Motley Moose – Archive

Doors

I live with two dogs and two cats. They all need me to let them in and out. 

This is because I worry. I worry that if I made them their own door, they’d get in trouble. Casey the Border Collie would freak out at some noise and claw himself over the fence and run off. Jess the Calico Cat would take to working the streets and never come back again.

Charlotte the Mildly Autistic Tortoise Shell would likely still hang around and sleep on my spot on the couch. She likes being an indoor-ish cat. Caught herself a big mouse on the stoop this evening though. I was effusive with praise. Jess hung back and looked at me a bit plaintively, perhaps suggesting that she’d had a role in this fine capture of this exceptionally impressive mouse?

Likely. I’ve seen them tag-team before.

My other inhouse non-human here is The Fabulous Furry Frolicking Falcor. All my pets are rescues, and he and the cats date from last year. Falc is a border collie-Great Pyrenees cross, and is okay left in the yard, but still, I worry. What if something horribly terrifying happened while I was gone? I’ve only been his human since last summer. We haven’t done the thunderstorm thing since the weather hasn’t been cooperating. 

So, I do the door thing all the time. I keep my non-human peeps here in, I keep them out occasionally. But it all seems so rude on my part. 

There is an ex-pet door, covered over with plywood, that I could uncover and rework. I could also fit it with a movable cover.

Point being, I spend a lot of time here on my turf. I like to keep doors closed because of flies. (mosquitoes are technically flies.) So why am I being so controlling about this door thing with my nonhuman friends? 

I can probably fix this by knocking out a little sheetrock, maybe cutting back a few two-by-fours some, and making some kind of flap and then working out an interior barrier with plywood and slotted hardware. 

Yes, I can.

I bought begonias today, because I like the contrast of pinks across the dark purplish foliage and because I like how they can grow in pots in the shade, because trying to grow things here directly in the dirt, out in the sun, tends to be something of a losing enterprise if one is not made out of water, and we are increasingly unmade of water these days in the USA southwest.

I have taken to mining the topsoil, tedious rapacious White Person that I am, and using it for potting soil. I dig out the top six or ten inches. I’m currently working a plot I composted on top of, for several years. When I’m done, I have a nice shallow wide ditch in which to work a light compost of leaves and soft vegetation removed from elsewhere where I would get cited if I let it grow because That Is Weeds.

I’m currently trying to grow potatoes in such mixes of rotting leaves upon dirt in ditches, because I had more seed potatoes than I needed even after I gave the extras away in a box on the street with a friendly handwritten explanatory note. 

 The worst thing that will happen here is that I will have a little more information about growing potatoes, even if that information is basically “nope.” But so far, the ones in the bins are sprouting. The old plastic compost bins that were starting to crack and the five gallon buckets were what I had around, and so far I hear no subsonic whining.

I’m seeing a lot of purple in the upcoming foliage. I tried growing purpler potatoes a little ways north of here in 1998 and they did great but we had to move before they might have grown us some new potatoes.

I also planted yellow finns and a red fingerling. And a Rio Grande russet. 

I would not try to grow potatoes if I did not want to regularly eat them. They are nutritiously wonderfully balanced and they soothe my digestion. I have the good fortune to have marginal legal control over a piece of Mother Earth measuring about sixty by 120 feet, meaning I “own” this land I hole up in, and feel relatively safe upon.

But mostly I don’t eat from my “property,” at least historically. I planted a bunch of reasonably drought-tolerant trees and shrubs. I appreciate them, and they appreciate me. 

Red onions were $2.50 a pound at the grocery store today. I could grow those. But I’d have to be careful. 

Assuming it rains, which I don’t. We’re predicted ENSO neutral so far this year. But who is doing the predicting and how far have they figured in this business of the temperature differentials changing when one thing heats up and another melts and the energy that drives a wind engine is diminished because the heat differential lessened, and then the wind engine that drives a wind train that moves the weather along stalls out, and the wind train gets all lost and takes to meandering around into Mexico or wherever and whenever it feels like it?

Damned if I know. I have some spinach looking good in pots. I expect to be doing more of this. 

I made them out of empty cat litter containers. You can steal that stuff from recycling bins, ya know. White containers reflect heat.

Don’t forget to drill holes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03…

This outlines the local situation reasonably well. A few of the early settlers here (fin d’ siecle) were farseeing and nailed down senior water rights for Carlsbad, which continues to be pretty strong in this department. As the droughts continue and temperatures rise a bit, surface water storage is going to become even less effective and it’s going to become increasingly obvious that water is best stored underground.

The dissent is as always about the flow of the Pecos and how much it’s affected by pumping. But this dissent links directly into above-ground storage. Ultimately people in the region should recognize that they are fighting the wrong battle and should address pumping overall, not the flow of the Pecos specifically, but that would mean fighting water rights that are over 100 years old.

Meanwhile what will probably happen is the mining companies will buy up the land with water rights as the drought continues and farming will suffer a severe setback in the region, which is likely a good idea, except that at least with farming, the water is given back in some manner – mining tends to pollute and even sequester it. 

Well, it’s Spring, and the winds are all happy,

As they blow the garbage around,

Because what else must winds be happy about

Other than doing what winds do.

And here I am in my property

Such a strange term.

I am on it, out of it, around it,

I have yet to dig a hole to be in it.

Yes, it’s Spring! And it will freeze yet again next week

It’s Predicted!

