Using a shovel to compost is like using a fly swatter to serve soup. It is possible, but there’s never a moment you’re unaware the wrong utensil is in your hands. But when life hands you lemons, throw them at people you dislike. After all, any supernatural event is worth expressing forcefully, so when a shovel is all you have, dig it.
I shifted most of the mass of the compost pile from the south end to the north and then dug down another third of a meter or so. The heat was kicking in, the mosquitoes were flying in formations, and humidity had become the primary atmosphere. Yet there is something acutely Zen about manual labor to prepare the soil for a garden I will not plant for many months.
Too much time, far too much labor, and some aggravation of unusual size later, the pile is turned and ready for the next batch of yard debris. I dug down until I hit water, to find out how wet the area was, and it was.
Composting works without optimum anything. I supply sweat, put the pieces together, and receive rich, black soil. Nothing is ever perfect but the ending.
Summer isn’t a season in the Deep South, but rather it is a condition, a state of being, or a prison sentence. Unlike any other time of year, Summer becomes omnipresent at all times of the day. She has minions, this one does, this Dragon Queen of Heat. It’s not just the mercury being forced higher into the thermometer, oh no, were it only that simple. Summer is an assault on many fronts of the human senses and psyche.
Any rain that accidentally falls, does so in sheets, in volumes, and it does so quickly, as if the clouds have only a specific time allotted to them by the Queen. Quickly, the heat turns rain back into clouds of humidity that are dense and suffocating.
One of my pet theories regarding Summer and the South is the citizenry scores so low in nearly every educational category is for four months of the year, they are in a state of half drowning in humidity. If this causes any permanent brain damage has never been tested, but it would explain a few things.
But humidity is a condition, not an entity. The Dragon Queen brings the scorching heat and billions of gnats, mosquitoes, biting flies, and all manner of creeping, crawling, and flying insects. No step is taken outside without an entourage of misery. Human eyes, ears, and noses are fair game for these peddlers of pain. Gnats, whose function is unknown to science, fly directly into the eye, and it’s painful to remove them. Mosquitoes alight on exposed skin, demand a blood donation and leave welts as payment. The biting flies are kamikazes, diving down to rend flesh and leave swelling wounds. Only poisons, like diethyltoluamide, create a barrier between the minions of the Dragon Queen and anemia. But this, too, is part of her world. Insect repellent is the cologne we wear to appease the Queen.
Yet the Dragon cannot concern herself with individuals. She must bring excess to her domain. Ponds explode with algae and water plants even as they dry up. Land vegetation grows overnight to require mowing or pruning. Gardens quickly produce, but fruit rots if not promptly harvested. Summer demands the world slows down but quickens the growth of all things green. Trees soak up sunlight like solar addicts. The woods thicken to the point of blocking the sun, creating a dark green globe of vegetation and shadows, each plant at war with all others for every photon.
Humans hide from the Dragon Queen of Summer. Safely secured in cars or their homes, air conditioning prevents any experience with the real world. Binge-watching, video games, and social media become electronic refugee camps for those who can or will not face the Queen.
I am part reptile, part lunatic, and fully cognizant of whose realm I trespass. Walking in the day’s heat brings her wrath upon me, and working in the compost pile irritates the Queen with my presence, but who are you? Would you cower behind your ceiling fans, their blades protecting you, as the world turns outside your drawn shades, blocking the sun’s assault? I breathe the Dragon’s Breath and feel her power, absorb the heat, and I become one with it. The path around the fenceline is cleared with a bush hook and with sweat and done in full view of the sun. Wide brim hat, long sleeves, work boots, and the desire to experience Summer, in all her glory, compel me to tempt the Dragon to kill me.
The Queen loves no human. She will leave me dead in the woods without a thought towards life. If I choose to dance with her, then it is up to me to survive the music played. Yet for decades, I have done this, walked into the heat, flexed muscle, bled sweat and swam in the river Styx. It is only hell if you choose to be unhappy. Misery is a state of mind. If you want to, if you set the conditions of your life to do so, you can walk inside the breath of the Dragon Queen, embrace the world she has created, and live to write about it.
Lilith Anne makes the slow journey out, plodding along like a death row inmate heading for certain execution, but the trip is essential. It’s ten in the morning when Lilith has her daily bowel movement. I prefer she has it outside.
It’s optimum she does this away from the house, and if I do not walk along with Lilith, she will deposit her goods close to the deck. We walk down to the old dog kennel, where a bucket of fresh water awaits. I return to the house, and Lilith drinks deeply and then off to the weeds to leave her pile.
Lilith likes to lay in the sun on the deck, and I noticed a few days ago, when she returned from the weeds, a swarm of mosquitoes followed. Regardless of what might be said, mosquitoes aren’t excellent fliers and fly poorly in direct sunlight. It’s their hope to withdraw some blood and return to the humidity and shade from whence they came. Lilith is old and slow, therefore, an easy and lumbering target.
The leaf blower sat nearby, and an idea formed.
