LOCAL VIEW –Fighting The Fungus Funk–

I can never remember a summer as wet as the past summer was, in southern New Hampshire. I can remember wet spells, especially in springtime, but never such a persistence of damp and dour and dripping dismalness, during summer.

About a decade ago we had a record-setting, dark and drenching June, but it dried out in July. Other years have seen training, July gully-washer thunderstorms that caused local flash floods. And of course, dying tropical storms have given us amazing August and September rains and floods, (most notably Connie and Diane in 1955). However, all these events are mostly a matter of days, or at most of two or three weeks. This past summer made me sit up and take notice.

Not that the summer was “unprecedented”. Just because you yourself have never seen a thing happen before doesn’t mean it never happened. It was said (I think by President Truman) that, “The only thing new under the sun is the history you haven’t read.” If you look back through the records you will often see our forefathers endured worse.

However, just to argue with myself, I will also assert that every day is fresh and new. Each day differs from other days in a manner that makes each day have a unique fingerprint. Therefore, every day is in some way “Unprecedented”.

To truly be a great meteorologist one must on one hand study history, and on the other be aware that another word for “freshness and newness” is, “Chaos”. In fact, predicting weather is nearly as hard as predicting humanity. Meteorologists are nearly as inclined to forecast incorrectly as psychologists are.

The major difference is that when meteorologists forecast incorrectly, they cannot put the weather in jail for disobeying them. Psychologists, on the other hand, can institutionalize their clients for indicating that their pet therapy was and is and ever more will be total bunkum.

Politicians tend to be more like psychologists than like meteorologists. When Stalin was wrong, he was far more inclined to institutionalize his subjects than confess his own error. Blame is a wonderful thing, if you have the power to get away with it. When Stalin’s invasion of Finland was a debacle, it was wonderful (for Stalin) to be able to purge generals, as Stalin himself kept his status as “infallible”.

In actual fact, the only One worthy of being called “infallible” is God. Stalin made a mistake when he tried to replace the Almighty, and his end was tragic. To avoid such tragedy, it is far better to confess we do fail, which meteorologists are able to do. They have a thing or two to teach the rest of us about humbleness.

But they can’t claim credit, for the true teacher is a thing called “weather”. In New England some say, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a short while.” What this statement suggests is that weather can do what psychologists can’t. Weather can improve your mood, where psychologists at times charge you an absurd amount for an hour spent making you feel that you are insane. The sun breaking through the clouds charges you nothing, but can change your life by making you feel saner. In the case of Johnny Nash and the song, “I Can See Clearly Now”, the good mood prompted by sunshine sold a million copies, but the sunshine charged nothing.

If sunshine can elevate our mood, then rain can depress it, if the rain does more than end a drought. (No rain at all is not a good thing.) And here we notice something about the euphoria so wonderfully described by Johnny Nash’s hit song. The reason “seeing clearly” is such a good thing, and the reason “the rain is gone” and “the pain is gone” is because the “obstacles” are clearly seen. What this suggests is that there was an earlier time when “obstacles” were not so clearly seen. As the poet Longfellow put it, “Into each life some rain must fall.”

A quick perusal of Johnny Nash’s life does show a darker time followed by a brighter time: A recording studio he attempted to run in the United States collided with cutthroat competition and a certain unwillingness to invest in new music, so he declared bankruptcy, moved to Jamaica, where expenses were far lower and the Reggae-scene embraced new music, and there he found success and a “bright, bright, sunshiny day”, (and a million-seller).

In a sense Johnny Nash did what meteorologists do. He admitted he failed, when he declared bankruptcy, and without that admission he could not have moved on to his million-selling success.

This brings me around to the dismal topic of those who cannot admit their failure. I am referring to the so-called “Elite” who live in the so-called “Swamp” of Washington DC, and satellite swamps such as “Hollywood”.

What failure can they not admit? Chiefly, they cannot admit they are increasingly unpopular. They are addicted to fame, and lust for applause, but increasingly hear booing. (“F— Joe Biden!”) They need to see they might be doing something wrong, but instead dismiss their audience as idiots. Their increasing unpopularity in fact lost them the last two presidential election, but they used fraud to “win” the last one. This did not make them more popular. In like manner, many of their ideas are rejected by other highly intelligent thinkers, yet, by employing “cancel culture” and censoring differing ideas on platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, the Elite think they create the illusion everyone agrees with them.

This vain foolishness is painful to watch. It is as if a meteorologist predicted sunshine and it rained, and the meteorologist was so vain he walked about in the rain wearing sunglasses and saying, “Isn’t this sunshine wonderful?”

Or perhaps singing, “I can see clearly now. It’s pouring rain.”

