Would You Like a Cup of Tea?

We have a new housemate and jesus is she young. She's so young that if we lived in a town where legally enforced drinking ages were considering anything but bougie-as-shit, we wouldn't be able to take her to bars.
We celebrated by cleaning the house, including the disgusting parts that we usually leave alone because they scare us, like the "spice cabinet" and the "area under the stairs". ew ew ew. No me gusta las cucarachas. I sprayed them over and over again with a bottle of what was advertised to be "nature's neurotoxin" until Patrick demonstrated that the most efficient way to murder las cucarachas with that stuff was to smuch them with the bottle cap.

Were I in the mood to file for 501(c)3 status I'd form my own religious cult: The Followes of St. Linda of the Unwaveringly Reasonable. It's purpose would be to embrace unconventional beliefs and lifestyles while not being a total, irrational wingnut.
Lately, I value reasonableness above all other virtues. I argued passionatly in favor or our new roomate, Louisa, on the basis that she is a deeply reasonable young women. A little before that I said harsh, unkind words to another housemate regarding her story friend who was, she feels, not properly counseled by Planned Parenthood and now has cried every night for twelve years, grieving over her dead fetus. I should not, in retrospect, has commented that this friend is obviously, "a fucking nutcase who shouldn't reproduce". But that's exactly the kind of unreasonable behavior that gets my goat because of the nasty political consequences of someone wishing their every irrational feeling be indulged instead of addressed. Next thing you know the Beatles'll be sending you secret messages to kill Paris Hilton or some shit.
I think the housemate in question has forgiven me my unkind words. After we attended a lecture by this guy, she turned to me and said, "Wow. You must love him. He's so reasonable, and yet such a wingnut."
At least my housemate understands me. Sandorkraut is exactly my kind of reasonable wingnut. I'll frickin' canonize him when my paperwork goes through. Sure, he recomends leaving goat milk on the counter for a few days and then refering to it as "sour cream" but even after much goading from the crowd he refused to endorse any sort of food eating dogma ("I mean, I guess aluminum is not that good for you, but I'll pretty much eat anything you offer me") or alternative medicine orthodoxy (" I take a lot of pills to stay alive and I wouldn't consider sourkraut a subsitute, but you know, it's good for you).

I think we're all pretty inspired by the demonstration. I finally went to the brewing store today to buy the yeast and tannic acid needed to start making my mead. Frugal as I am, I realized, with the help of Patrick, my obsessively frugal housemate, that a full bottle of Carlo Rossi wine is cheaper than the exact same bottle for sale at a brewing supply store. Now the only thing holding me back is drinking a gallon of wine in the next day or so. shit. That's totally unreasonable

OMG! I am officially a graduate student! Whee! I got my acceptence email today!
I am so goddamn excited, witness the unrestrained use of exclaimation marks!
I am going to be such a tenured radical! I can't wait to start having a legitimate reason to wax philosophic about hyperaccumulators in bioremediation have really firm opinions about which CDC is more, y'know, down. I'm going to be fucking insufferable and when called on it I may be slightly tempted to say things, like, "look I have more college than all of you put together."

There is the life of the farmer and there is life of the drum player in a loud crust punk band. The schedules of the two lives are very different and it is the rare man who tries to combine the two.
After playing a show in Lansing last night the Cap'n was feeling so tired and grouchy that I agreed to drive him to the barnyard and help him with the chores. The Cap'n turkey's are almost adults now and they are just beginning to grow the robin-hood like feathers that will flop in front of their heads. Right now, the spot where the feathers will be are little round nubins on top of their blue and pink heads. Lord those things are funny looking.
I'm convinced they're smart. I figure it's usually mean to rate animals as smart or dumb since a chicken is plenty smart enough to be a chicken and people use that kind of shit to justify mistreating the objectively dumber members of the animal kingdom. Nonetheless, these turkeys certainly seem to have more problem solving ability and awarness of the world around them than either chickens or ducks. They've come very close to learning that a certain amount of obnoxious behavior will cause someone to squirt them with goat's milk and then the only trick is to open their beaks at the right moments. They look at you with their weird dinosaur eyes and I am convinced they know exactly what is going on.
I really don't want the Cap'n to eat them.

