The Last Chicken

In the beginning, my chickens were to be free range, but they pooped everywhere which was incompatible with my barefoot prone family. And they ate every little shoot, every seedling, every seed. Nothing good could grow with chickens on the loose. So we clipped their wings and fenced them in.

Huck and I clipped their wings at night. Without light, chickens sleep, a stupor-y, paralyzed sleep. This is why they need latched coops. They are defenseless in the night. Plus, in the dark, I could half-heartedly lunge at them and no one, not even I, could see my chicken-shit farmeress-ness. I hated handling chickens.

Coyote was our go-to chicken-rustler. His preferred, if unconventional, method was a leaf blower we’ve never needed as we have no leaves out here. But Coyote found a use for it. He’d bluster the chickens back to their barn. At first it seemed cruel. But it was so darn effective that the chickens would run to the barn as soon as they saw Coyote with his uzi of air.

Sometimes they ran towards me, goddess of kitchen scraps that I am. They’d squat down, a submissive posture which means “fuck me, oh great rooster!” But I’d just scratch their backs instead. They never did that when it was time for clipping wings. Their empty little heads were full of instinct.

In six years we’d never had a predator. Early on, we found a mink winding around their coop. And once, after one died, an owl ate its head. We moved the coop in to the barn, out of the weather and further removed from claws, beaks and teeth. We secured the entrances to the barn. I don’t know when we stopped shutting the coop altogether.  

Six years in, their rickety little coop was falling to pieces. If you jostled the chicken-filled coop like a maraca for long enough, you could get the door closed but the locks wouldn’t line up. And what good would locks do when the chicken wire was coming off? Staple and nail. Staple and nail and still, corners popped up here and there, now and again. So we’d just shut the barn door instead of the coop. Only a few still slept in the coop anyway.

Ninja (or Dragon, we had two indistinguishable black chickens) sleeps on a high high shelf. No one knows how she gets up there, but the dismount is a bitch. Every morning, she throws herself off the ledge, bounces on her chest across the barn floor, rests for a disturbing moment, and then resumes her day. 

Meanwhile her twin was constantly brooding in the hay. After four years she was still convinced that an egg would hatch, some day. As she grew older, she grew broodier and broodier and I gave up trying to convince her to leave her faux clutch for the coop.

At six and four years old, their best egg laying days were behind them. There were only a few eggs a week, and that was during prime laying times. Yet we continued to feed them, not quite sure when to call it quits, or how. 

When we bought this place, I was thrilled to live out my farmish fantasies. Cows and chickens and a 5000 square foot garden!! My dreams were big and I had the energy and enthusiasm to match. After over two years of head injury, it doesn’t fit any more. Even if we had somehow known all that wasn’t coming back, all that I had to let go of, that this whole enterprise was actually over two years ago, who had the energy, the wherewithal to close up shop? We just kept doing what we could to keep what we had going. 

Slowly now, we are bringing the property to a state the matches what our lives look like now. Fences are being pulled out, large swaths of overly needy plants are in hospice care, their final days a looming certainty.  I don’t have the energy and desire for doing this dismantling work either, but it’s too depressing to look out the windows at Falling Apart Farm, Not Quite Able to Keep Up Enterprises, and The Garden of Dead Dreams. So each day, a little bit of farm gets folded up and put away. No one knew how to dis-assemble the chicken-husbandry.

That morning, I slid the broad, white, barn door aside and there, at my flip-flops, lay Sri Racha, a black and white speckled beauty, headless, her neck bleeding into the water jug, feathers everywhere. 

That was all I wanted to see. I did not want to step around her, deal with her, with this.  I didn’t like touching the chickens when they were alive, certainly dead would be no better. I dashed back to the house and asked Huck to bury the beautiful bird before he left for work.  By the time I realized he’d forgotten, the day was on its way to record-breaking heat.

