Making signs, working the phone

The only thing better than the speech last night is hearing the lame asses whine about it. I see the party of Nativist terror has one turd left in their shit-flinging basket, and that’s the Bill Ayers gambit. This from the Party whose slack jawed cousinfucks gave us the Oklahoma City bombing, and responded to intelligence of an impending strike on the US with an insolent fratboy brainfart.

i’ve talked to a few of the  McCain slime molds while I’ve been phone banking, and they’s mighty testy. Maybe the meth don’t have the same kick it used to. Maybe the neighbors quit talking to them after their kid came home in a box. Well, fuck them. I’m tired of hearing them anyway. I keep hoping that we’ll turn them out of public life and then they’ll just evaporate like a gobbet of bloody spit on a griddle. But I’m aware that I’m indulging in magical thinking there; and their mentors on the radio will have them whipped into a murdering  crosseyed froth by election day.

Why they don’t let me do news.

The pain. The pain.

I fell off of a piece of scaffolding last Sunday, and Wednesday my lower back started aching. Today I wasn’t walking too good. If I didn’t have access to Google, I’d be afraid I’d slipped a disc, but as it turns out, I’ve simply busted my ass:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sciatica#Piriformis_syndrome

Here’s a picture of the neighbor’s dog we’re keeping while he visits some relatives who were injured in a auto accident. I think the Mesoamericans raised these chicken-sized creatures for the stewpot.

Minerva says she don't swing that way, but she's a liar.

You’re likely to see more animals.

Between doing voter registration on the weekends, making Obama signs out of old doors, and rebuilding the guest house for Nancy Nall and family, it appears I’ve done emptied my skull. We do have a lot more animals around here, and many of them have their own theme songs.

Minerva (Nervix Virginicus)

Minerva, or Nervish, as we like to call her, is a rescue we’d dearly hoped to unload on another hapless family, but lo, none of the minimally brain-equipped human refuse sluicing through the Pet-Smart during the adopt-a-thons would take her. She was spayed as part of a vet school training program, and ten little Boston Terrier/whathefuckevers joined her uterus in the waste bin. She was a popular girl, for sure. I once witnessed her trying to demonstrate coitus to a Basset hound who for want of height was unable to hit it. For some reason it seemed vaguely familiar.

Nervish has no real theme song, just some twisted doggerel that suits her just fine.

Ahem.

Nervish, Nervish, Nervishtry.

Nervish, Nervish, wild and free.*

………………………………………………………….

*I don’t suppose there’s an “Oxford Companion to Utter Bullshit”: Otherwise I’ll never make the cut for an anthology.

Vicious Alessuthra

Feel the Vicious!

Vicious, Vicious Alessuthra

Ever Vicious, viciously.

Vicious vicious Aless-oo-oo-thra

Vicious to everyone but me!

Vicious, Vicious Alessuthra

three legs just as good as four

she will kill your German Shepherd

Then she’ll piddle on your floor.

Hereabouts

I had to run into town today, so I brought the camera along to give you an idea of the neighborhood. There’ll be more of these, but I thought this would do for starters. If you head east from my house on Cunningham road, you’re driving into an area of plantations constructed during the economic boom prior to the Civil War. If you go west, you’re looking at land that was more or less exhausted by the early plantations of the colonial and revolutionary period. There are no existing structures from that era, but at least one church remains on the site where Cornwallis and his boys set the old one alight.

Today we’re going east.

Grocer's. Recently closed.

I don’t know how old this structure is, but I’d guess 1920’s. I like the loft as an apartment for the storekeeper and his family. The steep gables are also nice. For awhile after we moved here this place sold white bread, Budweiser, cigarettes, mango-flavored White Owl cigars, sodas, toilet paper, twelve-year old franks seared with a heat lamp, styrofoam coolers and tube-rose snuff. You know, the essentials.

And just across the street….

you may find youself living in one of these.

This isn’t a proper shotgun shack. It more a simple hall and parlor. It’s occupied by an elderly couple, and I like driving by it in winter to see the woodsmoke drafting from the chimney. It’s just enough house; unlike…

Waverly

The big plantation seat here. Built in the 1830’s by people who were apparently fond of Walter Scott novels* They also operated a large community storehouse from around the 1790’s. It’s apparently still in the hands of the Cunningham family, who have maintained it well.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A brief detour down Mcghee’s Mill Road brings us to this plantation house, owned by a general practitioner who built a number of schools in the area. Most of his wealth came from attending the cluster of wealthy families in Cunningham Township, and probably hawking his traveling sideshow of the pickled results of father-daughter connubiality.*

Columbus Terrel House

Finally, there’s this antebellum monstrosity in the Italianate fashion, which has received an appropriately troglodite makeover. I only have one further suggestion: Gazing balls.

The satellite dish would look better on the roof.

