The next page from my Book of Drawing Prompts. (The previous page appeared on 13 Nov.) This one here is called “Fedora”.
Dear diary,
We’re all too old. Even the children are old. Nothing can save us from the doom we’re funneling towards. Our only recourse is to sing songs together.
For this reason, I’m excited to participate, next spring, in the Communal Dethatching Ceremony. A dethatcher or “lawn scarifier” is a device that removes the roof covering of straw, reeds, & non-mental palms from lawns. Economy-size dethatchers can be pulled by the population of a village, as if the people had magically fused their bodies into One Vast Collective Garden Tractor. I like to hold hands with folks while we participate in tasks that heap the common good.
“He tasks me! He heaps me!”
—Ahab[Moby-Dick, ch. 36: “The Quarter-Deck”]
The truth is that my primary schoolmate Ronald “Not Margaret T.” Reagan just explained to me what dethatching is, and I wanted to include it in this entry somehow; plus I wish our neighborhood weren’t so isolated.
*
& the so-called holiday of U.S. Thanksgiving is coming. I always joke and say (rhetorically, implying an answer of NOTHING) “What have I to be thankful for!?” And I employ the adjective so-called when I mention this event becuz the word holiday means “holy day”, and there are at least a few reasons to reconsider granting the notion of holiness, which seems to share a ballpark (or at least one parking lot) with the doctrine of sanctification, to a day marked annually by religious observances and a traditional meal including turkey which ostensibly commemorates a harvest festival celebrated by the Pilgrims in 1621 and is held on the fourth Thursday in November here in Shitsville, in the Unrestricted Banks of Americana.
But I don’t wanna get into the controversy surrounding all the evils of our forefathers again — I think I did that last time this pox was upon us (note to self: check the previous years’ entries that were written around No·thanksgiving·time) — I only wanted to record, for this diary, the junk in my brain…
I’m trying to say that an idea is weighing on me, knowing that I’m going to see my family next week. The stress of an impending Family Endurance Test always shivers my timbers (for further info, see below), but this year is even more whatchamacallit than usual, because my brother recently fathered a baby boy, whose soul is still so small that it can’t speak English, and I’ll be expected to show great love and affection for the lad, and although it is very much consistent with the essence of my being to feel and show great love and affection, I’m rather more terrified than enraptured by the thot of any cute infant facing the world-to-come, and by world I mean hellscape, because I hated my own world so much that I vowed never to father anything beyond books, thus if this world of today was so worthy of hate, then how much more worthy of hate will be the world of tomorrow! In other words, it’s not because I don’t like your pet leviathan that I refrain from cradling its oily bulk; it’s that I don’t want to invest too much emotion in any species that is destined to suffer. It’s like when a poet tells me that a rodent has kissed the throat of his cat and made the cat sad; I say “See? That’s why I didn’t get attached to poor, poor Jeoffry. That was SMART of me: I saved myself your trauma. Now you’re the one blubbering, and I’m only weeping a little more profusely than usual.”
I know it’s too late to clear things up; nevertheless, here’s a quote from the encyclopedia, to explain the idiomatic outburst that I used near the beginning of that recently expired paragraph:
In heavy seas, ships would be lifted up and pounded down so hard as to ‘shiver’ the timbers, startling the sailors. Such an exclamation was meant to convey a feeling of fear and awe, similar to, ‘Well, blow me down!’
Now let me just list the things I accomplished over the last few days, plainly and simply, and then we’ll get outta here.
First, you’ve maybe noted that my last couple entries have contained references to leaf-raking. Not dethatching now, leaf-raking. That’s cuz on Thursday and Friday I raked all our leaves. Well, admittedly, there’s a patch about as big as a huddle of walruses out by the shed which is covered in ice, so I couldn’t rake that precinct; but the rest of our huge yard is back to being bare dirt again. It took the better part of two days for me to finish, and, each time I would stop to take a break, I thought I was going to have a heart attack, because I don’t normally get that much physical exercise — my style is more to sit stock-still and contemplate the world all day, like those deities that you read about in Plato — so I assumed that my blood would gel up and get stuck in the chamber (my heart only has one chamber that actually works: all the rest are obstructed; and they all have labels over the top of their tubes, like “Faith”, “Hope”, and “Charity”, and underneath these names, look and see: the pathways are all clogged and boarded up; and the remaining operational chamber is labeled “Resentment”), but, as luck would have it, I did not collapse from my labors.