And then, it slowly occurred to me that I hadn’t seen the other chickens emerge from the barn yet either. In retrospect, I seem like a dimwitted ninny, but it’s the slowness of the unsuspecting, I hope.

I sent my chicken rustler, my gross-chore go-to guy out to the barn for a reconnaissance mission. He returned with wild tales of blood and feathers and severed heads. If it wasn’t the work of Ozzie Osbourne, it was a mink or a new-to-the-hood raccoon. Coyote reported that the white one still had her head. Half of it. And she needed to be killed. 

Photos courtesy Blue Palmer: this was her favorite

I traded my flipflops for my barn shoes and went to witness the grizzly scene myself. I stepped over the corpse of Sri Racha and found the brooder’s body still on the nest, a testament to motherly instinct. The walls around it were covered in blood and her head lay nearby. Priscilla cowered just behind the door, her lower beak missing along with half her neck. I hoped she was dead, but she waddled a few steps. Ninja wandered through, dazed and silent, yet whole. The floor seemed to move and breathe with a layer of feathers. 

Priscilla was the original chicken. I picked her specifically to help me with my fear of chickens. She was the white one, the look alike to the headless chicken that attacked me in my youth. I did not want to kill a chicken; I did not want to kill Priscilla. I didn't want it to be final; could she pull through? Alternately, she seemed so close to death anyway, why bother with the final severance? But Coyote insisted. 

Despite my discomfort in asking for help, in the implication that I was in over my head farming-wise, I called the Russian neighbor, Sergei, the one who botched the killing of Beignet. They’d just lost nine chickens under similar circumstances. He quickly entered the barn, assessed the damage, and took Priscilla into his arms. He told me that I should run back to the house and prepare a large vat of just boiled water. I would dip the chicken (although his English is not great so he called it a dog) in to the vat, the feathers would fall off easily and then this incision and that and soon I’d be on my way to a wonderful cauldron of chicken soup, presumably to sooth my no-kill farmer-ette soul. 

I returned to the house and began filling a large pot with water, but then remembered his wife telling me to never ever eat laying hens because they are gross. A six year old laying hen would be even grosser. Chickens, like cows, were genetically separated long ago for their specific uses. A milk cow will give no meat and a meat cow will give little milk. A laying hen in her prime will lay daily but her muscles are jute twine and taste like chicken shit. A meat chicken will live 6 months and never lay an egg.

I wasn’t going to eat this ancient hen. I abandoned my cauldron and returned to the barn, realizing it’d just been a ruse anyway. While I’d remembered the shot between Beignet’s eyes not being immediately successful, Sergei likely remembered me passing out in his field and probably hoped to avoid an encore performance. Sergei’s “look over there!” ploy got me out of the barn long enough for him to slit Priscilla’s throat the rest of the way. When I returned, she was flopping and hopping about the barn, blood silently squirting from her neck. It was the same scene from when I was 7. The white bird. The red pulsing arc of life. She flung her large body against the hay, the walls, the coop. Meanwhile, Sergei tried to make small talk. I responded to his questions, one eye on the old bird, the one white bird, the memory, the dream, not gently dying, but raging, raging. It seemed she could go on forever that way. Here we are old girl. It’s over now. 

Priscilla was a great chicken, really, as chickens go. I’m not just saying that because she’s dead. If I loved any chicken, it was her. She never let me touch her. She was the first to try any new food, any dinner scraps I tossed over the fence. The others would wave their beaks over it and wait until she tried it first. I thought that would be the death of her, that she’d adventuresomely try a poisonous plant someday. But her instincts were right, always, and the others were smart (if that’s even a word that belongs to a chicken) to trust her lead.  She was the explorer, the adventurer. She was never the bottom of the pecking order, but seemed outside of it: sometimes not worth pecking, and other times their non-pecking leader. She seemed bothered by none of it, oblivious to the ever shifting chicken politics.

