And more Christmas

God almighty, doesn’t this just want to make you hug your knees and weep:

Holiday music

Thanksgiving turkey

We had a wild turkey visit the place today. Just after we’d strung two rolls of fencing around the orchard, and were preparing to celebrate not quite finishing the job by getting thoroughly drunk, my wife heard gunshots from across the road, and a beautiful wild turkey invaded our airspace. He landed in the southeast corner of the property, and the Guinea fowl immediately began screaming about an intruder. He was apparently a large tom, because he was trying to force his way through the fence running parallel to the creek near our property line, and he was rocking the T-posts harder than most cattle care to. I tried to get a picture of him, and didn’t, but it was just as well. He was terrified, and my presence shook him just enough he remembered he could back away from the fence somewhat, and fly.

Rock it… part 2

Descriptions of tripping are always going to sound similar, since everyone is having their brains soaked in similar stuff, but my religious LSD experience is unique because the heavy part was triggered by my asshole of a roomate losing his wallet. I had been having a pretty good time until I stopped off at my room to grab a coat. My roomate was looking very serious when we showed up, and he started to spill his guts. Up until that time he hadn’t really struck me as the sensitve sort, after all, he’d banged a number of girls in the room while I was trying to read about Hat-Shep-Sut, or triangulating Mircea Eliade, Jung and Francis Cornford. When my roomate and his friends finished fucking, they always felt like discussing the most pressing issue of the day, which was the second coming of Jesus. After all, I should be able to offer something on the subject since I had the mental discipline to pretend to read Wittgenstein while people were having screaming stand-up sex balanced on a lime green cinderblock wall not four feet away.

Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t jealous. Just slightly more picky than my roommate or his guests. I knew my folks wouldn’t fork out the money for the cure, and besides, I was saving my body for a hebephrenic girlfriend  who would  one day almost certainly figure out that while I might not be as attractive as some of the members of Squeeze, I was available, and had months of post-adolescent rut capability stored up, whereas they had already fucked themselves anorexic.

As a middle aged man, I have come to be deliriously happy that this union never took place.

Anyway, my douchesack roommate was droning on about his lost wallet when the LSD started to reshape the world I was struggling to swim through. I started to believe I could help him find the wallet just as the upper part of his face , and then his eyes and nose began a steady, dribbling descent to the floor.

” Why in the hell is he going on like this” I thought. “He’ll be able to look under the desks and ooze into the shelves underneath the beds if he keeps this up…….

-Uh oh.”

We left him yammering about his wallet and walked out into the crisp January air for a half a minute, then quickly returned to that womb of boiler generated heat. I experienced a brief jolt of lucidity, and began to believe I’d finished tripping.

A Ha Ha Ha. a Ha Ha Uh Ha Ha Ha. hahahahahahahahahhaha.

We got back to my friend’s room to find it had been taken over by a bong party, complete with some doctor’s kid with a Les Paul singing ” Oh lord supreme, supreme, LET ME FULFILL MY WILL! LET ME FULFILL MY WILL!” without the slightest fucking trace of irony. They immediately began to try and get us to take bong hits, which we initially tried to refuse, but chron culture is essentially Spartan in nature, and we feared being thrown off a cliff if we refused. I tried faking the hit, but immediately a  green swampy cloud replaced my conscience. Some gentle soul put a GONG album on the turntable, and my brains started to squirt out of my ears like grease out of a hot doughnut.

My last “natural” memory as the turn of the century blues artists referred to “things of this world”, was some idiot trying to tell me Jughead was the archetype of the rock and roll persona, and asking me if i could draw him a Jughead from memory. My hand skittered across the page, and the dork began to draw one for me. They must have been gone for awhile when I woke up and looked at the analog numeric display clock on the bong-table in he center of the room. It just kept rolling and melting. The  Paisely Batik sheets that had been stretched across the ceiling with a couple of thin metal wires were reverberating like pelagic fish lungs along with the wheezing dorm refrigerator. I looked across the room to the other bed, where the guitarist for my band was dropping half of his face in a competent imitation of cubism, and asked him the fatal question:

“What time is it?’”

Hahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahha. Nrrgghhhrrgh.

