Pesaro Archipelago
It was not altogether unlike an I Love Lucy episode in that the way things turned out was a bit more frenetic than what we initially anticipated. They did have a conveyer belt you bent over but instead of wrapping chocolates you picked through the passing grapes for any remaining stems the de-stemming apparatus had missed. And it did go faster than you could handle but you were never tempted to shove the passing stems into your mouth. For every small piece of stem you grabbed, and tossed behind you onto the floor, the more refined this 2009 batch of Cabernet Francs would be, despite all the literal blood, sweat and tears that would eventually over a very long process also end up with the grapes. There was not however a large wooden barrel of grapes we all climbed into, smashing them with our bare feet, nor did tempers flare and lead to a grape throwing fight with the locals. No, these grapes went from red plastic totes into the de-stemmer and up the conveyer into flexible suction tubing that led up to twenty foot tall 7 foot wide stainless steel containers, where mixed with a little yeast or other secret ingredients they would sit for a week or so and then be hand raked from a small door at the bottom into another suction device that leads them to the ATI Softpress 12, which very effectively removes every bit of juice and sends it I'm not actually sure where (but eventually into wooden barrels) after which the nearly dry clumps of grape husk are fed down that earlier (now repurposed) conveyer, into blue 50 gallon plastic barrels, which along with all those stems, will be used at some point to make grappa.
The night before, at dusk, after a day of sightseeing in and around Pesaro and a swim in the Adriatic, the four of us--our host, Antonio Ramone, Bernadette, and I--followed behind a specifically sized John Deere tractor driven by the brother of our host, that fit without room to spare between the rows of grape vine, and from the tractor our host off loaded to us an impressive quantity of red plastic totes that we then space out every third vine or so down each row. It took no time at all to do this and when we were finished we had the totes spread out down about 5 or 6 long rows and I went to bed that night thinking this would be no big deal and how it was sort of quaint that we were helping out with the 2009 harvest. In fact that is how I had been thinking of it since first learning we were going to Italy and that we would be for a brief period of our trip "helping" with this year's harvest. Quaint it was not.
What I did not understand, until it became painfully obvious, was that after the totes were filled with the clipped clumps of purple blue grapes and then picked up and stacked ( don't fill the totes so full we were admonished early on, they have to be stacked) on that same tractor and off loaded near the de-stemming apparatus, they were then brought back to the field empty and it was after nearly ten hours of this, with a short break now and then (one break was in the de-stemming line where eyeing carefully the passing conveyer of loose grapes for minute bits of stem I did have brief but unremarkable hallucinations), that I could feel it coming on, although in the end I did fight it off, a fit of uncontrollable full out weeping. I was determined though not to let the young Moldavian pickers see me cry nor any of the 65 year old men, especially that one with the bad leg, nor any of the Italian women, least of all that bossy one, good God would she ever shut up. Bernadette and I picked together, facing each other and attacking a vine from adjacent rows, and we were not the only pickers who purposefully searched for places to pick grapes out of earshot from that bossy, relentlessly chatty woman. Our friend Antonio Ramone, who is one of the original partners, along with Bernadette and a few others, of this NYC five floor walk up, and who lives just across the hall up here on five, has been traveling to Pesaro for the last three or four years and was no stranger to any of this process spent almost all of his day in the extremely arduous stem removal line. Antonio, who at times is a most expressive and gregarious fellow, was however from first mention that we would join him on this trip, mute to us about the rigors of what we were getting ourselves into. Which on his part I thinks shows a good judgment.
Early in the day, after we had picked barely a crate or two, the first line of women showed up with fresh cold mineral water and fresh breads, some of which, while without cheese or any other ingredient beyond a smear of marinara could almost be little pizzas. And they did this throughout the day but whereas early on it seemed like a wonderful and classy way to run a work project, by the end of the day, with knowledge of a promised grand feast of wine and pork, lasagna, chicken, rabbit and even pigeon, this bread and water break became to seem more like a picture from some slave labor story, or a prison road gang movie, and from one such famous movie the line "what we got here is a failure to communicate" began to ring into my consciousness with a tone so much clearer than ever before.
All of this I say with an attempt at humor because far from slave like treatment our accommodations were splendid and our host was most gracious and heaped onto us so much exquisite food (much of it prepared by his mother) and wine and tour guiding over three days that I would have to work another three harvests just to make up my share.
Next year we are traveling to a dude ranch in the Gulag Archipelago.
...more recent posts
Palermo
In Palermo we travel dark alleys but this day it is light and Bernadette and I are being chased down by a guy with a mug like Quasimodo. He is shaking his finger at us and ordering us to hault. It is Giovanni and he is reminding us to honor the Saint. I reach into my pocket and take out my Euros and let him pick out what the Saint wants. He takes four or five and drops them into a slot and that is that. We have recently stood by and watched two men break into our rental car, a very nice handling Fiat Punto.
On the way to Agrigento yesterday I am down shiftng into third to get a little torque up so I can speed past those motorists doing the speed limit. Antonio Ramone and Bernadette and I looked at enough ruins to give us a good feel for what a ruin is.
We were recently behind a student driver to get the idea that not all drivers start out with the pure skill necessary to maneuver like a mad person. It is exhilarating but requires a concentration I have not fully used for such extended periods during any time in my life. Bernadette has map skills, without which we would get nowhere.
