By my newest writerly faboo obsession – an old column (where was I with my head up my ass that I didn’t know about Michael Ventura earlier?) on poems read in the dark).
There will be more from him here, much more. I’m quite taken with his work, as I’ve always wanted to write beautiful essays but just can’t quite seem to manage.
Well, I feel much better now that I have all the details of the Nuclear War Fallout Shelter Survival Info for California (with FEMA Target Maps).
Guess that puts it all in perspective, eh?
Okay, so the one area I’ve been steadily resisting dealing with in getting the house ready for sale has been the yard. I planted a whole bunch of flowers, etc., a few months back with a good friend and her daughter, and promptly neglected to water same sufficiently… yeah, I’m a mass-flora-murderer. I need to spend next weekend polishing up the house and tossing the rest of my extra shit that I’m not putting in storage so as to lend the illusion of uncluttered turnkey wonderfulness, as well as plant new pretties all over the front and back yards, and am just so not looking forward to that at all, lemme tell ya. It’s not that I mind nurturing stuff and stuff like that (when it’s convenient and doesn’t interfere with writing or reading), it’s that my ex-hubby paid more attention to the yard than he did to me, and that the backyard was where we were supposed to teach the children we’ll never have how to walk… I had insisted on getting a house before becoming with child, as I wanted my kids to learn to walk on their own grass instead of in an apartment where I’d have to worry about them falling up or down stairs like I did when I was little. Thank the gods we did things in that particular order, given how all of it has turned out. But the issue remains at this point of what I need to do to make the house purtier and perfecter than it already is. I need to plant brightly-colored stuff in the front and back and water it all every day and clean out the fountain in the backyard so it can burble charmingly when prospective buyers come by to view and critique all our hard work. And not resist handling it out of some passive-aggressive bullshit or residual mourning for what I’d never really wanted in the first place.
I think IronMonkey has the right idea about what would spark my interest in gardening… Gardening-Mon: “Gardening would be more fun if it were more like Pokemon. You’d grow some plants, your friends would grow some plants, then you’d have the plants fight each other in exciting tournament battles” Yup – I could charge admission and put up some tiki torches for ambience. Ook!!!