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The Fishing Report
The inexorable cycle of life thought Caretaker. The nurturing, the murdering. He was up early on Tuesday having fallen asleep the previous day with still some light in the sky and an aluminum pipe in his mouth. Alzheimer's be damned. Honey is that you? Yes mom. Have you always been here? Got here yesterday mom. The grass would be wet with dew, this he knew without even leaving his bed, because he was a genius this Caretaker with regards to dampness and seasonal dew-points. He would use up the last of the fertilizer and hit those spots near the bighouse that were less than lush. And since he was up and moving around with barely a sun up to burn him he would also poison the weeds in the driveways and between the brick pavers at both houses.
While he did these things gnats hovered around his face and these gnats he was careful not to inhale, but this did not prevent one from flying onto the wetness of his eyeball and sticking there irritably. Honey is that you? Yes mom. Well its good you could come for a visit. Yeah mom, glad I could come.
Caretaker was now avoiding the hateful manual weed pulling between the 200 or so flat jagged rock pavers surrounding the pool. On his knees on a cushion, sitting yoga style, legs stretched in front, one knee up one folded underneath, a dip in the pool, it did not matter, it was hateful and slow. He used a butter knife as his digging tool. But he wasn't doing that now, he was instead thinking about the fishing he had done over the weekend and the unprecedented feeling of almost being sated by success. Over 5 different area ponds traveling around with Mowerman and sometimes his twin brother, which made things nosier, Caretaker had caught at least twenty small bass, a half dozen more that had thankfully unhooked themselves at the bank to save him the trouble, four nice sized bass, and one really nice sized one at a pond they had sneaked to through bramble and over a dry stacked rock wall, that Mowerman had fished growing up, with his dad, and considered his birthright. And no one messed with us which was giving Mowerman the courage to consider trespassing onto some other area ponds. Except for Kriegers pond because he was, quaint as it may sound, known for shooting at trespassers. No, he WILL shoot your ass Mowerman's twin brother reminded us more than once.
But this reminiscing was only one of the many techniques Caretaker had for avoiding hateful work so he had to be careful not to spend too much time on it. Weeds awaited. There would be some reward for the accomplishment, however temporary.
Poop On My Window
Caretaker was at the kitchen table breaking down his 525 Mag when a Brown Thrasher bullied by a Bluejay crashed into the window causing caretaker to cry out, ahh get out of there. A brown viscous drool of poop dripped from the Thrashers poop shoot and down the screen to which it was attached. Caretaker reached over and hit the window with his palm and the bird flew off crashing into the window over the kitchen sink and then to the unknown.
Caretaker had gone fishing at the pond that morning because it was a lot closer than the 4 hour drive to the nearest beach on which he wished to be fishing. Nothing hit his popper and nothing hit the spinner bait and when a small bass hit his plastic worm he thought oh boy game on but the bass spit the worm out and nothing hit the rest of his time out there. He watched his five new inherited Asian Carp, swept over from Sullivan's pond after the last flood. He had been looking for some grass eaters and now here they were, floating foreignly along the surface of a small pond inhabited by bass and bluegill and catfish, some frogs, some small turtles and one monster snapping turtle which before he left tugged the plastic worm off his hook.
He left the pond and explored the property on a cloudy damp day pausing momentarily to look happily at the blooming white azaleas which had never looked quite so good since their planting 5 years ago. Parking the ATV in his garage he saw his unpacked surf fishing gear still lying forlornly on the garage floor where he had left them after last weeks trip to the Outer Banks. So he picked up the Penn reel lying on one of his tackle bags and went to the kitchen table and took it apart and cleaned off the sand and salt which was making his drag sound crusty and greased the screws and put them back in while eating frozen pizza and when the timer went off he removed the chicken from the portable gas grill outside and put the whole chicken in a glass pan to cool on the kitchen counter because he wasn't that hungry having just eaten pizza and now he was staring out the window.
Vigilance The caretaker watered the lawn two ways. The second way was holding his thumb over the end of the garden hose and spritzing water over a 30 foot distance to wet the grass seed with mulch he had just sprinkled over that bald spot. His Jeep was parked on the lawn and he had not even noticed the realtors truck parked only 50 feet up the driveway. When the realtor and his female assistant stepped out on the front porch and alerted caretaker to their presence in the house he immediately wondered if they had seen him water the lawn the first way and while realtor prattled on about some damn thing caretaker was counting in his head the number of windows on that side of the house he had watered. Eight windows. This was a new era indeed when a man couldn't pull his pants down anywhere he wanted and water the grass anytime he wanted.