I was told, in answer to prayer, that the best way to do the job (I’m still talking about raking) is to stand in one spot and pivot around in a circle to draw the leaves toward you into a pile; then hop over six paces and do the same routine, so that you end up with a yard full of leaf piles, which you can then bag up and send to Mars (here, by Mars, I mean the rendering grove, which is my nickname for the place that charges one dollar per bag and allows you to dump out into their specialized zones all manner of yard waste). But what I did is rake a long line between my neighbor’s yard and my own — basically following the property line — and then I raked from the other side a long line back until it met up with the first line: thus it was not a series of piles that I created but rather a shape resembling a mutant earthen caterpillar or cosmic centipede, which you could imagine slithering around your farm and threatening to consume all the hens. As it is written, in The Encyclopedia of Gardening, from Adam to Zarathrustra:
Imagine a video game where the player maneuvers a line which grows in length, with the line itself being a primary obstacle. This concept originated in the 1977 arcade game Blockade; and the ease of implementing the idea has led to hundreds of similar versions for many platforms, most of which have the word snake or worm in the title.
So, to review, the new proper way to rake a yard is as follows:
The raker is bound by a rectangular plane. As she moves forward, she leaves a trail of leaves behind, resembling a thrashing serpent named Rahab. The raker proceeds along a path, which hugs the perimeter of the yard and then spirals toward the center; & as she moves, the serpent—traditionally referred to as “the dragon”—keeps growing longer. Once all the leaves have been fashioned thus into a lengthy creature that represents the forces of chaos, this enemy must be bagged. Start at the head, and, using your rake like a salad fork, lift with your arm until the serpent’s head is severed from its body. Place the head in the sack, like Perseus did to the head of the gorgon Medusa. Do not make eye contact with the slain serpent’s face: it will leave you stoned. (Believe me, you don’t want to live as a gorgeous nude statue.)
Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the LORD; awake, as in the ancient days, in the generations of old. Art thou not it that hath cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon? (Isaiah 51:9)
For God is my King of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth. Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength: (and the sea is Bryan’s yard) thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters. Thou brakest the heads of Block-Nibbler and Snake Byte in pieces. And also Snake II. Thou gavest them to be meat for thy people inhabiting thine arcade. (Psalm 74:21-14)
In the end, I had thirty-seven bags of leaves to bring to the rendering grove. Thirty-seven: that’s the age of Walt Whitman when he bagged his first edition of Leaves of Grass, and it’s how old I was when I completed my own life’s rake-work. And these bags are not just regular flimsy garbage sacks, which hold like three French-fried potato containers and two thin paper cups of vodka thrice daily and that’s it; no, these are 55-gallon hefty satchels for foresters, with leather straps reinforcing each built-in bra.
So we rented a motor-powered horse-and-buggy to transport the form-fitting support-satchels to the rendering grove. And we said one to another: As long as I’m renting this buggy, with its muscular horse,
A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses,
Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears,
Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground,
Eyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly moving.[—“Song of Myself”, from §32]
I say, as long as I am paying to jaunt with this warhorse, I might as well take advantage of my increased hauling-power to pillage some larger items for the house. For I recently moved into a new-old ugly house that needs a lot of stuff repaired. So this resulted in us visiting a bunch of extra stores with our “fine stallion, glossy and supple.” We went to the supply palace Menards and bought a flat door (32 inches, right in-swing) and a six-panel backdoor (32 inches, left out-swing), plus a wooden vanity contraption for the sink. And we had to park our huge stallion in front of the entryway, so one of the employees could help us haul our purchases out of the store and into the buggy (which was continually ablaze, tho its frame was not consumed); and, as we hefted the doors and the vanity into position, we broke or damaged every item.
Then we went to the floor store and bought some floor. This was after we had brought home the doors and the vanity contraption, and after we’d unloaded all thirty-seven bags of the entire shipment of leaves of grass. So the floor store’s male sales-whore exclaimed, upon our arrival:
Whoa Nelly! Shiver my top-sails, I know a better way to transport a small order of flooring than to rent a thoroughbred!
For our order was embarrassingly small to be using an hundred-foot buggy to carry it home; but we explained to the fellow that we’d only hired the getup to carry out the total wealth of the Indies.
NOTE. Nellie was the stereotypical name for a female horse or mule; as opposed to Nessie, which was mostly reserved for sea-monsters (one such creature is said to inhabit the freshwaters of Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands). “Whoa thar, Nelly!” thus follows the same conventions as “Hold your horses!”
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