Deep ecology

she says I have ear mites

Another band of rain is passing through this morning, so everything I’ve got stuck in the mud is going to sink a little more. We’ve had a couple of opportunities to hitch the mules up, but nowhere to go once we do. By midweek the ground is supposed to freeze a little, and it may be possible to walk in the yard without practically twisting a foot off.

Me and my wife were walking one edge of the property that still needs fencing, and the dogs kept dragging up blood-soaked deer legs. If we ate meat, there’d have been plenty for a large stewpot. I’m not 100% certain we’ve got people trespassing , but I’m paranoid enough to find the thought distressing.

In the local news today, we heard something we’d been expecting for awhile. Some guy overcharged his black powder rifle and blew himself up.  Part of the more is better mindset, who are also involved in the introduction of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and growth regulators into the water table.

Doesn’t matter, really. Looks like the petroleum industry is not above stoking a few wars to get their profit margins back up.

You can’t even dream the hell that would sufficiently repay these bastards.

On a lighter note: THE MULES!

You can tell Jane was raised with kids.

We wanted a carrot birthday cake, asshole.

Stoner high school highlights

The longest joke

It occurs to me that I’ve been trying to build a story out of a single joke for a couple of long posts now,  not drawing any closer to the punchline, which upon long (and, o Lord, how long) reflection strikes me as unfunny, even stupid; and I’ve decided I’m like a guy who’s fallen off the deck of the Lusitania, who manages nearly to swim even with it as the torpedo rips through the waterline.

So I’ve decided to cut straight to the punchline, and you, the crew of the lifeboat, can decide whether I climb aboard, or there’s not room for both me and lady Astor’s giant arse, and I get the mercy stroke with an oarhandle instead.

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The Punchline.

Me, my wife, and our Brit acquaintance are sitting at a bar very popular with lesbian, transgender and gay kids  (the average age is about25). Our friend has been strangely obtuse this evening. He is also on the ragged edge of a protracted bender. We have brought him here, against his strenuous objections, to get something to eat. It is a nice restaurant and the wait staff is very cordial, and there’s a punk girrl band ripping through Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks covers (They may even be called the Buzzcunts) which has the added bonus of periodically drowning out our friend’s now very convoluted harangue about how there is no such thing as lesbianism, there is only a kind of postadolescent female fetishization of masculinity which manifests itself in the lean muscular woman with a crewcut at the next table, who, if looks mean anything, is preparing to walk over to our table and feed our friend his balls.

Suddenly, the band cranks up again, and our friend shouts that he is out of cigarettes. He walks to the bar and returns with a whiskey, and notifies us the kitchen is closed and there are no more cigarettes  at the bar, either. My wife says he can ask one of “the postadolescents” for a cigarette, but he demurs. She correctly decides he is afraid of the lesbians and gets up to go snake a few off one of the many couples enjoying a slow, lascivious dance to “I am an antichrist!”

I have been listening to this guy rant for half an hour about the nonexistence of lesbians at what is undeniably a majority lesbian venue. And I’ve been staring at him. Dumbstruck.

As my wife gets up to bum the smokes, I suddenly know what to say.

“Make sure you don’t get the pussy flavored ones, honey.”

Our friend turns to me, and hisses “You’re manic!”

THE END

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Here are some more pictures of mules:

What a handsome creature. I'm speaking of course, about the mule.

Sweet Jane

What a handsome creature. I’m speaking of course, about the mule.

Sweet Jane

I got nothin

The weather hasn’t permitted us to do much around here, but we did harness and drive the mules briefly yesterday. I think they were grateful for something to do, so they ignored my inept driving. I planned to hitch them again today, but we had another heavy rain and the place is a sea of mud.

Sun’s out, at least. Maybe I’ll plant a few more apple trees. We drove to Reidsville yesterday and picked up another twenty-five rust-resistant varieties.

In about three years,  if you find youself short of apples,  give me a call.

More bleeding holiday shit

Excellent performance.

But why am I unable to locate a single heterosexual?!!!11!.

When your mules cry

It’s fucking raining again. The goats have thrush, the sheep have thrush. Next it’ll be the mules. Hell, I’m going to have thrush. Goddam goddam goddam. Please, people, if you have an SUV, push it into a fucking lake or something.
At least the temperatures are in the seventies. That way we can watch the animal’s feet rot off in relative comfort.
Rant over, for now.

Nothing in particular

During the boom period of the nineties, my wife worked with a software development company that paid not extravagantly but well, provided affordable health care, a gym, aerobics instructors , a natatorium, free child care  and a world class cafeteria. The break rooms had the shitty coffee endemic to the pre self-roasting years, but there were boxes of free high carbohydrate snacks and big plastic jugs of M&M’s. It was actually a little vulgar.