Rather than embracing Truth, such people prefer ignorance. It hurts to see it. It is embarrassing. They are making such complete jackasses of themselves! Yet, in their ignorance, they actually believe they are “winning”. They believe they are “popular” even as they alienate. They are as ridiculous as a person who cheats at solitaire, for even in their alienated loneliness they puff out their chests and swagger about “winning”.

The loving thing to do with such people is to gently and kindly inform them of the Truth, but fifty years of sad experience informs me that such people are all too often incorrigible. They are too certain they are “winning” to see they are not. After fifty years I have witnessed many such people come to bad ends. I never wished they’d see such unhappy endings. But…they insisted.

If God allows it, I hope to someday write about the people I knew, and often loved, who came to bad ends. If my pen is able, the reader will see why such people were lovable. They dared do things most are too inhibited to do. However, because such daring involved being to some degree “outlaws” they ran up against the “Law”.

In some cases the “law” was silly rules, clung-to by an outdated status-quo, (and such “law” does not deserve a capital “L”), but in other cases the “Law” was the real deal, the Truth. There is a gigantic difference between standing up to outdated prudes and stick-in-the-muds, and standing up to Truth, (which some call “God”.) I would try to point out the huge differences, but largely my explanations failed. My daring friends considered me a prude and stick-in-the-mud for even suggesting they be reined back. Then, for example, they would die of AIDs. They found other ways to come to bad ends, as well. It was not what I liked to witness. (It seems a sort of definition of both ignorance and tragedy that the tragic hero sometimes looks for freedom by donning chains, (for example, addictions), and sometimes seeks life in the direction of death).

You might think that after fifty years my generation would wise up, but many never let go of their ignorance, and to see such gross ignorance seize power in my homeland in 2020 made the past summer dismal enough. We didn’t need a single rainy day. But sometimes the Creator seems to use weather as a sort of mood-music for His movie, and all summer we had wet weather befitting “The Swamp’s Coup”. Sometimes the wet blew in from the chilly Gulf of Maine, and sometimes it rolled up from the hot and humid south, but it was never truly dry.

How bad was it? Well, it snuck up on us, for at the start we were in a drought. Radar showed thunder pounding New York City, which had a very wet June, but that rain slipped south of us, at first. But it slowly made inroads north, until now the drought has retreated up to northern Maine. In a number of nearby communities, it has been the rainiest July-August-September on record, (with the records going back between 90 and 152 years). And where the record was not set, the rainfall “nearly” set a record.

Basically, summer sucked. My garden became a mire. My lush and green potatoes’ foliage produced rotted tubers down in their roots. I now know how the farmers felt in the Irish potato famine. You do the usual work, but get no crop.

I gained other insights. When the Medieval Warm Period gave way to the Little Ice Age some terrible famines afflicted Europe. Basically the fields which had been bountiful became mires under cold, excessive rainfall. I got a glimpse of this. I couldn’t till between the rows of my garden because my rototiller sank in the mire. The weeds rejoiced.

I am very thankful I am not dependent on my garden for food, for, as a survivalist, I would have starved if I only depended on my garden. I am thankful better farmers work elsewhere, and I can go to the market. But I am a little nervous because a few shelves at our market are empty. I have never seen that before. (It has something to do with the ignorant being in control in Washington, and disruptions in the “supply chain”).

However, as a survivalist, I have other sources of food besides my garden. The garden’s failure is like Johnny Nash’s bankruptcy. Failure is not a proof a million-seller doesn’t lie just ahead. So, midst all the rain, I looked about to see how nature was handling the wet.

One thing that loved the wet was fungus. Mushrooms were popping up all over the place. If the markets had been emptier, one likely could have feasted on mushrooms, if they knew their mushrooms. One might even have become fat. But you have to know your mushrooms. Some can kill you, and some can derange you, and some merely cause bellyaches and astounding flatulence. Others are loaded with protein, including some proteins which are rare and can help ill people deal with their ailments. But, (besides feasting on pasture mushrooms), I tended to ignore that particular bounty, provided by the amazing wet.

Other, less edible fungus did some odd things. Besides turning my potatoes to slime underground, they rotted some (but not all) of my tomato plants right at ground level. Just above that brown rot the green tomato stems produced masses of white roots in the rain, so I just dug a new hole and stuck the stem underground and the plant amazingly went on to produce tomatoes, (some of which rotted even as they reddened, covered with an odd, white mold.) But I did get some good ones and enjoyed tomatoes on toast.

Mold grew all over the place. I saw some odd examples. Want some?

When I scattered “layer pellet” for my chickens a few pellets would bounce outside the chicken wire. The next day they had grown white beards of mold.

So did flies trapped in my car. I’d try to wave them out of my vehicle, but one evening I was too weary to be bothered, and when I got in the car the next morning three flies were on the inside of my windscreen, dead as doornails and covered in white mold, like itty-bitty wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing.

