The wasps came down on top of my head, jabbing and digging into my flesh. I screamed and flailed like a budget table hamster at the pet store getting thrown in with the ball python. I slapped at my scalp, scooped up I don't know how many of the buzzing, flying needle bandits and cast them out like the little, black devils they were.
From the side of the house, to the front door, to the kitchen table all the way in the middle of the house, I screamed obscenities that would have added up to a sizable car payment if I kept a swear jar.
I do not keep a swear jar. That's just fucking ridiculous.
Sweating, head throbbing, both of the boys stared at me. The eldest laughed.
"What happened?"
"Fucking hornets, fucking wasps, God damned bees. I'll kill them. They are going to die." The top of my head throbbed. It hurt to blink. The words poured out of my mouth effortlessly.
The youngest gaped at me, eyes wide, jaw hanging slightly open. Me, swearing openly, is not a new thing. Me, holding my head and pledging murder while I uttered every conceivable oath, however, was new and it was scary because I seemed to mean it.
I ran my hand through my hair, felt for the wound and there was a lump. Looking in the mirror, between the shafts of thinning hair, I saw the wound. No blood. It just hurt.
"Oh, I'm going to kill them. I'm going to kill them."
But not that day. Outside a gentle rain was falling. You can's spray a nest while it's raining. Don't ask me why? I'm sure it has to do with environmental concerns, the groundwater maybe, worries of killing the squirrels or something. I don't know, but that nest was safe.
The funny thing was is I'd seen the nest before --or so I'd been told.
"Sure, you told me not to worry about it," my girlfriend said.
I probably did.
Generally speaking, I'm a peaceful guy. When my girlfriend and I first started dating, I was reading a lot of Buddhist literature and one of the writers talked about avoiding unnecessary violence to other living things --even to things that annoyed you like insects.
Once, while sitting together, she'd spotted a spider, shrieked and pointed at it then demanded I get rid of it.
She'd meant kill it. Instead, I'd scooped it up in a napkin and taken it outside. She looked at me as if I'd lost my mind.
"Why did you do that?"
I explained and she wasn't impressed. I'd betrayed an important part of the social contract between men and women who are dating: I was supposed to kill things like spiders, just kill them; if necessary, with fire.
I still harbor a mostly live and let live sort of attitude.
A nest outside, if I'd seen it and not known for sure what kind of bees lived within, would I have said, "Oh, don't worry about it? They won't bother you if you don't bother them?"
Yeah, I would have done that.
Stupid hippie.
So, the unprovoked, Pearl Harbor-style attack on my head was my fault. I should have known better. I should have listened to early reconnaissance. I should have increased patrols in the Pacific or maybe, just maybe, I should have taken the nuclear option early, protected my own person by eliminating the threat beforehand.
I was lucky that the things just got me and not anyone else.
It took days to get the job done. First, it had to stop raining and the nest had to dry out. Second, I had to have the required $4.65 needed to buy a big, black can of bug spray --the more ecologically destructive the better.
As it happened, the wasps got an extra couple of days while I waited for a check to clear. I was broke. So, I spent at least three days just wishing and hating, which was sort of therapeutic.
Finally, when I had the money (or close enough as far as the grocery store was concerned), I stood from a safe distance and hosed the bleached paper orb down. Winged, black figures fell from the nest and plummeted silently to the ground and whatever heavenly reward is reserved for such ugly, hateful things.
I imagine they get to go to hell.
Monday, July 28, 2014
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Summer Bummer
It's been largely quiet the past couple of weeks. The blogging has slacked off because my radio show launched and not much has happened since the one car slowed down to look at the sign in my front yard a few weeks back.
I'm starting to think I just got in too late. I waited too long and most of the people who were going to buy this summer have already started the tedious, yet soul-crushing process of dealing with the banks.
Still, I hear the Chinese are buying up property in the U.S. Maybe I can talk my realtor into sending some brochures to Beijing. They could put an embassy here or maybe a prison work camp. Whatever works. I'm sure the county commission would be happy to have them.
I also got my lawnmower back, but I'm sick of yard work. I'm sick of it and would be happy to pave the whole damned thing and turn the backyard into a trailer park, if I just had the money.
Money is the new, old worry. My mortgage went up in July. This happens, apparently. Taxes go up. The value of property goes up, which means taxes go up some more. Then there's insurance which probably goes up with the increase in value, inflation or just because Jesus said so.
I have no idea what the reason is. I got a note about it a couple of months ago, warning me it was coming, explaining in detail why this was happening and how I could avert it by simply giving them the money up front.
I didn't study the reasons, I just looked at the number and said, "Fuck, like I need this."