I have not lost a key in a long time but I was due so this morning I locked the one key in the Fiat. The car rental agency had also lost their spare key so that is why they were breaking into the car. We were on our way to Tapani I think or maybe that is not even a place. Giovanni looks over the lot we park in and treats us like a friend. Giovanni and the lead mechanic breaking into our Fiat with a coat hanger seemed for a minute like they might go to blows but it all worked out. Pretty much you have to let the guy with the coat hanger do his thing. It is another skill which requires a certain amount of concentration. I had not said a thing or gotten too close and may have even dosed off for a moment when the guy, the lead mechanic, who had so far not really shown any sign that he knew I was there, called out to me so that I could be made aware of his success. He and his partner we rewarded with 10 euros a piece and I think seeing this, and knowing that he could have done just as well is perhaps why Giovanni later chased us down and suggested we honor the Saint with a little appreciation as well.
I cannot really go into what we have eaten but some of it has been spectactular, especially anything resembling a little fish. We have had pasta so fresh that it is like born on your plate and speaking of birth I am after ten days in Italy starting to resemble a man who while still skinny as a rail, is about to give birth to a 12 pound baby.
We were in Rome for only enough time to land, eat two meals and be driven the three hours to Pesaro by our friend. We picked enough grapes on our third day in Italy to remind me of that distant distant past when I for about a year worked in the Texas oilfields, 12 hour days, ten day stretches. I should say more about the grape picking and maybe I will later but now I should get back to the house. I have gone swimming in the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. I have not been that tempted to be online and I cannot find the apostrophe key on the keyboard so if you have been wondering why no contractions, well there you have it.
I think we are going out to eat in a few minutes. I am not the least bit hungry but that does not seem to be stopping me. We are not going to the opera tomorrow but The Teatro Massimo, around the corner from us, is going with Madame Butterfly for its opening night. Ciao.
In Palermo we travel dark alleys but this day it is light and Bernadette and I are being chased down by a guy with a mug like Quasimodo. He is shaking his finger at us and ordering us to hault. It is Giovanni and he is reminding us to honor the Saint. I reach into my pocket and take out my Euros and let him pick out what the Saint wants. He takes four or five and drops them into a slot and that is that. We have recently stood by and watched two men break into our rental car, a very nice handling Fiat Punto.
On the way to Agrigento yesterday I am down shiftng into third to get a little torque up so I can speed past those motorists doing the speed limit. Antonio Ramone and Bernadette and I looked at enough ruins to give us a good feel for what a ruin is.
We were recently behind a student driver to get the idea that not all drivers start out with the pure skill necessary to maneuver like a mad person. It is exhilarating but requires a concentration I have not fully used for such extended periods during any time in my life. Bernadette has map skills, without which we would get nowhere.
I have not lost a key in a long time but I was due so this morning I locked the one key in the Fiat. The car rental agency had also lost their spare key so that is why they were breaking into the car. We were on our way to Tapani I think or maybe that is not even a place. Giovanni looks over the lot we park in and treats us like a friend. Giovanni and the lead mechanic breaking into our Fiat with a coat hanger seemed for a minute like they might go to blows but it all worked out. Pretty much you have to let the guy with the coat hanger do his thing. It is another skill which requires a certain amount of concentration. I had not said a thing or gotten too close and may have even dosed off for a moment when the guy, the lead mechanic, who had so far not really shown any sign that he knew I was there, called out to me so that I could be made aware of his success. He and his partner we rewarded with 10 euros a piece and I think seeing this, and knowing that he could have done just as well is perhaps why Giovanni later chased us down and suggested we honor the Saint with a little appreciation as well.
I cannot really go into what we have eaten but some of it has been spectactular, especially anything resembling a little fish. We have had pasta so fresh that it is like born on your plate and speaking of birth I am after ten days in Italy starting to resemble a man who while still skinny as a rail, is about to give birth to a 12 pound baby.
We were in Rome for only enough time to land, eat two meals and be driven the three hours to Pesaro by our friend. We picked enough grapes on our third day in Italy to remind me of that distant distant past when I for about a year worked in the Texas oilfields, 12 hour days, ten day stretches. I should say more about the grape picking and maybe I will later but now I should get back to the house. I have gone swimming in the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. I have not been that tempted to be online and I cannot find the apostrophe key on the keyboard so if you have been wondering why no contractions, well there you have it.
I think we are going out to eat in a few minutes. I am not the least bit hungry but that does not seem to be stopping me. We are not going to the opera tomorrow but The Teatro Massimo, around the corner from us, is going with Madame Butterfly for its opening night. Ciao.
How To Make Dried Flower Arrangements
The tobacco leaves are harvested from the bottom of the plant upwards as they begin to yellow and I guess are vine ripened in this sense. The leaves are picked by hand by mostly Mexican workers and loaded onto small 6 by 8 foot trailers with 4 foot high plywood sides and stacked high and slightly above the top and then pulled behind slow moving pickup trucks down highway 49 in North Carolina, on their way to being graded and weighed at area processing plants. The bigger and bottom-most leaves may be picked in mid summer but the harvest begins in earnest in late August and into September. During this latter period the roads are littered with tobacco leaves and suggest a time gone by unaffected by a hundred years of progress and all things modern.
There is a well maintained family cemetery less than a mile behind the house I have been working on, through thick hardwood forests cut here and there with footpaths opening onto tobacco or corn or soybean fields, ponds with forgotten bass and bream, and the occasional sagging barn and farmhouse, and in the cemetery is the remains of a man who in the mid nineteenth century was an area "Negro speculator," which to my imperfect understanding means he acquired and then resold slaves as a profitable business. He and other landowners in the area are commemorated for their years of hard work and sizable real estate holdings by having most of the area's back roads named after them, and many are also remembered, with surprising detail, by recorded slave narratives. Slaves, some one hundred years old, interviewed in the 1930s and 40s, offer a remarkable insight into a time that for some people is surely looked back to as a "good ole day" and to others is seen as a time of unimaginable horror. The slave narratives are as interesting for their kind memories as they are for the evil retold. There was it seems always a good man or woman doing battle with the bad. Which is not meant as an overly simplified blanket of forgiveness for badness but just to suggest that there have always been people willing to stand up and fight the good fight. And that nothing is hopeless.
