it was two o’clock and sun slid towards the horizon like an egg in a hot skillet.
The gf is gone for a week and a half, and I sink into my solitary rituals. I am both self-consciously wholesome, and simultaneously released from the expectations of another human’s gaze. I drink cheap beer at all hours, as if it were just water, smoke cigarettes. I watch dumb movies full of tits and beer that no feminist could admit to enjoying. I like them, their crass simplicity. I walk the dog, we smell rocks, pee on things, mark our trail. I corral my everyday objects into their places, obsessively carrying each mug and sweater back to its designated resting place. I wear long underwear at all hours, I only change to go to work. I collect the harness, the dildos from the bedside table where they had been abandoned in exhaustion, wash them, and tuck them into their case like shoes, head to toe. I go to yoga, stretch the stiffness out of my shoulders and back, all those hours of driving hunched into the steering wheel dissapating in a flush of heat and breath. I eat toast, and leftovers. I use the same mug over and over without washing it. I like it, this measured solitude, this winter quiet. I like not having any witnesses.
one day I’ll come back to you
I struggle, I founder. This morning she kissed me, when she came for Sophie. My mouth was dry from sleep, and she was so soft, & awake in her desire. I thought of the 30 minute drive from Thomas’ house to here, how she might have thought of this kiss every mile of the way. I smiled into her lips. Blinked slowly, barely seeing her braids, & glasses, only feeling.
In high school I didn’t know that debt defined you. That it made you an adult, an American really. That you couldn’t join happy crowds of normal 6 o’clock news watching suburbanites without a few thousand dollars of stafford loans under your belt. It didn’t even matter that I wasn’t particualarly interested in any of those things, the news, baby strollers, time-shares, debt would still come for me. Because I was going to go to college! that shining light of teenaged alienation, I only had to submit my soul to the student loan office in order to pass through the university’s shining gates. So I did, and even that didn’t seem like a big deal after four years. Everyone has student debt! Its safe, the interest rate is low! Don’t worry, you’ll be fine…and I was. I kept expecting debt to affect me in some physical way, that maybe I would more susceptible to colds or the check out clerks would refuse to sell me frivolous items like goat cheese, because “You still have $19,000 in student debt, and you don’t deserve to eat olives, or cheese!” But it doesn’t, and the fact that I haven’t rushed out to work a great job with a salary, benefits, and a pension plan hasn’t really been the catastrophe that I imagined it to be. This disinterest in ’settling down’ as my grandfather calls it (and he doesn’t mean marriage to another human, he means marriage to a Job) doesn’t erase my privileged physicality, my able white limbs, my placeless urban way of speaking English. These things keep me a a float, allow me to work high on the manual labor food chain. And I’m paying my bills, and it fucking feels good. Even though they are just numbers, that say nothing about me as a individual, even though they are just minute addendums to the 100 billion we owe as a nation. More than anything this struggle is what brings me back to normal, I may say I am different, that I am a queer, tattooed, wandering youth raised by mochi-munching macrobiotics, but really I am just another number in Visa’s pocket.
Anybody remember this cheesy 90’s awesomeness? I remember loving her when I was about ten or eleven, I thought she must be so cool, who knew, she’s a really dorky dancer, and can’t even pretend to drive a motorcycle! Also who knew the repo man was a cowboy, who would ride off into the sunset with you?
other than being a really good garth brooks ballad…its what blogs are about right?
This summer I took a break from working two jobs, and dating more than my fair share of amazing farmers and made this zine for a workshop I did at my house’s fall party. Honestly, only 3 people came to my DIY bike fixing class, but it was so much fun! and I really can’t blame all those folks who went on the field walk instead, cover-cropping is more relevant up here than flat tires. Anyhow its a whopping 10 pages long, and tells you in as few words as possible how to fix a flat, adjust or replace your brake cable, and change out or clean your chain. Should you want one for educational or decorational purposes, let me know! Its yours free of charge.
the cover
i drew everything myself!
Love your bike, and wear a helmet or I will have frickin baby, homosexual or not!
And of course many thanks to the folks of Women and Trans Night at North Portland Bike Works, for teaching me everything I know.
