World Naked Gardening Day...no, I am not kidding

I see that World Naked Gardening Day is upon us yet again (how the time does fly, doesn’t it? It seems like only yesterday that we were all talking about this and now here it is again). Now I understand that there are many events in this world where the reasoning behind the event is a bit obscure to anyone not actually involved in the event. Soccer games and Grateful Dead concerts come immediately to mind, and I know that there is an annual bathtub race in Nome, Alaska, for another example, and there is a Garlic Festival held every year about 45 miles up the river from our happy little burg, but the reasoning behind nude gardening in the first place and celebrating nude gardening in the second place is proving particularly elusive to me. I can see no advantages to gardening in the nude and there appears to be no end of disadvantages. Gardening in the nude increases the amount of skin affected by a chance encounter with poison ivy, an always unpleasant encounter leading to an even more unpleasant experience, and gives many insects--bees and wasps, for instance--a much broader area to make their displeasure with the gardener's disturbing their natural habitat known. And unless you are Daniel Craig or Kate Upton, your neighbors will use the opportunity presented by you puttering around in your garden in the altogether to mock you openly, mockery, if you will please forgive me for pointing this out, you will have earned. So please, on May 7th, do not garden in the nude. Pay no attention to the pleas of those who want you to do this and who will then laugh at you when you do. Just say no. Put on some old trousers and an old shirt and a straw hat and go forth to do battle with the weeds. The weeds will respect you more as well.

More excuses, except without the nice picture of Emily.

Okay, so here’s the thing: I do have some stuff to post, but the pieces (there are two of them, you know, but they are not about the same thing, which makes them fraternal twins, I suppose) are not ready for prime time. In short, I have not finished either one of them and I have used a great deal of psychic energy these past few weeks justifying to myself why I have not finished them.  I could blame George W. Bush, but I started both of these pieces several years after Bush left the Presidency, although, if the newspapers are anything to go by, incumbency is not a requirement for things to be George W. Bush’s fault. But I can’t, not really, a result, I think, of long years of Roman Catholic teaching. The well-developed Catholic conscience understands that blaming others for one’s own faults is the oldest sin in the Book, other than eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and that Adam's excuse that she made me, and Eve's excuse that the serpent made her, does not excuse either one of them at all. So it is not George W. Bush’s fault that I have not been posting as much as I should, much as I would like to say otherwise.

My desultory posting is also not the fault of my brother and his potato salad, even if I am certain beyond a reasonable doubt that he gave me that potato salad in order to poison me.  In the cold salad realm, I have always been partial to macaroni salad, especially my mother’s macaroni salad. Unlike so many people, including my brother, my mother does not annoy the palate with a multitude of flavors. There’s vinegar and mayonnaise, some tomatoes and celery, which I pick out of the salad and throw to the nearest cat, and macaroni. Simple, basic, filling, all the things I want in a cold salad. My brother, on the other hand, is a pupil of the more is better culinary school, and in his potato salad there are potatoes that you cannot taste and every manner of spice that you can, sort of, when those spices are not fighting for space and attention on your taste buds.  In short, I hate my brother’s potato salad and I would not eat the ghastly stuff at all except that my mother values family peace over almost everything else, especially at family get-togethers, and so in the interest of peace and brotherhood and good will I ate my brother’s potato salad and quickly came down with a nasty case of food poisoning.  As you might imagine, my brother did not like my accusing him of attempted murder nor did he appreciate my calling his potato salad loathsome noisome swill. All right, I didn’t use those words exactly, but I am sure you get the point. My brother certainly did and he certainly didn’t like it. Some people get very defensive about their potato salad and my brother is one of those people. In his defense, however, I should point out that my refusal to buckle down and start writing pre-dated his attempted fratricide for quite a while, and so, in the interests of truth and fair play and all sorts of other virtues Americans hold sacred, I cannot blame him for my unswerving loyalty to procrastination as a virtue.  I still hate his potato salad, though.

What I do blame for all the delay is my recent commitment to lemur ranching for fun and profit.  Ranching on a spread filled with ring-tailed lemurs is something that can drive a grown man to Despair, which, people tell me, is a pretty upscale new French bar and grill here in our happy little burg.  I didn’t know that the French had bars and grills; none of those bistros you see in the travel brochures ever look like what I’d consider to be a bar and grill, but then I don’t get out much. The food is very nice though, if you like overly intellectualized hamburger. Contrary to what you might have heard, the cow involved is not having an existential crisis as a response to its search for meaning in a meaningless world; the cow has passed from being to nothingness by becoming hamburger. Ergo, the cow has solved its existential crisis by finding the meaning denied to so many human beings. For the cow, the purpose of existence is simple: it is dinner.  That the cow is no longer in a position to grasp this elegant solution to its existential problem simply demonstrates the inadequacy of any overarching philosophical system when that system confronts reality. And steak tastes good.