But when mold started growing on the legs of my dining room chairs, I bought a dehumidifier. (My wife was washing our furniture in vinegar to stop the mold, and that is work we don’t need). (Also I don’t like the smell of vinegar; in a salad dressing viniger is OK; but not as an air freshener).

Even the foliage of trees seemed to get moldy, especially in the understory where leaves never dried out. Up higher the foliage was vigorous and green, and I expect the tree trunks grew wide rings this year, but down in the shade the leaves had struggles and by the start of August I saw the lower foliage of both Oaks and Maples simply turning brown and falling off. Here’s an Oak:

And here’s a Maple:

I am sixty-eight and had never seen the leaves rot on the trees like this before. It was a bit creepy. I felt like a Hobbit marching into Mordor, where all life is blighted. Combined with the insanity reported in the news broadcasts, the summer became very depressing. Rot was everywhere. When I bought a loaf of bread at the market it was blue with mold before I had three mornings of toast. Mold spores must have been filling the air everywhere, and I did notice the children at our Childcare had runny noses, and sometimes their noses produced boogers especially green, as if mold was even growing in their noses. When even children’s noses started to look moldy, I felt like I was slumping into some sort of hysteria.

Fortunately, I have eleven years’ worth of experience with a Childcare’s expenses, and one amazingly big expense is Kleenex. It rivals diapers and wipes. Childcare Professionals are exposed to unholy amounts of snot, both viral (clear) and bacterial (green), and even washing your hands until they are chapped can’t avoid the simple fact you are doused in viruses and bacteria and either develop a healthy immune system, or else quit the business. Developing “natural immunity” is an important part of both childhood and being a functioning Childcare Professional. In fact, children who grow up on farms are far healthier than children who grow up in dirt-free high-rises. Also, Childcare Professionals tend to be healthier than people who are scared to death of snot.

Therefore, I was not excessively alarmed when I noticed I sniffled this summer. I figured it likely was “an allergy”, and due to all the mold spores. But I did notice that being a sniveler gave me power sniveling didn’t used to get me. In the old days, when you sniveled, people scorned and sneered at you as a sort of weakling. Now they assume you are carrying the dreaded corona virus and dive out of your way. If there is a crowd at the register at the supermarket, you are able to cut line just by sniveling loudly. Surely sniveling is far short of the power of God, but where God could part the Red Sea, a clever sniveler like myself could part a politically correct crowd, simply by strategically sniffling. But this power did not make me feel good. It made me feel the mold had infected the thinking of the politically correct.

I fought the sense that rot and fungus was winning, but at times it seemed reality conspired against me. For example, in August even the brooks and rivulets of clear, clean water seemed to get moldy. As the rains went on and on clean waters grew strangely brown. I frantically searched my memory for excuses.

Sometimes water gets brown due to silt, but at first this was clear-brownness, like tea without milk. Sometimes such clear-brownness occurs in brooks because falling leaves are like tea-leaves which steep in the water, but the leaves hadn’t fallen yet. Then I noticed the brownness began precipitating in the water, like some Mordor algae, brown rather than green, and at times the brownness even became a scum on the surface.

My faith felt tested. So I asked myself, “What would a Hobbit do in Mordor?” As I recall they lifted their eyes. Sam and Frodo then saw that above all the fume and stench of Mordor the stars still shone, in a realm untouched by corruption.

So, did I lift my eyes? No, as a scientist I crouched down and looked even lower, to study the phenomenon of brown waters.

It happened on a day when my dour mood was made more dour because, when the skies finally, finally cleared, they were dulled by the smudge of smoke from western forest fires. Under this yellow sky the brown water looked browner. But, after three days of yellow skies there was one rill which was finally, finally drying out a little.

This rill ran down a sandy path children’s feet have made in a pasture’s sod, and usually water only trickles down this path as the snows melt in April and early May, but this year the rill kept flowing all summer. The rill is born from a spring, and usually is sparkling and clear, so when even the rill turned brown I felt like I was in some sort of bad dream. Either that, or I’d been a foolish teenager and gone to see a horror movie on a bright, bright sunshiny day, and walked out afterwards into sunshine polluted by fear. But, when the rain actually ceased for three entire days, (albeit it under pus-yellow skies), the rill shrank and left brown crud on its coasts. So I crouched down to examine the crud. What did I learn by actually looking? I learned the brown crud wasn’t fibrous filaments like Mordor algae. It was a powder like….like….pollen.