In a month or so I am going to have a new kitten. Dude, I am such a cat lady. If I had permission from my housemates I would so totally have 5 new kittens and one new cat a month from now.
It's not, I don't think, even that I'm so gaga over cats more than it's that I am a closet misanthrope with the same instinct to swoop in and rescue people from their own dumb lives that permeates left-wing do-gooders. I just want to swoop in and rescue people's cats from those people's dumb lives. This makes me more like Cara's mom who used to sneak into people's backyards and build them Buckmeister Fuller-esque dog houses when she feeled that the dogs rightful owners were neglecting the animals shelter needs.
This could be a big problem for me. I'm torn between feeling like a judgemental college actvist for being disgusted at the casual and utilitarian approach to pets that permeates the working-class neighborhood where I work and just, well, being disgusted. For example: My client's mother has a chow dog which lives in her backyard in a dog house, never, ever enters the human house and because he is never brushed has a tangle of dreadlocks all over his body. Now technically, this dog is not abused at all. He has food, water, shelter and isn't sick. But, I feel strongly that dogs belong in the house. That they deserve constant attention, medical care and to be appropriatly groomed. Many times I've contemplated stealing the dog. Cats get off even worse. My clients mom and several of her neighbors see nothing wrong with leaving small children unsupervised around cats and letting the small children toss the cats up into the air or whatnot, without so much as saying, as I've said, "that cat won't like you if you treat it like that". Then they say nothing when the children smack the cat for "being mean".
Anyway, a stray cat had a litter of kittens in the un-used dog house in my client's grandmother's backyard. When I arrived at work in the morning I was told that the cat was vicious because it kept hissing at my client at the neighborhood children who poked it. The cat, for the record, is anything but vicious. She's barely more than a kitten and purrs while being petted. I was also told that the grandmother's plan for the next six weeks or so was to feed this skinny mother cat bread and milk. I went home and brought some cat food.
Part of me so wants to take this cat and all her kittens home and put myself in charge of finding homes. I hear the family discussing people to give the kittens to, (well they might want another one. they kicked that one they had out of the house for making too much noise) and want to hold the cats hostage, demanding proof of rabies vaccines and nuetering from anyone who gets one. But that's not going to work. Instead I plan to bring more cans of wet catfood tomorrow morning and try and convince my roomate that a cat plus a kitten doesn't really count as two more cats.

I had the worst day at work today. Details I won't bore you with, internet. But really, I want a job where the issue on which I must stand firm and hold the line is not, I repeat not, that no matter how many times a person crashes her head into the wall while screaming obscenities that person is still required to give me a little bit of token assistence while I scrub the urine stained mattresses (yes, plural), sheets, three sets of clothing and two blankets that the aforsaid person pissed on in an early morning fit of spitefullness.
Malicious peeing is really where it's at and it's something I'm thinking about taking up. God. I am so damn hostile these days! I have totally abandoned my old 'live and let live' policy towards stupidity and antisocial behavior. What if I just started sneaking into the homes of people who bug me and peeing all over their suff?
I've keyed 1 hummer and 2 Candillac Escalades in the past 48 hours. I've scratched "Pig" into their driver's side door. Yeah, I know, how Sadie Mae Glutz of me. But I'm a weenie about vandalism and I can't think of anything equally short that will express a similiar sentiment. I feel pretty justified about it, like it's my own personal throwback to the days of branding thieves and making lepers wear a bell. If you are going to be a goddamn pig about everything then you should have to drive around with a personal reminder of it slowly rusting your sty-mobile and announcing your pig status to everyone you meet.