I didn’t really love my chickens, not in the emotional way, not the way I loved my cows. They were an experiment, a challenge, a desire to know where my food comes from and a way to face a childhood fear. If I never quite loved them, I did learn to care for their well-being, to not wish them ill, to not be terrified of them as I was when I was a child, or rather not as much. Priscilla was the closest I came to an emotional bond with these little dinosaurs. She was my childhood fear. And I made friends with her and in that way she was transformed from fear to friend. The poppy-red blood on white wings, once a macabre emblem of childhood drama, now felt like just another turn on our wheel of fortune, the end of another era.

Sergei piled the chickens like wood and I thanked him with a deep gratitude. I stood over Priscilla, my emotions held at bay for now with the practical issues of a hot day and a barn full of dead bodies.

At first, I tried digging a plot in the dry ground, hard as granite this time of year. I tried commandeering a gopher hole, but realized 25 pounds of chicken would not go easily or deeply into it. 

I donned my yellow kitchen gloves and haltingly reached towards Priscilla. My gloves matched her yellow claws. She was heavier than I imagined, her old body resting deeply into the dirt of the barn floor. I plopped her body into the black plastic bag. I plopped her head in to it. I plopped the brooder’s body in, her head too, and Sri Racha’s body, head still unaccounted for. The yard waste bag sagged and threatened to split open. I could barely lift it up into the garbage can. Luckily, pick-up was the next day and my girls would soon be cremated at the Waste-to-Energy plant. I placed my yellow kitchen gloves, like a rose, atop of the black bag inside the garbage can turned coffin. 

It turns out that Ninja was our sole layer as the trickle of eggs has not slowed since that Monday. She is truly free-range now as one chicken’s shits are easily avoided. She hasn’t quite figure out what to eat, except the grasshoppers. She dodges wildly back and forth, aiming for one specific victim in a sea of what seems like thousands around here this year. One can’t walk in flipflops across the lawn without making a little grasshopper pesto in one’s flipflops. (Even as I type, a grasshopper just flung itself at my computer screen...I think I left a window open)

Crunch all ya want! We'll make more!

Ninja, a dark shadow of my farmy dreams, is utterly alone now. Chickens are nothing if not social, despite their vicious pecking order. They are like middle school girls that way. One lonely chicken is so horrible that even the factory chick farms won’t sell them as singles. They need to know where they stand in order to survive. Even if it’s at the bottom. Even if they’re hen-pecked to death. They would prefer a death by peers to no peers at all. Ninja Dragon faces such a fate, poor dear. It might be more merciful to bring Sergei in, to finish off this farm once and for all.

The Art and Craft of Passing out of Slavery

I'd like to highlight a different story of racial passing and this story includes gender bending too! Dolezal seems to be enjoying her spotlight a little much and I thought we could give a little attention now to a more noble passing.

My now defunct one-woman show featured the true story (and real quotes) of a legally black female slave who dressed as a white man to escape slavery in the South. These are the sorts of conditions that make deception something I can sympathize with. This segment of my show did not feel right in first person as I worried (silly me!) I could be insulting, appropriating, and presumptuous if I donned a fake accent and pretended to be a technically "black" slave, so it alone was written in 3^rd person. Since the show is never now likely to see the light of day, I present to you: 1/6^th of the moth-balled Sisterhood of Kings: True Stories of Women in Power and Pants. In it, I portrayed six women who dressed up as men to achieve their dreams, or just survive.  Please note that this is written as a script, not an essay.

----

Ellen Craft grew up in her father's house in the deep South, Georgia. It was the 1840's and her father had slaves. One of her father's slaves was Ellen's mother. And although Ellen appeared white, not black, she was still legally black and a slave. When she was 11, she was given to her older half sister as a wedding gift and that is how she came to live in Macon, Georgia and to eventually meet William, also a slave.

Her half sister was thrilled with their marriage because any children that Ellen and William had would automatically be her property, to sell or use as she wished.

And you thought you had problems with your sister.

