Pre-emrgence

The Forsythia are blooming, can crabgrass be far behind?  This homely bit of suburban lore was grafted onto my consciousness about 10 years ago.  Now I faithfully note the crabgrass patches each summer and dose them with pre-emergent herbicide each spring.

Yardwork seems to unsettle my mind.  I often hum and muse as I go about the repetitive tasks, minimally engaged with what is in front of me, and sort of free-roaming in my mind.  Todays muse is hooked-up with the internet and the global pre-consciousness.  The pieces that have stuck together in my minds filter today are our coping mechanisms - primarily coping with each other and the pain we can inflict.

I started my internet day by finishing a "National Magazine Award" finalist for best feature article of the year called "Burning Man" about an Iraq war veteran recovering from massive burns, partially with the help of immersive VR.  In it he quotes from Samuel Johnson (via a song - check the article if you really are interested) "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."

Who knows what demons SJ had in mind - this burnt man had plenty of his own.  There is a mythic element here that allows this image./ idea to pierce consciousness and strike deeper: I think of Beauty and the Beast, or perhaps the Minotaur.  Each had his own pain to deal with, and the recurrent pain he inflicted on those around him.  Much too much for a middle-class suburban existence to bear.
Current medical / psychiatric orthodoxy tends to medicate the deviances our sensitive souls note in ourselves and others.  I find harmony with the opinions of another blogger:  who recently writes:
The young move too fast for our comfort and we give them drugs to slow them down. The elderly move too slowly for our comfort and we give them drugs to speed them up. 

There is a middle-managerial methodology at work here: get the most done with the least cost, and whatever you do Don't make Waves.  Its not merely that we, as individuals don't want to deal with the riskier excesses of life, but that we somehow find ourselves accountable for those excesses in others, and feel a need to control them 'for their own good'.

Classicly, we are indicted for being middling - indicted like Jim Baxter is indicted by James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause" ' What do you do when you have to be a man?'.  Or by Jack Nicholson in "A Few Good Men" 'You can't handle the truth'.  The fact that both of these characters are indelibly flawed does little to fog the moral challenges they raise on their way down.
So I control my crabgrass, and my dandlelions, largely because they are 'mine' in the same way this patch of earth is mine, and what I do with it effects my neighbors.  Each of us cares in some way about keeping things is order and under control.  We watch in a hundred little ways that provide a security blanket for the more vulnerable in the neighborhood.  I worry about my neighbors toads each time I apply some chemical to the lawn.  The web we inhabit, inhabits us, and everyone we touch.

Six Legs Surprise

8 hard boiled eggs

3 Tbs onion juice

2 Tbs sour cream

4 Tbs sauteed chopped mealworms

minced garlic to taste

Remove yolk from eggs and mash with onion juice, sour cream, and mealworms

Fill egg halves with mixture

Chill and serve

Trout barbeque sauce

60 bottles of Worcestershire

20 bottles soy sauce

juice of 40 lemons

30 cups finely chopped celery

20 lbs butter

10 large cans Accent

20 tbls liquid smoke

10 lbs salt

5 gal peanut oil

20 cloves garlic, minced

Mix ingredients - let stand overnight in another house.

Brush on trout before barbequing

Sufficient for approx 2000 lbs trout

Easter Cockatrice

A cock and a rabbit are dressed separately and the tail end of the cock is cut off in order to allow the front half of the rabbit inside.

They are then trussed together so as to form a creature half chicken and half rabbit. Place them in a kettle, boil, cool, and separate for the purpose of stuffing. Put them back together and roast until brown all over.

Just before serving, reattach the cock's head and wings (with feathers) to the front of the beast. Set this on a nest of parsley surrounded by colored easter eggs.

Elephant Stew

1 Elephant

Salt and Pepper

2 Rabbits

Cut the elephant into small bite size pieces. This should take about 2 months. Add enough brown gravy to cover. Cook over kerosene stove for about 4 weeks at 465°

This will serve 3800 people. If more guests are expected, 2 rabbits may be added, but do this only if necessary as most people do not like to find hares in their stew.

Blue and Gold

I have watched my fathers hometown slide into graceful ruin over the past 50+ years. When I was a lad, there was a grocery store, tavern, cafes, filling stations, chicken hatchery, and telephone switchboard. The switchboard was replaced when the two sisters who ran it retired.

The tavern was abandoned and replaced with a liquor store sometime in the 50's. Two old buildings on the south side of the main street slid into decay, roofs and floors collapsing over the years, until by 1959 the only reminders were sunken lots and broken tile walls attached to the adjoining buildings. These tiles were colonized by sparrows and finches. I was fascinated by the chirping, fluttering chaos of those walls of a late summer evening. We had plenty of sparrows at home in Kansas, but nothing to compare with the yellow splash of the gold-finches.

I was reminded of those walls a couple of days ago when I looked out onto our backyard and saw a pair of gold-finches flitting around our blueberry cage. We lost all our berries last year when something nipped the blooms before they could germinate. We suspect bunnies or squirrels - since there was evidence of chewing on the bushes. So we built a cage - close spaced chicken wire around the perimeter, with a tomato cage panel on top. Our local squirrels are too chubby cheeked to fit through the tomato cage, so we felt reasonably safe. The blueberries blossomed and set buds - we counted up to a dozen little green swellings by mid may. Half a dozen of them had turned blue and bulbous by late May. We had one anxious morning when we saw blackbirds sitting on the cage. They eyed the situation carefully for a few minutes, but apparently decided not to risk getting trapped inside. Then, about two weeks ago, I noticed that the blues were gone - neatly trimmed at the calyx.

I watched the gold-finches - at first because they are an unusual sight in our neighborhood, but then because they hung around our cage. The female sat on the southern edge of the cage, while the male hopped about the northeast corner. Then he did a very finch-like maneuver and swung around his perch. Now he was holding onto the cage 'roof' but was inside! He stayed there for perhaps 15-20 seconds - obviously checking out something inside. I could see his head and neck moving, but otherwise have no clue what he found. He then swung back up and flew away. The female followed shortly.

I did a little research on finch foods. They are not known for berry picking. But we have obviously created a habitat that they are one of the few vertebrates capable of exploring. Cardinals, robins, starlings, and bluejays are more likely scavengers in our neighborhood. Still I am intrigued with the notion that we have created a puzzle favoring our more adventurous, and flexible, feathered friends.

1965 Impala

I am not nice to cars. I have ruined almost every car or truck I have owned. Some of this I can write off as inexperience in my callow youth. But, the truth is, I was ruining cars well into my 30's.

My first car was a 1965 Chevy Impala. It was sturdy, and held up to much abuse. Actually it was a tank. I got the car in 1969. I was a 22 year old college student and proud if myself for having talked the price down $500 by threatening to walk out of the dealers showroom. My first accident came after I owned the car about a month. I backed out of the driveway one morning and swung it around to face down the street. K. came out of the house waving her hands for me to stop, so I did. The Impala had a scratch on its rear fender, but my neighbors car had a significantly dented front end. From this incident I learned about insurance and to keep an eye out behind me. This same car succumbed to front end damage in the early 70's when I looked down to see what fell off the dashboard just as a tree entered my lane on 11th street. It finally succumbed to major abuse one weekend when I went to Kansas City. I drove over a curb in a fit of parking lot rage, bottomed out the front end and cracked the exhaust manifold. I must have also damaged the transmission, since I lost 3rd gear. So I roared back to Lawrence down highway 10 that night in 2nd gear. I sold it to a junkyard that same month.