The Ship of Fool

A message to a confused stranger

2012-01-06T12:47:00.001-05:00

Girl, I can scarcely speak. I could tell with just one view that you MUST be a model in search of a controller... and you have put an arrow through my heart.

And it brings me great sadness, girl....

See, ShipOfFool gotta be FREE... I'm talking open source and loosely coupled! But, girl, you're so fine, you could make a dead man go proprietary, HIGHLY proprietary, you feel me??

Damns... you got me speaking Erlang up in here...

I know you can feel what's in my heart, girl, and that you have already put your hand in mine, which I extend to you in an offer of date-hood that can only become legendary. I will tell you now how our date will go.

First, I will text you and make some SmallTalk, and not use any abbreviations that could mess up you knowing the fact that I was only the best possible verbal artist, the kind of well-speaking person you would be pleased to speak with in a conversational manner between us.

Then I will give you the address of the hoagie shack where we will have our get-to-know-you cup of Java. We will take separate cars. It is ShipOfFool's belief that on the first date, even when it is a sure thing beyond any doubt as it is between us, that this helps a woman as fine as yourself feel slightly less like a trapped animal when I stare at you with my crazy-eyes and let loose with the language of l'amour.

There will be a spark between us - there is no doubt in my mind, girl - and it will build into a blazing inferno of desire that will consume us both in the white-hot heat of a thousand suns. (If I am too intense for you, girl, please go ahead and dial that one down a couple of notches.)

Also, there may be mashed potatoes.

ShipOfFool has spoken the language of l'amour and he is certain that he has been understood. I will retire now to the study, don my burgundy-red crushed velour and virgin acrylic smoking jacket to await your reply, musing with a tell-tale smile over a glass of Boone's Farm.

I know you can see it, girl.

A letter to my love from a place of convalescence

2011-09-30T16:25:00.000-04:00

My dearest love -

I write to you this day from my home office, which adjoins the side bedroom that has been the setting for so many delirious afternoons together. Tomorrow you will join me here, and I am filled with emotion that I can scarcely contain or describe.

But I will try, my darling, to convey some sense of it to you with its complexities, its wet eddies of of warm and cold, the shimmering water and black aquatic plants, the reflective surfaces and hazy depths.

You see, my love, we have been through so very much these last two years... the utmost in physical and emotional expression and sensation, fearless protestations of our powerlessness in the presence of each other, united in our social defiance, gleeful with contempt for the future, sacrificing everything for each other in the moment, for the carnival, for the roller coaster, the house of horrors, cotton candy and the kissing booth and finally for holding hands seated on the veranda of the cafe with Irish coffee as the moon levitates over the twilight horizon to the east.

And, too, there have been separations and crushing betrayals, and our souls have shrieked at each other with a molten fury that has left our mortal selves cowering in terror of what we are able to summon from within, daring to glance up only intermittently to witness the merciless flaying of our deepest insecurities and self-delusions; and finally, when the banshees are spent and departed to the dimension of their origin, rising hesitantly, slowly, in a fearful and remorseful crouch, edging toward each other on the quivering legs of fawns, scarcely able to look at each other, until at last through herculean emotional effort we touch and are again within each other's magnetic field and collapse together and fuse into a new element, emitting pulses of deep red light from the mysterious new thing we have become as roots and leaves and twigs materialize around us in a new Spring.

I fear we are at the cusp of such a moment now, or perhaps even something worse... for you see, my love, I am aware that you have made the acquaintance of a total stranger on the Internet, a stranger whom you even mocked to me during our trip to the Historical Park one brilliant Sunday. A stupid man, a not so attractive man, an unaccomplished man, but above all an ignoramus who flattered you so artlessly that I was stunned when I realized you'd taken the bait, even if feigning ignorance. You are careless, and I have read your communications, my dearest, and I was dismayed how you led him on, at last practically taking him by the hand to get him to agree to take possession of you, asking him directly if he wanted to make you his; and his clownish response makes me cringe with embarrassment for you even now as I write this.