It was easy to sneak up on caretaker. He would not make a good spy or bodyguard or any of those characters he watched on programs via his computer that you couldn't sneak up on and were vigilant and could take a bullet in the first half of the show and be playing racquetball in the second half. HIs girlfriend, Bernadette, who lived in New York, 5 hours away, because that was as close as she could stand to be to him some of the time would come down to this barely southern barely farm and remove the hermetic from his lifestyle periodically and she could sneak up on him like it was nobody's business. He would often scream or gasp like a girl when she snuck up on him not that there's anything wrong with that. Bernadette had taken to various method's of announcing her presence while caretaker performed duties, he said duties, on property. The whistle followed by a hello, the bold hello, the quiet just stand there approach, but none of them worked and caretaker in the end was always snuck upon. Who can even guess into what depth he was immersed while being flanked? Refining the nuances between various cupcake recipes perhaps.
Caretaker remembered a contractor he once worked for in the New Orleans area who in mid conversation, outside on a job would quicker than you could react just open his fly and turning only slightly away empty his bladder onto the dirt and sawdust and scrap 2x4s without missing a beat in his instructions or story about him and his pet chickens on the farm he grew up on in Mississippi.
Caretaker would have to be more vigilant, that is all.
Dissolved Matrimony
Mr. BC dumped all shared property on the MRS and the matrimonial dissolution was complete. The properties included the family compound, the country property, and the beach house. It was an unknown sum of money set aside for upkeep of the properties and the three boys but imaginably sufficient. The country property was their bastard stepchild, bought in the early days of acquisitions but never really loved nor was there ever a certainty about whose idea its acquisition had been. She thought it was his idea and he thought it hers.
The permanent staff included one caretaker to oversee duties and one man and his lawn mower to manage the 4 acres of cut grass on the 40 acre mini estate. As the reality of expenses for a never used property began to grow on the MRS she suggested to caretaker that he fire the one man and his lawn mower and find somebody cheaper. She had put the property up for sale, was hoping to clear 2 million or so and saw a cheaper mower man, one who would not take advantage of her as this current one clearly was, as a way to save possibly 3 or 4 thousand dollars on the way to that 2 million.
The caretaker, who in the early days of the job had commented on the absurdity of expenses to Mr. BC and was told not to worry too much about it had put the idea of absurd expenses behind him, but not completely and had cut his own pay by a third long ago in hopes of easing the burden of absurdity. Furthermore, the caretaker would retire from the property and his compensation at every given chance in hopes of one, easing up on the finances and two, separating himself from this silly job with no real client or customer or boss for that matter and rarely even someone who had the time or inclination to just come out and lay by the pool or knock a few balls around the tennis court. Lets be clear, the silliness and absurdity were also balanced by the pure enjoyment of having the 40 acres almost always to himself, he was the loner this caretaker, but the announcement of every proposed sale, this current one he thought was the third one, brought him a certain amount of hope for escape, albeit combined with a be careful what you wish for wariness.
The mower man was in his ninth year of employment, had five kids, one who had been born with a brain malfunction and operated on successfully and pro bono by one of the worlds top childrens brain surgeons at Johns Hopkins, one of his last cases before retirement. Mowerman was a friend inasmuch as he represented a breathing soul who came out periodically to break the monotony of the caretakers hermetic existence. They would laugh over a beer or the occasional Percocet and the caretaker would work in the half acre of gardens while the mower man mowed for eight hours, every 10 days or so from late April to October. So he had told her no, a simple flat out no when she suggested he find another mower man. And there had been no explosion of emotion or immediate firing of caretaker. In retrospect he realized he should have seen her calm reaction as a warning. For the next morning her and the new boyfriend decided that the 100 foot stretch of bramble out front by the pond, consisting of thin spindly 15 foot trees intertwined with the vines of blackberry, poison oak and ivy, honeysuckle, mustang grapes and poison sumac must be cut clean to the ground to open up what with other obstructions would amount to 1.5 more seconds of drive by view from the road. The next week he had off and when he returned he was met with wooden stakes winding through the cut grass and a note telling him that one side of the stakes would be cut and the other side to be returned to hay.
While the caretaker was for awhile apoplectic because he would now of course have to cut mower mans pay (a kind of fuck you and your five kids and 9 years of loyalty), the mower man calmed him down, hugged him even and said all things must pass boss man, the rich are not like you and me. I never liked mowing that bumpy assed back pasture anyhow.
