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Eat, Deer
The people down the hill got some Adirondack chairs facing up this way which gives me a small sense of grandiosity, on site caretaker and single most occupier of this land that I am. I heard them speak once, at a local public forum, and they expressed their feelings of reverence for this hill and the low rising mountains behind it and I had to wonder were there people who get out less than I do. Not that the scenery is not nice but for mountain scenery in this area there is nicer. Or I may just be used to it. Two years ago after leaving New Orleans and driving 19 hours to get here I was myself somewhat overwhelmed by the scene of this place, and shortly after pulling through the gates and past the hand painted sign which implied this property to be something like that plantation in Gone with the Wind, I burst out laughing. Not in the funny, ha-ha sort of way but in the hysterical no one is stopping me and throwing me up against the police car sort of way. Because people like me don't occupy places like this.
In addition to feeling grandiose I feel annoyed, although you can call it paranoid, or some other common psychological problem, because the chairs make me feel onstage when I move about the place doing my chores. This feeling is much the same as my early-on problem with the 19th century bell tower (of what is now a baptist church) that rises high enough to be not only a very pretty site for me to look at but also gives the person up in there with binoculars full view of me and my rather skeletal morphology while I work or laze about the pool. Even though every time I use my own binoculars to look up into the bell tower, there is no one there with binoculars looking back at me. I think I am at a stage close to having worked through this problem of self- consciousness regarding people in bell towers with binoculars.
Yesterday I was down by the pond shoveling hardwood mulch into the back of a small four-wheel drive vehicle and everybody that passed by on the road waved at me. I have never before been waved at by attractive women in BMW's. And then I looked up and a church lady in a beater Chevy waves and smiles and I can only assume there is occurring some sort of celestial aligning that has people of all different socioeconomic persuasions being nice to each other.
Deer are eating my sunflowers and maybe too my young string bean plants but the deer were here first and I knew that place I put the garden was one of their main hangouts so whatever happens I will just try to be happy about, or, if I can't make lemonade out of lemons perhaps I will make deer sausage.
I am becoming a little smarter about poison ivy but still get regular attacks of it.
One of the women at the local art gallery/video store lets me spew ridiculous and perhaps in her subtle way encourages it and so I was being sort of full of myself and two more locals in the store said "who are you?" and then I told them, so I met two more people and am becoming quite the social butterfly. One woman was getting Meet the Fockers for her husband and I said oh my god that was the worst movie I have seen this year and she put it back and got something else. But then after she left I was shown some of the husband's artwork (sort of Bosch meets the California Raisins), there be beau coup artists hiding out here, and I felt that someone who can create such work as he should be allowed to watch whatever he damn well pleases, so I hope he gets to watch that movie, soon, and bears me no ill will for my temporary preventing of him seeing it when he wanted to. I myself got Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and consider it now my favorite Wes Anderson flick.
By the way, for my ten or twelve regular readers, if you don't want to check the site and be pissed off that I haven't posted for awhile you can thanks to the genius of our webmaster be alerted by email when I post something new. I will leave it to you to figure out how to do that. I'm going to copy this to a small device and take it up to the bighouse and post it now. I had high hopes for those sunflowers but deer gotta eat too.
Burgers And Beer
Lorina and I not having anything thawed and at least pretending budgetary constraints, belabored over what to eat for dinner. We have this 20 dollar for two rule we are trying out but beyond fast food that is a pretty tough constraint and on top of that the nearest fast food is almost twenty miles away, which could easily be considered a good thing, except when you are really hungry and tired and don't want the extra labor of cooking and cleaning up added to your day.
It was going to be my birthday soon so I said hey its going to be my birthday soon, we can go to that quaint little place with the outdoor seating and occasional septic overflow and have a hopefully juicy burger and two pints of stout a piece for about 20 dollars for each of us and even though that's twice over the budget, let's just live.
So we agreed on that and Lorina takes the scenic route up Fodderstack Rd. and I collar the first waitress I see in the bar and say, we can sit outside? and she says sure, but it's a little cold. We brought jackets, I say self-assuredly and with some pride, even though my jacket is a wreck, and I'm in dirty work clothes. "It's a little cold" turned out to be a euphemism for there is occasional septic overflow and depending on prevailing winds you might spend part of your meal thinking about dogshit.
It's hard getting me out sometimes because of my questionable feelings about larger congregations of humanity and I know in this tiny area the chances of running into someone we know is large and even though I haven't really met a bucketful of people I enjoy sharing Lorina with I accept the necessity of occasionally relating to people and being personable, which is a thing I am capable of and not all that shitty at, if not exactly drawn towards. So, I know we are going to run into somebody before we even go and I have factored that in to my wholehearted decision to go out and spend money we don't have on burgers that are adequate but not great and draft pints of Guinness (not that goddamned 11.2 ounce bottle) which are great, always great, just great. Where would any of us be without Guinness (although I have started drinking budweiser again as a mainstay of the budget.)
I know budgetary talk is less preferable than walking barefoot on rusty nails. You won't hear another word about it from me.
I was 24 hours recovered from my back pain medication abuse and had a hazy feeling affecting me not so distinctly that you would see a difference, if already you knew me. I hungrily devoured (Guinness qualifies as food) my first pint, only slowing down for the last few sips because I saw that Lorina was barely one sip into hers. She was facing the prevailing breeze and so was for the first few minutes distracted by a smell she thought was dogshit, and that apparently kept her thirst at bay.
