View current page
...more recent posts
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.