Using the power button judiciously, the air coming out was strong enough to blow the mosquitoes back but not intrusive to Lilith’s slumber. Of course, they would return undeterred, but I kept them at bay. Then one or two flew too high, and I was able to blast them, and a strategy formed. I used the nozzle to form a barrier around Lilith, and if any of her tormentors managed to go too high up or too far out, I blasted them with a burst of accelerated air. Lilith dozed unconcerned.
After a few minutes of this aerial combat, the mosquitoes were thinning out. I watched as none returned to the arena, and Lilith slept comfortably under the sun.
Why Time Travel is Fun, Yet Horrible to Write About in Fiction.
Let’s begin with very simple things. If you went back and time and killed Hitler no one would know you had done something good. And now, at what age would you kill him? Worse, if you murdered Hitler when he was twelve, you might be arrested and executed, then you wouldn’t exist to travel back in time to kill Hitler.
That went poorly. Let’s try this: You travel back in time to tell your ten year old self what stocks to invest in, who will win the Word Series, and to get the hell out of New Orleans before Katrina hits in 2005. Then you travel back to the future, where you arrive to find you lost the use of your legs in a plane crash when you were fleeing Katrina in 2005, and the past looks nothing as you remember it.
Hmmm, this isn’t easy at all. Okay, then this: You travel back in time to tell your ten-year-old self how the world might unfold, desktops, laptops, nothing precise, but an idea of what inventions to invest in. He pepper sprays you and calls the cops. You get arrested, and hopefully, you were smart enough not to have any ID or cash on you. But then what?
Take Three: As a child, you are fascinated with time travel, and at age sixteen, you meet a man who hands you a piece of paper with the phrase, “You did it. The machine works,” which is exactly the phrase you made up as a kid to your future self in case you invented time travel. You then go back to the future, and all is well, right? But if you went back into the past and found you were there, it stands to reason that once you leave the past and get to the future, you will also be there. Every timeline you visit will have you in it, wouldn’t it?
I think the most exciting part about time travel in fiction is how difficult it is.
Here’s “The Matrix” movie I want to see: A woman is lying on the beach, enjoying the sunset, and watching her grandkids play in the surf. Her husband, a world famous cardiologist, just retired to spend more time with her. The novel she has spent so long writing was finally published, and is climbing up the top ten list. Their daughter is on the verge of inventing a vaccine for cancer.
Suddenly, she wakes up, tubes in her body, with Neo telling her it will be okay. She discovers her life never existed, she never had a husband, kids, or grandchildren, and she’s twenty years old, naked and freaked out.
They woke her up by mistake.
Now what?
It’s the end of the first Matrix movie. The Matrix, as an entity, is waking up people at random, turning them loose on the Resistance, and it becomes clear that humans don’t have the resources to take in thousands of refugees, most of whom don’t want to be there.
The Matrix offers to stop releasing Sleepers if the Resistance stops hacking into the mainframe.
If you’ve never spoken to someone who worked on a submarine, it’s an interesting conversation. Sub-warfare is waged in total darkness and, ostensibly, in near silence. Yet the equipment that picks up outside sounds in the ocean stays busy because the ocean’s depths are a remarkably noisy environment. The water is moving, pulling, pushing, and swirling around, and with it, debris floats and falls, collides, and sinks again. The wreckage of thousands of years of human wanderings, voyages, and wars litters the blackness of the seas. Lost fishing nets will trap objects, drag, pull, and wrap around other detritus, which creates sound, some minute, others not so.
The earth’s crust moans and shifts, sunken mountains have slides of mud and rock, and boulders that have not moved in centuries tumble and crash downward, their journey marked by nothing but sound.
A submariner, blind yet all-seeing, would tell you the ocean is a vast, dark, and dangerous place, filled with its cacophony of its passage and mass. Like Braille, the sounds of the sea can lead the blind and perhaps even assist those who will listen carefully.
The ocean is a disinterested goddess. Humans live or die, but she cares not at all. They may or they may not pass over the waves or under them; she does not notice.
This is the final word on everything once the salt water is sailed.
The dream dogged my every step today, slunk around like a second shadow, always there, invisible unless I looked directly at it, and even when I did, the question remained: What is this? But writing is not a process without its little quirks. I have no idea what it is, but what else might there be because of this thing?
The thing is a device, old, metal rusting away, tiny window, and it looks like an odometer. Standing at the edge of one of Valdosta’s side streets of a side street, Jenette Street used to be open to the public, but the University absorbed it. I dreamed a device stood at the edge of the street, had a button to push, and the numbers would spin for a few seconds, and like a slot machine, they would slow down and finally read, “1.4.” No such device exists. I looked. But why have something that tells you how far away the edge of the road is from that point? (Don’t ask me how I know what it does and why I know what it does, but I don’t understand why it does it, I just know, okay?)
You got a point to this, Cowboy, or are you just burning off some excess caffeine here?
And here we go. Buckle up, Kittens. Dreams can get away with this sort of thing. The device is either meaningless, or the meaning is lost somewhere in the imagery. Or I didn’t retain something I should have. This bothers me because that sort of thing in fiction is a distraction.
But suppose I write a story where the meaningless distraction is part of the plot.