Not without my good friend Doubt but feeling ok, perhaps even full of myself, pulling away from the end of the dead end road and the property almost entirely detail-cleaned of it's momentous yard garbage--garbage spread and in some cases buried over one-third of the two and a half acres, and taking in the house prepped and scraped and primed and double-coated with fresh paint, inside and out, and even allowing for its persistent appearance of lower, working-class dowdiness, which cannot be cured with paint or new roof or new central air and heating system, or refinished wood floors, new linoleum, new second hand appliances, some repaired plumbing and electric, the new coat of varnish on kitchen cabinets or even the new shelving paper on every cabinet shelf and in every drawer, I am still driving away with a sense of pride, which has been long in coming and is a pretty fair distance away from the palpable shame and I dare-say horror I experienced pulling up to the property two years ago, after ignoring it for every bit of fifteen years.
Knowing that this is but my penultimate exit, that I will be back for a final go over, I turn left from gravel onto the paved highway 49, away from that family cemetery behind me, and I begin passing tobacco fields with large clusters of Mexican workers. I wave to them and see them in my rear view mirror turning to see who it was waving and perhaps wondering could I be the better employer (or who knows, employee) sometime down the road. The heat had broken a few days previous and the red dirt and green/yellowing tobacco and blue sky is not mired by the haze of superheated wet air and the view is crisp and clean. I look at a variety of weeds growing on both sides of the road and see possible dried flower arrangements.
The tobacco leaves are harvested from the bottom of the plant upwards as they begin to yellow and I guess are vine ripened in this sense. The leaves are picked by hand by mostly Mexican workers and loaded onto small 6 by 8 foot trailers with 4 foot high plywood sides and stacked high and slightly above the top and then pulled behind slow moving pickup trucks down highway 49 in North Carolina, on their way to being graded and weighed at area processing plants. The bigger and bottom-most leaves may be picked in mid summer but the harvest begins in earnest in late August and into September. During this latter period the roads are littered with tobacco leaves and suggest a time gone by unaffected by a hundred years of progress and all things modern.
There is a well maintained family cemetery less than a mile behind the house I have been working on, through thick hardwood forests cut here and there with footpaths opening onto tobacco or corn or soybean fields, ponds with forgotten bass and bream, and the occasional sagging barn and farmhouse, and in the cemetery is the remains of a man who in the mid nineteenth century was an area "Negro speculator," which to my imperfect understanding means he acquired and then resold slaves as a profitable business. He and other landowners in the area are commemorated for their years of hard work and sizable real estate holdings by having most of the area's back roads named after them, and many are also remembered, with surprising detail, by recorded slave narratives. Slaves, some one hundred years old, interviewed in the 1930s and 40s, offer a remarkable insight into a time that for some people is surely looked back to as a "good ole day" and to others is seen as a time of unimaginable horror. The slave narratives are as interesting for their kind memories as they are for the evil retold. There was it seems always a good man or woman doing battle with the bad. Which is not meant as an overly simplified blanket of forgiveness for badness but just to suggest that there have always been people willing to stand up and fight the good fight. And that nothing is hopeless.
Not without my good friend Doubt but feeling ok, perhaps even full of myself, pulling away from the end of the dead end road and the property almost entirely detail-cleaned of it's momentous yard garbage--garbage spread and in some cases buried over one-third of the two and a half acres, and taking in the house prepped and scraped and primed and double-coated with fresh paint, inside and out, and even allowing for its persistent appearance of lower, working-class dowdiness, which cannot be cured with paint or new roof or new central air and heating system, or refinished wood floors, new linoleum, new second hand appliances, some repaired plumbing and electric, the new coat of varnish on kitchen cabinets or even the new shelving paper on every cabinet shelf and in every drawer, I am still driving away with a sense of pride, which has been long in coming and is a pretty fair distance away from the palpable shame and I dare-say horror I experienced pulling up to the property two years ago, after ignoring it for every bit of fifteen years.
Knowing that this is but my penultimate exit, that I will be back for a final go over, I turn left from gravel onto the paved highway 49, away from that family cemetery behind me, and I begin passing tobacco fields with large clusters of Mexican workers. I wave to them and see them in my rear view mirror turning to see who it was waving and perhaps wondering could I be the better employer (or who knows, employee) sometime down the road. The heat had broken a few days previous and the red dirt and green/yellowing tobacco and blue sky is not mired by the haze of superheated wet air and the view is crisp and clean. I look at a variety of weeds growing on both sides of the road and see possible dried flower arrangements.
Hey There
As August wears on Mr. BC's mom wonders what is wrong with that boy and his blog. Doesn't he have anything to say? He mumbles in response, no ma'am not really. She taps the table with her coffee mug and says I can't hear you, did you say something? No, I didn't. Well, what are you doing? I'm just looking at the shirts hanging in the closet. Why?
They are freshly laundered.
Is your arm broken?
Nope.
Tummy ache?
No.
Stub your toe?
I think not.
Lose your rhyme and reason?
Not really.
How about that swine flu?
Yeah, it's really something.
