Tyler's Turn Blog

I had a kid walk in the store this afternoon with dyed black hair, black eyeliner, and all black clothes (including an amazing black trench coat with a laced bodice). He's a regular, and a good kid. He bought his usual, and I complimented him on the new trench coat, which really is fabulous, as I checked him out.

After he left, an old man walked up to the register and said, "What is that?"

I said, "What do you mean?"

He indicated the door where the kid had just left. "Well, is it a religion or something?"

I said it was just a style of dress. I told him it was called "Goth" short for "Gothic," and tried to explain that it was a way of identifying one's peer group in high school. I likened it to dressing "country," or any other way that kids try to look like their friends.

He wasn't getting it, so I said, "You remember the movie Rebel without a Cause? Remember how the kids dressed in that movie? If they wore jeans, you knew they were rebels, and if they wore khaki pants, you knew they were straights. That period was the beginning of this whole 'dressing like your group' thing. It's the same today, it's just that there are more groups in high school now, and their costumes have gotten more dramatic."

I think he finally understood, and hopefully he won't be afraid of those "satanist" kids walking up and down Bullard street any more.

As usual, David Horsey cuts to the heart of the idiocy that's going on in D.C. these days.

I spent the morning walk burying dog poop. Where we walk, I don't usually pick up after my dogs, but this morning it seemed necessary. My puppy Lexi has a stomach virus, and I figure her stools are probably teeming with viral matter that could infect another dog. So, I made sure to place large stones over all of her droppings to keep them from the prying noses of other pups.

As is common with dogs who have stomach bugs, Lexi has blood in her stool, and as I was burying her poop, I wondered why this is common in dogs but not in humans. Then it occurred to me, Dog's like to eat blood, and this "yummy" bloody stool is filled with viral material. What an ingenious way for a virus to spread itself -- much more effective than human viruses, which have to lie in wait on door handles hoping someone will touch the virus and touch her mouth.

So, this inevitably leads to a twenty-first century American question: Is this a sign of an Intelligent Designer of the virus? And if it is, what does it say of the goodness of a designer who would create something so diabolical? Those who would assign intelligent design to every "smart" aspect of nature, beware of where your ideas can lead.