My Charles Mingus

"There go the critics, blinkin' eyes, clappin' hands, tryin' to act like they was listening. And get Bird playing as he walks off! Shuffle off to Buffalo! Ha ha! Ho ho!"

-Charles Mingus (from Beneath The Underdog)

Yucca Facts

I give you...four facts about yucca!

(1) Yucca us frequently used in parking lots where intense heat and light prohibits many other plants from growing. So look for yucca on your next excursion to Big Lots!

(2) The sword-shaped, pointed tip of the long rigid leaves can be very sharp. By being planted under windows, yucca has been classically used in the South as a means of discouraging thieves and trespassers in general. If you tangle with it, yucca will ruin your life and destroy your prized possessions.

(3) A popular accent plant, Yucca is best suited to hot, dry environs, such as Hell. Or Georgia in the summer.

(4) Its candelabra of blossoms is showy but delicate, a shimmer of plush hulls that undulates in the breeze.

Aaaagh!

This is Cuneiform Indus-Arabic graffiti, on the world's oldest extant boxcar. I'm pretty sure Woody Guthrie once lived in this boxcar. And who knows? Maybe these are his Okie shorthand scrawlings, rosetta stones to song lyrics still tucked away in a basement somewhere. As I type this, a fly is haunting me. It seems especially interested in my right ear. Aaaagh!

Picking Kale

Today at work I picked kale. I also weeded six long rows of watermelons and did some mulching. If you want to know how to handle kale at a small organic farm, I'll tell you:

(1) First, you simply pick the kale and put it in a bushel basket.

(2) Once you've picked enough kale, you place it in the old, ceramic bathtub and let any dirt rinse off.

(3) You remove the kale and let it dry in the shade.

(4) Finally, simply put the kale in bags for sale at market.

(5) That is all!

In other news, I shaved my beard off last night. So now I basically look like I'm twelve. Just imagine that you looked like you were twelve, but had the mind of a thirty-four year old man. Well that's me right now. I could totally narc on the whole world right now. But I won't. Because I'm cool, man. I'm cool.

One Minute Michelle

When I was a freshman in high school, my p.e. class was in an annex about a half mile down the road (it was actually the old YMCA). For p.e., we all had to pile onto a bus for the one-minute drive to the Y. Despite the fact that it was only a one-minute drive, all the usual hydraulics and dynamics of teen life nonetheless transpired on that bus, which, in a way, was a microcosm of this savage, beautiful world.

Because I was the littlest freshmen in a sea of students, I was sometimes the first to get picked on, so I dreaded any social situation where I might come in contact with an upperclassman who had something to prove about the rigid caste system of top-doggery. The p.e. bus ride was fraught with these kind of upperclassmen. There was a ray of hope, though. Her name was Michelle.

Michelle was a junior and, for some reason, she was always cool to me. She seemed to actually like me (as opposed to pity), which was a little confusing because i thought she was really pretty and smart. She was also the only New Wave person that existed in the tri-county area. How Michelle managed to be New Wave in rural-industrial Georgia is the world's last secret mystery. It will never be solved.

She had piercings, wore ripped jeans and strangely sewn shirts, and had a sculpted coiff that looked, to me, like it was flown in from Paris every morning. I recognized her as too cool for Manchester High School, but nobody else seemed to. People seemed to like her, but she never palled around with anybody in particular. I guess you could say that she was somewhat of a loner. She also skipped class a lot. I remember that, because whenever she skipped p.e. (probably to get high with the shop-class kids), my day had a New Wave Michelle-shaped hole in it.

On days when Michelle did go to p.e., though, she'd always appear like an angel and come sit by me on the chemical-green bench seat. We'd sit and talk and all the upperclassmen that usually gave me shit would just sort of stare, trying to make sense out of us. It was a magical minute of a bus ride. Michelle was moron repellent, but she was also a lot more. She was a good person. One day, though, she stopped coming to school altogether. I later learned that she transferred to another school. I also heard that her parents had divorced and she went to live with her mom, over in the next county. I started to hate p.e. even more than I already did.

A few years later, when I was a senior, me and a handful of other "skaters" were at a house party in Greenville, Georgia. All the debutantes were drunk and football jocks were shaving off the eyebrows of the mere mortals who had passed out in the front lawn. It was late, AC/DC was blasting from huge speakers, and one had the sense that police involvement was imminent. I walked across the highway to get away from the madness, and also to use the payphone at the Giant Mart, when I saw Michelle. She was coming out of the Giant Mart with two or three other people. They were locking up for the night.

"Michelle?"

"Jonathan?"

We had an awkward conversation, during which she asked me if I had gone to the party across the street. I told her that, yeah, I had. "You don't want to go over there, though. It's a bad scene." I felt self-conscious. It occurred to me that, if you compiled all the minutes of all those bus rides together, Michelle & I had only known one another for about an hour and a half. The lights on the Giant Mart sign flickered off. After about sixty seconds, some guy in an IROC-Z pulled up.