*There must be hundreds of plantations with this name, because the owners were largely displaced Scots. I’ve read some accounts of life on these places that suggest the patriarchs were all sullen megalomaniacs who bullied everybody who had the misfortune to cross their path. My favorite is an old bastard who lorded it over a couple thousand acres near Warrenton, and insisted his daughters eschew the company of local boys because they were of the “criminal class”. When his daughters asked to be permitted to travel north to attend school he refused because Yankees were “shiftless lazy dogs who would deflower them” (Maybe the deflowering fell to him, by default).

I’ll bet there were some quiet meals in that household.

It’s a thin line.

After I finished milking the cow today, I took up my paintbrushes and started work on my Person County For Obama recruitment placard. I know I have numerous shortcomings as an artist, but even I can come up with a likeness after awhile, and after all, it’s for Person County. I’ve long ago given up the idea that art should remain separate from politics: About eight years ago, to be precise . And anyway, some tobacco spittle swilling douche stole our Obama sign from the road frontage.

New Sheriff in town, Biatch!

When this sign I am currently making isn’t traveling with us to Roxboro, to encourage people to ask me “Where can I find the beach towel of this?” I will have it posted behind a barricade of thin plastic bags filled with the feces of my dogs, my own feces, and any old leftover paint I have lying around so any fuckbubble who comes up to swipe it will track crap into his SUV, and it will ruin his carpets, and by extension, his stupid fucking excuse for his stupid fucking empty-ass life.

I thought briefly about pungee sticks, but then I remembered what a litigious bunch Republicans are when God himself rips a hole in their sorry asses. And I’m really not a murdering, traitorous piece of shit, like the Republicans and “Independents” John McCain hangs with. I still have moments where I believe there is a polity, or at least something that could be expressed as a Venn diagram of decent, modest people that is made up of both parties. But today, I am wondering why I am so easily gulled.

The Republican party is inciting it’s bottom feeders to violence. That’s nothing new. But now they own the press.

Red in tooth and claw

I suppose Daniel Akaka coming down all hard on Cokie Roberts’ deranged spit-bubble blowing won’t have any measurable effect besides having her mother remove all the pineapple based entrees at her quasi-insidery DC restaurant; but seeing old fish-eyes trying to nastily reassert herself in American politics at this late phase in her dementia reminds me that all flesh must rot, and it starts on the hoof.

One begins to wonder if McCain publicly soiled himself if Cokie and her ilk would regard it as a somber reminder of his unflinching prisonertude for the 48 real states of the US, when he was homesick for the consumerist allures of Myrtle beach, and the aromatic company of the proles for whom he dedicated his young life.

It could even become a feature of his campaign. He could carry (or get Joe Lieberman to carry ) a big sloshing bucket of the stuff. The DC press corps could examine it daily for omens of our military future. Cokie could then intone soberly about America’s debt to John McCain. How he saved them from the Asians, and the ignominy of riding those little scooter things to work every day.

And if John and Cokie happened to accidentally brush hands during the taping of a show, might it lead to something even more emblematic of the whole notion of selfless public service?

Guest house

two or three year's work

There are just some projects I keep trying to put out of my mind, promising I’ll get to at a later date, but really hoping I’ll have a stroke or be hit by lightning before that day comes. Some of them you can’t ignore because they are visible from the spot where you prefer to get soused, and some of them are house-sized.

I remember hearing about one of my old high school acquaintances who was famous for having a mortal terror of anything that smacked of work. He was briefly employed by his brother, who rehabbed historic homes for a living. They got a lucrative job fixing up a mansion built in the 20’s. A local basketball coach of some repute was having it redone as a gift to his newly married daughter. The day they went to inspect the place this guy tagged along to see what he had signed up for. It was a 25 room frame house the size of a hotel. They were going to heat-strip, sand, prime and put two coats on the exterior, chemically strip the interior oak woodwork, sand and refinish the floors, etc.

My friend staggered out of the truck, stood in the circular drive in front of the stairs leading to the double oak doors for a moment, then crumpled to his knees and vomited.

I feel his pain. But I’m not the vomiting kind. I’m more the uncontrollable sobbing sort.

This is definitely no mansion, but termites have turned what was otherwise a simple sand-and paint job into a nightmare mission involving long hours in a crawlspace with an entrenching shovel, removing siding, replacing frame members, and replacing siding…. then there’s the chimney.

Alright! A masonry project!

It has to be disassembled to the ground some month when the European wasps aren’t actively trying to mob and kill intruders.

The interior could be worse, but not much worse.

Sid and Nancy. Mostly Nancy.

Nancy

Our old house was not far enough away from the road. There were four pine trees which had been planted some forty years back that formed a rudimentary screen. They permitted people to see whatever we were doing in the front yard, and when we visited the nearest town, strangers would recount to us what they’d seen us doing. There was never any question of wandering into the yard naked, even if a fox was eviscerating a chicken at four in the morning, because the next time we went to pick up a piece of hardware to fix the toilet, someone would be asking us why we slept without clothes, like Catholics.