Several times you have said to me that you did not understand my interest in you, that you were holding me back from meeting a better person; and in my love I laughed and reassured you and we tingled in the warm waters of love and affection and acceptance that bouyed us above the deep dark foreboding bottom, littered with broken bottles and rusty cans and sharp black branches and rot and decay.

I must tell you, my love, that it is worse for me in the mornings, the brief moments when I first wake with no sense of self, my ego still disassembled and scattered throughout the many gloomy and shifting Boschean chambers that are my sleep. During these very short periods of time, I can see you, and see through your eyes, and experience what you do, and feel sympathy for you, and even feel protective of you. But at last, my mind shakes itself free of the tentacles of night and does what it's designed to do, erecting the massive assembly of identity and rationalization, the corroded beams and gears and chains that are necessary for me to rise each morning and persist another day without melting down and dissolving away.

Unfortunately I am usually in this state of armature when we text on the five or six days a week that we're unable to be together, and I must regard each of your communications in this frame of reference, knowing that your expressions may be sincere, but they are not exclusive; or they may not be sincere after all, for each of us has tried to free ourselves of the other on occasion, and we both know the anguish and diabolical tortures that lie down that path. And then there are the long periods of time during the day when we do not text, and I know you are texting with the half-wit, and I cannot communicate to you in earnest because to do so would reveal that I know your secret, and so I remain silent and distant.

This afternoon I am most apprehensive, my love, for I have discovered that tomorrow you will meet the simpleton for the first time, early in the morning for a run, and it has only been two days since you induced him to take you. And it is tomorrow that we are to meet again in the side bedroom adjoining my office, with refreshing drink and laughter and confidences, and physical and emotional love. And it is tomorrow that you've told me that a "family obligation" earlier in the day may require you to come to me later, rather than sooner. I fear you will be smitten with the new-ness and the dangerous-ness and the electrical-ness that will hang like a dank cloud around the cretin when you meet him, and that you will indeed have a family obligation on that morning, my dearest love.

Then you will come to me. What will I do? Wall you in with words and with the final brick seal you away from me forever? Conceive of and execute the perfect plan that rids me of you and burns the lesson of your betrayal into your mind? Unilaterally revise the terms of our association to obligate us to each other on weekends only? Carry on in full knowledge, while keeping an eye toward the horizon for a mountain-top that is less degraded?

You see, my darling, that my mind swirls like a tall field of gyrating grass overrun with rodents and condors circling above and storm clouds on the horizon and lightning striking the ocean and the sun casting down shafts of light here and there once in a very great while. I am eager for this day to pass, and the next to start, and to progress to its conclusion, for many questions will be answered then.

I bid you adeiu with an inscrutable smile, and pray I see you sooner rather than later on the morrow.

- ShipOfFool

A letter to my love from the battlefields of The Office

2011-09-12T21:10:00.006-04:00

(To be read in the fashion of a Ken Burns history narration)

My dearest love -

I hope this letter finds you well, and that it gives you the lift and strength of spirit that I am given by communications received from you. I am still flush with memories of our two days together, and with the fulfillment, grim though it was, of tending the wounds you sustained at the battle of Towne Pub and the dreadful ambush at Sand Drift Cafe. I cannot help but feel that with greater vigilance and with a more furious fight I may have prevented your injury altogether. I assure you, my dearest, that I have incorporated these lessons with an eye toward counting more closely in the future, should we again find ourselves surrounded on all sides by mudslides on the rocks.

I write to you now following a march of not great physical distance but great spiritual hardship, having arrived with my fellow conscriptees on the fields of The Office. Skirmishes have already commenced, and my past experience leads me to believe this conflict will escalate and continue for another six, perhaps seven, hours. I assure you that in all my time on this earth I have not endured many places more infernal in their tortures than here.