Being actual people, with actual dreams of their own, and actual feelings, Ellen and William decided that as long as they were slaves they would never have children. They would never bring in to that world a child, a person, whose fate would be to be treated as property. Never. But … they did want children. And so they decided to figure out a way to escape to the North.

Ellen had already dismissed several of Williams unlikely plans when he finally suggested that Ellen could pretend to be a man, a white man, and William would be her slave.

No – no –Ellen could not imagine how she could pull that off, could not imagine wanting to, could not imagine living as a man, not just a man, but a slave owner. There were too many complications, too many possible pit falls, and the risk, should she be caught, would be too great.

But, William prodded, hadn't people always assumed she was the legitimate child of two white people?

And hadn't she gotten extra beatings just for that?

And didn't she know how to talk like the whites, working in the house?

Maybe – maybe, Ellen said.

William took on extra work, earned extra money, and piece by piece purchased the tools she would need.

Ellen and William got four days off for Christmas.

And early on the morning of December 21, before anyone else was awake, Ellen began to transform: 

First William cut off her hair.

To hide her smooth cheeks, Ellen tied on a toothache bandage.

William wrapped her right arm in a sling filled with medicine faking arthritis because she had never learned to write - so when she had to sign for her tickets, she could reasonably say she was unable to do so.

She pulled on her pants.

William slipped a suit coat over her shoulders.

And with the top hat and green gentleman's glasses of the time, this woman, considered her

father's prettiest daughter, became a man, a frail bespectacled deaf man with a toothache and a very, very attentive slave.

William got Ellen, now going by the name of Mr. Johnson, settled in her car, then took his place in the "Negro" car. They were careful to not look out the windows, to not, in their curiosity, reveal their own faces, and be recognized. For here, in their home town, the danger was greatest.

First, the worst possible thing happened. William's boss came to the station, suspicious. William could hear him urging the ticket agent to search the train.William slouched further and pulled his hat over his eyes and just when the cabinet maker looked through his window, the whistle blew and the train chugged forward.

Then the other worst possible thing happened. The man who sat next to Ellen was the neighbor, Mr. Cray. And he turned to her and said, "It is a fine morning, sir."

She did not know what to say.

Why was he talking to her?

Did he already know?

Had he been sent to find her?

This was just the first step of their plan, would it be foiled so soon?

Ellen did not respond, she didn't know how, she simply stared out the window.

Her heart pounded hard and loud and her hands sweat and she could barely breath.

Mr. Cray spoke louder "It is a very fine morning, sir. It is a very fine morning sir. It is a very fine morning!!!" Until Ellen felt she had to respond, to stop this scene "Yes."

"Sir, I think the gentleman is deaf," a passenger who'd overheard the exchange, intervened.

"Yes, and I shall not trouble him anymore." And Mr. Cray disembarked at the next stop. And with that Ellen knew, with a disorienting sense of irony, that she could pass as a Southern gentle man and she could manage a curve ball.

Ellen had many more close calls. The entire trip, she'd had to listen to the craziest stuff.

A rich woman carrying on about how her stupid slaves wanted to be free and were always running off,and how her stupid husband had given them their freedom on his stupid death bed,but she'd altered the final will:

"I knew he was too good a man to do such an unkind thing, had he been in his right mind, and therefore I had the will altered." she said.

And Ellen who'd stayed out of numerous similar conversations could not refrain,

"Do you mean, madam, that willing the slaves free was unkind to them or costly to you?"

"To the slaves! It seems cruel to turn [epithet for them] loose to shift for themselves, when there are so many good masters to take care of them."

Very carefully, Mr. Ellen Johnson shut her mouth tight, because if the words that were on the tip of her tongue were to actually make it out, all would be lost.

Ellen also had to endure being lectured for treating her slave too kindly.

One Army general demonstrated the way she should really talk to her slave.

No “please.” No “thank you.” But a string of expletives -- here let me show you-- that would keep him in line.

