Fire Just Waiting

I bought a new car recently (it’s ten years old; new to me) and it’s the first car I’ve had with a CD player. I’m too lazy to play CDs on my computer – you slide it in, wait for it to load, play a song, change your mind, eject, find another, put it in, play that one for a while, eject again, etc, etc. But, remember tapes? I have such vivid picture-memories of old rooms and old apartments, the stereo or boom box surrounded by stacks of tapes with dozens more scattered across the floor. It was different with tapes.

Anyway. My CDs have sat in boxes gathering dust while I was lazy, streaming KEXP on my computer, until I got this car. This morning, as I relaxed into the heated seat (heated seats – what a revelation!) and flipped through a dusty box of disks, I spotted one I’d not listened to in…. a decade? One year, in the late 90s, I was addicted to Little Plastic Castle – I heard a piece of myself in every single song. This morning, I put it in for the 40 minute drive to town, and remembered the lyrics to all the songs, thanks to the freaky muscle memory of the mind. The first track hit me with nostalgia, but I found myself, again, in the second song.

Fuel:
They were digging a new foundation in Manhattan
And they discovered a slave cemetery there
May their souls rest easy
Now that lynching is frowned upon
We’ve moved on to the electric chair
And I wonder who’s gonna be president, tweedle dum or tweedle dumber?
And who’s gonna have the big blockbuster box office this summer?
How ’bout we put up a wall between houses and the highway
And then you can go your way, and I can go my way.

Except all the radios agree with all the TVs
And all the magazines agree with all the radios
And I keep hearing that same damn song everywhere I go
Maybe I should put a bucket over my head
And a marshmallow in each ear
And stumble around for another dumb-numb week
For another humdrum hit song to appear.

People used to make records
As in a record of an event
The event of people playing music in a room
Now everything is cross-marketing
It’s about sunglasses and shoes
Or guns and drugs
You choose.

We got it rehashed
We got it half-assed
We’re digging up all the graves
And we’re spitting on the past
And we can choose between the colors
Of the lipstick on the whores
Because we know the difference
Between the font of “20% More!”
And the font of “Teriyaki”
You tell me
How does it make you feel?
You tell me what’s real.

And they say that alcoholics are always alcoholics
Even when they’re as dry as my lips for years
Even when they’re stranded on a small desert island
With no place in 2,000 miles to buy beer
And I wonder Is he different?
Is he different?
Has he changed what’s he about?
Or is he just a liar with nothing to lie about?

Am I headed for the same brick wall
Is there anything I can do about
Anything at all?
Except go back to that corner in Manhattan
And dig deeper, dig deeper this time
Down beneath the impossible pain of our history
Beneath unknown bones
Beneath the bedrock of the mystery
Beneath the sewage system and the PATH train
Beneath the cobblestones and the water main
Beneath the traffic of friendships and street deals
Beneath the screeching of kamikaze cab wheels
Beneath everything I can think of to think about
Beneath it all, beneath all get out
Beneath the good and the kind and the stupid and the cruel
There’s a fire that’s just waiting for fuel.

It put into words how I’ve been feeling about blogging. Lately, I’ve felt confronted by so much commercialism and mimicry, and money being the goal rather than a happy byproduct of unfettered creativity. And this is why I’ve kind of faded out from blogging here – I think about it a fair amount, and feel guilt at times, but my drives have been elsewhere, and I think that’s OK and important for the kind of evolution I want for myself.

And, of course, the solution is in the song, too. I listened to the biography of Steve Jobs on my drive home from California this summer, and a particular quote struck me hard – I was driving through Utah and when I got home, remembered enough of it to google the whole quote: “The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, ‘Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.’ And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.”

2014 Calendars ~ Charlie & The Farmily

– click image for larger view –

They’re back! This year, I’ve changed everything about the calendar – except the star, of course, though I have added a few new stars with the Farmily calendar.

The calendars are bigger (8.5″ by 25″ hanging), spiral bound, on thicker paper stock, and printed the old fashioned way, on a press. This technique creates images of such high quality, they can be saved and framed individually, if desired.

Ordering details are HERE and HERE.
(International + U.S. orders)

U.S. orders also available through my Square shop HERE.

Saving The Tomatoes

It snowed Thursday night. We knew cold was coming, though we were not expecting SNOW. In September! During the day, I had harvested all my herbs and peppers and transplanted basil, thyme, and parsley plants into pots which I carried indoors for the winter. And the jalepeño plant. I don’t expect it to continue producing through the winter, but it is such a beautiful plant.

