FRIDAY’S CHOWDER NOW SIMMERING
Where I regurgitate a thick soup of life and wisdom from the last 24 hours.
Jan 22, 2026
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DEEP THOUGHT
It’s a lazy day on the river, and I am preparing for the lazy weekend coming up.
It’s not that I, myself, am lazy, it’s that this ol’ river is definitely not a whitewater tributary, but only a slow-moving line between these two banks.
I can sit right here tied to a big hackberry, work on my chowder, and never slosh a bit due to the rocking of the boat. and, of course, you know I have my getaway office up on the blacktop parking lot.
It is Friday, the day of grand regurgitation, a bit like Mardi Gras or Mule-day. We boast of being heavily governed here in middle Tennessee, and the perma-party in control starts to shiver this time of year, and has to slip on a couple of extra layers of bureaucracy to keep warm.
In Nashville, we have TPAC, the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, a beautiful auditorium on the first floor of a large and gleamingly white high-rise downtown. I remember not many years ago while it was being built, the rooF caught on fire due to some ignited pitch or tar being used in its construction.
At the time, I worked in the city, but about four or five miles away from the building. It was amusing to watch, in a way, because it seemed as though the city was operating with its hair on fire the same way many of us who live here operated anyway.
The fire was extinguished, and TPAC operated for several years, bringing to Nashville many theatre productions, like our own public TV. It was a black-tie kind of place, not a rodeo kind of place, so it soon fell so far into disrepair, no sensible production company or audience wanted to go there.
So, we had a committee meeting and decided a new building was in order.
It had been discovered a few years earlier that we , the citizens of Nashville had an extra side of the river downtown that had been previously overlooked. We put a football stadium there, and got a football team.
The team also found a way to deteriorate into something fairly unrepairable, so we fired and or traded everyone, even the announcer, just in case. In a following committee meeting, someone casually mentioned that a new state-of-the-art domed stadium might attract a real team and that there was still room for several hundreds of millions of tax dollars on that “new” side of the river.
Unfortunately, the committee on new projects has found so many possibilities, and taken so long, that TPAC has finally left the equation and decided to seek a home in another neighboring county.
The committee has now come up with a new plan to arm our municipal codes inspectors and put them out in the city to fight crime and/or evil. The police had become way too slow to respond, and the codes inspectors, local builders will tell you, are always “Johnny-on-the-spot” are feeling much safer in town.
Thanks,
-don
Don Martin, Storyteller, Liar, Writer