Are you still feeling remorse over that mole you shot with the bb gun at Lake O' the Pines?
I think about it from time to time.
How long ago was that, must be...?
About 40 years ago.
Think maybe you should move on, get over that?
I am going to work it out very soon.
Well don't wait too long.
I am in North Carolina, getting ready to go to the Duke Medical Center for a routine follow up for that kidney stone I passed a few weeks ago. Then I have to go order some roofing supplies and set up a delivery for next week because I got a guy who said he can put a new roof on this rental house I have been puttering around with over the last year. I finally got my passport in order and am going to Italy for two weeks in September. I have never been to Europe or any other place that requires a passport. I lost my previous passport thirty years ago and never got around to getting another one. My last trip to Europe in 1980 ended after hitchhiking from Austin to the Dallas airport where I lost my non-refundable one way standby ticket to London. I had 200 dollars in cash and a belief in adventure. Some have argued it was probably better that I lost that ticket, others have suggested that I lost it on purpose, and still others have implied that maybe the hand of God reached down and swiped the ticket, which was bookmarking my place in The World According to Garp. I had only been out of the bathroom for a few minutes when I realized I had left the book there and when I went back it was gone. My attempts to retrieve it proved fruitless. I was nineteen or barely twenty and the drinking age in Texas at that time was 18 so I went to the airport bar and had three shots of tequila, then phoned a friend who picked me up and let me spend the night at her mother's house, because I hadn't really told my own mother that I was in town, much less that I was going to Europe one way. I told her about it later though. Boy, I used to put some worry on that woman. You can't really blame me for her gray hairs though, because as you know she was pretty much gone gray when she had me, and certainly was by the time you met her, five years after she brought me into this.
Sometime this year I have to get to New Orleans and do a little maintenance on my house there but I haven't figure out exactly when that will be. In the meantime I'm finishing up this NC house and acting as absentee manager of your son's weekend property in the Shenandoah foothills of Virginia. And slowly, ever so slowly I am gravitating towards New York to spend more time with my sweetheart, Bernadette. We both occasionally wonder how that's going to work as one of us is pigheaded and the other muleheaded. I'm not sure which of us is which but in the end I will be whichever one she tells me to be. Give my regards to the Mister, hope you are both doing well. jml.
As August wears on Mr. BC's mom wonders what is wrong with that boy and his blog. Doesn't he have anything to say? He mumbles in response, no ma'am not really. She taps the table with her coffee mug and says I can't hear you, did you say something? No, I didn't. Well, what are you doing? I'm just looking at the shirts hanging in the closet. Why?
They are freshly laundered.
Is your arm broken?
Nope.
Tummy ache?
No.
Stub your toe?
I think not.
Lose your rhyme and reason?
Not really.
How about that swine flu?
Yeah, it's really something.
Are you still feeling remorse over that mole you shot with the bb gun at Lake O' the Pines?
I think about it from time to time.
How long ago was that, must be...?
About 40 years ago.
Think maybe you should move on, get over that?
I am going to work it out very soon.
Well don't wait too long.
I am in North Carolina, getting ready to go to the Duke Medical Center for a routine follow up for that kidney stone I passed a few weeks ago. Then I have to go order some roofing supplies and set up a delivery for next week because I got a guy who said he can put a new roof on this rental house I have been puttering around with over the last year. I finally got my passport in order and am going to Italy for two weeks in September. I have never been to Europe or any other place that requires a passport. I lost my previous passport thirty years ago and never got around to getting another one. My last trip to Europe in 1980 ended after hitchhiking from Austin to the Dallas airport where I lost my non-refundable one way standby ticket to London. I had 200 dollars in cash and a belief in adventure. Some have argued it was probably better that I lost that ticket, others have suggested that I lost it on purpose, and still others have implied that maybe the hand of God reached down and swiped the ticket, which was bookmarking my place in The World According to Garp. I had only been out of the bathroom for a few minutes when I realized I had left the book there and when I went back it was gone. My attempts to retrieve it proved fruitless. I was nineteen or barely twenty and the drinking age in Texas at that time was 18 so I went to the airport bar and had three shots of tequila, then phoned a friend who picked me up and let me spend the night at her mother's house, because I hadn't really told my own mother that I was in town, much less that I was going to Europe one way. I told her about it later though. Boy, I used to put some worry on that woman. You can't really blame me for her gray hairs though, because as you know she was pretty much gone gray when she had me, and certainly was by the time you met her, five years after she brought me into this.
Sometime this year I have to get to New Orleans and do a little maintenance on my house there but I haven't figure out exactly when that will be. In the meantime I'm finishing up this NC house and acting as absentee manager of your son's weekend property in the Shenandoah foothills of Virginia. And slowly, ever so slowly I am gravitating towards New York to spend more time with my sweetheart, Bernadette. We both occasionally wonder how that's going to work as one of us is pigheaded and the other muleheaded. I'm not sure which of us is which but in the end I will be whichever one she tells me to be. Give my regards to the Mister, hope you are both doing well. jml.
Life: Scene 2, Take 1 Or 2
It's sad really only if you think it is, the image of a man standing in front of a pedestal sink, pushed up a little on the balls of his feet and leaning forward so that his penis, held lovingly in his hands, will clear the ceramic edge, him searching expectantly the flow of urine into a screened funnel for foreign treasure. Like panning for gold he picks through the paltry particles remaining on top of the fine mesh with a sliver of oak shaved from a scrap plank. "Is that a speck of dried blood?" he wonders aloud as he picks it out and sticks it to the side of a plastic specimen bottle. Hardly seems possible that it could be dried blood but it's dark and the doctor had said there was blood in his urine. He harkens back to his days as a junior hobo when in San Francisco a thorazine carrying Vietnam Vet was trying to school him on how to cheat the government out of assistance dollars. "The surest way to get disability dollars is to prick your finger and put a drop of blood in your urine specimen bottle." At the time he was just a middle class kid, dropped out from college, trying to travel on the cheap, and he had opted for the less deceitful and smaller payoff of the Mission District blood bank.