But my tomatoes! I have another tomato jungle this year, two raised beds full of towering plants heavy with gorgeous green tomatoes still on the vine. I could have picked them green, or pulled the whole plants to hang, but I really didn’t want to do either, since these autumn cold snaps are briefly brutal and then the temperatures head back into the 70’s for weeks until Real Winter hits.

So, Thursday evening, I covered my tomatoes, as the forecast was calling for rain and mid-30-degree lows. Eli meowed at the door at ten or eleven that night, and I opened my door to a snowstorm. I was concerned about my tomatoes, but not worried – it was just barely freezing, the plants were covered, and generally, it’s not coldest while it’s snowing – it’s coldest once it stops snowing.

It snowed through much of Friday, but was obviously going to clear off by sundown, which was when the real tomato-killing cold would arrive. Friday afternoon, Mike and I piled up some granite boulders and built a bonfire around them, to heat the rocks.

At dusk, just as the snow was tapering off and the cloud cover was dissipating, we moved the hot rocks (wearing heavy leather gloves) under the tarp and into the tomato garden, and placed them between the raised beds. I tucked the tomatoes in for the night and hoped for the best!

The next morning, I walked up to the garden at dawn. The temperature outside was 28°F.

Frost coated the grass, and the tarp itself.

I wanted to measure the temperature inside the tomato tent but didn’t dare disturb it so early, so I just slid my hand inside – and it was noticeably warmer. Around 9:30am, the sun was bright and the air temperature had warmed well above freezing, so we unveiled the tomatoes.

LIFE! Success!! They survived beautifully. It’s back in the 70’s this week, so my zillion remaining green tomatoes will have a good chance at ripening, after all.

Chicken Bits

Some chicken questions from my last post ~

What breed are they?
Silver Laced Wyandottes. Gold Laced Wyandottes are spectacular beauties, as well ~ I saw one in California this summer. Here’s a bit about them.

Do they enjoy all types of fruit?
So far, yes…. they’ve been offered cantaloupe, cucumbers, a few soggy tomatoes, and watermelon – and devour everything. They can clean a halved cucumber so that only the skin remains – not one speck of flesh left behind. How do they do this with only beaks??

How do you tell the black and white hens apart?
I can’t – not from afar! But Imogen likes to perch on my arms, and Sally is the most vocal. I’m hoping they’ll develop (and keep) distinguishing features once they finish growing. I can tell a dozen “identical” black cows apart; we’ll see if this ability carries to chickens.

. . .

Happy Equinox! Around here, the Autumn Equinox signals the final sprint to finish as many outdoor projects as possible before winter arrives – we’re packing in as much manual labor as we can into every day until the snow flies. While I’m out getting buff in the beautiful (but far too brief) fall weather, I’m having a huge sale in the Shop: 20% off everything. I’ll be retiring some of my older designs and products – once they’re gone, they’ll probably stay gone for good. If you’ve had your eye on anything, now’s the time! Just enter FALL during checkout for 20% off your entire order.

Forever Cowgirl

I’ve cried every day for the past eighteen days.
Some days it doesn’t last long; maybe 45 seconds.
Some days it goes on for hours.

Joslyn was in my book –
I wrote about feeding bum lambs with her in one of the first chapters.
When the book came out, she was off somewhere –
she was often off doing something amazing,
like apprenticing with a farrier and forging custom horseshoes.

On her way back in mid-November,
she stopped at a World Market to do some Christmas shopping
and saw my book on a display table.
She said it didn’t even register that it was my book,
that she was drawn to the picture and “Wyoming” in the subtitle,
and she picked it up and flipped to a random page and started reading.

She opened right to the passage I had written about her.
She told me she started tripping,
quickly looked back at the cover and it fully registered,
then started crying in the store
and bought half a dozen copies for gifts.

I’ve always loved that story –
to me, it’s not coincidence, but connection.

Part of what has made me so angry and sad these past weeks
is that it already feels like there is such an imbalance
between good vs shit where humanity is concerned
and she was so good.
So full of grace and genuine kindness.

She didn’t hold people’s flaws against them.
In this respect, I am a kindergartener
and she had a PhD.
But I will keep that part of her alive
by trying to make it a bigger part of me.

There’s that ubiquitous question:
If you could have anything, what would you wish for?
If we’re really honest, and really selfish,
wouldn’t our answers all be the same?
It’s not money.
It’s not world peace.
It’s having one more hour with those who have died.