November 20th, 2023
Unicycles
0 stars ☆☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
A mile into the woods I met a unicyclist coming the other way; all right; followed a hundred yards by a smiling person on a regular bicycle and then around the green bend, there—a second unicyclist—but that was all.
Letting It Get to This
2 stars ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Joe says, “The apocalypse will be soon. Do you know why we stand a chance as a society of running into not one but two(!) idiots on unicycles, a mile deep into the fucking woods? I’ll tell you. It’s because we stopped, as a society, physically attacking people riding a unicycle the second we saw them, thus empowering more people to ride unicycles. We never should have let it get to this.”
Porcupines
2 stars ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Joe knows all about the woods. He says porcupines have been eating through the side of his house. They have been doing so because they don’t have enough salt in their diet and eat his house for the salt content found in the plywood glue. The porcupines gnaw a porcupine sized-hole and then walk through the house leaving porcupine-sized turds and piles of quills and then they gnaw their way out of the other side of the house, leaving a porcupine-sized exit wound. His house is way out in the Pennsylvanian woods, was once a cabin. Since he inherited the place he has built onto it, adding offshoots that make the once-cabin into something closer to nearly-a-house. There’s still no running water and there isn’t electricity but the place is all his and he goes there periodically to get away from dipshits. He’s been chopping down trees and setting them ablaze where they topple. He says you’d be amazed how much fire you get out of a single tree. He has been keeping the porcupines at bay by nailing salt licks (at porcupine height) to various trees he’s keeping for his personal forest.
Electricity
1 star ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Rae and I live in the city. We live in a big pre-war building. We have no critters of our own, just the sound of the next door neighbor’s parrot squawking through the wall and his poodle having another nervous breakdown. We have running water and electricity, which seems like a clear positive, but which causes its own problems. The other day Rae saw an LED light she liked for the hallway and so I went to the store and bought it and came home and got up on the ladder and unwired the old incandescent and opened the window and threw the old light receptacle on the sidewalk outside the building. Then I went up on the ladder again and took a closer look at the electrical wiring. The wires were supposed to be black and white and red but the wires coming out of the ceiling consisted of new wires which were blue and grey (from some renovation in the 90s), and old, original wires, covered in a desiccated cloth, resembling the Shroud of Turin. No problem. I wired up the new light and flipped the switch and there was a bright flash and pop and that old familiar burning smell I know so well. I took the light back down and it was melted most foul and I considered throwing it out the window onto the sidewalk but instead I went back to the store and handed it to the clerk and said, “This doesn’t work.” And they looked at the pathetic, warped thing, and asked what was wrong with it and I said, “Defective.” I bought a new switch too while I was there because the internet said the kind of switch that I had tried to use (existing) was all wrong. I should be ashamed of myself. This time when I wired things up the bright flash was much more tame and the burning smell was reduced to half pungency/toxicity. The light still didn’t work, but also I noticed that I no longer had power in the closet in the adjacent room and I didn’t have power to the ceiling fan in the adjacent room (a disaster—we need it to sleep at night). Okay. So I began troubleshooting. Poking around. Flipping breakers, taking sockets and GCFIs apart, searching to see where and why and how the blue and grey wiring from the panel snaked through the plaster. I didn’t make much progress. The wiring is so kooky in our building, who knows up from down. And that night, though a mostly tortured night, of tossing and turning, I had one dream which I assumed (wrongly) was psychic. In the dream my next door neighbor and I had crossed wires, meaning some of my electric and some of his electric were on the same circuit, a shared circuit, sharing some of that desiccated old cloth wiring, and it was somehow tied into his panel, not mine. I couldn’t solve my domestic emergency without speaking to some outside force, to this neighbor who I subconsciously held a severe grudge against for various reasons not worth naming. I woke up, hesitant to go and knock on his door and ask if all his circuit breakers were on, on the panel in his apartment. I worried most of all he would ask what I’d done. As if I could even explain it. I worried I’d have to feign the ability to explain myself.
The Neighbor’s Circuit Breaker Panel
6 stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
He’s only lived in that apartment for a year or so. I wasn’t sure if he knew that back in the 1960s our apartments were split in two. (1A and 1B). Rae and I have the larger of the two apartments and it’s called 1B. Which doesn’t matter. I’m not saying that we should be apartment 1A and the neighbors in the smaller apartment should be called 1B. It doesn’t matter. At all. What matters is the circuit breaker. I went next door and knocked. He answered the door in a huff. A perturbed huff. I stood in his doorway, the parrot or whatever it is, screaming, the poodle having a meltdown and he said he was getting ready for work and had no idea what a circuit breaker even was. I thought this was impossible. If he didn’t know what a circuit breaker panel was, then that meant he never popped a breaker. Popping and resetting breakers is one of the main things I do with my life. Apparently this man had other hobbies. He clearly wanted me to come back another time. I said the panel would probably be in the kitchen. Dejected, he led me into his kitchen and I pointed to the grey box and he opened it up and all his circuit breakers were on, so now I felt a kind of sweeping euphoria, because my subconscious had been wrong, and nothing makes me happier than my subconscious getting shit wrong. My consciousness-thoughts and actions are wrong all the time and I just can’t stand the idea of my subconscious being smarter than me. The so-thought psychic dream I had had (sweating under the powerless ceiling fan) about the intermingled wiring had been another buffoonery by my ill-informed subconscious which wasn’t in the same league (it turned out) as my conscious-waking-mind. Fantastic! Proof, finally. I had a practical head on my shoulders worth keeping. And add to that, within this sweeping flood of euphoria, the satisfaction of knowing my problem was my problem alone and there was no other outside force that could be waylaying me. All I had to do to figure out the problem with my apartment was figure out my own shortcomings as a human being, it had nothing to do with me solving the shortcomings of the entire universe, or even the building I lived in.