My poor mother has had to retreat from the internet world with her tail between her legs after my stupid, stupid aunt created a personal internet homepage simply to harass my mother. I am so sad. My mother had such a good blog, she writes like she talks, sassy! I sympathize too, having perfect strangers butting into your life is one thing, having much disliked relatives get all snippy at you is much, much worse.
My aunt of course, will win this round, because she has so little activities to entertain herself with that she fill have hours and hours to fill sniping at my mother from the safe confines of cyberspace.
I, however, am boycotting the family birthday outing this year. That'll show 'em.

Except we don't because we are fucking peasants, wrapping ourselves in table cloths and drinking from the single unchipped mug found amongst the debris littering the kitchen floor. Anyway, on sundays I milk the goats.
I like to call animals by cute nicknames, something I never noticed was odd until I moved out of my parents house and had roomates that snickered when I called my cat, "Mr. Buttonpants" or "Pookylu". It's a blessing or a curse that I go to milk by myself sunday nights. I tend to keep up a steading stream of monologue while milking and my brain is turned off during most of it. I came to awareness tonight and realized that when I left off my brain was comforting Tabitha my calling her in french, "my pretty little goat" which is, "ma belle petite chevre" and had spun off from there until my sweet nickname for Tabitha had become "Chevre-Lu". I don't know whether to thrilled or horrified by the Joycean bit of bi-lingual punning my brain got up to in my abscence.
Here are the five people I meet on my way to the barnyard, in order:

1. The old man louging outside 'Adam's Soul Food', which keeps such insane hours I'm certain it is a drug front.

2. The constantly pregnant stray dog that's always trying to chase and eat my car. Her boyfriend these days is some sort of feral airdale.

3, 4, 5: The teenage boys who decide to stand in the middle of the street playing craps at all hours of the day or night. I figure they are pretty harmless because they always move aside to let my car pass into the parking lot. They don't bother to pick up their dice or money so I end up driving right over it.

phew. no worries internet. through some intensive csi style detective work we reached consensus that my arch-enemy has not been able to penetrate this far into the world of cyberspace.

as you were.

The thing I hate about the internet is, you tell your little stories to all the millions and millions of folks out there and you figure, statistics alone say that among those millions of folks and millions of the sites the chances of your own worst enemy stumbling upon your is pretty slim. But it never is, is it? You fucking worst enemy has tracking skills like a goddamn bobcat and sure enough, there she is popping up on your own little corner of cyberworld, totally uninvited. And she'll say, the next tiem I see her ugly face, "I don't need an invite. This is the internet. You invited everyone". And you feel like there should be some sort of implied "anti-invite" sent out only to those you totally hate hate hately hate. And then you think, well that wouldn't work because if my archenemy sene me an anti-invite I'd be over at their little personal homepage in a goddamn nano-second.

I don't think my nemesis know about this personal internet homepage, so I may still be in the clear. Don't worry internet, my nemesis is nobody you know. really.