And, quite oddly, there were spurts of raindrops on the resonant metal roof of this house in which I sleep and wake and read and type and too frequently cry.

I do the cooking and bathroom stuff in the other house.

It’s complicated.

I spend time every day carrying water around. Coffee grounds for the nitrogen, and any water that is relatively unsaltified, on the yard. I buy this water and I’m damned if I’m going to just give it back.

When I was young, we lived with some creative people in a very old house, who liked to do things like collect rocks and pile them up on the counters, and paint paintings that were sometimes excellent and sometimes deeply embarrassing, and occasionally get involved in something more complicated, such as saltwater aquariums.

We kids were not, to my recollection, involved with the actual maintenance of the aquarium. Our job was more literary. One Christmas, we made a song:

“Oh come, all ye faithful,

Living in a fishbowl,

Oh come ye, oh come ye to our a-quar-ium,

Come and behold him,

Born the king of seahorses

Oh come let us behold him

Oh come let us behold him,

Oh come let us behold him, Zorse, The Lord.”

Then there was the tubeworm meme. One of the critters in the tank lived in a long thin calcified shell she made herself, with her body and delicate tendrils spread out searching the currents, which were of course minimal, and awaiting whatever tubeworms await, other than dinner. Signs of other tubeworms, perhaps. We failed on that count as well.

Some of us, young and old,  took it upon ourselves to torture the tubeworm. We’d get a finger up close, gradually creep up…and finally touch her, upon which she’d whip herself back into her tube. Then we’d wait for her to come out again.

This turned into an actual meme for we humans in that karass. We’d call each other out for tubeworming, meaning stone cold withdrawal upon the receipt of triggering stimuli.

Funny the things one remembers. That tubeworm meme has lasted for me from well before I knew what a meme was.

Someone I knew for several decades and used to trust,once accused me of always taking a powder when the going got tough. Tubeworm.

Tubeworms gonna tubeworm.

There’s fingers out there. We tubeworms do what we gotta do.

mro

I had a visit, and it was nice,

I had a guest and he was so polite!

I had a friend here, and he spent a lot of time

   talking to my cats, saying special things

About their bellies. 

I made my visiting friend my favorite dinner,

with chile lime barbecue and green beans and potatoes, and cheese and butter,

And before we ate, I thanked the three chickens who died for those wings. I counted.

My friend helped me think about the premises here. “The furnace and water heater vents need more clearance, that could catch your roof on fire.”

“The furnace is wired directly into the house current? Well, do you have a good switchbox? Not to worry.”

“You are worried about your exterior faucet freezing? (metal pipe) ” Not likely a problem unless it gets really cold, then stuff a five gallon bucket full of straw and cover the fixture with that.

I haz friends.

Hi y’all. With all this struggle going on about cartridge guns, I thought I’d change the subject and ask you for some advice about a different gun; the shotgun.

I don’t own any guns, never have. I did live with a sensible fellow for some years, who owned a revolver and a shotgun, which was shortened. I don’t know why this is done.

Anyway, he took me down to the Pecos one day to show me how to shoot the guns. This is not difficult. Aiming is a bit more of a problem. When I fired the shotgun (I was supposed to shoot into the Pecos) I missed. My roommate laughed his ass off. “You killed that tree!”

Okay, it was a small tree, and I was very embarrassed, and none of this was my idea. I was just happy about getting to go to the river. If I had to shoot it, well whatever. Tree collateral damage, so sad. 

Okay, so a shotgun. I could kind of see owning a shotgun. I could see treating it as a kind of sacrament. I would put it under something or in a closet with a closing door. No humans live with me.

I’ve been depressed a lot over the years. I have never instigated physical assault. I have never tried to kill myself with knives, guns, ropes. I do drink a lot. And I have for years.

And I think, A shotgun. Why not? Just another tool. And I am so tired of the assaults and the attempted pimping and the general ongoing inclination to hurt people like me.

I probably won’t buy one, but you never know. I promise though that if I do ever buy a shotgun, I’ll ask too for a local gun buddy, of any gender, who will work with me to teach me to become comfortable with the gun. They are dangerous tools, but here we are, surrounded by them.

I want everything to be entirely different. I am as radical as we come.

But if I must be surrounded by gun-owners, all right. We must address this. And nothing about this will change quickly.

Miep

I like to write poems at times. I mostly do free verse, sometimes rhyming, and haiku.

I wrote this one the other day, for one of the First Nations groups that are part of my Facebook experience.

Small things at night

Beauty from the elders

Run and play, children. Your world is just beginning.

Remember these mysteries as you play and grow strong, children.

They are your heart.

I have always loved non- human animals and plants. I feel a great affinity for life forms different from me, those people I don’t understand but try to know and sometimes protect. I believe that they all speak to us in some manner, if we are willing to at least try to listen. What do you think?

Some of you are friends from the past. Some of you may well be people who have held grievances with me, from the past.

Some of you are people I never even thought much about, until I realized that you had been treated poorly.

Some of you are people I judged far too indiscriminately.

And some of you are people I never bothered to get to know.

I am honored here to make a fresh start.

Mitakuye Oyasin

(all my relations)

I also thank all of you who have ever been kind to me when I was feeling down. Wopila tanka.

Cante wasteya nape ciyuzapelo (it is with a good heart that I take your hand)

With thanks to Larry Monterey for the Lakota translations.