Don't Let Your Ice Melt
I am on a compound in the Saunderstown, RI area, within a herculean stones throw of the Jamestown Bridge, amongst friends, a surprising lack of bugs, cases of wine, and some beer and liquor under clear skies on a hot day in July. Today will be a hot one. Other days of this week maybe somewhat less so. That was the weather report. I nuked yesterday's coffee for Bernadette and myself this morning, listened to a bit of Prayer for Owen Meany the audiobook, played a round of drawsomething, and now am contemplating my first Dark and Stormy, a drink made with your choice of proportions of rum, lime juice and ginger beer. I am not daunted by the fact of 10 a.m.
We have this engineer flown in, at his expense, from the Bay Area each year to assist in the preparation and consumption of the large slabs of meat and gallons of alcohol and for example yesterday to co-pilot for me on a supply run into the neighboring areas for more liquor, propane, and if he had his way, propane accessories.
This isn't right I said 15 seconds after leaving the driveway in front of our second house. We claimed two houses this year. I had not even left the compound. No, the engineer said, you are going exactly opposite of our desired direction. I have a phone with a talking mapping program turned on, an iPad connected via bluetooth to a gps receiver marking our way on a pre-downloaded map, the engineer has his phone also with mapping program, and we have the experience of having been here one year previous. I turn around not actually chuckling but with the slightest hint of a spirit of mirth.
In the town of Wickford we park cautiously in a spot which we are fully aware is not that close to our liquor store destination and head off, soon taking a ninety degree turn in the wrong direction and after several blocks are staring stupidly at our individual smartphones. I can honestly say I am staring stupidly, not really seeing anything, or in truth even making the slightest effort at comprehension. The Engineer? I don't know, I've known him for over 30 years and I realize this is unfair but I tend to cling to this higher expectation regarding his skills of comprehension on all subjects. On this day however I was starting to think, could he be as big a dumbass as I am? But true to my expectations he does get us righted after a bit and we head off on foot, correcting our earlier mistake but soon pause, and I say, we should probably walk back to the car and drive to this liquor store. So we do that, only parking in some adjunct lot that faces the back of the store and causes me to suffer a brief panic regarding the operating hours of this unfamiliar liquor store.
But I get some more rum and beer and again we are off, this time in the opposite direction past our compound, the engineer on the phone after our first fail and me starting to realize this could be hell, I mean you know, being this long gone from the compound and the point of it by my reckoning, a place to relax with an always full cool beverage at hand.
After his first call I realized The Engineer's earlier seeming enthusiasm for this supply trip was not even in part based on an eagerness to be an assisting co-pilot, but rather what he saw as an adventure pretty surely to have some early failures so that he would have his chance to get on the phone and in all seriousness and with believable sincerity say to some local--uh yes, can you tell me, do you sell propane and uh, propane accessories. If you are thinking, I guess you had to be there, no, not really. Don't get off the boat and don't let your ice melt between drinks.
Birds in a Field
At Least Two Cracks
The local Virginia mechanic and I have this unspoken agreement that if I don't mention the crack in my windshield or the fact that I'm three months tardy on inspection, he won't pull out a measuring device to determine if my crack is legal or has spread into illegal territory, nor will he charge me the late penalty on the inspection tag. Those two things, the crack, and me being late are three years old although I guess me being late is harder to restrict to any one time frame. But for three years running now we wink and nod and I give him 16 dollars and head back to the so called farm where I spend some time each year.
Speaking of restrictions it is my goal here to minimize the use of the word pustule. Nobody wants to read the word pustule for breakfast. Once you get the word pustule in your head it is harder to get out than that Tony Orlando and Dawn song. And so far I only have the one bona fide pustule and the only reason it ("it" being the word "pustule") comes to mind is because it (again, the pustule) is between the middle and ring finger of my left hand and I can hardly move around the asdf range not to mention the qwerty vicinity without some friction occurring around said pustule. It is poison ivy season. Every year about this time I come to Virginia and strip down to the legal limit and then in a variety of fashions roll around practically nekkid in poison ivy. This year I took to masticating jungles of poison ivy or oak (if I could tell them apart from each other or their benign cousins, which you do frequently see them interspersed with, I wouldn't be writing this pustule-heavy essay) with a weedeater, line trimmer, gas powered trimming and weed destruction machine, and bits of plant matter and poisonous oils were fairly floating like dust motes caught in sunlight in an artily shot Western starring some actor who may or may not have written into his contract that dirt is allowed to be shown under his fingernails if it advances authenticity.
I have it on the inside of both wrists. I have one or two near-pustules behind my left ear. A hint of rash on my forehead, I'm not sure what that is on my chin, and last night after discovering that both legs from knee cap to ankle are pretty well covered I also found a new patch on my right bicep. I bathe in both Technu and some Burts Bees soap I am trying out this year. Technu is basically paint thinner and the soap I don't really know what it is but I just lather up with it and then don't rinse it off.
