The Chicken Saga Continued...

Eve has been fighting with Daryl.

A lot.

As in, 'one of us is going to have to die', kind of fighting. 

Thing is, there's no reason for it.

There aren't any chicks to show off for...

there's plenty of food...

and thirty-two acres to divide between the two of them.

They're just fighting to be fighting.

Apparently heterosexual human males don't have a monopoly on this kind of stupidity.

Anyway...

Eve is now Everette...

with four E's. 

I'm driving in my car.

I turn on the radio. The old-fashioned, free kind.

I hear like, four notes. I'm thinking Rod Stewart. Hot Legs.

I go into Karaoke mode.  

But no. I’ve been duped. It's not Rod Stewart. It’s Grand Funk. We’re an American Band.

I’m not in a Grand Funk mood. I don’t want anybody coming to my town. I don’t want to party it down. I'm in Karaoke mode for god's sake. I want some Rod Damn Stewart. I need some Rod Damn Stewart.

I change the station. There's Rod, wrapping up my request , all nasty and precognitive like, 'Hot Legs, keep my pencil sharp... ' 

I have a higher calling. I'm sure of it.        

The Big Trip: Mountains

click 'em

The Big Trip: Pictures of Texas... or Oklahoma, or New Mexico, or Arizona...

Touristy Stuff Cont., The Grand Canyon.

This place is insane...

'Grand' is a really poor choice of words.



I was dumbfounded...

Stupefied.

This, is a really, really big hole.

I don't know what rim we were at.

I don't think it matters...

It was all beautiful.

Definitely worth the fifteen bucks.

Put it on your to-do list.

(click the pictures... bigger is better)



The Big Trip, Part Two: Touristy Stuff

As a kid, places like the Continental Divide, The Four Corners, Pike's Peak, held a kind of Billy the Kid mystique for me. They were geographical legends, elusive heroes that could take your life at any given moment and think nothing of it.

Not so much any more. At least not the Continental Divide. Even the dogs there were run down.     

************

 Someone just had to stand on a corner in Winslow, Arizona...

A fine sight indeed.

************

Meteors do hit the Earth folks...

  

Not often. But they do.

And they make big, big holes, which cost fifteen dollars to see.

Worth every penny. 



The Big Trip, Part One

Sunday morning, the eleventh of November, I left the frost-nipped tranquility of my little Tennessee farm for sunny Southern California, land of my birth.

Plans for this prodigal return were set in motion way back in June, by my brother and I. It began as a semi-simple, super-secret Thanksgiving Day surprise, geared mostly toward my mother. But by the time the leaves had turned, our scheme encompassed Mom’s birthday as well, on the sixteenth, a celebration I haven’t been present at since ‘96. Eighteen days total. The most time I have ever voluntarily stepped away from home and work.

I rented a vehicle. Something foreign, comfy and dependable. Dixie rode shotgun. She navigated and poured coffee and stuff. I held the wheel. We drove I-40, the straighter and wider and smoother version of the legendary Route 66. You see a lot of the old highway, snaking along beside its titanic successor, a worn out frontage road. I can’t imagine ever getting any kicks on Route 66. It looks like a real bitch to drive.

'Credit'

It’s Friday, a little after four. We’re headed home from an install job. Lionel’s driving. I’ve got shotgun. Chris and Lucas, the latest help, are in the back seat, a Styrofoam cooler between them, talking through wads of tobacco and spitting intermittently into Mountain Dew cans they’ve expertly hogged the tops out of. The truck is warm, the sun flickering through trees high up on the ridge to my right. I’m trying not to nod off.

       ‘You should go to Aaron’s,’ I hear Lucas tell Chris. Lucas sounds as though he’s about to drown in chew juice.

       The subject is televisions. It seems Chris, with his less-than-steady income and ever-shifting address, is in the market for one.

       Lucas spits, or drains rather and then continues. ‘Yeah man. They gave us a fifty-inch flat screen, a sofa and a badass entertainment center, for like, two hundred bucks a month.’

       ‘How many months?’ Chris asks, obviously impressed.

       ‘Twelve.’

       ‘Do they deliver?’

       Chris doesn’t own a vehicle either.

       I perk up. Lionel looks over at me, rolls his eyes.