There were frequently parties that spilled out of the late afternoon work hours into midmornings at restaurants in Raleigh and Durham, and sometimes at the trial versions of McMansions.

I used to be a musician, who hung out with visual artists.  But  I’ve never seen so many people determined not to simply get fucked up, but get toxic and write  Shakespeare in the memories of their coworkers as I have with goddamned software developers . There was also, of course, the chorus of matronly admin types looking on and taking mental notes as fiercely as Stalin. I have not been an attractive man for decades, but at least among these folks  I could count on having my ass briefly fondled by a woman in  pornstar high heels on her way to open the door of her husband’s Lexus to douse the passenger floorboard with a gout of Jose Cuervo scented bile. A woman would  likely feel violated. I found it a thoroughly bittersweet experience. Particularly if I was one of the people who had to persuade the woman she had no more business driving that car than me.  In that role, I was the old, charming Peter O’Toole, without so much hair.

My wife enjoyed these parties because her vastly superior tolerance for alcohol enabled her to take the lay of the land and determine who was fucking who. She ultimately lost interest.  This was after  she understood it wasn’t just normal office slap and tickle, but mounds of people fucking obsessively, like  some glorious piece of  Tantric  architecture.

She started contracting independently, and we no longer had to worry about hurtling away from the wargamer capital of the south in a tiny car, driving with a hand over one eye, to our home some 60 miles distant. But the itch to hang out with other compulsive drunks remained. We tended to migrate toward palatable food, a coherent bartender, and the  few places where gay professionals were not afraid of being anally violated or beaten by by a gang of straight rurals. In North Carolina, this left us with Durham.

I grew up in Durham. But I spent most of my life in the trashy/clubby northern part that was a golf heaven for fatuous brown liquor sipping bastards whose sole sexual release seems to have been corrupting their kids beyond employability. Oddly, the white kids who grew up in the city seem to have had far greater access to education than the sadasses I huddled with, smoking ugly headache pot and shooting yard lights with a pellet gun.

I hope everyone has figured out that your friends at this stage suck, suck, suck.

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So we started hanging out at a coffee bar that employed a pair of inhumanly beautiful barristas. Old men were being let off by trains to visit the girls, and by the time we met them, they weren’t only nervous because of old men, but because a bunch of bloodheads had returned their snake god to power. The rednecks started spilling back into Durham like a stray flood of ejaculate.

At the time, I was  serving on a board of a local university library, and  believed I was working community service miracles. But I was, instead, a pretentious douche, as members of all such organizations are encouraged to be. But I was able to travel to town in a suit and it made me feel moderately whole. I carried my sketchpads and drew and the girls at the coffeeshop would drift by my table and say something nice and I felt marginally less old.

We met Jeremy here. He was obsessed with one of the Barristas. Laura. The more emotionally mature, and the most hauntingly beautiful of the two.

If Jeremy had had a few more years of experience, he’d have known that Laura was underage for selling alcohol, and part of her mystyque was that she was an overgrown child with a highly developed emotional sense. I’d fallen for her, in a way, too. But I just wanted her to house sit while my wife and I escaped to Canada.

Spoiling the team

The mules are bored, but I guess the apples are a small compensation. I was even considering hitching them to pick up some firewood, but the mud is a foot deep in spots.

Momus selections

I don’t know if Momus is an acquired taste. He’s certainly used a variety of styles over the years. The only constant is that savage wit, coupled with a kind of troubled empathy for its object. He’s likely the best lyricist alive. I keep thinking he’s gone too far off the deep end, even for me. Then he goes and does this.

More mud.

It could be worse. We could be in the deep-freeze most of you guys are going through, but the hurricane level rainfall Friday and the consistent damp this week are certainly a pain in the ass. I’m just bitching because I want to get out and work the mules.

I  got my Work Horse Manual in the mail today, and read it through once. So far, the only thing I’m doing wrong is feeding them a little  too much. Fortunately, the apples and carrots  are probably helping to counterbalance the superfluous grain in their diet.

The balky mule has shown my wife how to catch him, and I quickly followed suit. He just likes to be chased for a minute or two, apparently. I understand  now this is common.  I have plenty of time, and I need more exercise anyway.  At one point I was actually debating whether to get a walking or riding plow.

Looks like it’ll have to be the walking one, If I want to continue snorkeling through reefs of pasta. Or the three cheese pizza that’s cooling on the cutting board now.  I finally learned how to make a thin crust, and it’s completly counterintuitive: Add olive oil like you’re making focaccia , and press the dough as thinly as possible into the baking sheet. Fries up real nice.