It's All Gravy

Yesterday was nice. Got up early and helped move. The Pirate spent the rest of the day in a sort of retro-tech reverie thinking about all the coolie-neato stuff in that storage locker.
Came home and took a nap wherein I had a dream about having taken my children to a hotel where there was an infestation of spiders. The spiders would bite someone, and wherever they bit, the flesh would wither and die and then turn into more spiders. The process would begin gradually at the site of the bite, only to accelerate once the new spiders began to crawl off the body looking for a meal. At the end of the dream, I was herding my children through the airport realizing that it was just the beginning of a horrible plague.
Then I got to wake up and go to a party. It was nice. We played "Jenga," a game I haven't seen in years. Peaches was great at it, earning the admiration of the crowd. She's alsways been amazingly coordinated.
I woke up this morning and made fresh fruit crepes. We drank our coffee and listened to the radio and ate the crepes with creme freche and were very happy. It's cooling off a little, which is okay. And I was just thinking that I love my life here. We have the occasional grouchy time, but on the whole, our life is exactly what we want it to feel like. We don't need to go anywhere else or buy anything else to make us happy. That's a good feeling.
On an entirely different note, part of the reason for the party was that the Pirate's friend's gig is coming to an end. Several of the crowd, in fact, had recently (in the past 6 months) been laid off. Some had new gigs already, some did not. We exchanged "horrible lay off" stories and one woman told us about a company she'd heard of where an entire division was being laid off, so the company had a fire drill. Once all the employees were outside, they locked the doors and someone came on an outdoor P.A. and said "All those with last names beginning with A - G may come back tomorrow between nine and noon to pick up your final paychecks. Those people whose last names beginning H - M....."
That is the most harsh thing I've ever heard.

If This Were Dante's Inferno, What Would Happen to the Terminally Clueless?

I have a "friend" that I've known for a little over 20 years. He was my first love, the guy that I hung all of my teenage hopes and dreams on.
Then I wised up. He was an insensitive jerk. For all of his intelligence and ready wit, he was an asshole. I never hesitated in telling him that he was an asshole, and perhaps for this reason he has continued to call me his friend for over 20 years, long after our romantic involvement ended. I continue to allow him to be my "friend" because I can't bear to throw anything away. I'm a social pack rat.
When we were teenagers, he used to play really mean pranks on people. At the time, I participated in some of these pranks and thought that they were pretty funny. When they were played on me, I generally accepted it with grace. In college the joke started to wear thin, and I put him at a distance. It was at that time that I decided that I would never again loan this guy money, let this guy stay at my house for any reason, or tell him anything in confidence. I firmly believe that as a result, I have been spared more than one instance of public humiliation.
He told me yesterday that, once again, he played a "prank" on a friend and it had backfired. His friend is in a band, and he went to their website and "anonymously" posted some very inflammatory, hurtful things. And when they discovered who he was and confronted him, he squirmed and weaseled and generally tried to minimize what he had done. They had deserved it. Nobody looks at that website anyway. He didn't mean it.
I told him that he was not just an insensitive jerk, but that he was a stupid insensitive jerk. I told him that I hoped that at least one of these guys punched him hard in the face wearing a signet ring, because only then would he realize what he did.
He thanked me for talking to him about it, despite the fact that I likened him to Arizona's Bishop O'Brien who hit and killed a man and then said "I thought it was a cat. I thought someone threw a rock at me. The guy was jaywalking at night in dark clothes." But I worry that he uses our talks as some way of absolving himself of all responsibility. I don't want to allow people to be bad to each other.

The Guilty Pleasure of Violence

I was relating a dream I had to one of my good friends. The dream included my taking a broken laptop and hitting someone with it hard enough to knock him down, make him bleed and render him unconscious.
Now, I have noticed a trend within myself to make very violent comments and express displeasure with people in terms of how many of their vertebrae I would like to crush. I tend to listen to violent music, finding myself in a calm, Zenlike state as Disturbed sings about "droppin' plates on yo' ass, bitch." I LOVE violent movies. The Pirate and I recently sat through our favorite double feature - Blade and Blade II - which not only contain cartoonish amounts of ultra-violence, but offer the welcome spectacle of Wesley Snipes with his shirt off.
But here's the rub. I would be horrified in the face of actual violence. I love movie violence, but anything real - the news, reports of killing, make me sick to my stomach and often render me depressed for days. I tried watching Amistad, but the depictions of the violence against the slaves was too much and I ended up shaky and weeping for the better part of a day because although it was a movie and those were actors, these things routinely happened.
My friend admitted the same disconnect, and it mystifies us both.

