Our Lady of Perpetual Hell

Y’know, it’s not that I don’t have anything to write about. I sure as hell do. It’s just that I haven’t had the time to do it lately. And on those occasions when I have had time to do it, I’ve been too damned tired to do it! So this here blob has lapsed and I hate when that happens!

I have a post about the Joy Division/Control dream double-bill half-written, but it’s not exactly time-sensitive, so I will not tackle it tonight. I will just tell you about my recent adventures in gardening.

First off, let me admit that I have the proverbial black thumb. It doesn’t have even the slightest green tinge to it. All you have to do is give me a plant and, together, we can watch it wither and die on my watch. I am neglectful. It is not intentional. But it is pure disinterest on my part.

As for gardening, well, when I was a kid, our church was given use of a field out on a farm on Plank Road and a bunch of families in the church were each given their own little plots. Mom planted vegetables and she and Dad and I went out to tend to it regularly. Now, I don’t know if I can even describe the level of dread I felt every week as Farm Day approached. Ugh, ugh, ugh, how I despised it! And it was probably all for yucky vegetables that I didn’t even like, anyway–peas and onions and gourds of every shape and colour but the same nasty taste. *gag* Every week, we hadda go out there and dink around with the fuggin’ plants. I sat in the back seat of the Chevelle and pouted all the way out Plank. I scowled. I turned up my nose and curled my lip. Then, when we arrived, I slunk out and tried to as little as possible. Biding my time, mostly, until we could leave.

When I moved into my house (and, yes, maybe someday I will sit down and tell that story), there was already a pretty healthy crop of weeds in the gardens that run along the inside of the back yard fence and the back of the house and garage. There was also a no-man’s land around two sides of the storage shed–areas where the weeds were so thick, you couldn’t get in to investigate. All this time, I have studiously ignored the weeds as they grew stronger and heartier and taller. “I will get to you, eventually,” I’d say and waggle my finger at them.

On Sunday, it was high time I cut the grass (it had been about a week–mebbe 8 days, actually… long enough, anyway, that my lawncare-nerd Dad would faint if he knew)(“Haven’t I taught you anything about lawncare, lo these many years?! Agh, I’m a failure as a father!”). So I went back to the shed to get the mower, paused, and cast a hairy eyeball at the crop of weeds that had completely engulfed the two-feet-wide garden along the back of the house and around the shed. I reached down and pulled out a handful.

Well, I never did get to the lawn that day, but I did manage to pull six fucking garbage bags’ worth of weeds outta my yard. By the time I was stuffing the last bag, I was practically in tears, I was so exhausted. And I’d been stung by a bee, to add injury to insult. Little fucker. I hope those are the little bastards who die after they sting you. Die, die, you dirty muthafugga!!

That’s what I pulled and where I pulled ‘em from. You can see my little stool practically buried underneath. And you’ll note I left a total of one plant standing. It had some pretty orange flowers on it a couple weeks ago, so I wanted to keep it. I’m sure it’s just a weed, too, but at least it’s a pretty weed.

If you look down here, imagine weeds as tall as the roof of the shed… not to mention a few saplings. Hadda use some shears on those ones.

It was while trying to use the shears on a sapling that was growing out through the latticework around the deck that rings two sides of my house that I apparently awakened the stinging hoards. There must be a hive underneath the deck and now I gotta figure out how to deal with that. Only one stung me, but I had a reaction to the sting. That was a new experience. My forearm where I was stung got red and itchy and swollen. You know what it looked like?

…Kinda like that, yeah. I’ve been popping Benedryls for the past 30 hours and it is just starting to return to normal, finally. Perhaps I should plant spinach where once there were weeds.

Oh, nah. Who am I kidding? It would just wither and die from neglect. Seems like the only plants that manage to thrive on my negligence are weeds.

A pair of the severed feet found over the past year has now been matched to one man.

If anybody reading this has some tools better than the high quality ones I bought in the dollar section of Target

and likes to smash shit to pieces, have I got a job for you!

I dunno what the hell it is (but git mah pitcher beside it!)(Laurie, you’re prolly the only one who will get that reference), but I found it in my back yard shed when I moved in.

At first, I thought it was a dog house. But it has no entrance. Then I thought mebbe it was a bird house. But, again, no holes. I flipped it over and found nuthin’. Except spiders, natch. And I beat them all to hell with a broom while fear-dancing around it. Lucky my back yard has a privacy fence around it, eh?

Best I can figger is that it was the decoration on the house’s or the garage’s roof at some point in the past. Although it’s not shaped to fit on a roof. Unless some previous roof was flat. Beats me.

In any case, I gotta get rid of it to free up space in the shed. See, I am inheriting some exercise equipment and am going to set up a gym in the garage, so I need to move some stuff I have in the garage now into the shed, instead. That means the gnome home–or whatever it is–hasta go.

My cheap-ass wrench won’t keep its grip tightened so I can’t loosen the nuts. If I hadda mallet, I’d just smash the shit out of it. So, y’know, if your toolkit is better equipped than mine (and whose isn’t?), feel free to drop by and dismantle this thing for me. There’s plenty of beer in the fridge.

During the time I worked at Records On Wheels, we had a security system installed to try to prevent all the little skater kids from stealing stuff. We’d insert the security tabs inside the imported disks, tapes, and albums before we sealed them or just stick them on the outside of the domestics. If we didn’t deactivate them after purchase at the checkout stand, the customer would set off the alarms when s/he walked through the scanner at the door. Pretty straightforward. Pretty easy system to circumvent, too, of course. I mean how hard is it to peel off the wrapping and remove the sticker? Not exactly rocket science. I don’t think we were allowed to search through personal bags, but we were pretty scrupulous about having customers leave their bags at the counter when they came in to shop.

Anyhow, one day when I was at the cash register, a customer repeatedly set off the alarm. He’d paid for his stuff and it had been scanned, repeatedly. But still the alarm went off whenever he walked through. The store was busy and loud and I was getting frazzled and he kept giving me these doofus looks whenever he tried to leave and alarm went off. Like, “H’yuck, there goes the alarm again! Ain’t that crazy! Lawdamussy, what can be making it go off?”

I muttered, “Must be the plate in your head.”

…All that by way of introduction to this.

I especially like the note that advises customers, ‘If you don’t know the alphabet very well or you haven’t been fully trained on how to put records back where they belong, please leave and come back with someone who can accompany you through this confusing process.’

D’ja ever get the feeling that you’re being watched, even when there’s nobody else around?

Sitting out on my deck, I find that feeling comes over me. It creeps up and climbs into my lap with me. Dunno why. I mean, after all, it’s just me and the birch tree out there.

Just a tree. And me. And a creeping sense of dread. Ooh, did you ever see Evil Dead? There’s this scene in the film where a girl is running through the woods and the woods are chasing her. And they catch her. And they do unmentionable things to her.

I don’t know what made me think of that.

I just don’t know. But I think I’ll take my little laptop and go inside now.