Spring cleaning in the vineyard

My job today was to set four small controlled fires on the edges of the estate - I am the most qualified for arson because I've seen the most movies in which firemen tragically die. Also, I am good at controlling fires as long as they are very very small. For the most part, it was completely windless, so it wasn't any real work at all - the sets of old branches and dry leaves were super combustible and all I had to do was make sure the fire is burning at the least windy side, eating slowly at the pile, never getting higher than ten feet. There was no smoke to speak of, the waste completely dry. Normally there would have been a dozen piles, but I took most of the stuff and fed just the one at a time, keeping the scorched patch to a minimum, mindful of the vermin and bugs that would have made their homes in the rotting piles over the winter. I have two left, but those are in the middle of the orchards and should be entirely safe, no matter which way the wind turns. The dogs slept in the sun nearby, covered in ash, General building his bee-pasture platform. We had plans to go on a small hike tomorrow, but there's some trouble at the farm, so we're seeing the in-laws instead, helping out. It's so springy these days, so lovely and bird-song plentiful. 

Watching the paint dry ...

... quite literally ...
(Some of the cakes need three fillings - some, not all - with two weeks of drying in between and some need another run of mulling. Fickle little fuckers, even though they are beautiful. I suppose best things are.)

Okay, drawing a little ...

A bit of an improvement from yestereve, when I still couldn't paint jack s**. I made a beast with dirty paws and a bird - and a logo. For the paint-it-yourself promos to go along the paints ....

Tried for the second time in a row to walk long and run a little. Alas, the damn heel isn't letting me pretend I am actually not in half bad shape. I've lost weight, I can tell as much, because the bottom half of my tummy is now sooner visible and I can see the scars more prominently featured. I had a talented doctor, you can barely find two out of the four. They look like water striders. 

Last weekend was really sublime - probably because the weather was so very lovely: Saturday we went to the in-laws and I painted the beehives while the boys cut down cypress fence. The dog got worn down by the kids tossing tennis balls across the valley field, the General incidentally locked me into the garage and I had to climb out of the window and it was warm enough for short sleeves. (Considering the previous Tuesday there were nine inches of snow in an hour.)

Day after was certainly warm enough for short sleeves and I have the first red neck of the season to prove it: we went to my parent's place to make a platform on the edge of the forest, a foundation for the visiting two hives. The dog was tied to the grapevines, but she was tired enough to sleep in the sun the whole day anyway. We had a cool brunch of pork roast and bread and butter and a fruit salad, and G and I fell asleep in the bathtub later, compactly entwined like twins in a walnut shell. 

The weather now is shitty, depressing and grey and there's no grass yet to speak of, yet alone leaves. But I can make twenty plus kilometers fairly easily, mild sore thighs, were it not for the tendon. On one side exercise has been known to strengthen it and I was able to run easily once I got it warm enough ... but if I pushed it too liberally over the summer, then forget about winter hikes. Either way, it should make up its mind in the next couple of days, because knowing April, once a heavy enough rain falls, everything will explode in bloom and so will my drifter nature.

The 2018 portfolio, yo (only took me four years to bother updating that shit .....)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B7di13VGn5a_NmW66NOz-03wlt6IAaFD/view?usp=sharing

Brain still locked. :/  I tried to paint again today, but, nuhh. Fucking brain. Did I mention G said I have all the painting materials in the world and still refuse to use them? Expensive brushes, paper, dye? I can see myself trying to draw what other people would like and it clashes like a bad joke with what I like, leaving me with a bad sketch and a feeling of blindness. 

It's right there, behind the door. A closed door. I can feel it's warmth, breathing, and I have sooo many things to be excited about, so much love and sex and naughty things I do, piratey things, rogue stories. Like a ghost walks right beside me, being able to do all those things and I can't. 

Maybe tomorrow. 

I watched the trailers and reviews of 'Us' last night and consequently, the brain decided to spare me the price of a ticket and just put me in the movie. The General said he had to keep waking me up and couldn't sleep at all himself - I was weeping, whimpering and squealing the whole night. 

He has no sense of move-nightmares. I know now what it's like to be stabbed with scissors fifty fucking times. 

I shall from now on file things into three categories:

 (1) I will throw myself in the middle of this, because it seems kinda interesting.

 (2) We should file this under 'Not my fucking problem'.

 (3) What the General doesn't know, doesn't hurt me.

Starter inks

Oki, so, so far I've managed a black, gold, copper and red inks - albeit the black one is being tricky. You would think that's just hubris fucking with me, because black is fundamentally the simplest one to synthesize, alas. Where I'm failing is creating a sufficient acrylic medium from stuff I have lying around. It also feels like my thinnest quill tips are oily or something, when I attempt to use the shimmering two. Not enough ... honey? I'm not adding the ox gall to ink, the last thing you want is the bleeding gall is supposed to encourage in the paint. Just need to use thicker tips. Then again there isn't much I can't do with a very thin brush. Time to write a nerdy love letter. 

How about these adorable little fuckers?

I need a muller, and some ox gall (guess they won't be as vegan as I had hoped), but these trial tubbies are insanely cute! ... Really wish the fucker wouldn't concave so dramatically, yet alone foam and end up acting like swiss cheese.