"This is my ride," Michelle said.

I haven't seen Michelle since. For some reason, she only inhabited my life in minute-long intervals, like measured teaspoons. Like somebody somewhere had a tiny hourglass, keeping rural-industrial Georgia on an unlikely, brisk schedule. I do not know how this world works, nor do I understand time. It seems full of holes. I'm pretty sure Michelle actually existed, though. And she was cool.

Three of Ella

Behold Eleanor. She has eleven months under her little belt. She is taking a bath, chilling out, and offering you a flower. She's the bomb diggy dang a dang a dang diggy.

The Bi-Centennial Post

This is the tractor we use on the farm. I say "we," though I've never driven it and probably won't be driving it any time soon. I like tractors. Not as much as trains, but they certainly have their own special merits, the greatest of which, I'd say, is versatility.

On my best days I'm at least as versatile as a tractor. This is my 200th blog, by the way. Wait, what was I saying?

I just got back from the A-T-L, where I once again dropped off Janelle & Eleanor at the airport. I'll be seeing them again this weekend, when they return from St. Augustine. While I was in Atlanta, I took the opportunity to drive to a coffee shop and do a little aimless wandering, followed by some light stream of consciousness journaling:

What a disgrace Little Five Points has become, worse than most malls. This is punk's Southern deathbed. Nothing happening but name brands & upscale resale stores. A Capella Books, Criminal Records, & Sevananda still exist, but for who? Even the old school on Euclid has been remodeled into luxury urban lofts, full of NO TRESPASSING NO LOITERING NO LITTERING signs. In its own way, though, Inman Park is heaven. Especially on a radiant morning like this one. Octagon-tiled sidewalks, shade of magnolia, & opulent homes I can't even afford to rightly look at. Antebellum, Victorian, the Unclassifiable Anciently Vacant But Newly Remodeled With Care By A Master Carpenter. They all gleam quietly behind hedges of musky boxwood. Walking around this neighborhood, I hear the gentle, collective trill of fountains in the unseen backyards, sculpted and lush. It lulls me. In this quiet trance, I touch the po' white Southerner's dream, which is that one day I'll be Elvis enough to live in one a them fancy Virgina Highland homes. As I continue, jet pilots & web designers pull up and parallel-park their Escalades and Mini-Coops, get out, and start tapping keypads to unlock electric security gates. As I pass on foot, I glance over and see tangles of honeysuckle building their fortress on Grecian urns of various types and shapes. The wandering pheromones of a tea olive temporarily blinds me. I can't see her but she's out here. Gaia's perfume. She wants me. I want her back. Oh, holy mama. Inman girds Little Five Points, though, which is some kind of shore for Atlanta's social detritus. Lost boys and girls. Derelicts and hard-luck orphans, some of whom land here hoping to get high, kicks, spange the yuppies and suburban high school kids on holiday, spend that on meth, et al, and maybe eat a slice or so every couple of days to maintain a human thread to this plane of existence. And so you see little signs of malfeasance like the empty bottles of Robitussin I spy underneath a truly majestic beech tree, which lives in the Edenesque front yard of a homestead that rivals Anne Rice's New Orleans digs. "Somebody tripped under this tree last night," I reckon, at the same time that I discover an empty Trojan's wrapper in the mondo grass. A slight, nervous-looking older man walks past me and gives me the ol' homosexual eye. "Good morning," I say to him, all hetero- and square. He doesn't respond. He walks up the driveway of the Robitussin house and notices the trash. He starts picking it up and my heart breaks... "Suppose I got rich all of a sudden, somehow. How would the money change me?" I wonder this as I head to the coffee shop. It's a funny question, so I laugh at it and shake my head, which earns me the attention of a middle-aged woman on her front porch, watering a fern with a plastic bucket. "Good morning," I holler up at her, in a boisterous, rural way. No answer. What am I doing out here, anyway? ...at the coffee shop, the baristas are playing the Beach Boys, which means that I can't stay here, for I am allergic to the neutered twang of jangling guitars, affected harmonies, and school, girl, and car lyrics that mark their offensive sound. Neither Brian Wilson's crazee theramin nor Chuck Berry's stolen intros can impart anything worthy to this awful mess. It really couldn't get any weirder than the Beach Boys. They are an anti-septic nightmare, a chemical agent. "Be True To Your School" is devil worship, plain and simple. The fact that nearly every one of the original Beach Boys has morphed into a new member and that they nonetheless still tour and sell out arenas proves that they are nothing but a horrific hologram of some kind. I make my egress with the quickness, while they croon "Surfer Girl," like a watch winding down to their own psychological annihilation. (How could a man in his sixties want to sing these lyrics?) The Beach Boys - they are eternal, but why? I'm back out in the sunlight now, where I need to be. It's a beautiful day. My gals are somewhere up in the sky...