Only then did I lift my own eyes, just a little. I immediately saw many plants loved the rain and were twice as tall as usual. Some copious pollen-producers had dull green flowers, like ragweed, but the goldenrod and purple asters were as tall as I was, and were as yellow and purple as Easter in the fields. And once my eyes began lifting, they kept rising, and I saw the tops of trees were dried enough by breezes and sunshine to defeat the mold, and rather than dropping rotted leaves, the leaves were flaring the healthy hues of early autumn’s glory.

This seemed a good symbol. If you want health in Mordor, stick to the high ground. The mold likes the low places of the Swamp.

I suppose this idea will eventually metastasize into one of my awful sonnets, but as a survivalist I also had to study how nature responded. Was the rot winning, and causing animals to starve?

Not at all. The wet produced clouds of mosquitoes, which humans don’t like but which make birds and bats fat. Also a dry spring and wet summer produces a bounty of wind-pollenated nuts, such as acorns.

You nearly needed a helmet, walking under the oaks. And although acorns are so loaded with tannic acid that they are basically inedible, the original survivalists of New England knew how to make them edible. They’d scoop out a deep hole beneath the waterfall of a brook, and fill it with acorns, and just let the waters wash for month after month. Slowly but surely the tannic acid was washed from the nuts, yet the nuts could remain edible for years. I have read of such a stash of acorns discovered twenty years after the person who put them there departed, and those twenty-year-old acorns were judged especially sweet by the people who ate them. (If you are unwilling to wait twenty years, and are starving, you can hurry this process by boiling the acorns twenty times, and discarding the blackish water twenty times)

Of course, chestnuts were preferred over acorns, by the original survivalists, for they are delicious as they fall, but early in the twentieth century a terrible blight came from overseas and struck down this food supply. It was a grief of my grandparent’s time. But the chestnuts never quit. They kept sending up shoots from their roots, which the blight would again kill, whereupon new shoots would arise, until now, after a century, some of the shoots seem to be becoming more immune to the blight. Perhaps in my grandchildren’s time people will again rustle through fallen leaves looking for the prickly burrs, as my grandparents did. But for now, you have to know the woods well to find the shoots briefly producing burrs, even as they die.

Invasive blights have also struck down our elms, ashes, dogwoods and now our beeches. But one thing a dying tree does is produce nuts. It is as if they know they are dying and put all their effort into perpetuating their species. The woods are full of beechnuts.

There are so many beechnuts the squirrels can’t remember where they buried them all, (or, even if he could have remembered, that particular squirrel became prey for a hawk, and his stash remained buried, and sprouted the next spring.) In the sunny places where towering beeches have died, the forest floor is covered with hundreds of beech saplings. Who is to say one or two might not have immunity to the latest blight?

Nature fights back. It doesn’t just roll over and die, when afflicted by a blight from Mordor. Just as Johnny Nash moved from bankruptcy to a million-seller, nature has ways of moving from blight to bonanza. As a survivalist, you simply need to keep you eyes open, and to look.

Besides bonanzas of acorns and beechnuts, there have been others. Wild grapes have been prolific. And one bonanza which should have been obvious to me involved cranberries. Cranberries dislike dryness and thrive in the wet.

There was one patch which looked like it might be dying out, during the drought of last May and June. It spread like crazy once things became so wet. I’d say no farmer’s care could have done so well. The patch tripled in size, and produced cranberries galore.

The cranberry patch is more than able to feed the local flock of wild turkeys, and the children at my Childcare. But cranberries have pucker power, and you might think a modern child’s addiction to sugar would make children adverse to eating them. But I use reverse psychology. I tell them, “You won’t like them. Only grown-ups like them. You can try one, but they are wicked sour. You can spit it out, if you want.” Then, perhaps to show how grown-up they are, the little children do try one. Often they spit it out. But then something odd occurs. The children try another. Pretty soon they demand we detour on our hikes to other places, so they can visit the cranberry patch, so they can pause to munch the sour fruit. It likely does them good, as unprocessed cranberries have a fair amount of vitamin C and antioxidants. Also, it likely does them good, in terms of seeing things don’t need to be drenched in sugar to be appealing.

Now, if we could only teach the Elite in the Swamp the same thing: Things don’t need to be drenched in lucre to be appealing.

But I fear such Elite fools will need to first make a Mordor. Only then will they see life can be far better than Mordor. Like Johnny Cliff they need a bankruptcy to succeed. (Unfortunately, they seem determined to drag the rest of us along for the ride.)

LOCAL VIEW –Blighted Spring–

It’s been a drudging sort of week, full of duties one doesn’t plan for. Not much is blooming, but perhaps clouds of pollen from southern lands blew north, and everyone began sneezing. Or perhaps it was the common cold passing through town. In any case, who plans for that? It complicates things, and makes you make mistakes. Who plans for that? In your hurry you leave your key in the ignition, on the “on” position, as you are only hurrying inside for five minutes. But five minutes becomes two hours with phone-calls and other stuff, and when you hurry back to your car with an armload of other stuff, and are ready to rocket off, the battery is dead. Who plans for that?