And she was tortured by several young women who found Mr. Johnson to be adorable, no matter how sickly, and wanted to marry him. Mr. Johnson's only response was the refuge of many a non-talkative traveler: pretend to be asleep.

At Charleston, a major slave market, the couple found that Mr. Johnson would have to sign a form to leave the town with her slave.

"I'm afraid I can't sign." Ellen pointed at her bandaged arm. "You'll have to do it for me."

The official eyed the two suspiciously, "I shan't do it!" he said.

And here was a stand off. Each of them eying the other. The crowd gathering, craning their necks to see what and who was holding up this line. And into the middle of this all stumbled a tipsy Army officer, the very one who'd schooled Ellen on how to speak to her slave. [Slurring] "Oh Mr. Johnson, oh I know this family like the book!"  And he signed for them.

Later, the official apologized to Mr. Johnson saying "They make it a rule to be very strict at Charleston. If they were not very careful, any damned abolitionist might take off a lot of valuable … property."

But in the final stretch, from Baltimore to Philadelphia, William went missing.

Mr. Johnson's bags were unloaded and there she stood, a man, alone at the train station.

And William had not made it.

But by now, Mr. Johnson knew just what to do: Mr. Johnson panicked about his missing, possibly escaped, recalcitrant slave and the crew panicked with him. For if a slave escaped from Baltimore, Baltimore had to pay his owner the going rate.

William was finally found in the baggage area where all the slaves were put during the journey. After four long treacherous days, poor William had fallen asleep and no amount of unloading could have woken him.

One final train ride and then, there they were on Christmas morning, William and Mr. Johnson had finally arrive in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly love.

And in order to be free, Ellen had to dress as a man. As unnatural as it seemed to her, as horrifying the thought, this was what it took. Greater prices have been paid for the freedom to be human, to be as precious as any of god's children, but this was the price for Ellen, to spend four hungry, sleepless, terrifying days as some one else, as her exact opposite, a white slave-owning man. 

Imagination and Integrity

I typically don’t step in to the fray of current events here. There’s too much unknown, the landscape is too fluid and I hate to pitch my tent and then have the sands of what we know, what we can know, and how well we can know it shift and bury me. But this whole Rachel Dolezal thing is huge news here in Spokane. I watched it break quietly, reading the first reports on my Facebook feed Thursday night. I watched as it blossomed floridly all day until it became too tempting to not write about. 

Even with the shifting sands of the day’s news, I think I can solidly say that integrity is important to me. More important than any skin color. Honesty is hard and often requires vigilance and courage in the face of what we want and what people want from us.  I know we all fudge a little here and there. We try to keep a long story short, or we want to tell one part of the story but keep the other parts private.  And we all deceive ourselves. Maybe we accidentally twisted the story because we need the other person to be a villain or we really wanted what we wanted and only if we told ourselves that story in that way could we justify it. We are all currently deceiving ourselves in some way, even now, even as I type, trying so hard to keep the truth carved as close to the bone as possible. I fear this truth: that we lie to ourselves. I hate it. It’s a natural part of being human. But to say that we all lie to ourselves and therefore lying is okay, that’s where I disagree. And I have a really big problem with it when it all turns in to a colossal lie and intentional deception. At that point, I don’t feel the same softness for our human-ness as I do when it’s accidental. Perhaps I should, but I don’t. I have no idea where Rachel falls in this continuum of truth, but I do know that I have no time or energy for overt lies and the people who tell them. 

Here's my confession: I once passed as a Christian to take a room in a house very near the University. I didn’t lie. They knew my dad was a pastor and offered me the room based on my father’s occupation alone. I was new to town and I really needed a place to live so I did not correct them.

Here's where I stand up: When I had long dark hair, I often wore it in two braids. I thought it was cute and conveniently kept my hair from blowing in my face. When my hair was worn like this, and only when my hair was worn like this, people, always white people, (but obviously not ALL white people, Ha! That’d be just under 1 billion people. I imagine they would all stand in line and I would go from cradle to grave handling just that one question), would often ask me if I was Native American.

