The Buzzard Cult

Heap called his coterie of steadfast readers the Buzzard Cult,

after the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, a revitalization movement

that swept the Lower Mississippi Valley just before and after

European contact. Heap was trained as an anthropologist.

Sometimes he called himself the salvage archeologist of the

Mall Builder culture. Sometimes he thought he was rewriting

Bronislaw Malinowski’s The Sexual Life of Savages of North-Western

Melanesia. Making cat’s cradles out of cobwebs. Sometimes he thought

he was updating Edward Sapir’s essay, “Psychiatric and Cultural Pitfalls

in the Business of Getting a Living.” Work makes you crazy. The crazy from

the crazy-place outbroken. He used to work as a custodian in a community

behavioral heath care center. Then he worked as a handyman at the L. A.

(Lower Alabama) Folk Life Center. He called himself the anthropologist-in-

residence (AIR). A luftmensch, like Isaac Bashevis Singer. A man who lives

on air, or with his head in the clouds. He was fired for blogging after he wrote

the Anthropologist-in-Residence (AIR) Creed and his bossman saw it on the Internet.

Privacy issues chez Jack the Raver.