Bye bye, dollar store.

I wanted to say, to this CEO I ran into, a collection of cliches like you wouldn't believe right down to the tight jeans, dismissive attitude, small-dick yuppy German car, lame sports activity you don't need much talent for and a soul patch (but then I overheard him tear a new one to a telemarketer over the phone and thought: now here's a man whose face I'd love to watch while strangling him during dirty sex ...) I wanted to say something nice about my superiors, something like: The reason they are so effective is because they believe all this shit is actually important... (Whereas I believe important things are on the walls in Louvre.)
        Or, you know, if I was evil as fuck and was not afraid General would beat me if he found out, I could say something like: I'll just stand here in the corner and be quiet. You don't have to worry about me, I'd never tell anyone why our books don't match ...

       Luckily they fired me before I could say anything and once we heard the results of the yearly review, well, it was not quite so much 'effective' as it was more ... five blind one-armed morons in a rubber boat trying to paddle each in their own direction with a fork. In an ocean of CBD.



... Why was I fired, you may ask? Well, not quite as fired as sent home a week and a half before the end of my contract, saying I still have hours to spare and some yearly leave. Can just go now, don't even have to come back to sign any release forms. I've noticed quite a pattern by now in my life, when important people are in the house, I am never on shift. Funny that. Anyway, I humbly inquired on why my contract won't be extended, since I was getting quite the hang of things and thought myself to be one of the better, faster and more cheerful employees. Their answer was: it was obviously too hard work for me.

That is grown-up speak for: she has a temper of a banshee on crack and we need to get rid of her before she finds out something that could really hurt us.

Damn you, dollar store, you will be missed. 

Chicks gonna be comin' home ta roost

     "One of these days he's going to make a mess not even you will be able to clean up."

      "Ye, well, I don't give up on people when it's convenient."

     "The color of his crazy matches your eyes or something? He's a deranged Old God who thinks he needs to die. Might as well try and stop a collapsing sun. And for what? What do you think he thinks he does?"

     "I think he thinks he's going to weaponize his anger and burn down the world. That the bookless, culture-less wasteland of Samudra that is the endgame of this world is somehow his fault."

     "He may not be entirely wrong. A desert is his style, each grain a tiny corpse of an idea, unrealized."

     "I am not afraid of him, or his anger, or his crazy. Crazy is overrated. People have been trying to convince me I'm crazy my whole life. The fucking Devil tried it and what have I ever done to him?"

     "Took him all of nine seconds to convince you, too."

The southern window of my house
has much nicer music than my other.
Domesticated cats in love
songbirds trying to out-do each-other
Postman moped traffic and a distant train
about to go to distant train-related stops.
My northern window is a city street
of fumes and quarrel
and retarded fucking teens
playing mobile phone music
they think is gangsta.

New Zealand, man. :,(

One of the periodic customers in the dollar store is this beautiful bespectacled woman who tends to like the same items I keep buying and she told me she studied culturology, of all things, but has given up on the subject of recent, having a serious case of the Real-Life-tetis. I believe she owes the world a book. Culture is such a dumb-witted, enthusiastic teenager ... In my lifetime alone it's gone from nationalistic ideology, praising the magnificence of a post-war dictator, to 'everything foreign in amazing' to 'everything domestic is better', to nineties whatever the fuck that was, to this bizarre nihilistic kayfabe we now have, and this oddly awesome need to find something to hate and blame, despite finally after, ever, really, everyone in the civilised society having almost no reason to worry, fear, starve, fight, serve or be ill, we simply need and need and need again to generate reasons to do just that. And you can only be a world-famous singer if there is a lot of fuckable dancing involved. 

As my boy Morris put it, only keep shit in your place that you find useful or beautiful. I bring home SO MUCH stuff that I find beautiful. Every day. Crazy stuff. The General will constantly look at me and cringe: What the fuck IS that? ... and I'd coo Isn't it amazing?!

An ode to G's pulled wisdom tooth ... Dear tooth,
you shan't be missed,

since you never got to bite me

like the premolars. 

Leaving Neverland

Watching the docu series. I mean, trying to. Best you can hope is that those guys are really lying, because ... That is some next level disturbed fucking shit, man. Well done doc, though. Very well done. 

If only there weren't such good debunking videos out there, making it into a complete fiction. 

Attagirl

G commented how I'm getting quite comfortable/cocky at my new job at the dollar store. 

I said: Don't you remember how it was when I first started on the ship? I cried every night and then, few months later, I wanted to drive the thing. 

From time to time it occurs to me that being such a fan of Márquez and reading his work at an impressionable age (all ages, in my case), really did damage to my brain. Every hooker I now meet I think: she must be a witty well of awesome stories ... and every artsy bum I allow to engage me in a conversation and, perish the thought, asks to do my portrait, I expect him to turn out to be a secret, world-weary genius ...

... Ye. No. 