I grew up in the parsonages of Marietta Community Church, a stone’s throw from the town-ette of Marietta, on the lip of the Lummi Reservation. I had Lummi friends. I occasionally attended Lummi functions. But I’ve always found the wherewithal within me to chuckle and say to the inquiring minds, “Nope. I’m actually of Dutch heritage. It’s just the braids; they trick people every time.” I feel now I should specify that I am Dutch, except for 1/32 German, by about 10 feet across the border. But I’ve often said I was all Dutch. I’m sorry. It’s just seemed shorter than saying I was 31/32 Dutch and 1/32 German. And nobody seemed to care anyway.

I can see the temptation of saying I was Native American. I could easily get away with it and get all that exotic credit without the bother of being constantly hassled by stereotypes and racism, both overt cruelty and well-meaning pity.

I worked and attended college with my friend Denise, a black woman who grew up in Anchorage. We worked at the Farmer’s markets around Seattle, manning the Italian, rustic-bread booth together. Our liberal, open-minded customers often chatted her up while ignoring me. The farmer’s market demographic adored her, flirted with her, gave her gifts and invitations, loved her. I suspected it's because my white skin was so cliche, but I didn't say anything until she did. Then when they would leave, we would burst out laughing at them. “I’m so exotic!” She would tease and flaunt her exciting looking hair, maybe in braids or an afro.

She was a math major, a declared math major. She hated math, she told me, but as long as she kept one such class on her schedule, she could go to college as long as she wanted on fat scholarships. “Oh yeah. Black woman math major? Cha-ching! Donors go crazy for that shit.”

She wasn't the only one I knew doing it that way. An Asian friend always claimed to want to be a doctor on her scholarship applications. What kind of doctor? "Oh God no. I don't want to be a doctor at all. I just want my college paid for!"

Meanwhile, I choked along, putting myself through community college, working up to 40 hours a week while taking a full load. I transferred to a state university. I rode a city bus to school 1 ½ hours one way. I had no financial help from my family. I looked for scholarships for white girls studying liberal arts. I could not find any. I understand I have white privilege, just at times I wished it came with money.

I've read that Rachel attended a black college on full scholarships, the assumption being that she was black.

One black man I once had a crush on wouldn’t give me a second glance. I got to know his white friend and we had babies and got married. We hung out with this black man and his new girlfriend and after dinner one night, discussions commenced regarding my time living in Mexico, working as a sales clerk. “Wait! What?! You lived in Mexico? Where else have you been?” After more discussion, and a longish list, he said, “Oh man! I thought you’d just rolled out of the suburbs when I met you! Oh man!”

His white, wispy little girlfriend smiled knowingly at me, “I bet you get that all the time. I bet you’re sick of it!”

“You get that too?”

“Oh yeah.”

My roommate in that Christian house had a Native friend. My roommate coveted invitations to Native events and often talked of Native ideals. Her friend found it necessary to break the news that no matter how hard she tried, my roommate would never ever be Native American and to try to keep that in perspective. Another friend is part Native American and has struggled for acceptance by her tribe, a place where she feels more at home than any other. Racial identity is a tricky thing and deception does it no service.

I can see how passing as black or Native would be attractive. We white girls, a sprawling demographic, want in on a tighter community in America, a sisterhood, a clearer identity. And the farmer’s market clientele would have fawned over me. Scholarships might have materialized. If I wanted to do non-profit work, I wouldn’t just be another do-gooder white girl coming in to tell those flailing POC’s how to pick themselves up (a branding I’d heard another white girl get when she tried to get a teaching position at a Native school). In full disclosure, I’m certain I've said some well-meaning but totally stupid bullshit about race and I've heard other freckled white-girls say some pretty strange things too. Some of the stereotypes are based on some real issues. 

