Imagining a literature composed of nothing but questions, one sees the potential for depth, resonances, that cannot be reached by other means. Questions echo. They ask for the reader to enter their space; they embrace, not distance. Maybe someday I write something using nothing but questions. Maybe it will qualify as literature. But not today. This is just a list of questions.Why does Nelly insist on kissing me, vigorously and annoyingly, on the face while I'm trying to do a downward dog asana?
What's with all these ladybugs?
Why is gas so much cheaper in New Jersey? (Is it a conspiracy to keep their disproportionate numbers of SUVs on the road?)
And why is it against the law to pump it yourself there? I mean, what's going to get hurt?
Why did the New York Times decide to make the paper narrower, thus eliminating some of its content, and then decide to blow up the table of contents so that it now spans three pages and eliminates the content there, too?
What profession should I practice now that people will no longer be able to afford books because they have to spend every cent they have at the grocery store and gas station?
What is all that product filling the tables at Barnes & Noble?
Why do dogs hump people?
Why can't days be 36 hours?
Where does our daily increasing population live while no one is buying new houses anymore?
Why do people insist on thinking that if their dogs never taste fresh meat they won't ever want to kill anything?
Why do people drive Ford Explorers?
Why, in the middle of one of the country's largest apple-producing states, are the only organic apples available at the store flown in from New Zealand?
Why is it always one of your favorite socks (rarely one of the ones that never fit quite right) that goes into the laundry room's black hole--and has anyone ever found this cache of a billion orphan socks?
Why does Nelly scream as if the world is coming to an end when I leave her home or in the car, but when we're out on the trail, no distance is too far to be separated?
What the hell was that that she rolled in yesterday??
12 comments:
I glad to hear that those of you way east of me are cursed with the Asian beetles as well. I, too, thought they were ladybugs, representative of the Virgin Mary, or so my lapsed Roman Catholic wife informs me, but they are imports. Last week I thought that it might just be warm enough to get them to all go outside, no such luck, colder now. One thing, though, I don't think we have a single aphid left inside the house anyway.
I have just finished "The place you love is gone". I can relate to that, as there is a great deal of development pressure on my little town.
Thank you for writing that book. I hope people take note and strive to keep wht they have got
Now that my house is up for sale, I run around with the vacuum cleaner madly for an hour before a showing, trying to remove evidence of this creepy alien invasion. I figure some high-class New York City type is going to take one look at the walls moving, and run screaming out of here. And I NEED to sell this place quick, for my sanity. Ah, the wages of an old farmhouse. (And yes, I still feel guilty about sentencing them to death by vacuum.)
The place you love is gone, indeed. Everyone, everywhere, now feels this. Thank you for thanking me, Bunyip. But mine is just one small voice in a great collective cry of sadness. The loss is bigger than each of us, and is bigger than our homes. It extends to our Home, and that means psychic as well as planetary. Too bad the people in charge have missed than small part.
You may be one voice, as I am, but if we believe in it, then we keep trying to build that collective conciousness, and hopefully we make some positive change.
Our farm is on the edge of a town, which is under development pressure. What is our reposne? We are developing it as a "buffer" by fencing off reservations for trees,enhancing the natural aspect with the goal of leaving it better than we found it.
http://bunyipblog.blogspot.com/
Bunyip Blogger, I frankly can't understand any of it: but maybe if people check out your blog (see my Blogs of Note list) and see the Eyesores of the Week--by golly, they're the same damn eyesores we got here, only on the other side of the planet!--we might indeed wake up and come to our senses. Am I the only one who fears we might be idiots beyond all redemption? Oh. Maybe it's that I forgot to take my meds today. Back after some Levitra . . . .
No you are not the only one who fears we (the collective) might be idiots.
Despite the "eysores" there is so much beauty in this area, and that is what I want to see preserved.
I don't want the place I love to be gone.
Hang in there - some of us are listening
House-selling tip: if you have any flowers--ANY flowers of any sort at all--growing on your property right now, cut some and put them in a vase on the dining room or kitchen table, whichever you have. I sold a house in a bad market, and the wife of the buying couple told me that the thing that really got to her was the bunch of hydrangea on the dining room table. We had one straggly hydrangea bush in the measly back yard, but she glommed onto that and they bought the damn house. Good luck!
That's so funny--guess what I've got on my dining table right now? A big bunch of hydrangea. Maybe that will do the trick. Or perhaps I need to bring out the big guns now: an orchid!
When we were selling an old farmhouse in the Catskills, at the last minute I ran out to the garden store to get a simple trig wreath for the door. Then we left. In a couple of weeks, we had an offer on the house. It was our little joke that a $17 wreath sold a whole house.
Thanks for the tip. I think you're right.
There you go! This just confirms how people buy houses irrationally, which is fortunate for you. Here is my feeling on the hydrangea: you're selling a farmhouse, and hydrangea is this old-fashioned, nostalgic, upholstery-type flower. It ups the farmhouse vibe. Perhaps an orchid would not do this. I am not a realtor, thank God, but somehow I think the thing to do is go with whatever the vibe of the house is--emphasize that. Because someone who wants an antiseptic 1975 ranch house isn't going to go near your place anyway. We were bookish oddballs and our house looked like it. Guess who bought it? A couple moving to New Haven to do post-graduate work at Yale in some very arcane specialties.
Lilacs! They are beautiful, easy to arrange (for someone like me who fails miserably in the flower arranging dept. unless I can plop them in a vase en masse), and have the most amazing smell. Good color, too, and very farmhouse-ish.
I say this because my son just cut a bundle of them for me and I stuck them in an old blue Ball jar for a dinner we were having tonight.
So, we'll have lilacs in KY for another week or so and then I have them to look forward to in NE when we arrive up there. In my wildest dreams I've always wanted an extended lilac season.
Or, you could bury St. Joseph upside down in front of your front door. Sometime I'll have to blog about that funny story in our house from the first time we listed our house.
Sprinkling dried lavender in the window sills is supposed to help, also, for ladybugs or whatever that wants to get in. In France they use this method to keep out scorpions.
Ha! I was thinking of moving to Provence until I got to the part about scorpions . . . Maybe Tuscany? Oh, that's been done to death. I know: Greece, back to my roots. The men there are truly insufferable, it's true. And I don't know if I can witness the cruelty they inflict on their animals as a matter of course--plus my son is even more sensitive than I am to it. But what a place! An old whitewashed house perched on rocks above the Mediterranean: don't you think I could get at least one bestseller out of it?
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