Unsupported Speculation

I just finished a poem by William Wordsworth called ‘Lucy Gray; or, Solitude’, and was reflecting on it a bit.

Taken literally, a wonderful little girl goes missing in the snow, and they search for her, find her footprints in the snow, follow them to a bridge, and then the footprints stop precisely halfway across the bridge like she vanished in thin air, mid-step.

This is classic about all tall-tales and untrustworthy yarns of the supernatural. I remember the adults of the late 80’s and 90’s looking perplexed and fearful about the inexplicable ‘Spontaneous Combustion’ phenomenon that was all the television rage back then, when it was obvious people were falling asleep while drunk and in the middle of a cigarette, and burning their poor damn selves up in a fire. ”What could be responsible!!??”, they all cried in a mad and rising delirium. “But the victim wasn’t a smoker!!” Yeah, well, they probably fell asleep smoking a joint that they were disinclined to talk about for some reason, can’t imagine what, maybe Reagan’s anti-drug campaign or something.

Anyway, my thoughts were wandering over all of this, and then it made me think of today’s sad television shows, when an otherwise normal looking person, seemingly with good intelligence, nice clothes, and in good shape, mimics the language of science, and then tries to capture footage of El Chupacabra in the woods of Vermont with his infrared and night vision cameras. About ten minutes before, I’d watched him poke at an old sheep skull he found in the woods with a stick, and deduce that the area must be a preferred hunting ground of ‘The Dreaded Goat Sucker’.

It is sort of the age we live in now. The old techniques of making a wonderous story have been combined rather pathetically with a decent imitation of the types of statements actually credible researchers and scientists might say. And now, what we are dealing with from our cable boxes are people wasting their lives in a short-term hustle as one of the characters in a fake documentary serial. They get the role to pay off a few utility bills, and then they’re lucky if their new gig gets beyond the pilot. Then, they’re lucky if it survives longer than one season.

Regardless, long after the show is cancelled, it will play and replay on TV, and we will behold again and again the conquests of ‘Derrick’ the super-rationalist, to finally document cryptozoology’s most famous and elusive species.