We got by. Yesterday my battery was dead, but I wasn’t late to open the Farm-childcare as I got a quick jump from my wife’s car. Today her battery was dead at the Childcare, but she got a jump from me. To me it seemed very symbolic of how we get by, when we are not at our best.

Personally, I blame the delayed spring. Not that I wasn’t expecting it. Why? I think it was a queer mix of science and intuition and memory. I just noticed how a band of colder weather gave colder winters to places like Mexico and Syria and Thailand, even as places further north got a warmer winter, and I figured that band of colder weather would retreat north and get us. Meanwhile I recalled warm early springs in my past that got clobbered by May snowstorms, the worst being in 1977. Lastly, when you live as far north as New Hampshire, among Finns who immigrated here from much further north, you own a certain caution about warmth in March. Call it pragmatism or call it cynicism, I planted peas earlier than ever, but wasn’t surprised when snows followed, with record-setting cold.

But it needs to be said that such flip-flopping of weather is cruel. I am not being a selfish human, as I say this. It is not merely humans who get blighted. I can offer photographic evidence of the day-lily leaves with brown points, and the daffodils broken by frost.

Of course these are imported species, (as are Finns and even Yankees like myself), but what really impressed me was a local swamp maple that seemed to get fooled. It formed a purple misted tree, in the post I did about frogs singing early, back in March. Currently it looks like it isn’t even going to start budding. I may do a post about what happens with that tree, but I’ll have to wait and see.

In any case, though spring seemed ready to bust out in March, here it is a month later and the treeline looks pretty leafless.

However though the spring can be delayed, it cannot be denied. On the blighted lawn purple splashes.

And a few daffodil were more cautious, and now stand proud for being cowards.

And the grey fur of the pussy willow suddenly is yellow with pollen.

And the wiser, more cowardly swamp maples now venture to bloom.

And these tiny flowers, softening the treeline with a haze of reddish purple, always are worth a closer look.

However, though my heart is softened by the loveliness, I will not be a sucker and a chump. I remember snows in May. So I look to the black cherry trees. In Washington DC their cherries may be fools, and come out only to be blasted by frost, but I like to think our northern cherries are smarter. And even this late they are only budding.

So here I stand, betwixt and between. Spring will not be denied, but will not be a dunce.

The trees are distrustful; the very buds
Are reluctant; yet sneaking through the brush
Is a quickening of all creature’s bloods;
A hope that makes the grayest banker blush.

Who are you? Elf or zephyr or angel;
Invisible dancer swirling dead leaves;
You put us all through a long, slow, strange hell
Where the more one doubts the more one believes.

Logic dictates we distrust, and yet you
Seduce us with memories of past times
When you beat back that logic. Can you do
It again? In the face of this world’s crimes
Can you undo the loss of virginity?
Do that, and Oh! What a spring it would be!

LOCAL VIEW: DO SCHOOLMARMS DESERVE PENSIONS?

 

Because I raised five children, and coached teams, and now run a Childcare, I have great sympathy for anyone who has had to deal with children. There is nothing sillier, in my opinion, than a person who has never raised a child, or experienced a classroom full of unruly children, who writes a book advising people how we should deal with our youth, (for example, certain economists.).

Despite my sympathy, I do have a bone to pick with many schoolmarms, for I was once a boy, and feel some schoolmarm’s understanding of masculinity can, at times, resemble a fish’s understanding of what it is like to walk and breath air. Some schoolmarms have even less understanding of what it is like to be a man than most men have of what it is like to be a woman. Where a man can at least see physical evidence of a woman going through menstruation, schoolmarms can see no physical evidence of what makes a man a man, and in their ignorance they often attempt to nip the very buds of masculinity. So awful and blind is their ignorance that, in my exasperation, I have even suggested that certain schoolmarms are living proof that it was wrong to ever give women the vote.

Perhaps the most damning evidence has been the way schoolmarms have allowed perfectly normal and healthy young men to be drugged with Ritalin. Some day these schoolmarms will die and stand before God, and have to answer the question, “How could you allow this to happen?” They will spread their palms and whimper, “What could I do?” And then they will be asked, “What alternative did you seek?”

I am not God, but I have asked schoolmarms these same questions. It is not an answer to simply whimper and spread your palms, but many do it. Years ago it became apparent to me that few tried hard to do anything but walk on eggs and never make waves, and to merely serve their time and retire and collect their teacher’s pension, (a pension which I note is, in part, funded by the Pharmaceutical companies that drug children). In my humble, anti-schoolmarm, school-boyish opinion even the teachers that claim to be Christian have in fact worshiped Molech, and participated in the sacrifice of our children.

