What is Tits-up In A Ditch?
1.
A hopeless situation that only gets worse, usually brought about by chance, and from which there appears to be absolutely no escape.
Used in a fiction by Annie Proulx in the New Yorker June 9&16,2008
TITS-UP IN A DITCH,about the “luck” of a young woman,Dakota who was abandoned by her mother as a baby and raised on a farm by her grandparents. Her grandfather came back to the house one day and said that a cow had tried to climb a steep wet slope that apparently slid out from under her, and had landed on her back in a ditch. “Had me some (bad) luck today” he said. Goddam cow got herself tits-up in a ditch couple days ago. Dead time I found her”.
Dakota goes on to find herself pregnant, married and abandoned by her husband, Sash, who joined the army. Dakota then leaves her baby and also joins the army. Dacota lost an arm, her baby gets killed and Sash ends up in a coma with both legs blown off and half his head gone. Upon returning alone to the farm, Sash’s mother asks Dakota about his condition. Dakota answers “Sash is tits-up in a ditch”. And that is when Dakota began to feel her own decent into the dark watery mud.
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