If I could pass as black in my liberal circles, I could imagine that my struggles would be respected, made real by my race. It wouldn’t be assumed that I had had an easy, simple, well-funded life. People would look at me and know I’d been through some shit, and that part of the assumption would be true. It would almost be closer to truth to than what they get when they judge me on my skin color and my hair. It’s silly to complain: #whitegirlproblems. I’m not denying my white privilege, but I want to talk about my experiences. Stereotypes cut both ways. 

We could say, hate the game, not the player. But it’s my job to be honest, and your job to not jump to conclusions, to not stereo-type me, dismiss me, or anyone else. I certainly don’t imagine we fresh-faced and enthusiastic white girls are oppressed enough to justify the sort of deception all available evidence points to being perpetrated by Rachel Dolezal. This whole thing is mind blowing, strange, and yet understandable, pitiable. It’s hard to get traction as just another flacid-haired white girl, especially in liberal circles already awash in such mundane complexions in this region. But I’m not 100% sure that her act is even that well-reasoned. I’m also aware of the possibility that her parents have an ax to grind, yet that doesn't mean she's telling the truth.

The Wantonly Ironic Blog Post

This is the last day of April and I haven't posted yet this month. I set it as a personal goal to post at least once a month and for most of the seven years I've been puttering on this blog, I've achieved at least that. But not this month, apparently, or not. Now that I'm telling you this, I'm stuck in a paradox loop.

The whole fam damily

In the beginning, I posted many times a month, and once I even posted more than once in a single day! They were short posts, more about keeping in contact with our old friends and our diaspora of families. Since then it's morphed in to more of an essay thing. Often, I omit the various details of our lives, the ones I might share with friends, ones like: I put my back out on the back porch on the first hot day of the year and I got stuck out there but I had my cell phone and called Huck who happily took the rest of the day off work to care for his can't-get-up wife. While I waited for him, I got too hot in my black velour pants so I scooched them off of me. This might have been obscene but I 1) live in the country and no one can see me, 2) Except for there turned out to be construction workers building a house on the lot next to ours and they had a perfect view, 3) My unders often offer more coverage than my bathing suite bottoms.That sounds very granny-panty vs. string bikini, which would send the wrong message, both ways. And finally number 4) I don't give a shit who sees what. But then, pants-less, my legs burnt to purple and are just now, two weeks later, beginning to peel.

My view on the porch: that's the underside of the lounge chair

Huck's former work with severe Cerebral Palsy patients meant that he knew just how to pick me up without hurting me, how to feed me tacos by turning my head to the side, and how to sit me on the toilet. After a few immobile days I was fine, if a little resentful of what two and half years of laying down recovering from my head injury has done to my core strength. So now I'm doing more core exercises. The delightful thing was that it was just my back that hurt, not my head. So I laid flat on my back in bed and played on my phone which only fell on my face a few times. It was Mahjong Solitaire for days, baby. Having a hurt back was not boring, not like having a head injury. I was annoyed that the gardening would have to wait, but otherwise, it was a delight, interrupted only by stabbing sensations in my lower back. My mind was able to play, read, sing, tolerate light, and talk. Piece of cake, a little crumbly but yum.

I also would have written something about our heating system breaking down and how we have to buy a new one. I will post pictures when we finally get it done. These photos will be en lieu of photos of us wearing clothes, the ones I might have purchased for me and my family and our pets during the next five decades. Instead of enjoying clothing and shoes and desserts and beer and electricity and gasoline, we will be paying off this machine that's the cost of a car but doesn't even have cup holders. It's okay that we won't be able to afford clothes because our 27 year old washer and dryer just broke too, so what clothes we were going to buy wouldn't have been clean anyway. It's okay that the dryer is broken because it's clothesline season. And it's okay that the washer fills up at a drip and takes 2-3 hours per load because that's the same rate the 20 year old water-heater fills at too. But no worries, we will have warm air, if not warm water, in our home. If we weren't paying the mortgage on the house, we'd be able to afford it's upkeep. Next time I buy a house, I will be paying attention to the age of the appliances. Oi Vey!