Now the young boys they once couldn’t bother to truly help, and instead only drugged, have grown up. They are a very real social problem. The army, which is where troubled young men traditionally went in order to be slapped into shape, absolutely refuses to accept young men who spent their youth on Ritalin. Why? Because such men never learned even the rudimentary basics of a certain disciplines, because schoolmarms were too lazy to do anything more than drug, drug, drug them. Now such men are damaged goods.

If the boys were such a problem in classrooms, then teachers should have gone on strike, and demanded society deal with the problem. Teachers didn’t. Instead they meekly went along with the poisoning of bright young men, and now their retirement is not as serene as they hoped it would be. Bitter, snarling, surly, thirty-year-old men lurk about the edges of gated retirement communities, and retired teachers might get mugged. Is this any way for our elders to be treated? Yes. What goes around comes around, and if you treat helpless children badly you may expect to be treated badly when you are a helpless elder.

My rural town is facing a heroin epidemic. Enough heroin to get high all weekend currently costs less than a six-pack of beer. Young men do “sow wild oats”, but where drinking whisky once left youth horribly hung-over, playing with heroin now leaves youth horribly addicted. Therefore we warn our youth against heroin, but some don’t listen. I can’t help but notice that the youth who are deafest to good advice are the same ones who spent their entire boyhoods drugged on Ritalin. Obviously Ritalin didn’t make them smarter. In fact it seems to engender an attitude wherein the use of drugs is acceptable. And the use of drugs is acceptable, to schoolmarms, is it not? In fact some schoolmarms demand little boys be drugged, do they not?

The exception to this rule is tobacco. Since before the time of Tom Sawyer schoolmarms have been dead set against the small Winston Churchhills of the world smoking fat cigars. But make a fiery, defiant young Winston complacent with Ritalin? Oh, that is fine and dandy.

Now we are facing the consequences of our worship of Molech. Some schoolmarms feel it is horrible to send our youth off to war, and that sacrificing our youth in battle is a worship of Molech. However when danger invades our land it might be nice if elderly, retired teachers had a few healthy young men around to defend them. Are there many such young men left? Or have the schoolmarms crucified them all?

Some schoolmarms say it isn’t Ritalin that maims our young men, but rather the maiming is caused by a social problem that Ritalin was attempting to deal with. This is a lame excuse, and fails to recognize the damage such drugs do. It accepts the propaganda spewed out by the pharmaceutical companies, which suggest such drugs are not addictive and have no side effects, and which make the old Tobacco Lobby’s evil antics look minor, in comparison. Even if there was and is a social problem, the problem is not solved by drugging perfectly healthy little boys. In fact that ignores the problem, and the problem gets worse, like a cancer growing but hidden by painkillers.

In my opinion nothing is more degrading to manhood than addiction. The addicted cannot stand up and be a man, because they cannot worship anything high, (such as God if you are religious, or Truth if you are an atheist), and instead they are tortured and physically driven to worship their next fix. It is a “monkey” that rules them, and for their next fix they will sell their grandmother’s teeth. No promise they make can be trusted, for they will break it if it gets in the way of their next fix. They are reduced to being liars, for their next fix. It could happen to anyone, including people put on heroin against their will: Once addicted nobody can trust you. Your word is worthless. You are not a man; you are a junkie.

I’ve seen some young men pull out of this downward spiral, but they are a minority. They somehow have the guts to go through the nightmare of going “cold turkey”, (which few schoolmarms can even imagine), and then have the will to resist the attractive beckoning of friends who want them back, even though going back is death. However I’ve also seen pink-cheeked young men die of overdoses, even early on in their addiction.

In my Childcare I sometimes deal with the children of such addicts. Usually the grandparents have stepped in, because the parents are so focused on their next fix that they worship Moloch, and sacrifice their own children. The children have a certain air of sadness. They cannot understand why their parents care more for heroin than for them.

Schoolmarms need to be asked the same question. Why did you care more for Ritalin than six-year-old boys?

High up in skyscrapers the sleek executives of pharmaceutical companies preen and chortle and send out the blood money to the Teacher’s Union, so old teachers can receive pensions. They think they are above it all, but outdoorsmen built the very box they gloat in. Once their high-rise office was merely I-beams, high above city streets, with a cold wind whistling through, and the only people able to work in such scary circumstances were stoic Navajo and Sioux. In other words, the sort of outdoorsman their drugs destroy built the very perch such executives prattle upon.

The simple fact of the matter is that many boys are not born to be indoors. It is unnatural to ask them to sit for long hours at desks or in cubicles. It is even crueler to drug them for complaining about being cramped, especially when they are small and helpless, only five or six years old.