I too, am a just one loud boo from totally losing my shit these days. I can't even see my sister sleep without wanting to check her pulse. Now supposedly she's clean but this is the 4th or 5th time she's supposedly been clean and it's like the movie of my life is The Blob and the title card at the end say, "The end?"
Whenever this is really over, or who am I fucking kidding? Whenever I'm not so damn raw about it anymore I"m writing a memoir. I think I'll call it "through water with eyes like pearls" after that Richard Wilbur poem , because "Elizabeth Wurtzel Can Kiss My Ass, You No-Talent Cunt" is probably libelous. I hate that Elizabeth Wurtzel with such a burning passion. If I ever see her on the street I'll totally punch her lights out.
Not for me, I'm a big first-amendment-believing girl. I don't hold her responsible for the choices my sister made. I'd do it, the punching and the memoir writing, to rise up righteous on behalf of her poor family, whose suffering exists only to remind her how ignorant and shallow they are compared to her. It's an aesthetic objection. I'm tired of her and Joanna Kaysen and dead, overachieving Sylvia being the collective face and female artistry.
It's for Mary, too, who's the Edna Ward of my life story, thin hand reaching out, last word love . She was no Sylvia Plath. All she did was raise to smart, brave daughters and bury one of them. All she did was be decent and forgiving and fill her life with art and friendship and goodness. She, who was such this force of life and love, gets cut down by the vicious disease. I never got to know her like I should have because, with the emotional tilt-a-whirl that is my life I couldn't handle caring for a woman I barely knew as she slowly lost the ability to eat and speak and move and breath.
I'm so angry at my sister and so angry at the writers who inspired her. I'm angry at that 19 year old kid whose parents reported him missing a few hours before he blew himself up on a bus during rush hour and at the september 11th hijacker who called his wife he adored to tell her loved her before getting on the plane that morning. The pope, I think may have had a point. We need a culture of life. There is something wrong with us that we rate emotional depth by one's lack of attachment to all the things of this world, by one's suffering and willingness to destroy oneself.

ug. This heat is slowly enveloping my brain, smushing it. I want a pedal powered/solar powered bio-diesel air conditioner. I want to move to sunny Fairbanks. The Cap'n left Megan's dog at the barnyard today. We noticed a few hours later. She was fine and the Cap'n was sucessfully able to argue not guilty due to heat related stupidity.
Tuesday night, Megan and I completly submerged ourselves in the fountain outside the art musuem. It was chilly and refreshing right then but by the time we finished biking home I was again devoured by the heat.

When my brother, Nathan, was 7 or 8, my dad took him fishing and somehow they actually managed to catch a fish. My brother, now an earnest scholar of James Joyce was never one of those rought and tumble Dennis the Menace type boys...you know, ever... and my father's attempts to make him more macho are just a series of comic failures.
Anyway, driving back from the fishing hole with a cooler with the still alive fish on his lap my brother decided the fish's name is Petey and starts imploring my father to release Petey. My father refuses. As the song "It's a Heartache" began to play on the radio my brother cried out, "It really is a heartache!" and burst into tears.
When my dad first told me this story, I foolishly asked, "so then you let Petey go, right?" and my father replied, "Of course not! I fried that fish up and ate it."
Now some country bands cover of It's a Heartache is in heavy rotation on the Q country station I listen to during lulls in npr. Now, my dad and I have had a rather rocky relationship in general, and especially in the past year since he's found something he and my sister can really bond over, but I think I'm at the stage where I'm willing to cut him significantly more slack. Now any time I drive anywhere I hear this song that reminds me of one of my dad's jerkier moments and I worry it's poisoning our relationship.
Also, I hate that fucking song.

I have a job interview tomorrow (wednesday). It is for my dream job. All this really reveals is that my standards of what constitutes a "dream job" have plummeted over the years. Now it pretty much covers: Less than 40 hours a week, mostly indoor with little to no liklihood of being kicked or having to have extended contact with human urine not my own.

One: How I learned to Sweat away my worries
I totally won Hive Opening Challenge today, but there were some casualties. Even though I decided to forgo the full bee suit in deference to the 90 degree heat I still found myself in long sleeves, long pants, elbow length leather gloves and knee socks on an asphalt roof in the middle of the afternoon. About half-way through the process, sweeping bees off a frame with the snow brush from Megan's car, I started thinking that getting stung wouldn't be so bad and actually droplets of sweat were falling off my nose.
We ended up getting about six frames out of the boxes, which should add up to about 2 gallons of honey when we centrifuge it out tomorrow. In the meantime, Megan, the Cap'n and I collapsed on the couch and drank iced tea and giggle incoherently, which is making me wonder if heat stroke and dehydration might soon be the new street drug.
Two: How I Sweat Away my good sense and climbed up on a high horse I've been thinking a lot about my fellow Daily Content Challenge competitors and their collective feeling that George Bush is destroying the world. I want to be able to express these idea coherently, but the dehydration is making me stupid so bear with me. It's not that I don't hate George Bush but the feeling that he is the worst thing ever to happen to us ever seems a little bit disengenous...a little bit liberal. It seems like it lets, say, Bill Clinton off the hook for signing NAFTA and welfare reform and being the biggest cheerleader for the WTO or John Kerry for being a big NAFTA asshole or fill in the blank. It seems like if you're looking to politicians to solve this problem you're always going to be disapointed; there's no good guys, I'd say my definition of a good guy is someone who doesn't want the kind of power over people's lives that a president has. They're the problem, not the solution.
There's nothing good or just about presidents or corporations or nation-states or domestic policy and getting mad at governments for controlling people's lives and making war is, to use a favorite metaphor of my mom's, like getting mad a pig for being a pig.

