Bi-polar

You know, one day you’re up and thinking, heck, you’re the kind of gal who can go to a place and do a thing, and with some style maybe even. But there’s the next day when you sit in your car for forty minutes deciding whether or not to go to yoga class, thinking about how that will put you on the other side of town, near your brother’s house, your brother who sent you that email saying you were superficial; and thinking you should have baked Loring a pie for his birthday today because he replaced your clutch cable; and thinking how your ma is bruised up from falling down and looks weak and that maybe you should help her more than you do; and thinking your sister's in something like a body cast after her surgery and you should definitely help her; and knowing you will never ever ever finish writing another book—hell, you may never finish reading another book—and remembering that the mortgage is overdue and your bicycle tires are flat, and your pants are too tight and your house smells of cat piss and rotting compost, and the toilet doesn't flush right, and knowing that (because you have no children) you will die wretched and alone. When you finally get out of the car, the gray cat from next door runs over from the place on your lawn where he has just killed a chipmunk for pure pleasure and rubs against your leg. His fur is soft , and you hope that tomorrow your own skin will fit you again.

Jimmy is released from Psych Ward

Saw Jimmy today at the farm. That’s Jimmy who tried to commit suicide by drinking a cup of anti-freeze. He mixed it with orange juice, he said, half and half. He looked good, I thought, just tired, his neck a little more bent than it used to be; he used to stand up straighter, I’m pretty sure. Maybe his hair has gotten a little bit grayer in the last few months. He just got out of the psych ward at Borgess, One North, said everybody else he was with was all cut up wrists and shit; all kinds of folks are apparently trying to kill themselves nowadays. He didn’t really make any friends up there he said, though a big black guy was always bumming cigarettes from him. Jimmy was on foot today, didn’t have a forty ouncer in his hand the way he usually did before the anti-freeze. "I’m not drinking," he said. "My social worker says I shouldn’t drink." He took a sip of Faygo grape pop. "I won’t do that again. That stuff was nasty. Sweet. Every time I think about it makes me sick." I asked him why he drank anti-freeze instead of killing himself some other way. I told him I’d use a gun, put it right to my head, right here; I pointed to a place between my temple and the top of my ear. And I didn’t go on to tell him but I’d use a .22, because the bullet penetrates once, but is too small to get out, so it spins around inside your head and scrambles your brains. Really, though, it’s not something I think about doing. "I thought a gun would hurt too much," Jimmy said. He was on dialysis for three weeks, but then he started peeing normal again. That must have been a hallelujah moment. Jimmy said, "My dad said I should call him if I ever start thinking about suicide again."

Bone-eye improves her vocabulary

We tossed some words around at the cottage, Steve and Mike and me. Steve and Mike were there working on the electric. I mixed up grout for the tiled shower floor and then when I set it aside to let it slake, I commented to those guys how fun it was to use the word slake. Everybody said slake a few times, and then I said if I was a guy picking up a girl, I might say "Slake me, baby." Mike had a word he liked, that was bosky and he said it meant something like a natural area covered with shrubs, and we decided that we were all out in the bosky. "Basking in the bosky," Mike said. Steve said, "Basking my balls in the bosky," and then sang some Otis Redding. Then Steve told about some old black guys he’d been sitting with at breakfast the other morning, and the guys had been trying to one-up each other as to how their mothers had beaten them. One guy said something like, "She stripped me naked and beat me so hard that afterwards I was looking for my lips." When Steve said it, it was funnier, and probably when the old black guy said it, it was even funnier. Then Steve and Mike were talking about looking for women to fool around with. Well, I happen to know that both these guys are married, and Steve, married 28 years is known to be one of those true blue guys, so I called him out on his talking about extra-marital sex. "You don’t really fool around, Steve," I said. "You’re crazy about your wife." He said, "Yeah, that’s true." And then I asked Mike, and he said, "Yeah, I got it made with my wife." But then we all went silent. Mike said, "See what happens? You bring up that marriage and all the conversation stops." And sure enough it was true, that when you bring up happy marriage you’ve got nowhere to go from there; something about a happy marriage just sucks all the energy out of a place. So we were silent for a long time, all of us working, Steve feeding lengths of Romex wire through the studs in the wall, Mike sizing up how the new fuse box was going to fit. I was wiping up the excess grout from the shower floor, and pretty soon I couldn’t stand the silence, so I yelled into the other room. "Hell, can’t I get one of you guys to slake me in the bosky?" And both guys said, sure thing, they could do it. Steve started singing, then, "I’m in the mood for love." Mike fitted that fuse box right where he wanted it and told Steve he had a beautiful voice, just right for the bosky.