What I say is, “Lets go outside!” It is not merely the little boys that then jump for glee. Lots of the little girls don’t want to sit indoors at rows of desks either. Nor do they learn less by being outside. Can you tell the difference between checkerberries and partridgeberries? Between yellow vetch and crown vetch? Kids only four year old at my Childcare love to tell their parents about such distinctions. Furthermore children who may be the worst learners at rows of desks are sometimes the best students, when romping through the fields.

Is it so hard to do what I do? Obviously not, if a bumpkin like me can do it. So why didn’t schoolmarms do it thirty years ago, when they first became aware boys were a worsening problem in their classrooms?

Either they didn’t respond to the problem because they lacked the brains to see a solution, or they were too damn lazy, or perhaps too scared. None of these excuses justifies drugging small and helpless children. Rather than seeking the solution they complied with the problem, and became part of the problem, and included the problem in their retirement portfolios.

How strange it seems to me that these same schoolmarms now think their retirement should be free of the problem, which is looming like a thunderhead in our social skies. Did they really believe they could destroy our future, and then somehow retire into a future that wasn’t a wasteland?

Do schoolmarms deserve the fat pensions we pay them? That is not for me to decide. I suppose we each earn our respective rewards and punishments, whether they be in this world or the next, however I fear schoolmarms  will soon see a different sort of pension, when hyperinflation renders their fat checks too small to buy a loaf of bread, and they face streets full of the thugs they unwittingly created.

Old men and small children don’t do well
In wars, for in such madness a crazed greed
Casts songs of innocence into a hell
With songs of experience. War’s sick need
Is to mutilate both Truth and Beauty,
So old men and small children best lay low
And have nothing to do with loot or booty,
And own nothing worth taking, and never show
The true treasures that Truth and Beauty are.
Keep those secrets private, as the kings rave
And shake their fists at the evening’s first star
Because it dares shine and fears no brute’s knave.
That star glimmers Truth unseen by madmen
But seen by the old men walking with children.

 

CONTEMPLATING CRABGRASS

CONTEMPLATING CRABGRASS

            Yesterday the sun beat down with the peculiar yellowness that seems to go along with a heat wave.  It is as if you are seeing the world through sunflower-colored glasses.  The yellowness is more than a tint; it is a stain, and the process of staining is ongoing, drenching the green leaves, the wavering asphalt of the potholed country road, and the madman out there jogging doggedly down the side of that road under the lead-like weight of the heat. Even the spots of shade seem yellowed, as if seen through a honeyed haze, or as if the shadows existed in a photograph fading before your eyes.

The golden oppression was also drenching me, another madman with a big straw hat, walking very slowly out into the garden to contemplate the crabgrass, amazed at how a plant as big around as a teacup can spring out to larger around than a dinner plate, seemingly overnight  To add insult to injury, each leaf on a growing stem forms a joint on the round stem, such as you see on round stems of bamboo or corn, but where bamboo stays straight and forms a useful stick, and where corn has a nice ear of yellow kernels to munch at upper leaf joints, crab grass simply produces another stem at each joint, so one stem becomes two, and two becomes four.  What was as in innocuous weed with five legs like a starfish becomes a ten-legged and then twenty-legged creature as it sprawls sideways like a crab, but, unlike a crab, in all directions at once. To make matters worse, at each joint it also can start a new system of roots.  This means if you rip a big plant up, you may leave the tip of one stem behind, and it is rooted and ready to ramble, as soon as you turn your back.

The plant is amazingly good at sucking water from soil you would swear is bone dry. Two days ago there were thunderstorms rumbling all around us, however all we got was a misting that didn’t even drop the temperatures. Other plants, wilting in the heat, didn’t revive, but crabgrass guzzles such slight mists and drinks deeply of dew, looking lush and vigorous and vividly green, even as other plants fade.  Even when you rip them up, when you return to the pile of uprooted weeds a week later you find several crabgrass plants survived, and re-rooted, and are enjoying the compost made by former neighbors decomposing.

What is particularly annoying is that they are perfectly capable of growing straight and tall like other, more well-behaved grasses.  When they are warring other weeds a single root may form five stems, but they all shoot straight up without any dividing at leaf joints, marshaling all energy to escape the shade and pop above all other plants and catch the sun. I’ve seen stems six feet tall. Even in a well-weeded pumpkin patch, where the established plants create such a shade weeds can’t thrive, you will see a crabgrass stalk or two sticking up like little flags a midst the squashes’ thick and overlapping umbrellas. Therefore, considering they are perfectly able to be upright and civilized members of the vegetable kingdom, it seems sheer greediness that, given the slightest chance, they sprawl, and are like hogs or like dogs-in-the-manger, sucking every bit of dew and nutrients from an ever expanding circle. If they had voices they’d likely crackle like crazed misers hugging their heaps of coins, “Mine! All mine!”