Still, I receive a bitter comfort knowing that I am not alone - that you are engaged in warfare of your own, thinking of me as I think of you; and I find the sweetest comfort of all knowing that we are both blessed by providence to live another week and meet again in that place that we share from time to time, our Oasis of adventure and respite and, dare I say, ecstacy? Yes, I do dare to be so intimate on this page, for what are the odds that one day a little man with closely cropped facial hair will hire a folksy black man to read these words, and broadcast them over a machine called a "tele-vision"? Remote, I say.

I think of you always, my love, occasionally in a sense wider than the daily combat we share, which, though we share it, is different for each of us and thus separates us in our experiences. My thoughts drift to us in relation to the Almighty Economy, to which we are bound for our very existence and yet which falters in its step in these trying times, promising to bring us down with it. I reflect, my love, on this aspect of our condition, as raw materials for the Almighty Economy, and how its terrible force twists our souls and minds and bends our very beings to its purpose, as the blacksmith beats swords into plowshares, and back into swords again, according to its dictate. The essence of mankind is the Almighty Economy, and the history of mankind is slavery in its service; and we, my dearest love, along with all who have come before us and all who are to come after us, are authentic beings only in the same measure to which we can escape it with our dignity intact.

This existential blight is something we share, though it takes different forms: I by my conscription into this tormenting employment, and you by your forced domestic co-habitation, which, though ending soon, you have endured for so very long. It is ironic that these blights have played a role in bringing us together, and that through their malign energies we indirectly nourish each other's inner Spartacus to take up arms and carve out a spartan but self-determined existence, working in service of ourselves and of those for whom we care, instead of those who have fashioned the terrible wrath of the Almighty Economy into instruments against us.

I consider our similarities and our differences, and sing quietly to myself now the old Negro spiritual popularized by Louis Armstrong (and it is mandatory that I sing it in his voice):

Tomato, Tomah-to,
Potato, Potah-to,
Vagina, vagina,
Vagina, vagina...

Tomato. Potato. Vagina. Indeed, Louis Armstrong, indeed, fare thee well in the embrace of the hereafter. Your spirit carries on after you through the voices of those still living.

My dearest, the conflagration of slave-war rages all around me now and I must tend to my survival this day. It is with great reluctance that I close this letter, and though I am saddened that I must divert my attention to the threats immediately at hand, I have the assurance that thoughts of you will ever be in the background, ready to step in when I have a moment free from peril; and I am strengthed by the knowledge that we are one day closer to our Oasis, which incubates in our imaginations during the week and is realized upon week-end. We do not know its exact form ahead of time, but there is always drink to refresh us, cool shade from the cruel sun, quiet and leisure, occasional bouts of unimaginable terror - and each other, with whom we share conversation, confidences, and physical and spiritual love.

With love and care, I remain -

- ShipOfFool

Corelle

2011-08-18T02:21:00.032-04:00

The door-to-door Corelle salesman said "...and they're virtually unbreakable!" before dropping the plate from waist height, shattering it into many pieces that scattered across our kitchen floor*. He closed the deal anyway, somehow, and left my parents with a set of Butterfly Gold that has held up for forty years.

Today I need a dish set. I am nostalgic and utilitarian so I buy lightweight, durable, affordable Corelle. The Butterfly Gold pattern is long gone. I choose Memphis, with its orderly rectangles on the rim of the plate radiating outward in four colors: red, yellow, and blue - a nod to Bauhaus? - plus a weird green, for whose presence I have no theory.

I wonder how these colors are associated with Memphis, but Google fails to yield a plausible link with the city in Tennessee. I try Memphis, Egypt (you're probably ahead of me), but again come up empty-handed.

I abandon my search and attempt to learn something about Memphis, Egypt, beyond the fact that it exists. Wikipedia tells me that it's on the Nile river, it was once a center of production and commerce, and today it's uninhabited.