In the present he spies another minute specimen resting on top of the mesh and picking it out with the sharp oak point it appears gelatinous, with a fine thread of a tail and he wonders if it could be his unborn son. Can sperm be in your urine? It seemed plausible but as he had not had sex, or masturbated in...?...well, too long, it seemed not so likely. But what did he know about it? A screened funnel, a sliver of oak, and a specimen bottle does not a doctor make.
The first day he thought it was just food poisoning. The second day, with only two hours of severe pain, seemed an improvement and reaffirmed his food poisoning theory. The third day, with two separate pain sessions lasting multiple hours, he began to worry, and while not exactly hallucinating, his world view, small as it was inside the nearly finished 800 square foot renovated rental project, changed, and his vision became sharper and his sense of smell was registering every drop of mouse urine in the house. Later when he saw the mouse poke it's head up through a hole in the floor (holes a past renter had drilled to run extension cords or speaker wires), he threw a water bottle at it and then positioned a paint can over the hole. And cans of stain over three similar sized holes in other rooms. He made a mental note to plug the holes, as he should have done when he refinished the floors. On the fourth day, which started at 4 in the morning, for now his days were measured only by the onset of pain, he started to worry in earnest and began plotting out a trip to a doctor. By eight the pain had subsided enough that he thought he could drive without blacking out and crashing into a tobacco barn and he set off for the thirty mile drive south, the tobacco fields along the way showing mature crops with bottom leaves yellowing.
He signed in, and waited. There was a woman with a walker in the waiting room, who looked like Whitney Houston, and he wondered momentarily if she had indeed fallen this far. It made him sad to think so. After an hour the pain had come back and he prayed it would not come on full strength because he did not want to moan, or get on all fours, or lay on his back with legs up to his chest, or pace restlessly about the office, or perform any of the other unsuccessful pain management techniques he had tried over the last four days. He opted for an exaggeratedly upright posture with one fist clenched tightly on a rigid arm positioned slightly behind him on the seat. He kept his eyes averted and hoped the little Samoan boy with mother, father and grandmother in tow, would not engage him. The kid was all over the waiting room, pulling on pictures and rolling on the floor, generally seeming way too happy to be sick enough for a doctor's visit. The boy did start crying when his father carried him back to a doctor and the man unfairly took some pleasure in this.
His name was called after about an hour and he was elated but hoped his pants didn't fall down because he had unbuttoned them at some point in one of his attempts at relieving the pain. But it was just for temperature and blood pressure and basic questioning by nurses that he had been called back, and then he was sent out to the waiting room again. One of the questions was on the one to ten scale how would he rate the pain and misconstruing the meaning, thinking they meant relative to what he could conceive and not relative to what he had ever experienced, he said six. Over the next twenty minutes back in the waiting room he realized the more likely meaning of the question so when he eventually did see a doctor he said ten. Later, in the parking lot outside the pharmacist's office, while popping one non-narcotic and one narcotic pain killer, he remembered the time the top half of a faulty 24 foot extension ladder had broken free and slid in free fall to connect with his upright thumb, and amended the pain he felt now to a 9.5.
What the doctor had said was "welcome to the world of kidney stones."
It's sad really only if you think it is, the image of a man standing in front of a pedestal sink, pushed up a little on the balls of his feet and leaning forward so that his penis, held lovingly in his hands, will clear the ceramic edge, him searching expectantly the flow of urine into a screened funnel for foreign treasure. Like panning for gold he picks through the paltry particles remaining on top of the fine mesh with a sliver of oak shaved from a scrap plank. "Is that a speck of dried blood?" he wonders aloud as he picks it out and sticks it to the side of a plastic specimen bottle. Hardly seems possible that it could be dried blood but it's dark and the doctor had said there was blood in his urine. He harkens back to his days as a junior hobo when in San Francisco a thorazine carrying Vietnam Vet was trying to school him on how to cheat the government out of assistance dollars. "The surest way to get disability dollars is to prick your finger and put a drop of blood in your urine specimen bottle." At the time he was just a middle class kid, dropped out from college, trying to travel on the cheap, and he had opted for the less deceitful and smaller payoff of the Mission District blood bank.
In the present he spies another minute specimen resting on top of the mesh and picking it out with the sharp oak point it appears gelatinous, with a fine thread of a tail and he wonders if it could be his unborn son. Can sperm be in your urine? It seemed plausible but as he had not had sex, or masturbated in...?...well, too long, it seemed not so likely. But what did he know about it? A screened funnel, a sliver of oak, and a specimen bottle does not a doctor make.