It was almost unbearable when we first moved there. People would literally pull their vehicles off the road and rip up the front yard to get a look at what we were doing. Shortly after we moved into the house, my wife and I were undressing for bed when the neighbors (who had sold us the place) pulled their pickup truck to the window and flashed their headlights. I never figured out if it was strictly intimidation, or they just wanted to see how unrelated people fuck.

“Why don’t she bite that piller, Jay W?”

“I don’t know, Daddy. But they don’t look nothin’ alike. That ain’t right. Hand me them binoculars. Lord Jesus, daddy… They ain’t even fuckin’. They… they’s Readin!… Books!

Momma done sold the fuckin’ house to a pair a Devil worshippers.”

“You sure they ain’t fuckin’?’

“Yep. He done took off his hat.”

Eudora Welty was not exaggerating, folks. My wife and I were both raised in the South, and nothing prepared us for this. I’d grown up understanding that the guy who played with his dick beside the pinball machine at the bait store was essentially harmless, as long as you didn’t make eye contact, and that all that history stuff was fine for school, but you didn’t want to talk about it with uncle Red. And you definitely didn’t want to tell him he was a ringer for Lyndon Johnson, cause he’d walk out and get the 12 gauge out of the trunk of his Falcon and cut you in half.

My wife’s aunts were only a couple of years her senior. They were called Fleeta, Nelma, and Kitty. You’d think they were doomed to a life of prostitution with names like that hanging around their necks, but no. They took hold of their destinies like a case of shrink-wrapped Dolly Madison cakes and ate themselves into what passes for celibacy. Down here. Two of them died nearly virgins with only four kids apiece. We’ve had to attend their funerals, and it’s always a mystery to me 1.Why people here generally insist on burial, and 2. How in hell do they get them into that coffin without shoe horns or KY Jelly. And speaking of funerals, is there a type of aunt in the North or Midwest who attends all the funerals? The one if she happens to catch you by the arm will lead you straight to the deceased (at an open coffin ceremony) and start purring “Ooo. Just look at the job they did. They did a beautiful job on her. I like the cheeks. Not too much blush. They put too much blush on your grandma. Made her look like a whore. But this looks good. Almost alive. But without that big wrinkle in her forehead. I wonder how in hell they fixed that.”

Maybe that’s just in my family.

I think we can both be forgiven for thinking there were no surprises in store for us. But then we met The Family That Loved Itself. They had seen our peafowl while making a detailed inspection of our yard, and wanted to know if we’d take some chickens in trade. They had a couple of teenage kids with white hair, one male, one female, who’d smile and shyly drop their heads when addressed, but also appeared to be scoping the place for anything loose that could be dragged off without breaking a sweat. Dad reeked of booze and stale cigarette smoke and Mom had an eagle tattooed across her lower back. She was the one who conducted the transaction, while dad would stroke his daughter’s hair and interrupt with “These chickens is junk food junkies. You know that song? Ray Stevens? ” while mom increased her volume. “He’s right. I work at the bakery and they give us old donuts. What we don’t eat them chickens do.”

The chickens looked remarkably healthy for being raised on a fructose, hydrogenated oil, and starch diet. They were a pair of Rhode Island Reds that mom referred to as pulleys (I think she meant pullets). We traded a peafowl for them, and they drove off. We already had enough peafowl and a couple more laying hens would reinvigorate our aging flock. So we figured it was a fair deal, until later that evening, when we heard one of the “pulleys” start that adolescent screech that later becomes a crow. We figured we had a male and female now, so we named them Sid and Nancy.

Nancy took a while longer to start crowing, so his name had already stuck. He behaved more like a hen anyway. He was gentle and liked to hop up in your lap for a pet. The hens loved him. He would actually let them eat the treats he found, unlike most roosters, who just use food as bait and then savagely bite the hen’s heads while they hump the daylights out of them. Nancy’s girls just squatted right down for him. Treats or no treats.

Chickens occasionally exhibit this bizarre behavior I call “The Moony Eye” for want of a better term. A male and female will face each other, place their heads in roughly the same plane, gaze into each others eyes, and gargle. Nancy had moony-eyed most of the girls, and they were on his team. When you picked Nancy up, he would try to moony-eye you. We thought this would go over well at the farmer’s market, so we dragged him along to help us sell tomatoes. But as soon as people showed up at our table, he’d tuck one foot up and go to sleep. We stopped bringing him.

Nancy’s brother Sid died of a heart attack when he was about two, so we figured Nancy wouldn’t live very long, either. But he lived around six years, and actually moved with us to the new place. My wife was feeding the chickens one afternoon when Nancy strode over and began showing a hen the feed. Then he stood bolt upright and fell. Just like that.