Technique-wise, a good small dream. Dream within a dream, to be precise and I was fully aware of both of them and took advantage of it. In one, I was 'Google Earth'ing and wanted to see and feel what the shore Medina would feel like - yes, I know Medina isn't a country and has no shore, but I happen to love the line where a desert meets the ocean and the two ecosystems mix, so that is what my brain Google-Earthed at the time. Zooming down in first person POV as far as the search engine would go, I gradually reached 1:1 - the warm water, the rough sand, the scarce plants. Up the slope the sand was more dune-like and urban features appeared, some houses and people in the distance. Too far to register me, I was able to take off my shirt and just put my skin out there for the sun and the breeze to hug. My only concern was the surf was full of small turtles, some soft and small as garden snails, others harder and tennis-ball size, but still babies. I dug one out to play with it, but had to be careful I didn't step or sit on others or expose them to the predators. Gradually I had enough, got up and walked away, using (it was a man's shirt) to umbrella myself. Once the dream was removed, I was still fully asleep and indoors and was telling someone about this experience, but conscious both experiences were nocturnal.

Oddly enough, later towards the morning, I dreamed about horses. That is probably because every time I hear 'Holding out for a hero', I imagine myself racing on a Shire horse across the countryside. Who's racing with me/chasing me depends on how horny I am. 

Foggy morning :D Very pretty.

An interesting threat

So, today, on the dollar store job, I was threatened by a pack of gypo bitches. No, I am not a racist and I don't generalize, saying all gypsy people are bad. Never said all white fucking people are wondeful, either. But I was in a situation today, where my wellbeing was targeted - it may be an ongoing issue - and it was by a well-organized pack of gypo bitches.

Remember that time when I wrote our purses were being checked by a late-night inspection? Okay, sure, sometimes that flies. But the store's rule for catching thieves is: pick your battles. If they seem like they may wait for you outside in the parking lot late at night, don't engage. I'll be sure to bring up today's story the next time someone accuses me of stealing.

I wonder from time to time if I've ever half reacted in any situation, or am I just a walking over-reaction in every situation? G says that doesn't sound like me at all...

Here's the story: I watch WAY too many Liam Neeson movies, and I watch them with G, meaning we talk about shit after, opinionating and analyzing; that's not even leaning into the three years of security engineering university classes. No, I notice shit like you wouldn't believe. Whether or not I opt to ignore it, usually I do. On a bad day I may confront a kid or some noisy teenagers if I catch them damaging the items, but mostly it's just 'fuck it, I have more important things to do, these pencil sharpeners aren't going to shelf themselves.'

First, I notice a super cute little girl, proper as can be, following her phone, just shopping about. We get dozens of those. But she makes eye contact and then she makes another. And then she goes behind one of the stands and makes another.

A spotter.

Not even caring whether she's gesticulating to her family members, I go after her - walking right into a band of women, the elder of which is stuffing candy in her pockets. The three younger women, thirty-something, are blocking her, but I can hear perfectly well the tearing of the candy bag and they are not even trying to hide it. The three make a wall, walking slowly pass me as if I matter nothing. They know perfectly well I have no authority to engage or even accuse them of anything, they've done this many times before. I pick up the torn packaging and start walking behind them, and every time one turns, I am holding the wrapper up, glaring, moving behind them slowly. The movement of them is perfection - by the time I am confronted by their alpha, both little girls and the older woman with her pockets full are out of the store and I am forgetting the first rule of street confrontation: watch your six.

The alpha bitch steps up to me and says that if I open my fucking mouth, she'll stuff the wrapper in it. I am a lot heavier than she is an am really not into being bullied by a rabid she-dog who steals candy in dollar stores. I shout for my manager, and really loudly, so at least twenty people now understand something is happening. I declare I've caught them stealing and they have threatened me.

All three women begin to attack verbally, daring me to search their pockets, I point out through the window where the old woman is looking in. The manager tells me to go, leave, go to the cash register. She begins to apologize to them, de-escalating the situation. The alpha snarls I am lucky to have such a manager, because otherwise she'd punch my fucking face off. I do a boxer's open invitation stance, shouting: come try. Please, try!

The manager orders me, quite aggressively: Kay, go, to the back office, NOW!

I storm off, incidentally turning on the alarm and wait to be reprimanded. But in truth both the manager and her assistant came to me, telling me that these people, they are well known, they can't be deterred and it is simply not worth it, having to worry they'll spend their pathetic days looking for an opportunity to harm me. Having to look over your shoulder just isn't worth the damn candy.

I'll admit. The brain did enjoy frightening me a little. When later an elderly gentleman came up behind me to ask a simple direction, I nearly pissed myself. How easy it would be to stab me with a long needle. And when the General drove me home the car before us stopped and started backing, I thought, that is an ambush maybe, too.

No, of course not. It's not that kind of a town. It's just a weird feeling. Can't remember the last time I was threatened by a complete stranger. Other than for my dog getting into fights, that is. But the town gypsies, they can be nasty as fuck. They are unemployed and they move in packs and they have nothing better to do than to linger. What if one charges me and I hurt them? There will never be the end of it. What if the General's hunting buddy, who is the town police vice-commissioner, warns them social services are on the speed dial regarding the little girls? I don't want to be stuck in a game of chicken with half-literate candy thieves.

Another day in the dollar store, I'm telling ya.