Pockadoodle: 2023 Badminton at the Pine Straw dome.

Juan was "The Middenorf Badminton King".  He would enter on an El Camino, play a few rounds to appease the fans, then get craned out like an emperor, he would even scale the boom of the thing, with some rope looped around his arm, and wave like Errol Flynn.

It was Hunter S Thompson that observed of the lights of Las Vegas, "this would be ever Saturday night, if the Nazis had won the war."

This was not, of course, every Saturday night, at the Pine Straw Dome, but a rarified, annual event, something marked like rings in the circumference of a tree.  Pockadoodle.  "It's been a good year."

Juan's son was a porn star in Tijuana, and much of the year, Juan was scarce, too, working away at whatever it was that Juan and his handlers hid from the general populace: things that made money, dubiously or not, no one could rightly say.

It was a brilliant stroke of non-marketing, kind of a Velvet Fog, the way subversives talked in Free Mason code using popular sources, and no one ever caught on; they had even programmed the chat bot to talk the "dialeck", so it was not polyglotis or something, not a "dialack", but an open conversion that at once seemed an empty musing, until the Toyota TuRD Tundra showed up with the yellow flags, the foot and the snake.

Then sh*t would get solid, and no former Obama Czar had the unction to even imagine his own righteous indignation and moral relativities, equivocations, or simple knocks on the wall across the way, as if they were scurilous children at play.

They sold hot dogs, sausage dogs, grilled onions plenty, and you could watch the little slivers sweat and then brown, like fish jumping at the empty glare of the sun.  Juan was hitting at it a long, and the line at the bathroom got longer: something about food storage temperatures, something DHEC would have just loved to hate, but it was all empty calories of enjoyment, and the true emptiness of those calories was that we quickly ejected all of that carrion that came from the pull-behind grill.

Badminton, of course, near Blizzard Branch, was only the upscale cousin of Bottle Toss.  Everyone knew this, accepted it, and gave the game a little space for which to abide its time in comfort and joy.

Lionel Rothschild was preparing an excavator it was told, to upstage the boom crane, the modular home crap Juan's publicity department had trucked-in with the promoters stupid child-like glee thinking of the mountains of receipts and the end-all of reality and compunction itself, the vaunted Gate take.

They were all Ric Flairs, one would reckon, and we were all the hapless onlookers at time and circumstance run unfurled at large across the thoroughfare.