When they raised the monthly two years ago, I had the money. I paid it and that felt good. This time around, there is no extra money. I stay in a perpetual state of tension. There's barely enough just to get by, let alone take a handful of well-earned days to just relax.
I can hardly stand to look at all the pictures of people on vacation this summer. You see them on Facebook. Old friends who are in France and not for the first time, guys I knew in college taking their kids to Italy and vague acquaintances headed like lemmings to the ocean.
Envy is unbecoming in someone who has been so very much blessed, who has been given so many wonderful things, and I am so grateful for what I have, but I am envious and it makes my heart bitter.
Just not bitter enough to start going to Tea Party rallies. Those fools are crazy.
So, the new normal is to pay $60 more a month, raising my mortgage it to $750 a month, which well-meaning friends tell me is the going rate for a decent two-bedroom apartment in Charleston --at least in the parts where you don't have to worry too much about getting stuck in the ribs with a sharpened screwdriver.
That's what they tell me. For what I have, I'm getting a bargain they say.
"Plus you've got all that land."
They're probably right. This is what everybody wants. This is paradise.
I'm starting to think I just got in too late. I waited too long and most of the people who were going to buy this summer have already started the tedious, yet soul-crushing process of dealing with the banks.
Still, I hear the Chinese are buying up property in the U.S. Maybe I can talk my realtor into sending some brochures to Beijing. They could put an embassy here or maybe a prison work camp. Whatever works. I'm sure the county commission would be happy to have them.
I also got my lawnmower back, but I'm sick of yard work. I'm sick of it and would be happy to pave the whole damned thing and turn the backyard into a trailer park, if I just had the money.
Money is the new, old worry. My mortgage went up in July. This happens, apparently. Taxes go up. The value of property goes up, which means taxes go up some more. Then there's insurance which probably goes up with the increase in value, inflation or just because Jesus said so.
I have no idea what the reason is. I got a note about it a couple of months ago, warning me it was coming, explaining in detail why this was happening and how I could avert it by simply giving them the money up front.
I didn't study the reasons, I just looked at the number and said, "Fuck, like I need this."
When they raised the monthly two years ago, I had the money. I paid it and that felt good. This time around, there is no extra money. I stay in a perpetual state of tension. There's barely enough just to get by, let alone take a handful of well-earned days to just relax.
I can hardly stand to look at all the pictures of people on vacation this summer. You see them on Facebook. Old friends who are in France and not for the first time, guys I knew in college taking their kids to Italy and vague acquaintances headed like lemmings to the ocean.
Envy is unbecoming in someone who has been so very much blessed, who has been given so many wonderful things, and I am so grateful for what I have, but I am envious and it makes my heart bitter.
Just not bitter enough to start going to Tea Party rallies. Those fools are crazy.
So, the new normal is to pay $60 more a month, raising my mortgage it to $750 a month, which well-meaning friends tell me is the going rate for a decent two-bedroom apartment in Charleston --at least in the parts where you don't have to worry too much about getting stuck in the ribs with a sharpened screwdriver.
That's what they tell me. For what I have, I'm getting a bargain they say.
"Plus you've got all that land."
They're probably right. This is what everybody wants. This is paradise.
Thursday, July 10, 2014
Sounds of silence
I got the mower back just before the 4th. The hardware store fixed the carburetor and then went ahead and was good enough to do a full tune-up, sharpen the blade and polish the thing for another 30 bucks.
I didn't argue, but I didn't order it, either.
I spent most of the holiday mowing the lawn, listening to old Beatles records on my iPod and waiting for the knee-high grass to choke the mower to a stop, but it didn't happen. I got through in just five hours, which was about normal, even when the grass isn't deep and full of terrors.
I hadn't ordered the tune up or the sharpened blade for 30 bucks, but I had sure as hell needed it.
I was glad to get it done. For the last couple of weeks, I'd been trimming bushes, picking up debris and cutting back the honeysuckle vine strangling some as yet to be identified fruit tree out back (It looks kind of like an Asian pear, but I refuse to actually eat one).
The mowing was a relief. Without it, I doubt anyone would have even given the place even a second look --not that people are showing up much. I'm still hoping for the woman in that beater Honda to come back, possibly with her meth-making, hillbilly boyfriend or collection of dangerous pitbulls.
I'm not picky, but nobody has come by.
After the mowing, the showering and conscious re-hydrating, we cooked out on the patio. I'm getting better at grilling. The chicken turned out a little dry, but not charred like last month's steaks.
My girlfriend and I, we sat in chairs, read for a while and just soaked in the quiet.
