if you don’t have time to drive to Jacobs Island Park on a regular basis, maybe you don’t have time to own a dog. [more]

Missoula Notebook

My cure involves Nyquil, that syrupy sickbed absinthe. Amy shudders and gasps when she swallows it, and requires a chaser of chilled juice, but I find I quite like the taste and prefer to let it linger, so that I can savor its bouquet. Nyquil tastes to me sort of like Jagermeister mixed with a little cough syrup. Perhaps the bars should offer this combination, with a thermometer in it as a swizzle stick. Back in high school, a friend of mine and I were two of the only people who ever bought Dr. Pepper from the hallway soda machine. “But it tastes just like cough syrup,” I remember someone saying, to which my friend replied “What’s wrong with cough syrup?” [more]

Missoula Notebook

To his credit — and I want to be as even-handed as possible here — Rick did leave behind the cast-iron curtain rods and muslin drapes (which Amy was really hoping he’d leave), several elk skulls (which I was really hoping he’d leave), and some sort of device for suspending dead animals from the ceiling in the garage, which we hadn’t noticed on any of our previous inspections of the property but which seems like a handy thing to have in these parts. And, as if to make up for the state of the toilet, there was a fresh roll of toilet paper in the bathroom cupboard, right next to the February 2008 Playboy. (“Miss February wishes you a happy Valentine’s Day.”) [more]

Missoula Notebook

I will later learn that the lights-off rule is not an absolute necessity, but as we drive I am worried. Will my headlights spook the geese into a pre-dawn departure, when they would otherwise wait until just after dawn to take off? Will I ruin the “seventh wonder of the natural world” — as Professor Greene calls it — that about 20 teachers, students and tag-alongs like me are here to see? About 50 yards in, though, the road’s slight downward grade suggests a solution. I kill the engine and, with it, my headlights, and coast the next 500 yards in neutral and in darkness.

The eastern horizon is pinkening with the first hint of dawn, but the sky above us is inky black. All around, still invisible in the gloom, 35,000 geese are starting to think about breakfast. [more]

Missoula Notebook

By noon, as speaker after speaker mounts the podium, the crowd’s groans grow louder and more sour. The consensus among the bystanders near me is that it is to the mayor’s great credit that he is up here with us and not contributing to the delay by standing in line at the podium. We are momentarily excited when a man in a fleece vest leaves the podium and it stands empty for a few minutes, but he is replaced by a man in a green blazer. We can see flashbulbs popping. [more]

Missoula Notebook

In a way, the problem with evaluating modern, formless, envelope-pushing poetry is similar to the problem with taking your car in to get that clunking noise checked. You listen (to the poems, to the man explaining why you must now write him a large check), and in both cases it is hard to avoid the suspicion that someone is taking advantage of your good nature. I hope I’m not breaking any earth-shattering news to the poets out there when I mention that the general public is a little scared of poetry these days, or at least can’t seem to find an important place for the most modern instances of it in their lives. Can this be for any other reason than that, as an art form, its standards and goals seem unclear to the lay public? [more]

Missoula Notebook

Last week, Amy and I finally closed on the new house over by Westside Park. We won’t be moving in for another week or so, but we’ve already met our neighbors. By one of those happy coincidences that are so common in a small city like Missoula, they turned out to be friends of a friend, and he invited us all over to his house a few weeks ago for venison and introductions. It was nice to meet some actual residents of the Westside, because they were able to confirm many of our so-far good but mostly second-hand impressions of the neighborhood. [more]

Blog: Missoula Notebook

The question is whether we have any good way to prevent gun sales to the stupid at the policy level, as opposed to, say, harshly punishing the Smails of the world. If gun sales were to become illegal tomorrow, there would of course quickly be even more of a flourishing illegal market in the things than there is right now (and it’s already pretty flourishing). I’d refer you to, say, the market in illegal drugs, and point out that a lot of people who would like to see a prohibition on gun sales might be open, on the other hand, to a decriminalization of some forms of currently illegal drugs. Of course there are huge distinctions to be made (pot never killed anyone, but handguns — not so much), and I’m not saying that holding the two views makes anyone a hypocrite, but I do think it would be foolish to ignore the apparently powerful desire of vast numbers of people in this country to own guns, and to fail to consider the evidence from the “drug war” that a lot of people are quite willing to disobey laws they consider unjust. [more]