Genius

Sometimes I just hate Elvis out of spite at his youthful dumbassedness. But this motherfucker was  in some ways always head and ears above us.

Anybody home?

Calpurnia was wondering if there’s any cookies. In there. In that house.

She knows there are.

And this door is starting to look pretty damned flimsy.

In honor of our Irish President

Hogweed, Godammit.

God help me. I still love this shit.

The soft attack. Another letter to the editor of our local asswiper.

I’d like to thank Brinn Clayton and Phyliss Boatwright for attempting to paint the Courier Times as a purely local paper that doesn’t dabble in national, or even state issues, while simultaneously questioning President Obama’s first acts as president based upon a selective interpretation of scripture. I found the level of unintentional semiliterate comedy unusually high, even for this publication.

I would caution both of them to keep in mind that there are people in Person County who actually use full sentences and correct punctuation when setting their ideas down in writing, and fully expect the shapers of even purely local discourse to demonstrate a familiarity with English, even if they hail from South Carolina.

There are people who expect even more. Proper syntax in coordination with a logical framework for argument makes it far less likely your reader will simply wad the paper up and wonder why he subscribed to it in the first place.

Brinn, using his inherited platform for discussing purely local issues, decides that Obama is a community issue, but only if discussed from a right-wing perspective. It’s his paper I guess, but I wouldn’t be going on too much about the taking of innocent life  if I had shilled for the Republicans. The death toll of post-partum Americans as a direct result of the world-historical incompetence of the previous administration should remind you of a more salient passage in the Bible: Thou shall not kill. But I realize that for Republicans, the idea of the sanctity of human life is restricted to the unborn.

I would also remind you that the party of Bill O’ Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, David Vitter, Ted Haggard,  Mark Foley, Neil Bush, Larry Craig, the drug dealing mama of Levi Johnson and the guy from Liberty College who was found dead, suspended in two wet suits  while performing a self-colonoscopy hasn’t got a collective leg to stand on when they’re trying to tell people how to live. But you expect a good half of your community to  remain silent  if it’s just some has-been pastor from Durham, or a shill from the John Locke Foundation speaking in “a local way “about national issues in the pages of your rag.

You do have one thing right. Your paper has scarcely any power to shape opinion. Eight years of Republican racism, intolerance and failure has entirely superseded your efforts.

The Chills

We’re finally getting a little taste of the weather that’s been plaguing most of the rest of the country. We’re at 15 degrees, thirty miles north they’re hovering around five.

I’m taking the opportunity to do some of the finicky jobs that just don’t get done when you can get outdoors and away from them. I even alphabetized my CD collection yesterday (except for the World Music stuff, mostly because I stopped being able to remember names about the time I started listening to Sunny Ade). If there is a modern activity that comes closer to  Memento Mori, I don’t even want to know about it.

The cold weather reminded me that we needed balaclavas, so I dug up some scrap fabric and got to work. This one is a mere proof of concept: I think it needs a plastic beak, through which one can exhale vapor. Suck on this, LL Bean!

When good sheep become Wal-Mart shoppers

Or how many sheep is too many?

A brief warm spell.

My wife has the usual holiday slowdown with work, and it’s warm, so we’re fencing the western side of our property. This involves a staggering amount of prep, which is mostly cutting down a thicket of two to three inch  diameter aileanthus and sweetgum saplings interspersed with short, twisted specimens of Virginia pine. Previously, we were doing this with brush scythes, axes, bowsaws and lopping shears. Then I discovered my back has nerves in it, and they’re lazy bastards.

The chainsaw, when it’s not a mass manufactured stamped metal piece of shit with the life expectancy of a Cricket lighter, is a very useful tool. It requires slavish attention to its well being, but repays you generously by allowing you to sit comfortably on most conventional pieces of furniture after a day’s work. Today we actually worked through about 1/2 acre of densely set trees in about six hours. The sheep will graze over the stumps and have them dead by next fall. Then we can drag the harrow over the roots and plant forage mix, or cowpeas.

The object now is to restrict the access of hunters to the place, and our sheep’s access to the right of way. All 53 of them are hugely fat, but you’d never know it because of their constant search for food. Sometimes it takes them to a trailer park down the road, sometimes they just wait in the road itself for the lord of fast moving things to bring them a windfall. They’re like gamblers that way. Someone must have dropped a couple of square bales off a truck once, and they got that fatal dose of reinforcement.

We get calls from the UPS man: “Your sheep are heading toward town. If you hurry you can catch ‘em before they get to 119.”

Town, in our case is an extremely relative term. It’s the ‘town’ of Pat Garret and Billy the Kid, or perhaps more correctly, a Siberian star route. It’s a town where lonely men (and women) drink shoe polish. It’s a “we worry that people might fuck our sheep if they make it there” kind of  town.

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I’m not opposed to hunting, either. Just certain styles of it. I have known deerhunters who were adept with a compound bow, and were certain they had a kill when they shot the arrow. I’ve witnessed guys staggering through the woods with assault rifles pointed at their feet, or worse, straight ahead. I’ve heard people discussing a roadside hunting party interrupted by the unexpected appearance of a buck that resulted in a shooter tracking the target through a scope at close range and messily removing the head of a family member point-blank over the roof of their truck.

Another reason I just don’t want the place hunted is we  have a couple of exotic  ’sports’ of whitetails around here. One is a lovely piebald, mostly white, but with deep brown and tan markings, like a speckled heirloom bean. One of them is virtually indistinguishable from a Saanen goat. When I was in high school, I used to drive my friends up to my uncle and aunt’s farm to smoke dope and get the country vibe. Once, as we approached the farm in the car, I was  telling them about an albino deer my relatives had been putting corn out for, to try and lure it away from the hunters. It was ghostly white, and my aunt thought of it as  kind of portent. One of the guys in the car said offhandedly something to the effect that albinism was impossible in deer.

On cue,  the white doe emerged from the woods, and walked directly and majestically in front of the car. It paused, turned its  eyes on us, and slowly walked away. In the car there was a minute of stunned silence , a brief sucking of wind, and then the kind of painful, paralytic laughter that being stoned only makes worse.

brink of the fresh disaster