Monarch Butterflies Love Milkweed
11 stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Because he was in such a rush, I moved and spoke and moved and even breathed, as slow as possible. One interesting thing I noticed about my neighbor’s apartment was that they had nine paintings of butterflies in the hallway alone, and even had colorful butterfly sculptures made of papier mâché, dangling in a group of six over the toilet (in his pathetic bathroom). Though he kept saying he was sorry he couldn’t help me, I wasn’t in a rush to leave his apartment because one of life’s great joys (when you live in a convoluted nightmare of a building like mine where nothing is possible) is seeing what the apartments of your neighbors look like inside. Especially when their rather small and dull apartment used to (not so long ago) be part of your own (though long before your ‘time’). Very slowly, I said, “I see you like butterflies.” He just nodded. I walked into the living room and he followed in what seemed a reluctant way, and I saw there was only one butterfly painting in the living room, over the love seat, of course, but it was the most impressive butterfly painting of all. With careful brushstrokes on black velvet. “Is that a monarch?” I asked. He said he didn’t think so, but he said it in a way that I knew he knew it absolutely was not a monarch, and possible knew its actual species but didn’t want to insult me. I admitted I didn’t know very much about butterflies and to be honest, ‘monarch’ was probably the only species I even knew the name of. “I probably just revealed myself to be a butterfly fool. And I could care less. I should let you get back to what you were doing before I so rudely interrupted you.” He said I wasn’t rude at all, but yes, he was going to be late for work if he didn’t hurry now. I lingered anyway, staring at the impressive butterfly, whose species, who the hell knew. And I said, “I know this really interesting guy named Joe, you should meet Joe, he doesn’t live anywhere around here, but you should meet him someday. He’s also an appreciator of the monarch butterfly. Joe is way way way way out there in the country, and he’s got a heck of a porcupine problem, and he used to have this unbearable tangle of thorns and juniper brush and it clogged up more than half his damn property. Me and you could only dream, we’re boxed into this building and we have no scope of things, we can barely live our miserable lives—but Joe, he’s got enough land to make his property an orchard if he wants. And that’s exactly what he could do. If didn’t have so many squirrels and the aforementioned porcupines that’d eat everything. And he can’t plant a proper vegetable garden because of all the deer. And he can’t shoot the deer because the deer come out of the nature preserve and onto his land and they’re tagged with these special purple bows of elegant ribbon like a venison birthday present he can’t open and if he shot the deer and got caught with the ribbon it’d be no good for anybody. So he got himself a giant sack of corn kernels. What do you think he did next? I’m not going to tell you, you have to guess.” My neighbor said, “I’m not going to guess.” I said he had to. But he wouldn’t. I continued, “He threw the kernels all in the juniper bush and the thorns and the holly and he weaponized those does and those bucks and they stomped and trampled all that mess of bad brush to get at the corn and once it all was trampled flat and perished and reduced to dirt and dust and mud he began to throw manure in there and Carolina reaper peppers, some of the hottest peppers known to man or beast, and then when the deer, with fiery assholes and guts aflame and tongues singed clean off, were very much afeared of that so-newly-thought-haunted patch, Joe began throwing down milkweed seed. Joe collects milkweed seed, you see. There’s nothing monarch butterflies love more than a patch of milkweed. And what a fine patch of milkweed he made himself. And now he’s got all the monarch butterflies he can handle.” My neighbor said that sounded nice and he checked his watch and I pet the poodle and talked to the bird. Then my neighbor went into his bathroom and brushed his teeth. My neighbor put on his coat. My neighbor said goodbye to me. My neighbor walked out of his apartment and left me all alone in there with nothing worth stealing. He slipped out of the building. And from his shitty little kitchen window (if you could even call it a window), I saw him quicken his pace into what I can only describe as a dash—I hadn’t seen anyone properly dash in over a decade. A futile dash this was, no doubt, to make some impossible train, already arrived, far too soon to depart.
Broken Keyboard
-1 star -☆
the keyboard of my lapop stoed working (mosly) so now Ive got a lle exas insumens calculaor (ho rodded) hooked to the usb with a se of jumpe cables fom my car which no longer has a baery because I have to run our bedroom ceiling fan off it (empoaily)
Bud Smith reports live from Jersey City, New Jersey.
This is a brand new genre and I am so into it
"nothing makes me happier than my subconscious getting shit wrong." love it