We have, her and I, on a few occasions, driven to this town forty miles away, for Mexican food. We like it better than the 16 mile choice or the 22 mile choice, and the six mile choice went belly up, twice, because it sucked, both times. The last time we drove the forty miles, someone Lorina knew from our area was there, used to date the waitress he did, but on that day was content to plop down and regale us with his totally not uninteresting pursuits which nonetheless suffered from the overeagerness of his delivery, and that one unfortunate image seemingly derivative of a very popular yet somewhat shallow Leonardo di Caprio flick. We get plenty plenty of time alone Lorina and I do but still I can't seem to be sated by it and so I was a little put out by the intrusion but not overly so. Afterall, no man is an island, and equally possible is that no two people are a peninsula. We had a nice day together.
Back at the quaint place with occasional septic overflow it's the same guy who shows up and sits himself down summarily without an invite, although of course he was welcome. I mean that sincerely. But he appeared to be a few pints of lager ahead of my stout consumption, and, don't forget my residual drug hangover. And he went on and on and on, with equal or greater enthusiasm than he had showed interrupting our Mexican date. After he left, Lorina said I was dismissive of him, and I agreed with her about that, because that is exactly how I did feel after realizing his intention was not to have an interesting and lively three way discussion but rather to bogart my girlfriend with a version of himself that sounded pleasing, with occasional glances in my direction. The irony of "a version of himself that sounded pleasing..." is not lost on me, selective chronicler that I am.
He did get up and leave though, and so abruptly, that I was momentarily ashamed of my lack of embrace.
But shame, I think, is a thing of questionable value. If it spurs you on to greater performance then let's call it a good thing, but if, for example, you are a person who already helps many people, and you are visiting relatives who are economically less fortunate, and for no reason, let's just say I am with you, a last minute addition to your plans, and you are flying us around on a private jet, changing and arranging flights as your whim dictates, on a Blackberry, while being chauffeured, even if only by me, and you start feeling the weight of a trailer home juxtaposed against that jet meeting us late on a small strip miles from nowhere, rest assured that the reason I'm telling you not to dwell in guilt is not because I am the current benefactor of your graciousness but because I study that on an off day you do more for more people than any of the complainers who would have the leisure of time to suggest that your affluence is somehow wrong, or bad, or unnecessary.
At the outside table the wind blew fortuitously, Lorina's eyes gleamed, the yuppie man talking loudly about his wife's bowel movements was testament to the imperfection just under the surface of even the best moments.
Jetlag
I got another little crappy detail delivered to me by mail and it went a pretty good way towards harshing the mellow I had arrived at by a day of sustained manual labor and three budweisers. Put in its proper perspective it is a harmless detail and I will try to treat it is as such. And even though Lorina warned me of frost I chose to accept Weatherbug’s incorrect version of the morning temp and got light frost on my baby plants and so today am also expecting some disappointed news from Mother Nature in an enveloped marked “attrition,” with the body of the contents beginning—“Dear Sir, due to your abject carelessness with prescience, your flower account is being reduced by twenty percent.” I hope my surviving plants don’t hold against me my occasional ignorance and negligence towards them.
I still check up on New Orleans crime news and let me tell you people still living there that if you fear your sense of what it really looks like is being dulled by the relentless repetition of bad then I am here to tell you that from afar it looks really bad still and with no hint of cessation. And, as always, I only bring this up, I think, so as to offer a little contrast to the concept of New Orleans as an affected cutout called N’awlins, a happy happy party town. As for the children I used to know in those New Orleans killing fields, I don’t hear of them specifically anymore. I only hear of, through news reports, the continuing murders happening around them while they play in the streets (I feel certain the recent outlawing of street hoops in New Orleans will not be enough to make all the children disappear from those streets). I still aspire to and at the same time suffer from the desire to create in words a moderately accurate portrayal of a New Orleans youth from, for example, the Sixth Ward.
And this while I live as caretaker in relative opulence on 40 acres on the edge of a quaint and historic Virginia village populated by 186 people, where crime is only on TV, and not even there if you got a proper handle on your child rearin’.
Next thing you know I’ll be jumping on private jets to bop down to Texas to visit my mom for a day. How can anyone ever know what’s going to happen? And how do you keep from being perpetually dumbfounded?
Medication Road
I have always cautiously bragged that my back has held up pretty well to the strains put upon it so when recently I made an ordinary maneuver and my back went code red, which means it only hurts when I move, I was not so worried because I figured it would go away in short time. After a day, which is what I consider short time, and the pain was still there, I entered into the fortuitous convergence of my needing meds and actually coming upon them. A big man said, here, take these, only one knocked me out cold, so I took the whole bottle with me and drove back home. It can only be maturity that has me not popping them on the road as a late night driver.
When I got home I waited for a friend to come over but the friend had conflicting interests and so after a reasonable time of waiting I popped one. After more time I figured the friend's interest in coming over was more theoretical than actual so I popped a second one, deciding that consciousness is an overrated state, especially when you are alone and the night is well advanced. The two little pills made my back pain seem like something I had read about but never actually experienced.
In the morning I felt so stupid with pill haze yet still had pain in the lower back so I decided to write the whole day off to pill popping and bed rest. And anyway, it was raining a little so work on a metal roof seemed inadvisable. I dreamed about missles flying over America. I got out of bed in the evening and had a drink or two and that made me feel better than I could have imagined, because the prescription warned against alcohol mixing and the pills were stronger than other prescriptions with the same warning which I have summarily ignored. I then smoked a type of cigarette and arrived at a place that, although pleasant, seemed infused with too much knowledge of the artificiality of my agreeable state. I realized I only felt as good as I should feel, without meds.
So that's where I am now, on the road to wellness without meds. Of course, the road is long and the meds are many and although my back pain seems well removed I have received this morning a crick in my neck that makes me move stiff-looking, like I'm in a brace, so I'm not making comforting promises of abstinence to myself or any other fool.