After re-reading my post from yesterday, I realized that its P.S. was too much: it was weighing down the entry near its foremast; like a treasure chest that threatens to capsize the ship. So I threw it overboard, and God provided a post-historic sea creature to suck it up and vomit it over here. So here it is; here below. I did not revise it or edit it; I only moved it. Like when the movers moved Duchamp's "Large Glass" from the museum, and its panels shattered in transport.
But before I copy & paste my rerun, I'll share yet another page from my sketchbook of 10,000 Drawing Prompts. (For purposes of scholarly comparison, here's the prior image.) As I never tire of explaining, each page of this book contains a pre-printed prompt to serve as your subject. This present pic's prompt was “Totem pole”. Its price is twelve fortunes.
(HINT: it's just horizontal eggs flipped counterclockwise.)
P.S.
But seriously: What have we been up to lately? Well, we finally got rid of the last of the Big Brush Bags that had been left over from that day, long ago, when we trimmed all our trees. This is the first time we’ve ever had to clean up such a beautiful mess. Before, when we were living in the apartment, our association contracted out all the lawncare. Now we own our own yard, so we had to get rid of these enormous piles of leaves, brush, and branches, all by ourselves.
How do you properly dispose of huge piles of tree trimmings? What do you do? You can’t just set each brush-pile on fire – it’ll burn up the whole rest of the yard, & also your house and the surrounding yards and houses. Don’t set the neighborhood on fire – that’s a good mantra to repeat for meditation. Nor is it smart to build a wall of bricks around each pile of yard-debris to serve as a makeshift firepit, because that takes too much effort while giving you very little in return. Unless you roast a lamb on it.
What we found works the best (I think I explained this before) is renting a pickup truck for the first three loads, and then buying enormous “yard waste” bags from your local hardware store, and breaking down the rest of the brush so that it fits in these bags. Then just bring the bags to the recycling place, right down the street (take the first left and the second right, then do a U-turn and take the seventh left), where there’s this area of flat muddy land with a tiny shack in the middle, and a person lives in the shack, and when you pull up next to the shack in your hybrid motor-coach, the shack-dweller slides open their little window, just like a bank teller, except, unlike a bank teller, the shack’s clerk does not thrust a shotgun thru the window & scream “Would you like to deposit RIGHT NOW all your hard-earned money?” No, the shack-dweller addresses you in a welcoming voice:
“Whatcha got there? Four bags of bramble? That’ll be four dollars. (It’s a buck per bag.) Pull ahead to zone two.”
Cuz they have their mudscape zoned out and labeled with numbers, and you discard your brush leaves and branches in zones one and two, whereas grass clippings go in zone three, and I think wooden logs or old dead robots maybe get tossed in zones four and five – I haven’t gone there very many times, so I don’t know what all the extra zones are for; I’ve only dumped out brush and branches. And the place stinks like compost.
And if you happen to leave the empty bags in your car (for you dump the brush and branches out of the bags yet save the bags themselves for another visit because they are reusable), I say, if you forget to take the empty bags out of your car, when you come back after five hours of teaching your music students, your car will exude the scent of compost also. So beware of this, if you are accustomed to holding meetings in your car – meetings with potential new violin students. It’s not a good way to make a first impression, having a car that smells like compost. (Incidentally that’s another good mantra for meditation.)
Or if you just can’t stand to let go of your used yard-waste bags, but you wish to neutralize the foul smell of decayed organic material that now suffuses your car’s interior, then take up smoking. And I mean smoking, not vaping (“to vape” means to nurse vapor from an electronic cigarette) – no, here’s what I advise, in three easy steps: (1) roll an actual sheet of paper from a musical score around a clump of wet leaves; (2) shut your vehicle’s windows airtight; (3) exhale the fumes. You’ll find that now your car smells mostly like tobacco.
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