The first day he thought it was just food poisoning. The second day, with only two hours of severe pain, seemed an improvement and reaffirmed his food poisoning theory. The third day, with two separate pain sessions lasting multiple hours, he began to worry, and while not exactly hallucinating, his world view, small as it was inside the nearly finished 800 square foot renovated rental project, changed, and his vision became sharper and his sense of smell was registering every drop of mouse urine in the house. Later when he saw the mouse poke it's head up through a hole in the floor (holes a past renter had drilled to run extension cords or speaker wires), he threw a water bottle at it and then positioned a paint can over the hole. And cans of stain over three similar sized holes in other rooms. He made a mental note to plug the holes, as he should have done when he refinished the floors. On the fourth day, which started at 4 in the morning, for now his days were measured only by the onset of pain, he started to worry in earnest and began plotting out a trip to a doctor. By eight the pain had subsided enough that he thought he could drive without blacking out and crashing into a tobacco barn and he set off for the thirty mile drive south, the tobacco fields along the way showing mature crops with bottom leaves yellowing.
He signed in, and waited. There was a woman with a walker in the waiting room, who looked like Whitney Houston, and he wondered momentarily if she had indeed fallen this far. It made him sad to think so. After an hour the pain had come back and he prayed it would not come on full strength because he did not want to moan, or get on all fours, or lay on his back with legs up to his chest, or pace restlessly about the office, or perform any of the other unsuccessful pain management techniques he had tried over the last four days. He opted for an exaggeratedly upright posture with one fist clenched tightly on a rigid arm positioned slightly behind him on the seat. He kept his eyes averted and hoped the little Samoan boy with mother, father and grandmother in tow, would not engage him. The kid was all over the waiting room, pulling on pictures and rolling on the floor, generally seeming way too happy to be sick enough for a doctor's visit. The boy did start crying when his father carried him back to a doctor and the man unfairly took some pleasure in this.
His name was called after about an hour and he was elated but hoped his pants didn't fall down because he had unbuttoned them at some point in one of his attempts at relieving the pain. But it was just for temperature and blood pressure and basic questioning by nurses that he had been called back, and then he was sent out to the waiting room again. One of the questions was on the one to ten scale how would he rate the pain and misconstruing the meaning, thinking they meant relative to what he could conceive and not relative to what he had ever experienced, he said six. Over the next twenty minutes back in the waiting room he realized the more likely meaning of the question so when he eventually did see a doctor he said ten. Later, in the parking lot outside the pharmacist's office, while popping one non-narcotic and one narcotic pain killer, he remembered the time the top half of a faulty 24 foot extension ladder had broken free and slid in free fall to connect with his upright thumb, and amended the pain he felt now to a 9.5.
What the doctor had said was "welcome to the world of kidney stones."
Life: Scene 1, Take 31
On the edge of the deep woods he bent forward at the waist and crushed with his palm the swollen mosquito feeding on his shinbone. Then he ran a dirty fingernail across the bone, etching a white line in his freckled, marginally tan skin. There was a bite on his right index finger as well, and one on his calf and one on the other shinbone and... the itching seemed to spread, he was after-all on the edge of the deep woods. From the recently cleaned kitchen window these woods looked so enticingly green and cool and inviting but up close the garbage still peeked out from under dry leaves and the bugs bit and the snakes alerted by his rake slowly slithered under twigs and leaves. The finely woven spider webs stretched across impossible distances, visible only when the sun hit them just so, and these he swiped away when they limited his progress, wondering to which part of his body the spider escaped while he picked the webbing from his eyelashes.
It was not wrong what some said, that he could have cleaned up this property in a day, surely he could have with more money and manpower and tow trucks and blow torches. And a burn pile four stories high. And a work ethic not so limited as was his by daydreaming. No, he took his own time about things and now, a year after beginning, with a good bit of progress made, he still saw things not exactly as he wished them to be. This was not the first shithole he had cleaned up and he knew that over time hidden garbage seeped up from the ground and leaves decomposed exposing that which one had missed the first time around. His attention to the detail was borne less from a fastidious nature and more from a desire to lead by example. If the future renters saw even remnants of the past renter's momentous garbage, they might be tempted to be less than tidy their own-selves. This theory was flawed of course by the fact that the past renter had been given a pretty clean property to begin with and had over the course of many years just added a junk car here, a bass boat full of beer cans there.
Well, he was going to be more careful and attentive this time around. He would not go 14 years without taking so much as a peek at the property. Fourteen years, my God, what had he been doing that was so important he couldn't glance in once in awhile? He started thinking about it and it seemed that past happy times were getting squashed by the unhappy ones and that apparently he was even judging as premium the harsher experiences, possibly based on the simple fact that he had survived them and survival was something deemed universally good. Or was he just distrustful of happiness? Anyhow, it seemed a tricky business this judging the value of days spent and this defining of happiness, so he just stopped thinking about it. There had to be a limit to introspection, didn't there? But he couldn't just shut it off entirely so he imagined one last thing on the subject and that was an imaginary tombstone (although he had just sold off to a brother for $500 dollars his rights to a family burial plot) which read--I cried, I laughed, I cried again, and then I died. But that had his life summed up by crying twice as much as he laughed and that seemed wrong, and he began remembering his laughter, and it seemed more than sufficient. So he made in his mind a new tombstone which read--My laughter was sufficient, my crying necessary, may I now please rest in peace. Or--I cried until I laughed and some years later I died. As for my accomplishments, think of me when you dust.
He had come inside to do all this thinking. After putting into the blender a half cup of frozen blueberries, and slicing into pieces one frozen banana, and 4 large frozen strawberries and adding some apple juice and blending it all up. He looked back out that window, which was so clean now after having been for so long coated with oily cooking grime, and looking back out to that spot where he had been working it looked, again, cool and clean and green. But he knew that only the green part was accurate and just as surely he knew that he wouldn't go back out there until later, when the sun was getting very low in the sky and casting beams through the trees, which would make his life seem more like a well directed film than a haphazardly shot home movie. He would against his will spray his body with chemical repellant and make another go at it and be happy about the lighting if not the chore and the smell of his skin. He would accomplish this one little thing today while spying all about him so many other things that needed doing. He would treat the chores as equals until they were done and then he would find something else to do, somewhere else.