Of course I am not all that spiritual myself, when I see one of these twenty-legged spiders exploding green a midst my pepper plants. I am supposed to love my enemies, but when I drop to my knees it isn’t to worship. It is to grab that sucker by his neck, and rip him up, to shake him savagely until his roots are gasping for dirt, and then to sadistically lay him roots up, so he can only wither in the burning sun. And then, down on my knees, I look ahead, and see another, and another.  One I get started I don’t care that the temperature’s ninety and my skin is a shiny, slick sheen that catches the shaken dirt and dust and makes me look very tanned until I shower.  I just go crawling forward like some primitive ground sloth, rooting and ripping and shaking pattering showers of dirt.

After a while the motion develops a tempo, much like the plodding motion of jogging, though it strengthens the upper body more than the legs. Weeding is good exercise. Furthermore, it occurs outside, and blue skies and bird songs are more beautiful than machines at a gym, and rather than costing you anything it pays you with bigger vegetables. Much like jogging, as you rip up weeds you hit walls of exhaustion and then get second winds, and as you plod along you watch your moods go through a kaleidoscope.

Today my mood spun off onto an interesting tangent as I contemplated the crabgrass. It was based upon an interesting tangent I had a long time ago, when I contemplated how much better life would be if I was trying to grow crabgrass.  It is such a sprawling, greedy, spreading plant that the only competitors that stand a chance are the plants that start earlier. (Clover, vetch, lamb’s quarters, pig weed, ragweed and many grasses germinate at colder temperatures.) If you tilled the garden once the weather was warm, and planted crabgrass seed, it would basically overwhelm all other plants, and you could sit back and never need to weed.  You’d have to go to a gym for exercise.

Therefore, some time ago, I decided to see if crabgrass has any use, and what I did was to check to see what Indians did with it, for it had been my experience that if a plant had any use, Indians made use of it. To my surprise I discovered Indians made no use of crabgrass, because it didn’t exist in North America until it was introduced. Furthermore, it wasn’t introduced by accident. It was an actual grain crop, promoted by the USDA in the 1800’s. (You can still buy seed, but only to seed pastures, to create rich forage for cattle.)

Crabgrass  is a type of millet, called Fonio in Africa. One plant can make 150,000 seeds. (I’m glad I wasn’t the guy who had to count them.)  However it is a bit of a bother to husk the tiny seeds. (See  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonio ) In Africa they pound the seeds with sand.  Then what?  I don’t know; perhaps mix it with water and the sand sinks?

In any case, Corn and wheat had bigger seeds and replaced crabgrass as a crop in the USA.

However, as I weeded in the hot sun my brains began to fry, and I began to imagine plots for disaster movies. After all, that is one reason to grow a garden. You imagine some event occurs, and the supermarkets are empty, and your broccoli, carrots, potatoes and corn save the children, and you are a hero for weeding.

The plot that went traipsing through my imagination involved something you often come across when roaming the internet: The fact corn is genetically modified and the modifications may at some point cause corn become susceptible to some smut or corn virus we don’t know about, and in a single year vast crops could vanish world wide. Vast populations would then be in shoes of the Irish, when their entire crops of potatoes abruptly turned to inedible slime in 1848.  The face of famine would loom and leer across lands where people can’t imagine such a thing.

And what might save the day?  What could we eat with corn withered away? Crabgrass. Crops of crabgrass with itty bitty seeds. Cotton picking Crabgrass!  My worst enemy might become my best friend!

Oh! The irony of it all! However at least I’d be learning to love my enemy.

HERE COMES THE SUN!

HERE COMES THE SUN!

If you compare the above radar shot and the above weather map with the ones posted a couple days ago you see we are still drenched, but there is a big difference.  In the second weather map there is a nice dry high approaching.  Or I should say, as the maps are from this morning and it is now evening, “a nice dry high has moved in.”

As dawn came the sky barely brightened to deep purple, and the rain just poured, but by seven the rain stopped and by eight the sky was bright and the clouds were high, and then the sun peeked down at nine.

The world never looks quite so fine as it does after a long gloom breaks into a sunny spell. They say rain is good for plants, but you can’t see the lushness until the sun enlivens it.  Then it jumps out at you, and the wildflowers speckling the green seem straight from the painting of an impressionist.

It’s hard to be serious even if you are trying.  Even the smells improve as gloom gives way to gold, shifting from fungal to fragrance, my favorite being the fragrance of partridge-berry flowers so small you have to stoop to see them, but which can form a heady pocket of ambrosia that floors you, as you walk through wet woods.

Someone, somewhere, must have been very good for the rest of us to deserve this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bj1AesMfIf8