I realize now why all those seventies back to the land types kept getting busted by the feds for their little hobby gardens; marijuana really does make tedious farm tasks more tolerable. Poor Ma and Pa Ingles, all they had was Mr. Edwards and his horrible moonshine. Lucky me. I know a lot of conspiracy theorists with grow lights.
Today I helped strain the wax and dead bees out of what became 23 12 oz. jars of honey while at the same time peeling the newly harvest garlic.
I'm the "wipe your hands on your pants" type of girl, not the other type, whatever that is. So by the end of this adventure my legs, skirt and arms were covered in a dirty, garlicly smelling coat of stickiness. I also had a medium sized pool of honey collecting on the table. At just the right moment, however, a flock of rambunctious young children came galloping into the room, devoured the spilled honey and, in a bright fit of sugar shock went galloping back outside to go play in traffic or climb on piles of bricks or whatever free-spirited, home schooled youngsters do these
days.
Tomorrow: the Hive Opening Challenge. If I am not stung by a bee by the end of the day I win.

Most people who interest me have a book or two that changed their live, for me it's the journal, the Baffler. My brother bought me a subscription for my 17th birthday and it was the best thing that every happened to me.
Following the example of the Baffler and it's editorial suspicion of youth culture and rebellion I have begun, relatively recently to completly embrace the idea of identifying as utterly mainstream. I am mainstream, I have the values of the kindergarten classroom. I want people to share their toys and be nice to each other and think of other people and have fun. I just want everybody to be happy and no one to hurt anybody else.
I've been floating this idea of how mainstream I am to a couple non-internet people. They have found the concept hilarious. "Look at your home!" they say, "What are your opinions on the government, anyway?"
I was never really comfortable being a member of any subculture, anyway, not like I was a beautiful unique snowflake but like I was never good at it. I'm too big a dork. Through no fault of my own, however, I embraced a political idealogy that is not only extreme but comes complete with it's own (loud) musical genre and style of dress. I don't really mind. The music is catchy and the fashion is low maintence. Now fast-forward four years or so and I live in such a subcultural bubble that I can legitimatly think of myself as mainstream because I still think eating roadkill squirrel is weird.
I think the fact that I can live comfortably in my bubble without noticing is* a sign that we are moving, slowly but surely, beyond being just a subculture with a musical genre and way of wearing our pants to a full blown culture culture with values and taboos and ways of interacting that are holistic and workable. I like my culture; after all this I'm still convinced we can save the world.



*besides a reminder of how socially awkward I am

The New York Times got snotty last week in reference to Local Sports Team's playoff game. The sentence was (to paraphrase), "Detroit as city so crappy that people are half-seriously considering turning it into farmland". Yeah, fuck you very much New York Times.
Hopefully, the joke will be on New York before it's too late. Patrick's been surveying every garden in the agriculture network so that by the end of the summer we'll know the total acres under cultivation within the city limits. If the agriculture network keeps growing then within ten years Detroit could very well be something we haven't seen on this earth in over 5,000 years: a city that can feed itself. .
I'm not too worried about how fucked we are because necessity is, as they say, the mother of invention and we're certainly experiencing that in Detroit. I really think we can all make this whole "world not coming to an end" thing work out. The solutions are there and there are lots of smart people and wacky crackpots working overtime trying to find them.