I don’t know what the lemurs taste like and I don’t intend to find out. I’m not raising them for food, at least not for people, and I don’t think the furry little bastards have enough meat on them to interest the pet food manufacturers.  So why bother with lemurs?  Lemur oil will cure a boatload of skin ailments, yes it will, everything from eczema to seborrhea and psoriasis, so step right up and put in your order for your own 12 oz. bottle of Dr. Green’s Old Fashioned Green Lemur Miracle Oil and if you order within the next ten minutes I will be happy to send you another bottle absolutely free; just pay shipping and handling. And then I sit and watch the money roll in, or I would, if only get the ornery little beasts to stay still for long enough to press some oil out of them.  Lemurs object to pressing, for reasons I am not sure I fathom—a consequence of poor parenting and equally poor socialization in the public schools seems a reasonable hypothesis—and while I am not pressing them the lemurs insist on three meals a day and a roof over their heads, which makes them seem less an investment than members of my family.  In addition to this, I have the Department of Agriculture inspectors going over every inch of my operation and the Humane Society and every other animal rights group in the country camped out in my front yard demonstrating against my pressing the lemurs at all. The lemurs don’t like the animal rights people very much; one of those PETA people broke into the lemurs’ compound two weeks ago to “liberate” them and the lemurs bit him on his ass for his troubles. Serves him right, too; I hope the bastard gets rabies.

So as you can see, as a small aspiring entrepreneur in the age of the Illinois Incitatus I am up to my backside in money problems and government red tape and high-minded idiots who don’t know the first thing about lemurs or business trying to tell me how to run my business. I simply do not have the time to whip up these little funny bits regularly. I have things to do, important things, like trying to figure out where the damn lemurs are hiding my pencils. Damn, I hate when they do that; it’s more annoying than you can imagine.

The wave

Yes, my mood has improved greatly over the course of the past twenty-four hours, although I’m not sure why that is, he said lying through his teeth, and thank you for asking.  It’s as if a great wave has washed over me and swept away a multitude of things that annoyed the hell out of me and now I feel clean and refreshed.  Of course, the biggest annoyance of all is still with us and will be until winter of 2017, at which I am seriously considering throwing a humongous party complete with liquor and strippers to celebrate the glorious occasion.  I think it’s a wonderful idea, although my brother tells me that I should make the celebration contingent on no one pretending to come from Westchester coming by to cast a pall on the whole affair.  This strikes me as very sound advice and so I will hold off the actual planning of the annoyance’s retirement until such time that I know it can’t continue to annoy me

Missing the point

Yes indeed, today is Cesar Chavez’s 86^th birthday, and we all know that’s the reason why billions of people are going to church all over the world today.  Making the world safe for California lettuce and the people who harvest it is just so much more important than anything else that could be going on today and that's why Google's doodle of the day is all about Cesar Chavez.

Pot shot

"We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate.." The former junior senator from Illinois, bloviating on January 21.

Why not, I wonder?  He does it all the time and he seems to be doing quite well with the strategy, unless, of course, this is not a strategy but rather an example of what the psychologists call projection, wherein one imputes one's own faults and shortcomings on to someone else. In either case, it hardly seems fair that He gets to project stuff and the GOP does not, and since fairness is the great mantra of the Illinois Messiah and His minions one would expect that conservatives would sue this maladministration for violating our equal protection rights under the 14th Amendment. I don't think it will happen, though; the trial lawyers are on His side. Such is life, I fear.

With apologies to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr.

Absolute knowledge have I none,

But my aunt's washerwoman's sister's son

Heard a policeman on his beat

Say to a laborer in the street

That he had a letter just last week --

A letter which he did not seek --

From a Chinese merchant in Timbuktoo

Who said that his brother in Cuba knew

Of an Indian chief in a Texas town,

Who got the dope from a circus clown,

That a man in Klondike had it straight

From a guy in a South American state,

That a wild man over in Borneo

Was told by a woman who claimed to know,

Of a well-known society rake,

Whose mother-in-law will undertake

To prove that her husband's sister's niece

Has stated plain in a printed piece

That she has a son she never does see

Who knows what happened in Benghazi.