       Aaron’s, if you don’t already know, is one of those rent-to-own places that thrives on statistical fuck-ups like Chris and Lucas. I want to ask Chris whose living room he plans to put that fancy TV in. But I resist. Just like I resist ragging on their saggy-ass pants, cockeyed hats, Red Bull, generic smokes and tattoos of their kid’s goddamn feet. Statistically, it’s a waste of good sarcasm.

      Nearer home, Lionel turns onto a side road I don’t recognize. We’re dropping Lucas off, he says. A couple of rights and we’re on a slip of asphalt, winding through this crazy valley. Everything is straight up. Scraggly trees, shotgun shacks and No-Trespassing signs, all seem to be clinging for dear life to the huge limestone boulders. I can’t see out.

       Lucas’s vintage doublewide is hung on the side of a cliff, above what I’m guessing to be a flood zone. I see the blue glow of that fifty-inch flat screen, shimmering through the trailer's yellowed sheers. Lucas’s five kids, four dogs and wife—who I learned earlier had a bid in for Disability—pour out of the trailer when we pull in to the drive. Daddie’s home. It’s payday.

       We all get out, stretch. After some quick introductions, Lionel asks Lucas for his hours. He fills out a check. I scratch the dogs. Some kind of Jack Russell mix—real friendly. Then we’re loaded up and leaving, the kids all waving us goodbye.

       Lucas drives a van, a big, green Chevy that he got a great deal on, just like the fifty-inch flat screen. It dawns on me, as we are pulling out, that I don’t see the van anywhere.

       Wondering, I ask Chris, ‘Lucas have his van in the shop?’

       ‘No,’ Chris says, ‘It’s hiding.’

       ‘Hiding?’

       ‘He owes on it.’

       I look back. The kids are still standing there at the end of the drive, waving at us, like we forgot something.

Dear Mr. Happy (a.k.a., my penis)

     In answer to your question: No, I am not trying to chop you off. Don’t be ridiculous. I am fully aware that this has happened twice now, but I promise you, both times were accidents. Besides, if I were trying to chop you off—which I am not—I’d use something sharper than a piece of plywood.

     If it makes you feel any better, I tried to stop the board with my thumb. You should see it. Really. It’s mangled. Far worse than you. You didn’t even take a direct hit. You might actually have my thumb to thank for that.

     Anyway... that's water under the bridge now. I truly am sorry about all the swelling and bruising. Hopefully it will abate soon. In the meantime, please know that I care for you dearly, and pray that you forgive me again, and that our friendship will continue on into the years to come. I would truly miss you hanging around, despite what you might think at present. 


    S.C.       

Wal-O-Ween

“Great costume!” I say to the bumblebee who parks beside me in the meat isle, where I'm browsing the questionably organic chicken (it is Wal-Mart after all), her antennae—actual wire thin braids of hair and not just any old off-the-rack headband—bobbing like some kind of lure.

“Great costume!” I say again to the Mad Hatter—Johnny Depp and Tim Burton’s version, marvelously reproduced by a woman not much taller than her top hat, who looks as if she has never questioned anything that said, “Eat me”—over in the Candy and Snack aisle, where, for marketing reasons I have yet to decipher, the raisins have been moved.

“Great Costume!” I say yet again to The Queen of Hearts, a tall and thick woman, who I’m guessing has a CDL, and only now it occurs to me, might have a thing going with the Mad Hatter.

“Great Costume!” I wanted to say to the homely Mennonite chick in her grey bonnet, blue skirt and course black shoes. But of course... I didn’t have the balls.

Dixie and the Giant Virus

Dixie is sitting a rabbit.

          And a virus.

                A giant virus.

     The rabbit stays in a little blue-roofed hutch beside Dixie’s big new tool shed. His name is Houdini. The virus has taken up residence in Dixie's tiny stomach, where there's hardly room for a standard-size guest, let alone a giant one. Dixie doesn’t know the virus's name. She doesn't know for certain if it’s a boy or if it's a girl. But, judging from its immensity, Dixie guesses that it’s a boy. Probably a boy named Bart.

     Houdini is a kind rabbit. He sleeps a lot and eats lettuce and carrots, but mostly carrots and sometimes little green pellets that smell like old cut grass. The virus sleeps a lot too, but it is far less kind and eats nothing but Melba toast, (which tastes a lot like old cut grass), and very little of that.