I have a half dozen chigger bites. If I had to choose my favorite two it would be those in the crease that is the backside of my right knee. I haven't found any ticks on me yet, which is unusual considering the territory I've been traipsing through but probably the few that have considered me have reconsidered after getting a good look at my skin. This is one fucked up son of a gun the one tick says to the other. Yeah man the other tick responds, let's get out of here, I'd rather suck blood from the anus of a possum.
I think I crossed the line with that last line. That was just gross. Gratuitous grossness. I should have stuck with pustules.
At the mechanic's this morning I am reading a three day old Washington Post about Mitt Romney's gay bashing days which I only mention to cull readership, or what I mean is, to cull from the masses and direct here to my pustule ramblings those select few who may put together in a search string, for whatever sick reason, the words, "Mitt Romney" and "anus of a possum." Those are the kind of readers I want. I know, be careful what you wish for.
I've been working since Wednesday painting this caretaker's cottage out here at Mt. Pleasant Farm so that makes tomorrow, Tuesday, the Lord's day of rest for me but it's raining today so I'll make this the Lord's day except I have to get up there and vacuum the stink bugs from out of the bighouse. There is no rest for the weary, there is no day more dreary, there is nothing more humbling, than stumbling, on a crack, in a sidewalk.
Jackhammer
I'm not one of those anti-immigrant types who says you gotta speak the language to live here but I do believe your language skills should exceed my hearing skills if that word you are saying after Pepsi is diet and you know damn well I am not ordering diet Pepsi. That was strike two because I'm arriving at the plate already with a strike for being at this fast food nightmare on PepsiCo Street in the first place. Do I want KFC or Taco Bell or Pizza Hut or all three? You get out of the fast food game for awhile and, bloody hell, it's like starting over. I got this Taco Supreme Box and I don't want to ruin it for you but it comes in a box. Also one of the taco shells is made of nacho cheese Doritos. I forgot to tell you I'm in Penn Station for this waiting on the 171 to Culpeper, early because I was escaping the sound of jackhammers chipping through the asphalt and concrete five floors below, me in bed reading Flann O'Brien. There isn't a third strike, always just the two, but if there ever did come the third one I would go down looking.
There Will Be A Test
Yeah I'm going through my calendar shifting things around out the wazzoo here because Hector Bilby canceled at the last minute. Oh we were a few of us supposed to meet up at an art gallery and I'm assuming a drink after, otherwise what would be the point? Am I right? I mean right out the gate this morning Bernadette is shifting her calendar around due to a cancellation, which is regrettable because I was looking forward to whatever that was. I'm not even sure she was aware of the Bilby engagement and certainly not the cancellation. I judge this by the lack of her head exploding. Don't use ink and carry a big eraser is what I tell people. Forget about planning.
I had seen art last night, and had pizza, beer and wine, but are you going to tell Bilby that? Uh yeah, Bilby, I have ingested beau coup art lately. Would love to see you but am afraid of getting art toxicity so...like what? I mean seriously. What are you going to do? Christ. Now with all these cancellations, these reaffirmations of nothingness, Bernadette is spiraling out of control, trying to get me to go out and view vegetables and cat toys and I'll just be blunt here, I'm not feeling that at all. I am three quarters the way through a novel that I was ready to quit at the halfway point but am sticking with just because I honestly don't know why I'm sticking with it. It was one of the Pulitzer for fiction nominees this year, a year with no winners, and so far I'm pretty much in agreement with the committee. Anyhow, the cat will come out ahead in all this.
Ok, here's the thing, you don't realize how ludicrous, how borderline mean-spirited, hell, insane even, is the comment--I hear you have termites, until you say it to the wrong person, and by wrong I only mean a person in the room who is not the woman Bernadette suggested I go talk to last night and give unto her my substantial wisdom concerning termites, which is, call someone then quit worrying about it. For the greater body of people including all of humanity, here is my more general advice regarding termites. If you can't tell Asian people apart (even if Bernadette did say Japanese, about a woman who is part Japanese) or are just easily confused in those crowded spaces from which you are seeking the most rapid extrication, wait for a person with termite problems to reach out to you, not the other way around. Otherwise you will spend the rest of the night hoping those two Asian people at the party don't learn that you mistook one for the other and decide they have had enough of your petit bourgeois racist bullshit, effectively banning you from art openings the world over, which remember, can include after parties with pizza and beer.
Following is a short list of the Asians you should studiously learn to differentiate.