Last week the farm buddies and I felted slippers. These are the ones I made for my sister from Awesome Farm Icelandic roving.
i wrote this for the blog, seems like when I write for a professional audience I always fall into this weird campy-speak. all the same, its true that this is what i do…
If I were to ask you, ‘Who are the greatest foes of organic farming?’ You might automatically start thinking really big. ‘Well there’s the industrial food system, that produces cheap food using pesticides and herbicides.’ Or maybe, you’d think about Monsanto, one of the premier chemical-pushers of modern agriculture, and also the genius behind tons of GMO crops. These giants do their own damage to our food system, but from day-to-day the organic farmer is often concerned with much smaller foes like the Colorado potato beetle, the cabbageworm, the flea beetle, and the cucumber beetle. Though these guys are small they can wreak havoc on your crops turning a tasty bed of arugula greens into an unsightly mess overnight. And that’s where Reemay (or floating row cover, a white super light weight fabric) and I get involved.
At the beginning of the season we were all designated a different ‘area of specialization’. During the week when we aren’t harvesting you’ll see Sean ripping around on the G (one of specially rigged tractors) cultivating between plants, Jamie dragging around different hoses & drip tape for our irrigation, or Sarah plowing a section of field for planting. I was given the title of Row Cover Queen. I already knew that Reemay could protect crops from insects, but was a little unclear as to which crops should be covered when, and for what reasons.
Here are a few bits of information I’ve gathered in the last month. You can plant eggplant and tomatoes a little earlier in the season if you both plant them into black plastic, and cover them with Reemay. Both of these help trap the sun’s heat in the soil, and especially if a late frost is coming you’ll want to cover anything that’s sensitive to cold. So while Solanaceae (nightshades) need to be covered to mimic a warmer climate, Brassicaceae (broccoli, cabbages, radishes, & arugula), which prefer the cooler summer and fall have to be covered because they’re the favorite food of both flea beetles, and cabbage, worms. Just remember you’ll need to uncover any flowering plants so bees can pollinate them. Seems like every family of vegetables has its corresponding six-legged muncher. There’s thousands of them and only one of me, but when your arugula arrives with only a few holes, for one you’ll know its pesticide-free, and second that I’ve been carrying soil bags and unfurling Reemay left & right to keep your veggies warm, snug, and relatively bug free.
the North East was slammed with rain this week. there’s standing water in our fields, where there has never been any before. the wheel tracks are super sloppy. i can only hope for sunshine.
reading my last post, i make my dad sound like some crazy person, and sometimes its true. surely i remember things as being crazy. when i see my dad now, its all concern and well meant instructions. he feeds me all the time. homemade crisp, full of nuts. thick bread, with fresh cheese. a chicken sandwich, carved from the bird. mustard. my dad eats well, hardy and yet he’s skinny as ever. the dust gathers in the house, i can feel him missing me. its a strange feeling. i wish he would come visit me in New York, bring some familiarity to this landscape. we would walk to the river, eat food. he would force me to drive around with him, take him to buy bottle water, because he won’t drink anything else, except his well water. annoy the hell out of me. i’d love it.
i’ve got all sorts of stories about my father. and some of them are funny, and most are a little sad with a twist of fucked-up for good measure. some people have good families, clean neat, easily explained families. and for the rest of us there is the tangled mesh of scandal and the continental drift of adulthood. once my dad crashed his truck into a tree on our driveway. the very same tree he had posted a ’slow children at play’ sign on 10 years previously. like he was trying to tell his future self to pause for just one second. on weekend mornings i’d get woken up by him shooting at squirrels in his underwear from the second story window. he’d drive us to school in the mornings, pull on his seat belt while barrelling down the middle of our country road. i’d always pray nobody’d be coming as we lurched back and forth across the center line. and he would swish a mouth full of whiskey around for the whole 5 mile drive, wouldn’t say a word and then spit it out at the last stop sign before the high school, deliver some last minute instructions as he cursed all the 8:05 traffic.
i met somebody recently, she’s an only child of a professor and a budhist (occupation unknown). her parents are together, and they all three get along just fine. she says she’s a calm & patient person. how could she not be? you know that my childhood was filled with yelling, followed by late night car drives, leaving fast, or searching for those who left. there were no cell phones, my dad would just rip angrily around the county trying to figure out where my mother had taken refuge this time. and there were affairs, and of course the tell-all STD’s, and eventually long-awaited divorce. and how about me, can you blame a girl for turning out a little off-kilter. lacking patience, and an intense desire for the stability of other people’s bodies, & its my mother’s lust. i can feel it in my skin that reckless & giddy desire. its my fathers deliberate charm, his repetitive stories. how smart his kids are, how talented, and the implication of his own genius at having steered them so well. the nest, the escape, & the morning after.
my father liked country music, he had george strait tapes in boxes on the footboards. once in texas he gave my brother & i beer to drink at a resturant, cause he thought the water tasted bad & he’d rather we drink beer than soda. my mom tells this story, she said we weeved our way drunkenly out.