On the edge of the deep woods he bent forward at the waist and crushed with his palm the swollen mosquito feeding on his shinbone. Then he ran a dirty fingernail across the bone, etching a white line in his freckled, marginally tan skin. There was a bite on his right index finger as well, and one on his calf and one on the other shinbone and... the itching seemed to spread, he was after-all on the edge of the deep woods. From the recently cleaned kitchen window these woods looked so enticingly green and cool and inviting but up close the garbage still peeked out from under dry leaves and the bugs bit and the snakes alerted by his rake slowly slithered under twigs and leaves. The finely woven spider webs stretched across impossible distances, visible only when the sun hit them just so, and these he swiped away when they limited his progress, wondering to which part of his body the spider escaped while he picked the webbing from his eyelashes.
It was not wrong what some said, that he could have cleaned up this property in a day, surely he could have with more money and manpower and tow trucks and blow torches. And a burn pile four stories high. And a work ethic not so limited as was his by daydreaming. No, he took his own time about things and now, a year after beginning, with a good bit of progress made, he still saw things not exactly as he wished them to be. This was not the first shithole he had cleaned up and he knew that over time hidden garbage seeped up from the ground and leaves decomposed exposing that which one had missed the first time around. His attention to the detail was borne less from a fastidious nature and more from a desire to lead by example. If the future renters saw even remnants of the past renter's momentous garbage, they might be tempted to be less than tidy their own-selves. This theory was flawed of course by the fact that the past renter had been given a pretty clean property to begin with and had over the course of many years just added a junk car here, a bass boat full of beer cans there.
Well, he was going to be more careful and attentive this time around. He would not go 14 years without taking so much as a peek at the property. Fourteen years, my God, what had he been doing that was so important he couldn't glance in once in awhile? He started thinking about it and it seemed that past happy times were getting squashed by the unhappy ones and that apparently he was even judging as premium the harsher experiences, possibly based on the simple fact that he had survived them and survival was something deemed universally good. Or was he just distrustful of happiness? Anyhow, it seemed a tricky business this judging the value of days spent and this defining of happiness, so he just stopped thinking about it. There had to be a limit to introspection, didn't there? But he couldn't just shut it off entirely so he imagined one last thing on the subject and that was an imaginary tombstone (although he had just sold off to a brother for $500 dollars his rights to a family burial plot) which read--I cried, I laughed, I cried again, and then I died. But that had his life summed up by crying twice as much as he laughed and that seemed wrong, and he began remembering his laughter, and it seemed more than sufficient. So he made in his mind a new tombstone which read--My laughter was sufficient, my crying necessary, may I now please rest in peace. Or--I cried until I laughed and some years later I died. As for my accomplishments, think of me when you dust.
He had come inside to do all this thinking. After putting into the blender a half cup of frozen blueberries, and slicing into pieces one frozen banana, and 4 large frozen strawberries and adding some apple juice and blending it all up. He looked back out that window, which was so clean now after having been for so long coated with oily cooking grime, and looking back out to that spot where he had been working it looked, again, cool and clean and green. But he knew that only the green part was accurate and just as surely he knew that he wouldn't go back out there until later, when the sun was getting very low in the sky and casting beams through the trees, which would make his life seem more like a well directed film than a haphazardly shot home movie. He would against his will spray his body with chemical repellant and make another go at it and be happy about the lighting if not the chore and the smell of his skin. He would accomplish this one little thing today while spying all about him so many other things that needed doing. He would treat the chores as equals until they were done and then he would find something else to do, somewhere else.
The Ballad Of Timmy Meecum
Said Jolene, "no silly, while that dog vomit may be disgusting, it's no fungus."
"Is it physarum polycephalum?" exploded Ramen with querulous excitement.
"And yet 'fungus-like' surely you must admit," asserted Bill Macy, ignoring the patently absurd Ramen.
Squinting, with one eye closed and the other looking sideways at Bill Macy, Ramen shot back, "I think it's physarum polycephalum, don't you Jolene?"
"More likely fuligo septica. I mean texturally speaking it's not really a question, although I will grant to an untrained casual observer it might be mistaken for a polycephalum." For Bill Macy, taunting Ramen was not so much a sport but a child's game. Tiddlywinks if he were forced to put a name to it.
"Heh, she said 'dog vomit,'" snorted Timmy Meecum from the back row.
Said Jolene, "no silly, while that dog vomit may be disgusting, it's no fungus."
"Is it physarum polycephalum?" exploded Ramen with querulous excitement.
"And yet 'fungus-like' surely you must admit," asserted Bill Macy, ignoring the patently absurd Ramen.
Squinting, with one eye closed and the other looking sideways at Bill Macy, Ramen shot back, "I think it's physarum polycephalum, don't you Jolene?"
"More likely fuligo septica. I mean texturally speaking it's not really a question, although I will grant to an untrained casual observer it might be mistaken for a polycephalum." For Bill Macy, taunting Ramen was not so much a sport but a child's game. Tiddlywinks if he were forced to put a name to it.
"Heh, she said 'dog vomit,'" snorted Timmy Meecum from the back row.