Then it really hit. Really took over. I mean vital functions. I was a smoker at the time, so I was a bit more sensitive, but my heart felt like it was ratcheting itself out of my chest. About this time I was convinced I was dead, then I tranced.

I was a human trunk, stripped of skin, basically supra lumbar spine and skull, flying through a sandstorm. The flight aspect was fun, but I was worried that girls wouldn’t understand me. And the sand hurt. This flying went on for days until my sad little remains squelched up in the vicinity of a mammoth concrete spheroid. My new lung and brains body slung itself under the shadow of the edifice.The big ball kept vibrating these strange warm signals through the cold. Be. It said. Be. Beeeee.

If I told you I’d drawn any unique lessons from this experience, I’d be a run of the mill dick.

But Just being seems to be the order of the day. Can’t much disagree with that.

Still digging holes.

As Nancy says, me and my wife just placed an order for a mule team, and they’ll be arriving shortly after Thanksgiving. Right now I’m fighting the remnants of a chest cold, and continuing to prep our apple orchard. I figure the area will accommodate seventy trees but we’re starting with 25. Here’s a view of the holes:

only 45 left to go!

If you enlarge the picture, you can see the lawn chair where I’ve spent a great deal of time wondering if my intestines were  going to flop out on the ground in a steaming heap, or if I’d simply pitch forward into one of the holes, a victim of  coronary thrombosis.

Here’s a picture of the mule’s butts, all laced up to the forecart.

for some reason, this picture reminds me of folks on smoke break

Coitus fencerruptus

fig.1. Whiffin' it.

We’ve got enough sheep already, but they insist we need more. Last spring, we banded all the male lambs. Banding consists of slipping a four jawed plier that stretches a thing that looks like a dense gutta-percha Cheerio over the scrotum, snapping it into place above the testicles, then sliding the plier from beneath the band. Sounds easy, and it would be, if the animal were dead.

But the living ones resist.

A lot of farmers prefer surgical castration. We’ve used both methods here, and I believe the banding method poses fewer risks of sepsis.  For people concerned about pain, I’d have to say I only screamed a couple of times before the whiskey kicked in;  but as for the lambs, if you band them right after the testicles drop, they only appear to experience mild pain for a few minutes, then resume nursing or sleeping .

One area where surgical castration is radically better, is determining that both testicles are out of play. With banding sometimes a testicle will occasionally creep back beneath the band, or you’ll miss one while dealing with a struggling animal. We’ve got a few instances of that mishap currently fenced away from the rest of the flock,  raining buckets of jizz on their fellow sufferers and themselves. It’s simply amazing what one nut can produce.

Poor Eva Braun.

When the ewes are in oestrus (love that British spelling. If we’d had a male child, I’d have considered it for a name) they walk up to the fence and wiggle it for the inmates. This particular set of unwethered males has hit on the gymnastic strategy of trying to snake it through the fence (see fig.2, below)

Fig.2. Stiffin' it

As you can see, it’s hell on a fence. Can’t be too easy on that ram’s penis either. I can’t think of a time in my life  (well, maybe in my teens) when I’d have tried to get it through woven wire fencing. Alright, then, So I’m prone to exaggeration. But this looks painful to me.

Ultimately the ewes cycle out, and lose interest in lap dancing for these unfortunate fraternity pledges. But until the vet comes to finish the grisly job we started, the boys are left with erections that may exceed four hours in duration.

Fig.3. Don't leave me, mama!

Planting apple trees.

I am still able to dig holes, but that’s about all. I’ll be in and out of the house regularly to lie down. I’ll force myself to get up and make some petty, mean spirited swipe at any neo-Confederates, because it’s the force of habit: other than that I’ve got a zombie movie going on right here, and it’s a documentary.

Rock it, bitches (part 1)

When my parents first visited me in the dorms, they were unprepared for the hellish spectacle that awaited. As a child, I’d always considered the Catholic blandishments of the film “The Sentinel” some strong-ass meat. After a couple years in the dorms, public sexual congress between bleached blond tobacco family druids and closely shaven Apocalypse Now extras was nothing to raise an eyebrow about.  I did have to  attempt to explain the drunk naked  girl sweeping her vomit up in the hallway just across from my room. “Pledge week”, I offered. They were strangely satisfied.