     Houdini belongs to Dixie’s dear friend Donna, who is in the midst of an extended move. Over the days, Dixie has grown quite attached to her dear friend's rabbit, with his pink and twinkling nose, and she tries very, very hard not to think of the day she’ll have to send him back home. The virus, on the other hand, Dixie acquired from her other dear friend, Jen. And although Dixie loves her two dear friends exactly the same… Jen, Dixie says, can come get her giant virus.

The Crap I Deal With Every Fall









George's Big Night

(click photos to enlarge and to do a 'flipbook' time-lapse)

 

Seriously?

                                                                       

We. Are. Doomed. Ya'll.



Mag 138: 'From Mother's Clutch'

From mother’s old black clutch,
I draw out a Popsicle stick,
her wary eyes
forming a link between my brazen lips
and its discolored hilt,
while around my neck
the stethoscope she forgo
to have my careful hands
depress her tongue.

‘Say, Ah.’

On The Not-So-Very-Mysterious George and the Slightly-More-Mysterious Eve

George, my Night-Blooming Cereus, a plant renown for its remarkable flowers that blossom only once a year, opening in the dead of night and wilting just before sunrise, is now on his not-so-mysterious, borderline ho-hum, third round of blooms for the season. 

     And then there’s Eve, who, this morning, despite her lack of crown and all around iffy roosterness, I am quite certain was attempting to crow. 

     This place is just... strange.

     I swear though, if that chicken winds up both laying eggs and crowing, we’ll be live and prime time, quicker than you can say pageant daddy. 

  

The Undecided, Unproductive Eve...

Mag 137

It Must Be Time For Lunch Now, 1979, by Francesca Woodman 

'Late Breakfast'

Her soul, too big for her body,
had bruised her with broken hearts and crescent moons
that in the light of a late breakfast she explained
as they measured fingers again
to seal the certainty of the whole deal.

                                                      S.C.

In The Shop

 Dovetails...

Made easy.

In The Wake, Vaguely

I wanted to tell you before about the not so mysterious someone or something who is eating pears on my back porch, about Dixie getting bloated on moon stuff, and the piece of superwood that rattled my brain parts idiotically. But I was busy being sad and not so much wanting to never get a certain someone’s comments, ever again, in the places I have grown so used to finding them. But that certain someone would think that was an absolutely silly reason to not write the silly things that I write.

And so we write. Despite.

Right?



                                        

My Dear Friend...

You are loved.

You are missed.

Dixie and the Littlest Birthday

“You’re just going to have to get used to birthdays now,” Dixie explained. “And cake and presents and Mexican food sometimes in the middle of the week.”

     Since she knew all about meteors and why girl elephants can sometimes be bigger, the boy didn’t argue. He made a boy’s simple wish, blew out his candle, and found wrapped in brown paper the reason for the flutterings he often felt in his stomach, when she looked at him that one way in particular.

     You know that way.

Dixie said,

"Take a picture, it will last longer."

So he did.









                                                    And this time...

                                  ...he thinks...

...it will.

Twenty-Eight More...

...and we'll be even.

Getting Small

LGBTQIA Chickens

So, we all know that I’m down to two chickens from thirty-five, thanks to Ranger Rick and his buddies—god rest their heathen souls. At first, I wasn’t too worried about the whole deal. Pissed maybe, but not worried. I mean, I still had a rooster and a hen, right? Adam and Eve. I figured next spring I’d throw a couple eggs off in the incubator and be knee deep in birds by June—lineage intact. I forget though, this is Elsewhere, land of weirdness.

          My hen—Eve—is... Oh, how do you say it? Different.

          I have Rocks. Had Rocks. Speckled Rocks. Normally the hens of this breed are heavy and low to the ground—squat. Eve, on the other hand, is tall. If chickens played professional women’s basketball, Eve would be a starting forward. She looks forever like a rooster, only without a crown. She hasn’t laid egg one and wants nothing to do with Adam.

          I’m thinking Eve is either lesbian, or gay, or bisexual, or transgender, or questioning, or intersexual, or asexual.

          Which ever, I’m fucked… chicken-wise

          Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Elsewhere...