I continue to read: "The city reached a peak of prestige under the 6th dynasty as a centre for the worship of Ptah, the god of creation and artworks... it was Ptah who called the world into being, having dreamt creation in his heart, and speaking it, his name meaning 'opener', in the sense of 'opener of the mouth'. Indeed the opening of the mouth ceremony, performed by priests at funerals to release souls from their corpses, was said to have been created by Ptah."

Which is rather deep and dark and creepy, and it gives you goosebumps if you read it at two in the morning in an empty house. But then you yell "Eureka!" because you see the illustration of Ptah in the form of a mummy, and he is painted red, yellow, and blue, plus a weird green.

A connection between this dish set picked up at Walmart for twenty-five bucks and the ancient Egyptian god is highly unlikely. Still, I imagine an industrial designer in the Corelle studios applying the bitterness of a failed art history career to the creation of this pattern, concealing the divine message behind the name Memphis, a name with two meanings - one that attracts the consumer and another that points the way to Ptah, the god of creation and artworks, a tribute to the designer's squandered potential.

The simple, colorful pattern of the Memphis dish set catches the eye of the Memphis Walmart shopper, who will pile these plates high with babyback ribs for her brood while The King croons from a boombox on the picnic table, unaware that they are summoning Ptah with their own opening-of-the-mouth death ceremony as they ladle body-temperature potato salad down their gullets.

Yes, Walmart shoppers like me, although I do not eat meat; so instead of ribs my Memphis plate sees as its first meal another exemplary Memphis dish: a peanut butter and processed american cheese-food on toast sandwich, which I last had forty years ago, surely on Butterfly Gold, surely in my parents' kitchen. A meal fit for a King, thank you, thankyouverymuch.

* In fairness to the Corelle corporation, their salesman, and his plate, it had probably made a thousand similar trips in its lifetime before finally meeting its doom on our kitchen floor.

The fire is so delightful

2010-12-24T14:57:00.011-05:00

While browsing the NASA JPL website for home-made Christmas card material, I came across two images:

It reminded me of another pair of images:

And that made me think of the personings and unpersonings that I had been part of over the years.

I took another (lawfully prescribed, entirely medically justifiable, and perhaps off-labelly-therapeutic) Percocet and got back to work on those cards.

unHappy unHolidays, Plutoids!

An unsolicited reply to the New London punk

2009-07-26T13:25:00.006-04:00

Re: I have a mohawk yes. What of it?! (New London)

Let your freak flag fly, Mohawk Guy! Sure it can be annoying when people get more excited by your getup than you are, but don't let it get you down.

I like to see mohawks because they remind me of the glorious 1980's, when I would have liked to have been the guy that would have had the self-confidence to rock a mohawk, which was not the case, for obvious reasons (namely my over-conjugation of conditional past-perfect verbs and reckless disregard for run-on sentences and misclassification of elements of grammar).

If you're annoyed now, boy will you be angry if I ever drive by you on the street! Because I'm going to roll down the window and scream "New London Calling...!", and then you will cry a little inside. But I will not throw devil-horns, because that is Metal.

Now, if you'll pardon me, I'm going to give that kitchen floor the once-over with some Lemon Glow.

A message to "It kills me"

2009-07-18T04:22:00.007-04:00

"It absolutely kills me that people who have a job will quit because they don't have enough hours or pay. Well, isn't some hours and some pay better than NO pay or hours??"

Not necessarily. When you calculate the ACTUAL pay rate - accounting for vehicle/gas, day care, Work Costume purchase and maintenance, having to hire others to provide services that you could do for yourself if you were at home, the psychological toll of being subjected to degrading power relationships and personality conflicts at work, and simply being tied up in a suck-ass job so that you don't have time or opportunity to find a better one - it can actually be a net negative to work. All those costs, though hidden in that you're not always consciously aware of them or don't always relate them to your job, are real.

Even someone who is fully employed might benefit by spending less time on the job and investing that time in learning more general-purpose life skills, like home maintenance, vehicle repair, starting a garden and growing your own food (or fishing/hunting if gardening isn't manly enough for you), starting a simple home business, and getting involved with neighbors to help each other out and solve common local problems. Having a diverse skill set and relationships with people local to you is just a good idea generally, and probably more so as the economy continues to wind down.