I never had a clear idea  if I was living in a dorm room or a  Piranesi carceri, but  almost miraculously, through the munificence of North Carolina’s Outlaws biker gang, my parent’s departure coincided with a flood of cheap blotter acid in the dorms. I was unaware of this development until the guitarist for my band informed me we were about to make historic inroads on the structure of local music. Unfortunately our bassist was on tour with the university jazz band, and ultimately would not recoup his investment in the future. We ate his share of the four way hit as a kind of tribute .

I didn’t know that time had folded until I decided I needed a carbonated beverage of any description to wash the terrible dryness from my throat, and we advanced on the vending machine in the dorm lobby. I fidgeted briefly with the change in my pocket, and tentatively moved my forearm toward the machine. The machine gave me my selection without my having touched it. My wife says this is common. As it turned out , it was a harbinger of another fucked-up day in the dorms.

Music hadn’t gotten me laid much, at that point, and  I was counting on some sonic breakthrough that would make me a sort of pussy lord, or , at the very least get me a 30k job with the local recording industry, so I could caution young rockers against the perils of drugs and whores; then see what bonus was left over for me. But ultimately, music took a twelve-string Rickenbacker and shoved it up my ass sideways.

My early efforts were based on the philosphical infallibilty of Neil Young and gradually shifted to the disturbing subtleties of Albert Goldman, leading directly to this lyric:

Good morning flower In the sparkling clear syringe

My veins have grown a rose. I push it back to its bed beneath my skin.

And now I stand in God’s applause.

Nice, if I’d ever done heroin.

Sleep dirt

I’ve spent the last couple of days in more or less a stupor, and finally got a good fifteen hours of sleep yesterday. It’s probably because of the beginning of cold weather that some sort of readjustment was in order.

I’m late for milking the cow this morning. Usually she’d be trying to scream her tits off, but it’s too chilly for that. The calf, however is taking up her slack. Gotta go.

The Verdict Of 1865 (a letter to the editor of our local rag)

It can take awhile for the judgment of history to roll around. After all, it took some time for the Romans to recognize that the Christians they were feeding to the lions outnumbered them substantially. But history obeys certain protocols,and the first is, the abusers are the first to complain of abuse. The historic victory of Barack Obama will long be remembered as a black day for papers such as the Courier-Times, and their subsequent drop in circulation will be blamed on carpetbaggers who perturbated the natural relationship between whites and blacks in friendly county, USA.

But the sorry fact is, here in Person County, we have a bit of an historic track of racism. As a white guy, I’d be more than willing to sweep the whole sorry spectacle under the rug, except for the fact I’m up to my neck in it.  During early voting, a current member of the board of elections asked me “How long have you been here?”. On its face, a  harmless question. But on reflection, one relating to the time-honored concepts of Blood and Soil, as enumerated by those snappy dressers at the Nuremburg Party Rally.  I have my Person county residency card, which I obtained after emigrating from Oxford (NC), and I also have a copy of the US Constitution which tells me my inquisitive friend was trying to abridge my First Amendment rights.

After eight years of the worst presidency in US history, I would not be moved.

We hadn’t even thought of distributing our voter education ballots until we heard that board of elections personnel were disseminating false information regarding straight ticket voting: Specifically, telling voters that a straight ticket automatically generated a vote for president. This would be … you guessed it, a felony. We (with the generous assistance of Obama’s legal team) had to correct that nonsense immediately. But it was the window for a  purrrrfect opportunity, and absolutely legal, and we all leapt on Larry Yarborough  with our sample ballots and drowned him like a sack of kittens.

I won’t apologize for it.

But I feel strongly that a local paper that elevates the views of paid Republican shills from Raleigh over those of its own citizens, and refuses to place the victor on the front page on the day following the election owes us all a detailed explanation of their motives: Any honest accounting would involve a discussion of endemic racialist hysteria.

In the words of justice “Fat Tony” Scalia, get over it.

The Civil War has finally been won. Ask your new government how you can help clean up the mess.