BLESS GAIA: “Tonight is the longest night of the year,” said the Green Woman, “and it is on this night that we must awaken our spiritual energy and send it forth and bring back the light of the sun to the Earth, because the Earth is in great need…” And so it went, just before the winter solstice yesterday, as a man made a fire with a bow and a stick, and a woman dressed like an extra in a road company production of The Lord of the Rings intoned the sort of New Age drivel one comes to expect on such an occasion. There were the usual jeremiads against technology and corporate greed; you cannot, apparently, worship Gaia without bashing the shareholders on occasion, and our Green Woman made much of this week’s lunar eclipse and its spiritual connection to yesterday’s festivities.

Please color me unimpressed. That yesterday was the longest night of the year was the one fact in this woman’s ongoing spiel, and this fact is only true if you live in the Northern Hemisphere; if you live in Australia, it was the longest day of the year and probably a great day to go to the beach and enjoy yourself. In fact, with Christmas falling on a Saturday this year, your average Australian will probably spend many a long hour at the beach with the family, swimming and eating fried chicken and working on the tan while laughing at the poor Pommy bastards up to their backsides in snow in dear old Blighty, content in the knowledge that the horse great—great—great—great—granddad tried to snaffle in London way back in the day was the best thing that ever happened to the family; without Granddad to the fifth power getting caught and sentenced to transportation to the Antipodes, you’d be freezing your backside off now too.

I suppose this baying at the moon was the sort of thing that impressed the hell out of your average noble savage back in the days when being a noble savage was all the rage, but let me point something out here: my spiritual energy—always a low flame, I will admit—and the spiritual energy of everyone gathered together in that small park isn’t enough to light up a cigarette, assuming you could smoke one during the festivities, much less bring back the power of the sun to the Earth. The reason for this is simple: the Sun hasn’t gone anywhere. What occurred yesterday is that the Earth moved on its axis and from here on out the top part of the planet will be getting more sunlight than the bottom part of the planet. Please pardon me for pointing out that our collective spiritual energy didn’t have a damn thing to do with it; if none of us were in that park intoning New Age drivel, if ancient tribes of Hollywood extras did not sacrifice virginal platinum blondes to the all-knowing moon when the director barked, “Action,” if hordes of refugees from adult responsibility did not strip naked, smoke weed, and howl at the moon tonight, something I hear goes on a fairly regular basis in California’s state legislature, the Earth’s movement on its axis would still have happened. In short, Gaia doesn’t need our spiritual energy to do anything. I repeat, for those of you who are hard of reading, the winter solstice was going to happen anyway. Sir Isaac Newton, a strange little man with an odd predilection for drawing and quartering counterfeiters; a revolting hobby, to be sure, but we all need something to take our minds off our troubles, I suppose; explained how all of this worked in Principia Mathematica some three hundred years ago. He also explained how lunar eclipses happen too, and I hate to rain on anyone’s parade here, but the spiritual link between the winter solstice and the lunar eclipse isn’t a link at all; it’s just something that happens every so often. The last time it happened was 1638 and the next time it will happen is 2094, at which point the kids at yesterday’s get-together will be ancients and can bore their grandchildren to tears with stories of how dumb people were back in 2010. So all of that good spiritual energy you felt while chanting and moving around the big fire in a circle was probably the sugar rush you get when your body metabolizes the jelly doughnut you had for lunch instead of a ham sandwich. Doughnuts are a good thing, spiritually and gastronomically.

As for the standard denunciation of technology, let me point something out here. Christmas began life as a Roman holiday, the feast of Sol Invictus, the Invincible Sun, which came back to life every 25th day of the tenth month of the Roman year. Once Constantine Christianized the Roman Empire, he saw that he had a perfectly good holiday with nothing to holiday about anymore. Being a clever man, Constantine did what millions of other people have done in the years since then: he regifted. He put the celebration of Christ’s birth on the vacated holiday, despite the biblical evidence that Jesus was born in either the spring or summer; as I’ve mentioned in another context, in Judea shepherds do not tend their flocks by night in the middle of winter on the off-chance that a wandering heavenly host with nothing better to do with their time will come drifting by blasting out Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus in high definition stereo sound. But why was the 25th day of the tenth month the date of the holiday? Because when your most technologically advanced timekeeping device is a sundial, the 25th day of the tenth month is the day that clearly shows the days getting longer. Our Green Woman who despises technology so much only knows that the 21st day of the twelfth month of the Gregorian calendar is the longest day of the year because improved chronological technology can now tell her to the nanosecond when the big moment is going to happen. Without said technology, the Green Woman would be spewing her spiritual energy on the wrong day. On the other hand, I have to admit that watching the guy start a fire with a bow and a stick was pretty cool, but then I am easily entertained. Starting fires this way is a useful skill if you’re a Boy Scout or a Green Beret, but I think I will stick with the microwave oven, if it’s all the same to Gaia.