Sounds kooky, doesn't it? That's because status-driven consumer culture has locked us into a mentality that prevents us from seeing the obvious even when it's right before our eyes.

Let's all get on my ship and sail away to Self-sufficiency Island. We'll never set another alarm clock again.

A Communication Regarding the Radical

2009-07-08T15:20:00.007-04:00

Oh, Radical - my post was not intended as an attack. Have you seen Fairuza Balk in American History X? She's awesome! Now, I must say that, as a Radical, your political organizing skills could use a little fine-tuning. Remember, among The People, those that you consider to be the opposition are merely fellow activists that you have yet to convert. You will recognize this as Principle IX in The Radical Organizer's Handbook*. Alienating the opposition with insults, while liberating, isn't productive. But political organizing skills can be learned - looking awesome can't! So: Point Radical.

EVERYWhere - I don't know much about the psycho-social classifications these crazy kids use today. I thought "Emo" is an "interior anguish" category - that does not seem to fit Radical, who tends more toward "externalized anger". Anyway, when I was a kid, we didn't need no fancy names for being fucked up and pissed off**. Personally, I wouldn't worry about Radical, whom I peg to be in her mid-20s. Most of us outgrow that stage and progress on to "fucked up and resentful", then to "fucked up and demoralized", finally reaching "resigned and crying softly into a kitten" somewhere in our forties.

What do you know - those Emo kids are just way ahead of their peers, is all.

Well, we sure have gotten far afield of persnickety critters and unrequited crushes. Where's my hat? Time to put the bells back on! No one wants to see Santa with his pants off.

* In the interest of saving you Google time: this book does not exist.

** Actually, we did need fancy names for it, but I can't remember what they were.

The White Supremacist, the Radical, and the Robber Baron

2009-07-04T00:42:00.002-04:00

After wandering around the boards for awhile, I decide to stop in at my favorite watering hole, the Rants & Raves Cafe.

At the bar, a white supremacist enjoys an apfel-schnapps and occasionally sneaks a glance in the mirror to admire his Iron Cross neck tattoo. He argues with a radical who pronounces some words slightly differently, like "colour" and "womyn". It's mostly about racial oppression versus the political over-correction for it.

The radical tries to convince the white supremacist, between insults to his intelligence, that the people must work together and demand unspecified change. The white supremacist resists with arguments like "Why is there no WHITE Entertainment Television?". There is a brief lull in the bar noise, and the phrase "robber baron" floats into audibility from another conversation. I think of a quote from Jay Gould, a real-life robber baron much despised in his own time: "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half", he said, before dying a cowardly, miserable death of tuberculosis at age 56, regretting only that he hadn't the chance to molest the family pet just one last time*.

I've only had a cola and lime, but the noise in the bar goes flat, as it does sometimes, and the chatter begins to sound like a flock of geese honking overhead on a grey day. I feel a quiet neutral sadness on the way home, but it isn't a total loss - I've decided to get one of those awesome Iron Cross neck tattoos.

* I would like to thank Wikipedia for the invaluable biographical details concerning Jay Gould, without which this post would not have been possible.

A message to the person dealing with speeders

2009-06-21T17:31:00.007-04:00

Dear person dealing with speeders:

You live in a high-traffic zone with a low speed limit. You want to ensure the safety of your kids and your pets, and municipal services are failing you. Thanks to the wonderful Internet, our community can work together, online, in various stages of undress and inebriation, to achieve your goals. But first, we need more information.