The Comfort Of An Acronym
I looked out just now and all I could see was a little baby rabbit under the pine tree, hopping out towards the hay fields. I did not see the other thing but know it is out there. It was in the front yard this morning walking in circles and except for emaciation and rib protrusion was showing most all the signs of a progressive neurological disease, although one not yet reported in this state. I took some up close photos and it's not pretty. And it wouldn't run away which was perhaps the scariest thing. Wild animals should run away when you get close. I didn't get too close though, that's what the zoom lens is for. After I got a local government official on the phone, who gave me a number for a wildlife biologist I might like to call on Monday, and told me also that there was up to this point in time not a single reported case of CWD in Virginia, I felt a little better. But not that much better because something is very wrong with that deer. I got up enough courage to blow up the photos a little and it could be that the deer was shot in the face and is just suffering from that. There is though so much to look at in the photos that it's hard to tell. The head is coated with flies, as is the left flank. The ears are thickly dotted with both flies and swollen ticks. I have a gun and could kill the deer and take it to the burn pile and set it all on fire but without a front end loader the scooping up of a potentially diseased deer is difficult. On farms, when large livestock dies and burning is impractical the front end loader is also useful for digging the hole to bury the dead animal. I've seen a pickup truck drag a dead cow with a heavy chain around its neck down a gravel road in Texas to...I'm not sure where he was taking it but what he was doing, unpleasant though it may seem, was taking care of business.
Well, just in case it is CWD the state requests that you do nothing until you contact them to check it out. They don't want you to kill it. Which lets me off that hook, I'm frankly not keen on killing, although as I understand it, you can develop a knack for it.
What are the chances that during those hours I wasn't paying attention, between the time when I saw it this late morning, acting in erratic fashion, and this early evening when I noticed all my roses eaten, that it had come within five feet of my living space and munched and drooled and pissed and left behind a few flies and tics? I would say about 93 percent.
Really, is it any wonder people have nightmares? I've been wondering lately about post traumatic stress disorder. Partly about how nice it is to have a name for something which on the surface might appear, to the casual observer, as simply bad manners, and partly wondering how many people could be suffering from it just by nature of their environment? Worldwide for sure but I'm mostly meaning in these United States.
Deer and Elk have the acronym CWD to cover them in the event they start acting really weird. The downside to some of the acronyms is that they lead to slow and horrible death. Oh, I should have told you this by now that CWD stands for Chronic Wasting Disease. It would appear there is no sensitivity training for the disease naming committees of non-sentient creatures.
I don't know what else to tell you. I've brought my cat inside and locked up her cat window. I've washed my feet and (dammit to hell) put on shoes when I leave the house. I extracted that deer tick a few minutes ago and am feeling fine about it. The thing about nature is that while it is sometimes pretty, it is also sometimes not. Not pretty can be good though, we would have no extraordinary art and literature without it, so in the end what we have, what we always have, is win win. Does this screen look blurry to you?
I looked out just now and all I could see was a little baby rabbit under the pine tree, hopping out towards the hay fields. I did not see the other thing but know it is out there. It was in the front yard this morning walking in circles and except for emaciation and rib protrusion was showing most all the signs of a progressive neurological disease, although one not yet reported in this state. I took some up close photos and it's not pretty. And it wouldn't run away which was perhaps the scariest thing. Wild animals should run away when you get close. I didn't get too close though, that's what the zoom lens is for. After I got a local government official on the phone, who gave me a number for a wildlife biologist I might like to call on Monday, and told me also that there was up to this point in time not a single reported case of CWD in Virginia, I felt a little better. But not that much better because something is very wrong with that deer. I got up enough courage to blow up the photos a little and it could be that the deer was shot in the face and is just suffering from that. There is though so much to look at in the photos that it's hard to tell. The head is coated with flies, as is the left flank. The ears are thickly dotted with both flies and swollen ticks. I have a gun and could kill the deer and take it to the burn pile and set it all on fire but without a front end loader the scooping up of a potentially diseased deer is difficult. On farms, when large livestock dies and burning is impractical the front end loader is also useful for digging the hole to bury the dead animal. I've seen a pickup truck drag a dead cow with a heavy chain around its neck down a gravel road in Texas to...I'm not sure where he was taking it but what he was doing, unpleasant though it may seem, was taking care of business.
Well, just in case it is CWD the state requests that you do nothing until you contact them to check it out. They don't want you to kill it. Which lets me off that hook, I'm frankly not keen on killing, although as I understand it, you can develop a knack for it.
What are the chances that during those hours I wasn't paying attention, between the time when I saw it this late morning, acting in erratic fashion, and this early evening when I noticed all my roses eaten, that it had come within five feet of my living space and munched and drooled and pissed and left behind a few flies and tics? I would say about 93 percent.
Really, is it any wonder people have nightmares? I've been wondering lately about post traumatic stress disorder. Partly about how nice it is to have a name for something which on the surface might appear, to the casual observer, as simply bad manners, and partly wondering how many people could be suffering from it just by nature of their environment? Worldwide for sure but I'm mostly meaning in these United States.
Deer and Elk have the acronym CWD to cover them in the event they start acting really weird. The downside to some of the acronyms is that they lead to slow and horrible death. Oh, I should have told you this by now that CWD stands for Chronic Wasting Disease. It would appear there is no sensitivity training for the disease naming committees of non-sentient creatures.
I don't know what else to tell you. I've brought my cat inside and locked up her cat window. I've washed my feet and (dammit to hell) put on shoes when I leave the house. I extracted that deer tick a few minutes ago and am feeling fine about it. The thing about nature is that while it is sometimes pretty, it is also sometimes not. Not pretty can be good though, we would have no extraordinary art and literature without it, so in the end what we have, what we always have, is win win. Does this screen look blurry to you?
