I don't think you've anything to apologize for.

I really liked the long run on sentence about the horses you pasted in. It's lyrical and preachy, maybe a little breathless. It drones and twirls like dervish

I found it broke down In my head Into verses Alternating Between a few And several syllables each And lo! I heard it sung By Bono By Jim Morrison By Johnny Cash and David Byrne Each having His own band Accompaniment Alike unto his kind.

I can't really represent it as I experienced it. But the prose really lent itself to some of the more epic pop music in my head.

It was a minute of cinema piped directly into my mind. Quite a treat. Thank you for dereferencing them!

Having said all that, it's still a cheap shot of dopamine that leans heavily on this reader to pick and layer his own poisons for effect.

I'd dare say another reader more skilled in poetry might be able to dice it into various meters and recite to different types of music.

Werner Herzog's voice, pronunciation, and pacing are fun to use to read these

Kermit the frog? Hilarious!

Appreciate your sharing your experience. I can hear Jim Morrison's incantatory rhythms as you point out..."Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding. Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind."

But as you point out, you're bringing a lot to the equation. If all we had were Jim Morrison's lyrics they wouldn't be that interesting. He just wasn't that great of a poet compared to what's available in English poetry. Without the music it doesn't have much magic.

A more irrecoverable criticism is if something lends itself to parody. My sense is McCarthy's prose style is extremely parodyable. How could one distinguish between it and something an LLM generates? Not in the fragmentary incantatory cadence or questionable semantics. Not in the meaning, or the symbolic and metaphoric content? So where then?

One can question. It's a difficult reality sometimes though. Children have minds and bodies of their own. They mature at different rates.

Outside of taking care of a child's physiological needs, their parents are providing a small proportion of the inputs which go into a child's system of being. Peers, teachers, elder family, media, the economic system [and it's insatiable desire for consumers and tools to leverage the consumers], all conspire to forward agenda that often don't align with and support being a good citizen.

One teaches children to enter a museum or library with wonderment and a wish to learn, yet with a degree of reverence; it isn't a playground.

If your children act the goat, not only are they disturbing others, they clearly have not be told, nor understand, why they are there.

As a parent of more than a few kids of my own, I can say from my experience that even if you raise them all the same, some kids will understand and behave exactly the way I would hope—full of wonder and reverence—and others will act the goat, over and over. Some kids are different than others. Even in the same family. I can only imagine how much the difference might be from one family to another—even if all the parents make sure they have been told and understand why they are at those museums or libraries.

Also, I’ve been using the em-dash since the late 90s.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. Being told, understanding, and choosing to behave well are not perfectly correlated. They will choose their actions for themselves. Of course you don't allow them to continue acting that way and over the course of time try to raise responsible adults.

Thanks for that!

Much of Tennessee is deeply forested. 8000 acres is a square 3.5 miles or 5.7 km on a side.

Knocking down that much forest hits different than planting poles in dry grassland or desert that prevails in much of the western US.