The front door broke on sunday in such a way that it would not open. What happened is that one of the locks, unused since the Bruce Campbell days, broke free of it's duct tape covering and mischeviously locked itself. I had arranged that very day for an earnest little busy bee from 3000 mile to arrange a rock show Cara's touring housemates. Everyone was therefor forced to walk through the theater to reach their bedroom. Fortunatly the Busy Bee gave us all "Band and Crew" laminants. In case you had any illusions internet, we are not the backstage passes kind of a venue, if only because "backstage" is technically the kitchen.
While the other bands were gripping about the lack of monitors (are they fucking serious, monitors would get in the way of the buckets under the leaking roof) the Baltimore crew were embracing the humour of the situation by putting laminants on the cat.
The next day Patrick sliced the mischevious lock in half with a sawzall and all was well.

P.S. I too wish to participate in this Blog-A-Day challenge I have heard of.

One
Megan's have some issues in her relationship. This is prompting her to, out of vengeance, start a rumour that her boyfriend once had a torrid affair with John Zerzan. I am doing her a favor by spreading this rumour, because John Zerzan in one those red-flag, beloved only by asshole types of writers. Like Chuck P. and Ayn Rand and Neitzche.

Two
My spiritual guru was in town the other night; braggin, but only after I asked, about his new 2.5 million dollar government grant to, among, other things, experiment with using mushrooms for brownfield remediation. Oh world I cannot hold thee close enough!
My spiritual guru feels that we should use the fact that a whole lot of people are moving out of the compound this summer to do some serious renovations. I disagree. I feel we should bulldoze the less attractive of our two houses and build one of those enviromentally friendly swimming pools, with a water slide and a diving board. According to my guru anything is possible with a weekend, about 10 people and a carefully controlled flow of beer. He should know, right?

1. We are so very happy

I'm too punk for vitamins, althought I could probably use some, damnit. Instead I'm going to secretly blow up the compound while everyone's away, saving only one cup and plate for myself and a table cloth toga to wear. Actually, I'm not punk enough to do that, so you see my predicamite.
I think I'm just going to vaccum my room real well and make it a pleasant sanctuary inside which I can hide from crowds of party goers that leave me feeling all shaky and unwell.
Things aren't all bad, we are, after all, so very happy.

2.Centrifuge

Yesterday we spun out the honey from one of the 5 hive boxes. We ended up getting 3 1/2 gallons out of it and only two minor casualties. Megan got stung by a bee. I got the worst of it; I was holding down our janky spinner was Keven turned the crank when the gear box flew off, slicing my palm open on its way to the ground. It was one of those really macho injuries though. Y'know, those ones that don't hurt at first so you can say, "it was just a scratch" and then you and everybody else can look down and see blood pouring out of your hand onto the ground and into the vat of honey. Oops. Don't worry about it internet, we'll filter the blood out with the wax an dead bees and honey is naturally anti-biotic so you won't get the sif or the hiv.
We've also been on a cheese-making extravaganza. I'll be spending bits of my teeny paycheck to order feta cheese bacteria from the internet tonight.

3. Ginger Snapping
My sister received a card in the mail from our kindly southern grandmother, herself a 30 year long friend of Bill W. It had a golden retreiver puppy on the cover congratulating my sister on her sucessful stint in rehab. Now, adult me, the one who understands that other people have feelings, realizes that my sister needs are the support and encouragement she can get and appreciates my southern grandmother for her compassion and unconditional love (which my evil bitch michigan grandmother does not have). The selfish adolescent part of me is pissed. I too, have gone at least a month without perpetrating grand larceny against my family or shooting heroin. Where's my card with a puppy on it?