Bone-eye buys new bicycle chain

Something felt wrong when I pedalled my bike; I thought it was the new crank slipping, but P. of P.'s Bike Shop said it was probably just my chain. He said that affirmative action was never meant to give blacks an advantage over whites; it was supposed to just even things out, but it had gone too far. Did I want him to put the new chain on? Well, I could have put the chain on myself, but I figured if he put the bike up on the rack, then he'd notice if anything else was wrong. He said I seemed like a nice gal but that he'd never much liked the United Nations and that the United Nations was right now trying to take our guns away. People don't know that, he said. Your crank arms are loose, he said--you would have ruined those crank arms if you'd biked with them loose like this. He tightened them, said he was from Alabama and that when he was a boy he didn't know he wasn't supposed to like black people; he had black friends back then (and still does), and he'd called some black people uncle. Could I change the wheel size on this bike, to go metric, I asked, 27 inch to 700 cm, and he not only told me I probably could, but he took my front wheel off, put on his own front wheel and moved my brakes down and tested it and says no problem. Now that was going really above and beyond the call of duty; no wonder he's been able to keep his bike shop afloat all these years. Doing a little extra something for a customer creates good will. He said it had been wrong for those white people to come from the north on busses trying to force change to happen fast in the south; he had met a nun recently who said she had come down on a bus to cause change way back when, and she hadn't even really known what she was going down there for. Change was happening already he said, he said, slowly, the way it should happen When he put the chain back on, he used this smooth-working tool, and when I admired it, he said always buy good tools. Sometimes the tools disappear, he said, but it's still worth it to use good tools. P.'s son died in the military, was buried at Fort Custer in Battle Creek. Most deaths in the military aren't from fighting, he told me, they're from driving when you're tired and other stupid things. It's a hard thing to lose a son so young, he said in a way that showed the pain he still felt after a couple of decades; nobody would try to deny that pain of his.

Birds leave nest

Outside my window this morning, some young cardinals were being cute as hell. One was missing feathers from a couple of places. Another had almost no tail. Their crests were tiny. A couple of them were pecking the dew off from hickory tree leaves—you don’t get cuter than that, unless maybe you catch some bunny sipping herb tea out of an acorn shell with his chipmunk pals. A grown male cardinal came over and fed one of the cardinal babies. They were lucky, if you ask me, that a stray cat didn’t come by, maybe that little black skinny one with the plastic collar or the tortoise shell. The sad truth was I hadn’t filled the bird feeder out there for months, so I snuck out as quietly as I could, filled the feeder, tossed some seed on the ground. The birds all flew away at first, but by the time I was back in the house they were back for the food. Meanwhile, one was still drinking off a leaf, and then he lifted his head too quickly and fell right off and onto the ground. Plonk.

Narcotics Team investigates donkey pasture

This evening I was feeding the donkeys some wormy apples I found and two guys showed up in torn jeans and tennis shoes, and they had some piercings, and my mom said, "They look like undercover cops," and she was right. They said they’d gotten a tip about Brian Brugh growing marijuana at the farm, and I said, "Hey, you ought to not worry about pot. Go hassle those guys making meth. There's your trouble makers." He told me that meth makes people able to have sex all night. "It’s a sex drug. Guys take it and just go and go. It’s like nothing else." The two guys looked all around the barnyard and down by the creek and found nothing, of course. Just to make conversation, I said I'd heard meth was super addictive, and he said if you just take it once you get addicted and you can never get off it. "Once you’ve had sex on meth, nothing else is good enough. You just keep going." He moved his mouth somehow so that his thin lips got even thinner. "Doesn’t sound very restful," I said. He looked out over a patch of pokeweed and ragweed and nettles, looked lost for a moment, maybe thinking about the kind of sex he was never going to have.

Man curses muffler

This morning Christopher was lying underneath my goddamned Volkwagen Rabbit Diesel Pick-up cursing the lengths of exhaust pipe the UPS lady had delivered to us. Christopher dragged himself out from under, told me to call the parts place and tell those bastards that they sent us the wrong parts, and the parts place guy told me he sure as hell did send us the right parts, and I said thanks a lot you lousy son of a bitch, and I left town, took Christopher's car and went to go lay some tile in St. Joe. By the time I got home, everything was all peaceful, and the tools were put away, and the exhaust was fixed good as new, real fucking quiet.

Snake relocates

Christopher just moved the wood from the pile in the driveway to the pile by the house, and he reports that the garter snake living in the old pile slithered on over to the new pile, as did the big wood spider. The mouse, however, ran under the tarped Mercedes parts car.

No chickens died today

Weasel successfully repelled