Asian people - the people from or of the continent of Asia
North Asians, includes people west of the Urals and the Ural river, north of East and Central Asia. Includes:
Russians
Yakuts
Tungusic peoples
Uralic peoples east of the Urals
the Ainu people
East Asians, including:
Chinese people
Japanese people
Taiwanese people
Koreans
Mongols
Southeast Asians, including:
Thai people
Vietnamese people
Filipino people
Bamar
Cambodian people
Bruneian people
Lao people
Malaysian people
Singaporean people
Indonesian people
South Asians, includes:
Indian people
Pakistani people
Bengali people
Sinhalese People
Nepalese people
Bhutanese people
Dhivehi people
Central Asians including
Uzbeks
Karakalpaks
Tajik people
Hazara people
Kyrgyz people
Uyghur people
Kazakhs
Pashtun people
Turkmen people
Western Asians, including:
Arab people
Turkish people
Kurdish people
Iranian peoples
Israeli people
I Think Torture Speaks For Itself
Torture is a moral issue on my right and a pig on a leash to my left. I left the house early and after crossing Houston found a path to follow with good sunlight and also shade. I would run into a friend much later, a black, tidy, smooth speaking ex-Marine who would tell me of his most recent woes involving hospital and a lack of a proper lunch. I wore a light rain jacket and in the left pocket were a few bills set aside for just this purpose, the contributing towards a lunch for someone I could through his demeanor and bearing see as a friend even though it would be a fiscally unbalanced friendship filled with periods of resentment and the seeming unfairness of it all. But the bills in my pocket weren't there, literally disappeared like a goddammned insertion of a metaphor, so I had to bring out the wallet which is only ever full in just these situations, so that I have to rifle through twenties and such to get to ones while the person towering over this personal cash drawer is adding detail to his woe in hopes of having one of my Jacksons, or come on man, you really gonna miss that Hamilton? My yes is always unspoken, allowing instead how possibly wrong it may be for a man so obviously flush in paper to be so cheap. The spoiler has already occurred and I'll give you a hint it has to do with a pig on a leash in NYC. And one other thing, as if this should have to be explained to you each and every time--nothing happens. Seeing the pig is all that happens. This isn't one of those guaranteed gold stories you might hear at a dinner table where one transvestite regales the table inhabited by other transvestites and friends of transvestites with his story about the parrot of his masseuse. So what if you value that type of story and were happy for the one bit of genuine laugh it gave you surrounded by a lot of other minutes where you were painfully aware of the negative aspects of being a non smoker who can't use the I have to go out for a smoke excuse. So this would be a good time to head to the market, nothing to see here folks. Think to all the times you have watched that barely tolerable sitcom and waited for the last bit after the last commercial break and all that happened, all that came on was the credits. Doesn't that piss you off? Don't say I didn't warn you. I was going to on these next lines, one, describe what it would look like for a Border Collie dog or possibly a Holstein heifer to have messy, awkward, could even be barbaric sex with a pig, two, the resulting if unlikely progeny, three, a brief running over the drama laden upbringing of inter-specie offspring, and just when the most sentimental of you were wiping away that one tear, I would four, make you cry many tears of happiness as the freaky looking low lying dog/cow/rhinoceros-looking calf-pup-lets are adopted each and every one by middle-aged childless lesbian couples across the city of New York only days or minutes before certain annihilation and perhaps transformation into items found in a to-go container purchased on or around Grand St. But that description will have to wait. My siting of this pig is many years later and the horror perhaps only my own. And there is only one of the pigs left in the city, and I am on this day, yesterday, seeing it while killing time under the leaves before heading off to pull down my pants one final time for the urologist. The other pigs have moved north with their owners or been pawned off to friends in Hudson or Woodstock or in the case of the litters' runt, Vinylhaven, Maine. I can see from a reading over that I am branding myself a pig hater and while this is strictly not true, I will say I lack the necessary vehement conviction to alter outside opinion. Inside where I imagine things I nod sympathetically to each and every lovely thing spoken about pet hybrid pigs. Later I found those three single dollar bills in my left coat pocket just where they have been for the last month or so but could not find earlier to assist the ex-Marine. I rubbed the folded green paper between my fingers inside my pocket before extracting the now completely unfrozen peanut butter medical marijuana brownie. I was sitting on a bench by the lake in Central Park. A gregarious group of Dutch kids had finally finished all their photo taking and moved on. Two gay men, uncomfortable with their silence, moved silently on. A Chinese couple moving with inscrutable precision leaned over the short hog wire fence separating the path from the lake and in less than a minute expertly ripped from the ground enough lush dandelion green to fill a grocery sack. After they moved on I unwrapped the peanut butter brownie and ate it, licking the adhered residue from the cellophane just in case I should somewhere on the road home run into a pot sniffing beagle attached to a six foot six jackbooted policeman.