Q: Which section of road are you talking about? You say it's a dead end road, but that people drive by at 60mph? Seriously? Give us a Google Maps link so we can see the street layout. Here is a link to Haven Healthcare in Norwich to get you started:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=haven+healthcare,+norwich,+ct&sll=41.661271,-72.22561&sspn=0.010596,0.014377&ie=UTF8&t=h&view=map&ei=Z5Y-Soe2LIj4NbafnOMD&attrid=&ll=41.334545,-72.154169&spn=0.021558,0.045061&z=15

Q: You say the speed limit is 20mph. That's slow. Really slow. The kind of slow reserved for a burro-path up the side of a cliff. What is the truly, actually, "reasonable" speed for that road? What speed would *you* drive by if you didn't live there? I'm not saying 20mph isn't reasonable - but drive the road and watch the speedometer, and let us know.

Q: In your post, you say "what we are going to do is videotape all the morons flying up the road". It sounds like you have already spoken with your neighbors about this, and that they are concerned enough to take action - is this correct? Because you can forget about that "rugged individualism" crap. That is brainwashing designed to keep you isolated and defenseless against The Man. You will need a posse in order to get something done.

OK, that should be enough information to get us started. It will take a little work on your part, but not as much work as chaining your kids and pets to cement blocks in your front yard. Mixing cement is hard! Not to mention you would have to make room among your garden gnomes or Christmas decorations or whatever the hell you have out there. Actually you could probably start a petting zoo and generate a nice little side income, but this may not be technically "legal" in all states - please consult an attorney.

On a side-note - something else you plan to videotape is the cops sleeping behind the school when they should be ticketing speeders on your road, and sending that tape to Channel 3. Please have some sympathy for the night shift police officer. I know what you're thinking - he's probably tired from his moonlighting gig providing security at the after-hours club for free because that's where all the college girls go ("they don't wear no panties at all!"). Or he might feel shaky from that chocolate eclair he knew he shouldn't have had ("on account of I got the diabetes"). In reality, he could simply be fed up with ticketing otherwise nice and normal law-abiding citizens trying to get to work at 3am through an incredibly unreasonable 20mph zone. At this point we have no way of knowing, so let's hold off on sting operations against the cops for now.

As we develop and perfect our diabolical plan to return justice to your neighborhood, videotape and media coverage may be a very good friend to you indeed - but be patient. We need more facts first - your online community awaits your field report.

A message to the beautiful girl in my boating safety class

2009-06-05T00:13:00.006-04:00

Dear beautiful girl in my boating safety class:

Boy was I fired up to learn about safe boating! I signed up for the first class of the season. Learning the rules is very important to stay safe, and to keep others around you safe too. Not only that, it's important to have self-confidence when, as a great man once said, you are only a few consecutive mistakes away from drowning. You have to keep your cool, like Fonzi.

You sat next to me and you were very pretty. Hey, no problem - I see pretty girls every day, on the street avoiding me, in the store not making eye contact with me, and sometimes on TV where they cannot hear me say "wow!" and "look at her!" and "I'm going to die alone!".

So anyway, everything was going fine. I learned about red lights and green lights, and how to use a horn in the fog, and how sailboats always have right-of-way over powerboats (suck it, powerboaters). Even when you got up during break and I noticed that you were probably a ballet dancer because you were so graceful and in such awesome shape, I kept the sadness deep inside and concentrated on EPIRBS and minimum age requirements for operating personal watercraft and how to not mess up the boat launch by powering onto your trailer (you powerboaters ruin everything).

But after the break everything went downhill. You said hello, and you were nice to me, and we started whispering in the back of the class and making jokes. I would like to take a minute to say that we are all human beings, and all countries are equal, especially Scotland, which is no better or worse than any other country on this fabulous blue planet that we call home. So when I say that your Scottish accent was really crazy-distracting I am not saying that Scotland is better than Germany, or Ireland, or even France.

You took this long sip from your coffee - seriously, way-long, you were doing it on purpose - and then held the cup to your lips for a minute or two (seriously, you were really out of control) and looked at me sideways for like five seconds, during which I was completely hypnotized... it was about this time that everything coming out of the instructor's mouth started sounding like "blah blah Type II PFD blah carbon monoxide blah blah blah..."