Lovecraft Was Also a Gardener

I felt as though I had conquered Mother Nature herself - my plants were in orderly rows, growing according to their natures and the schedule I had carefully laid out in March after consulting the Sunset Western Gardens book.
But Mother Nature had one last unconquerable bastion. Between the peppers and the orange tree, there lay a section of grass that was older than even primordial swamp life. This grass sneered at the newcomers who had so recently emerged from the slime to walk bipedal upon the earth, presuming dominion.
I began my assault by soaking the earth, thinking to loosen the grip of the roots, fastened as they were to the very core of the Earth itself. There was no visible change to the grass as I held the hose steady on, but at the edges of the plot, the earth began to darken. Within a very few minutes, the water, dark as blood, began to run in rivulets down toward the peppers. Looking back, I fear to think what effect this might have on the nascent fruit.
Protected by nothing but fabric gloves festooned with deceptively cheerful images of fruit, I set to, laying hold of great handfuls of the grass and putting the entirety of my not-inconsiderable weight into my effort. The grass did not merely resist, but my straining muscles detected a force battling against my own efforts. The roots were mustering their forces to thwart me.
The first salvo resulted in my coming away with an armful of dying grass. Looking over my burden, I saw, poking from the black earth, the knobbled roots of the grass I had just liberated emerging from the softened loam like the fingers of my skeletal ancestors emerging from the depths. But not even the grim spectacle of all Hell's demons could daunt me from my task!
I reached my gloved hands under a particularly thick thatch with the intention of peeling back the vegetation to get directly at the roots. Pill-bugs scattered at the light and I, trembling underneath my broad straw gardening hat, reached right down into the depths of their lair, to better carry out my devastating assault.
My hand caught on a fragment of netting from the time my landlords in their tragic innocence laid down sod (sod!). I seized this ephemeral mesh of plastic and, sliding my hands underneath, succeeded in separating the grass from the bosom of the earth by prying up a thin layer of soil underneath its grasping, sucking roots. Imagine my horror, though, when I drew back my hands to better position them for a fresh assault and found them to be covered with bits of wet, pink animate meat. I had inadvertently plunged wrist-deep into some sort of slug breeding ground.
I fought the panic rising in my throat as I heaved the bundle of grass, roots and dirt (slugs and all) into the wheelbarrow. Come trash day, it would be the woodchipper for this lot. And I wouldn't be sorry.
My hair hung limp in my eyes beneath the wide brim of my hat, and were it not for the long-sleeved t-shirt I had thought to wear I would have been at the mercy of the sun's punishing gaze. As it was, perspiration poured into my eyes, blinding me as I bit my lip and forced my hands once again into the netherworld of soil. My hands did not meet the anticipated resistance, and I felt my gloves go cold and damp. In retaliation for my efforts, the roots of the grass, sensing their demise, had wrapped themselves around a sprinkler pipe, and my efforts to wrest loose their hold had shattered it.
I pulled back to find my gloves covered in pill-bugs of a never-before-seen brilliant peacock blue. Had they not been repulsive insects, they would have been splendid to behold. As it was, I did wonder at their beauty even as I hastily brushed them from my gloves. Worse, my gloves were covered with what at first glance would have appeared to be lines of ink drawn over the cheerful vegetables. But the lines of ink themselves moved and squirmed, inserting themselves into the weave of the fabric as though determined to bore into my very flesh. I tore the infested gloves from my hands and examined my pale skin for any sign of the inky demons. Luckily, I had acted in time.
There was nothing for it. The yard was rapidly flooding. I shut off the valve to the sprinklers and began to gather up my things. I had cleared easily a square meter of earth from it grip of the mighty grass, but this war is far from over, and it cannot yet be determined who won the first battle.