That's something Cavendar Drive has going for it: quiet.
It's not a perfect quiet. There are always the birds, the frogs and the crickets. Sometimes there are other things I'm not well-versed enough to identify --probably velociraptors, mutant rabbits, maybe unicorns or werewolf Republicans. In the distance, you can hear the road. Every now and again, a plane flies too low on its way to the airport. In the summer, we have mowers chewing yards, chainsaws whining as they slice through dead wood. In the fall, it's the far away report of hunting rifles echoing from high up in the hills somewhere.
That sound in particular reminds me of home. It reminds me of damp, misty autumn in Pearisburg, Virginia and being told to go outside because I'd become a pain-in-the-ass some Saturday morning.
I was regularly a pain-in-the-ass.
As I boy, I remembered wondering about who was up in those hills and what they were hunting. Either way or on either side, I was glad I wasn't up there. In the same way that they say golf is a good walk spoiled, hunting has never appealed to me either.
The quiet here was something I had to get used to. Before moving to Pinch, I'd grown accustom to city noise --or Charleston's version of it, which is not like the noise of an actual city (We're more of a good sized town). I'd gotten used to hearing the neighbor's television or the stray argument. I'd been painfully aware of the disturbances in my own home --did I snore too loud? If I could hear them, could they hear me?
I haven't had to worry about noise out in the semi-country. I close the door, close the window and the inside of the house is as quiet as a tomb. I can play my stereo as loud as I want and nobody is going to care --of course, I just have the iPod and a dinky MP3 player docking station. I don't even have a record player.
There's something to be said for peace and quiet.
Sometimes I wonder how I'll adapt to living in the city again, if I'll miss all this bucolic bliss and rural peace and quiet --and then I remember the damned lawn.
I didn't argue, but I didn't order it, either.
I spent most of the holiday mowing the lawn, listening to old Beatles records on my iPod and waiting for the knee-high grass to choke the mower to a stop, but it didn't happen. I got through in just five hours, which was about normal, even when the grass isn't deep and full of terrors.
I hadn't ordered the tune up or the sharpened blade for 30 bucks, but I had sure as hell needed it.
I was glad to get it done. For the last couple of weeks, I'd been trimming bushes, picking up debris and cutting back the honeysuckle vine strangling some as yet to be identified fruit tree out back (It looks kind of like an Asian pear, but I refuse to actually eat one).
The mowing was a relief. Without it, I doubt anyone would have even given the place even a second look --not that people are showing up much. I'm still hoping for the woman in that beater Honda to come back, possibly with her meth-making, hillbilly boyfriend or collection of dangerous pitbulls.
I'm not picky, but nobody has come by.
After the mowing, the showering and conscious re-hydrating, we cooked out on the patio. I'm getting better at grilling. The chicken turned out a little dry, but not charred like last month's steaks.
My girlfriend and I, we sat in chairs, read for a while and just soaked in the quiet.
That's something Cavendar Drive has going for it: quiet.
It's not a perfect quiet. There are always the birds, the frogs and the crickets. Sometimes there are other things I'm not well-versed enough to identify --probably velociraptors, mutant rabbits, maybe unicorns or werewolf Republicans. In the distance, you can hear the road. Every now and again, a plane flies too low on its way to the airport. In the summer, we have mowers chewing yards, chainsaws whining as they slice through dead wood. In the fall, it's the far away report of hunting rifles echoing from high up in the hills somewhere.
That sound in particular reminds me of home. It reminds me of damp, misty autumn in Pearisburg, Virginia and being told to go outside because I'd become a pain-in-the-ass some Saturday morning.
I was regularly a pain-in-the-ass.
As I boy, I remembered wondering about who was up in those hills and what they were hunting. Either way or on either side, I was glad I wasn't up there. In the same way that they say golf is a good walk spoiled, hunting has never appealed to me either.
The quiet here was something I had to get used to. Before moving to Pinch, I'd grown accustom to city noise --or Charleston's version of it, which is not like the noise of an actual city (We're more of a good sized town). I'd gotten used to hearing the neighbor's television or the stray argument. I'd been painfully aware of the disturbances in my own home --did I snore too loud? If I could hear them, could they hear me?
I haven't had to worry about noise out in the semi-country. I close the door, close the window and the inside of the house is as quiet as a tomb. I can play my stereo as loud as I want and nobody is going to care --of course, I just have the iPod and a dinky MP3 player docking station. I don't even have a record player.
There's something to be said for peace and quiet.
Sometimes I wonder how I'll adapt to living in the city again, if I'll miss all this bucolic bliss and rural peace and quiet --and then I remember the damned lawn.
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