So, you may ask, why am I bringing this up now, months after the boating safety course? I will tell you why, extremely pretty Scottish girl. Soon I'll be sailing a boat alone in the treacherous waters of Long Island Sound, and I am not self-confident. Not self-confident at all! When I handed in my test at the end of the course, the first three-quarters of the answers were all correct - I was tearing that thing up! But starting about where you were nice to me and made jokes, man, that was just a column of X's - X, X, X, X, X, X, X! Seven wrong answers! The kind of answers given by a man who makes a few consecutive mistakes and ends up drowning.

Will it be your fault when my boat strikes a Type II PFD (whatever the heck that is!) and sinks? Or when I get cut in half by a godforsaken powerboater because I didn't do some "safety thing" that I should have paid attention to during class? I'm not going to go that far. I only want it on record that there are seven X's following me that I cannot shake. Seven deadly unknowns that I should know, but that I wouldn't recognize if they were standing right in front of me. That's all I'm saying.

A message to the bats in my shed

2009-05-26T23:47:00.001-04:00

Hello bats. May I call you bats? I do not want to offend you because you are extremely scary. I don't mean that in a bad way. If you ask around anyone will tell you that I'm always saying how bats are very cool. Bats have contributed a lot to the earth, keeping the bugs in check, and need I mention what you have done for the movies! Hollywood would be nothing without you. You made Bela Lugosi a huge star, and in no way are you responsible for his smack habit near the end. NOT bat-related.

You might be asking yourselves why I am sending you this message. First I want to say how very nice it is to have you terrifying creatures living in my shed. That lumber up there is all yours if you want it. Also, that hibachi? Yours.

Where was I? I was saying that you are terrifying (but not in a bad way). I didn't even realize that you were a cluster of bats when I poked my head up there looking for the hibachi. Not that I want it - you can put your names on it, seriously. I just wanted to see if it was there with the weather getting warm and all. Yep, there it was, a couple of feet from its new owners.

I thought you guys were an old hornet's nest or some kind of weird tree fungus or who knows what. Then I saw what looked like a little pile of bat crap, and I thought "why would there be a little pile of bat crap under a tree fungus?" Fast-forward to about a half-hour later, the splinters are out of my face, and I'm out there with my camera and a nice new pair of shorts on. I thought I'd never use that telephoto lens - boy was I wrong!

So I'm looking at the pictures, and I see five incredibly handsome, horrifyingly spooky bats. With your wrinkled-up noses and beady eyes you look like insane miniature pit-bulls that are constantly growling, just waiting to tear into someone who has no neighbors within screaming distance.

Let's be honest, that's creepy! But my blood did not truly run cold until I looked closely at the pictures and saw that when you guys are sleeping, one of you stays awake to keep an eye on things. When you are flying around and catching bugs and squeaking, that seems like pretty normal bat stuff. Sleeping all bunched up when it's chilly outside - nice and toasty, makes sense. But posting one guard while you the rest of you sleep? That is way too much smarts in a bat for me (no offense)! Do you have a rotating schedule for standing watch? That takes some brains. Does the "new guy" have to pull guard duty while the rest of you dream of getting tangled up in my hair and giving me rabies and using my hibachi?

To summarize: scary, squeaking, eating bugs. Splinters in face, miniature pit-bulls. Terrifying, screaming distance, incredibly handsome. Delicious hibachi-roasted veggie-kebabs. Scary.

I'm glad I got these feelings about your general scaryness out on the table. Man and Bat can live together peacefully without giving each other rabies as long as we keep the channels of communication open. Also, neighbors to north have gas-fired grill.

A message to all moles in the immediate vicinity

2009-05-23T13:17:00.001-04:00

OK moles, here's the deal.

I see your tunnels in the yard, and they don't really bother me, even when I feel them collapse under my feet as I mow the lawn. I hardly ever see you, except when one of you is unfortunate enough to meet my cat. I'm truly sorry about that, but there's no way I can change the wanton sadistic cruelty of feline instinct. You have to deal with that, just as I deal with the headless critter bodies that appear on the sidewalk now and then.