Oh well, that's life: impossible situations, inconvenience, trouble, nuisances and frustration. Life is suffering, as the Buddhists say, no matter what you decide to do. Life is other things too, but suffering is the part we're always squirming away from. I often look at children (and myself sometimes; I'm young yet) and pity the sheer volume of suffering they have in front of them --days, decades, centuries-- and the obnoxious process they will have to go through of acclimating to it, accepting it, and finally laughing languidly in it's face. Hahaha.

Party's over for the blossom carnival

I almost made my self-imposed monthly deadline. I started a blog post yesterday, but I keep having more and more ideas and things I want to write and now it's getting really long, way too long for this blog. I don't think you people can handle the 15 page essay, not here, not in the few minutes you have today. So I'll need to cut some things. I do this for free, out of my own need to connect and communicate and string together pretty (and sometimes ugly) words. I do it as honestly and as compassionately as I can figure out how to do. The words come easily but the cutting is hard. Although I'll do it as much as I can stand for you, my unknown readers. Thanks for reading, by the way. The verbiage of the internet is so absurdly copious that I am always happy that anyone picks a blog post of mine from this ocean of blather and takes a few highly coveted moments of their time to read what I've written. Thank you.

About you: You are anonymous. My blog has a statistics page which keeps you that way but also lets me know the general gist of my readership. I wish I knew more about you all, but the most they'll tell me, that I actually want to know, is search terms and country of search. Recently, someone found my blog through the unlikely Google search: "Sarajoy, your ass.my life." Ooh-kaaaay.

Also, I've discovered that if you are in Denmark and for some very disturbing "reason" you Google, "Cow Shit Porn," photos of me licking cow shit off a pitchfork will be at the top of your search. Obviously, looking back on it now, I can see how I would end up there. Back then, however, I was clueless about cow shit porn. Now that I've seen the Google search habits of the Danes, I can see how my silly photos would have landed me at the top. That was not the intended outcome. Oh crap, I just realized that every time I use the term "Cow Shit Porn," (Now CSP!) I create a stronger and stronger link from CSP! to me. This is not what I want! I am not CSP! No. No. No. If you are looking for CSP, this is NOT it! Please! Look away!

The spider I didn't see until I went inside and inspected the photos

That post, however, is obviously the most popular one, at least 15 times more viewed than any other post. The next most viewed is One Black Sex Link Ninja Chick, a harmless post about our baby chicks that happens to have a much-sought title.

Since it's been seven years, I am wondering about changing the name of my blog. "Sarajoy FRESH!" has gotten a little old and sounds like a cooking blog, which it really isn't. I'm thinking of "Dura Matters," but that might be too medically, TBI-y referential. And don't want to get stuck on this topic for the rest of my life. Because that's how it works, you name your blog and then you HAVE to talk about only that thing, FOREVER. ONLY. THAT. It's in the Blogspot marriage license.

"Dura Matters" also doesn't sound very perky or clever. Maybe "Dury Maties"? Or maybe something more sophomoric-ly sophisticated and un-spellable like "The Bureau of Recollections." Maybe I should rename it "Inutile Larrikin," a nutty phrase I put together just now using Google, which is about as much thought as I put in to the original title. But I'm not sure anyone would ever find my blog, or care to, if I named it that. Maybe I'll just refresh the name a tad to "SarajoyROTTEN!" But more likely, I will think about it for a long time, so long that I'll feel enough satisfaction from having day dreamed about it and I won't actually do it.


What do you think I should rename my blog? Or should I? "Let me know in the comments!" I finally wrote it! I may be a blogger for real now! And I really do want to know what you think! Unless you are my mother. If you are my mother, you are officially invited to stop telling me how much you "can't stand" my blog.