Ruminations from the Hill

Another growing season winds down and I take a slow morning to think about where it's all going. A proper mixture of certain chemicals is an essential part of this process. One that must be adhered to in order to maintain proper function.The removal of nicotine from this mixture has given me a little trouble of late, but the overall benefits far out way the drawbacks. The caffeine though, cannot go without that, no, no I can't...
     It's cold this year, not uncommon to have beautiful seventy plus days all the way to the big freeze at Halloween. If we have one this year. It is getting harder and harder to know what's in store. I worry for a bad year, where a blight comes and crops fail. Not a new worry for the human condition, but it feels more and more relevant as I watch our little climate experiment unfold. I can't be the only one that sees the storms rolling in, stronger and stronger, almost with a sense of malevolence, and it would be hard to blame them. I myself often cheer them on. In fact, most of the art and music I have been generating over the last twenty years has been based on the belief that it would be best if most of humanity were to annihilated in some great catastrophe. One where only the most extremely clever and lucky mother fuckers even have a chance of survival. I realize there is a conflict between worrying about successful crop cycles and hopping most of humanity dies in the hideous nightmare that is the change we have wrought on our little blue green planetoid. There are many ways in which we have interacted with our environment is nothing short of fantastic. Cultivation and selective breading of plants, for example. There are, at present roughly seventy five hundred different varieties of apples grown thought the world. So clever, us homo sapiens. So much abundance and so much of it wasted.

pity party

There remains, at the heart of things, a lack of something. A feeling of excitement and joy at new adventures that is simply gone. It went away in the fall a couple of years back. I'd been living with her with the ever so foolish intent of building a life together. Not an idea she shared and with the usual callousness ran back to the arms of her true love. The first night she spent back with him I drank alone in our living room. Stared, bleary eyed,  at the beautiful home we'd put together. It had been a source of pride, our little house. It was a lie and in sudden clarity I saw it as such. As the ends of several liquor bottles funneled down something in me went away. Something vital, something pure. I kept drinking until I found black unknowing oblivion. The following morning I sat on the back stoop chain smoking hoping that the world would implode. She returned, hair unbrushed, sex knot in the back and clearly much relaxed. The dead part in me turned putrid and curled away deep, deep inside. It still cuts to think of it. Even in the face of that my heart wouldn't leave her. Torn open and shat in, it still held her close. Unrelenting in it's fervor. There was no real joy left though. It never returned after that whisky soaked night.

of Plumb Blossoms and Chicken Shit

The can is faded and bent from years of scoping nutrients out of ratty old buckets. At one time it had those long skinny french wafer cookies, vanilla ones. Pirouette's from Pepperidge Farm, and they would be an unlikely addition to the pantry nowadays, as much as I like to nibble the bastards.That's the problem with all that engineered food, it's fucking delicious. Those insidious greed holes have studied our lizard brains and learned how to make us want to poison ourselves. It's current contents are much more useful. Pellitized chicken shit. Wonderful stuff, chicken shit, really is amazing for growing things, it rattles around, reeking to high heaven. The can is just about the right size for metering out the fertilizer to the tress. One scoop for smallish trees, two for the bigger ones. I jam a spading fork into he ground and wrench it back and forth, rip a little hole in that rich red soil. Fill it with shit and stomp it shut. Keeps the nitrogen in for better absorption. This process is repeated at semi-regular 3 ft. intervals around all the trees at their drip lines (that's where the rain drips from the outer edge of their branches). An improptu meet of the Husum Hills Gun Club, for the blasting of some 9mm and 22 rounds, a necessary interruption  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, after all. I take the Luger out for the first time in years, it's a little old gun, built for the German war machine, frighteningly accurate. The case has gone moldy though and will need some oil, as will the gun. Then it's back to holes and shit. The wild plumb trees that are scattered around the hill are in full staggering blossom and so fragrant that it makes being covered in fine particles of chicken shit not even the least bit offensive (I imagine this would be highly a subjective statement). As the work day winds down I walk by one of the plumb trees and am caught by the humming vitality of hundreds of honey bees. They are laden with pollen as this last week of stunning sunny days has brought many things to bloom, and the bees aren't missing the opportunity. I watch them for bees are embattled in many places, not here though, no death mist to contend with here.