But enough about the cat - I'm here to talk about the vegetable garden. OK, it's not a vegetable garden YET, but I want to give you fair advance warning, so there will be no excuses.

I could have bought stuff that poisons you. I could have bought those diabolical spear-a-mole things that shishkebab you under the ground. I could have sent the cat to an elite badgering and assassination summer camp. Did I do that? No. I dug up - with a shovel - about 300 cubic feet of earth. I'm going to line the hole with a mole-proof barrier and then fill the hole back in. It was hell digging that hole. Did you ever see Cool Hand Luke? Ask Paul Newman about digging holes and filling them back up again when you could have just bought some mole spearguns instead.

Now listen closely, because I sure don't want us to have a failure to communicate! The bottom line is this: It's quite possible that I'll leave a gap somewhere in the barrier, or that the material turns out to be not so mole-proof after all, or that I seriously underestimate your above-ground climbing skills. The important thing is that I really went the extra mile for you guys. If you throw all this work back in my face and make it into the garden - all cards are on the table. What cards, you may ask? I'm not going to tell you. Any of them, all of them. Could be this, could be that. I could deal from the bottom of the deck. Just roll the idea around in your minds for awhile and use your imagination.

I'll be watching you, moles.

A message to all bugs in and around my house

2009-05-23T00:27:00.002-04:00

OK, bugs, listen up. Let's get a few things straight.

First of all - spiders. You are welcome in my house. UNLESS you are so big that you scare me! Then all bets are off. But you gotta be so big that I'm afraid to toss you out in the lawn because you might give birth to more giant spiders and then come after me all at once. If you're that big, then I may have no choice but to kill you.

Second of all - you mind your business and I mind mine. If you land on me or are walking on my body, I could smack you, or brush you off with hardly a second thought about your delicate legs and/or wings. Unless you are a ladybug, then you get the kid-glove treatment. But that's the only exception!

Third - to all you giant mosquito-looking bugs that aren't really mosquitos? I'm sorry about those early days. Ignorance is no excuse, but like I said I'm sorry. Let's let bygones be bygones.

Fourth - ants. What can I say? One at a time you are harmless and even cute, not to mention amazing because you can lift a leaf many times your own weight and carry it around no problem. But when you get together with your friends and start one of those lines going from the patio door to a drop of dried fruit juice on my desk? That's going too far. I gotta man up and take you all out. Even though I know you guys are just gonna keep coming and coming, no matter how high the bodies pile up. That is really freaky.

Fifth - space alien bugs. I look at you and I don't even know what I'm looking at. You could be shaped like anything, have crazy fringy antennas, a dozen legs and feelers sticking out. Sometimes you look like a couple of normal bugs combined into one. I figure you are from the jungle and are lost, so I'm basically gonna leave you alone and give you a chance to get back to the Amazon or onto your spaceship or wherever the hell you came from. However, you should take a long hard look at the spider rule.

Sixth - little dot bugs. You are the opposite of space alien bugs. You are just round dots completely devoid of any notable features or behaviors. Maybe a couple spindly feelers coming out of your general head area. You sit there on the edge of a patch of light, between the bright and the dark, not too hot, not too cold. I never see you come, I never see you go. I'm sorry to say that you are just boring. But in the grand scheme of things, that's a big plus for you, because I don't even think of smacking you or tossing you out.

Seventh - Attention all bugs that currently are, or in the future may be, caught in a spider web up in one of the high corners of my ceiling: You are on your own. I can't drag out the ladder every time one of you gets stuck. A word of advice: if you see a corner that has a bunch of your friends hanging around in it, and they're all dead or dying, listlessly flapping one wing - stay away from there. That's just common sense. Aside from that, all I can give you is my regrets.

Well, that about covers it. I hope our little talk has been educational, and that it will help you be a safe (and ideally temporary) co-occupant of my house.