First Swing: A cop is tracking down a serial killer. The man or woman who has been killing delivery drivers has killed four people, all in the same area of New York, and all were delivering food. The detective walks out of a restaurant, following a driver, when a woman in a blue hat approaches. She tells the detective a man in a white truck asked her if she was a driver and if she would deliver to his apartment. She gives the detective a description and hurries away.
The detective finds the man in the truck, but he speeds away at the flash of the badge.
It takes a while, but the detective catches the man, arrests him, and finds enough evidence for a conviction.
The detective seeks the woman in the blue hat. She saw the killer, spoke with him, and he asked about delivery. He doesn’t need her, but he wants to find her. But no camera captured her. No one else saw the woman, and it seemed she had vanished. Even after his conviction, where he confesses to other murders, the killer does not seem to remember this woman.
Is the woman in the blue hat an intriguing part of the story or a distraction?
The dream began with many people I knew walking to a lecture or a debate. I was young, maybe in college, as were the other people walking with me. A covered stage on the north end, where someone was speaking, then a woman on the opposite end of the venue, a woman I know in real life but still cannot place, stood up and said something shockingly disagreeable. I stood up and raised my right fist, clearly a sign I did not support her, as did many others. Then we left.
On the way back, the mood turned more jovial, and I knew our route in real life. It’s a city street in Valdosta where I used to run, as there is little traffic. We came upon a device on a pedestal. Pushing the button would display the distance from the device to the road’s edge, which was 1.4 feet. Neither the device nor the road ever moved, so we laughed at the ridiculousness of it all but still pushed the button many times.
Then, I was entirely in a different location, one I had never been to before or in a dream. A woman I knew only while asleep and I argued. She was leaving me but didn’t want to be the one who said it. In the end, she stormed out but didn’t take her stuff. This part of the dream lasted only a short while.
The next part of the dream was more lucid. The set was a reoccurring dreamscape of an apartment building made of deep reddish-brown brick. The apartments are small. The building has four stories, and even though it’s rather cramped, the place is nice and clean, and the flats are well-kept.
I had the key to a woman’s apartment, someone known in real life, and we were meeting soon. Yet a came upon a stack of doors on the sidewalk, stopped to look, and another woman put her coffee cup on top of the pile.
“Do you come to these doors often?” I asked, and she laughed.
Then I went up the stairs to my destination and stopped to think about my last time here. I remembered with great clarity the windows, the style of the rooms, the view over the town, and the smells of the building. I felt it fading away. Thunder awoke me. The sound of hard rain was the dominant sense.
Wrex Wyatt is up at three something, wants out, and wakes up the other dogs, but I’m not buying. Four something comes and goes and I’m winning the war of sleep, but at five Wrex paws at me, hitting my cell phone and it lights up. The look on his face is epic. Wrex has discovered fire, well, at least light, and is amazed. I should not leave the phone on the charger overnight, and I know it.
Up and writing, or trying to but the Muse is silent, waiting for me to do something, waiting for me to offer a cue so she can, like a woman at a bar looking at a man, wondering if he’s going to speak. My main character treats me as if we’re on a first date that’s going bad, quickly, and she isn’t speaking either. It’s time to move.
Thrift Stores speak to me. Inside one of the largest in town, castaway items crowd to the front of every flat surface wondering if they will ever find a home, or like a vaudeville show of old, just be on permanent display until the store goes under. An odd piece of furniture, part desk, part dresser, and all mutant speaks loudly. Painted by a five-year-old on acid, if I didn’t put a ban on me owning more stuff years ago I would buy it. Produce and buy until you die. No more of that for me.
Used bookstores are dead, reading is dying, and writing is being turned over to machines. The only bookstore in town is huge, lifeless, and lacking any reverence for books, and more like a prison, where books are sentenced, no pun intended. I look for old favorites, books that changed the way I see life, and it’s like going back to a childhood home that’s now in a subdivision with a strip bar next to a title loan place.
The big box hardware store is next for as a homeowner and a gardener, I never run out of things needed for one or the other. A woman, tall, blonde, and wearing jeans she was poured into walks past. I remember the first time I heard the phrase “peasant stock” in reference to a woman who wasn’t small of build, and I’m sure the person who said it would say it again here. But this woman has a glide to her walk, a slow shifting of mass and movement that speaks to physical grace as well as a body that is accustomed to moving in rhythm and in passion. The man with her stays close, but not possessively so. These two, I feel, have been together for a while, and their union has produced strong mutual attraction.
Once inside, I wonder what it would take to have a rain barrel on a stand, to produce water pressure, and for storing rainwater for the compost pile. And this speaks to me, too. Weight up high is never easy and shouldn’t be considered lightly. Fifty gallons of water will carry four hundred pounds of liquid mass, and that’s impressive if it were to ever start moving. Creative juices now begin to make their way through my brain. A metal stand, six fence posts, and some plumbing, yes, this is doable.
The Muse is delighted by all of this, and she wants more. Fiction writing later, she promises, and so right now, we start thinking about the Hickory Head Water Tower.
The Hickory Head Hermit 