Nature Red of Tooth & Nail
Jul. 9th, 2024 01:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraPerfectly okay day yesterday, though not a particularly productive one. John invited me out for lunch; we had indifferent pad Thai but excellent conversation:
We talked about his latest house-share applicant, a guy who showed up in bike shorts & is heavily into tossing back brewskis with the Bros. And who blanched when asked to provide a credit rating.
“Don’t do it!” I counseled. “It’s gonna be enough of an adjustment having somebody, anybody, else in that house but somebody you don’t feel comfortable wearing dresses & makeup around and who may be financially flakey?”
“I know, I know,” John said. “But I feel sorry for him.”
“You’re not his father!” I said. “Or his mother for that matter.”
John was wearing straight male attire—I think because his son had just gotten back from India, and he’s not officially out to his kids yet.
“Oh, they already know,” I told him. “Of course, they know.”
###
The amazing thing about hanging out with John is that even though I’ve only known him for two weeks, I feel completely comfortable around him like we could gab and gab endlessly about anything for hours & hours & hours without the slightest sense of, Okay, now what do I say?
I think this is because back in the day, he was a New Paltz variety hippie. New Paltz hippies and Berkeley hippies are kinda like Iceland poppies and California poppies. In fact, the New Paltz of now has a lot in common with the Berkeley of yesteryear, though, of course, I am no longer a hippie.
Yesterday, we mostly gabbed about John’s Plan B—which is to rent out his four-bedroom house—mortgage paid!—at a sub-market prime rate to a deserving veteran with PTSD and take off to for southeast Asia, there to live the life of an itinerant Lady Boy in Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia. He would drop a Tiny House on some portion of the 24 acres that comes with the house he owns and return for a few months every year.
“It’s very cheap to live over there,” he told me. “But very expensive to fly there. So it really doesn’t make sense to do the trip very often.”
###
It was the third day of a Heat Advisory. Instead of doing the rail trail that morning, I’d decided to drive into Newburgh & hike around George Washington’s Revolutionary War Headquarters—which was a mistake because George Washington’s Revolutionary War Headquarters appears to be closed indefinitely until further notice, perhaps as an editorial reflection on the current hopeless, desperate state of the American republic:
I have a strong affection for all old, decaying, derelict cities anyway, but I have a particularly strong affection for Newburgh because it combines ruin, decay, and disintegration with important American history!!!
And nobody seems to give a fuck.
(That row of houses is federal-style architecture, dating back to 1780, I’d reckon—which is very, very old for the States.)
###
When I went outside to tromp this morning, I saw tufts of brown feathers and immediately imagined that another chicksa had gone the way of all flesh. This one felt like a personal failure because I’d seen both chickens when I first woke up around 6 a.m., but now it was 8 a.m., and I could only find one of them. That meant that the Umbrella of Protection I try to raise over all gentle, innocent, guileless creatures in the Patrizia-sphere had not succeeded in keeping them safe.
I cried & cried & cried the whole time I tromped.
But then when I got back to the house, presto! There was the second hen.
Of course, it felt to me as though I’d magicked the chicksa back to life again.
Because, you know, I’m nuts that way.
And Nature is red of tooth and claw.
We talked about his latest house-share applicant, a guy who showed up in bike shorts & is heavily into tossing back brewskis with the Bros. And who blanched when asked to provide a credit rating.
“Don’t do it!” I counseled. “It’s gonna be enough of an adjustment having somebody, anybody, else in that house but somebody you don’t feel comfortable wearing dresses & makeup around and who may be financially flakey?”
“I know, I know,” John said. “But I feel sorry for him.”
“You’re not his father!” I said. “Or his mother for that matter.”
John was wearing straight male attire—I think because his son had just gotten back from India, and he’s not officially out to his kids yet.
“Oh, they already know,” I told him. “Of course, they know.”
###
The amazing thing about hanging out with John is that even though I’ve only known him for two weeks, I feel completely comfortable around him like we could gab and gab endlessly about anything for hours & hours & hours without the slightest sense of, Okay, now what do I say?
I think this is because back in the day, he was a New Paltz variety hippie. New Paltz hippies and Berkeley hippies are kinda like Iceland poppies and California poppies. In fact, the New Paltz of now has a lot in common with the Berkeley of yesteryear, though, of course, I am no longer a hippie.
Yesterday, we mostly gabbed about John’s Plan B—which is to rent out his four-bedroom house—mortgage paid!—at a sub-market prime rate to a deserving veteran with PTSD and take off to for southeast Asia, there to live the life of an itinerant Lady Boy in Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia. He would drop a Tiny House on some portion of the 24 acres that comes with the house he owns and return for a few months every year.
“It’s very cheap to live over there,” he told me. “But very expensive to fly there. So it really doesn’t make sense to do the trip very often.”
###
It was the third day of a Heat Advisory. Instead of doing the rail trail that morning, I’d decided to drive into Newburgh & hike around George Washington’s Revolutionary War Headquarters—which was a mistake because George Washington’s Revolutionary War Headquarters appears to be closed indefinitely until further notice, perhaps as an editorial reflection on the current hopeless, desperate state of the American republic:
I have a strong affection for all old, decaying, derelict cities anyway, but I have a particularly strong affection for Newburgh because it combines ruin, decay, and disintegration with important American history!!!
And nobody seems to give a fuck.
(That row of houses is federal-style architecture, dating back to 1780, I’d reckon—which is very, very old for the States.)
###
When I went outside to tromp this morning, I saw tufts of brown feathers and immediately imagined that another chicksa had gone the way of all flesh. This one felt like a personal failure because I’d seen both chickens when I first woke up around 6 a.m., but now it was 8 a.m., and I could only find one of them. That meant that the Umbrella of Protection I try to raise over all gentle, innocent, guileless creatures in the Patrizia-sphere had not succeeded in keeping them safe.
I cried & cried & cried the whole time I tromped.
But then when I got back to the house, presto! There was the second hen.
Of course, it felt to me as though I’d magicked the chicksa back to life again.
Because, you know, I’m nuts that way.
And Nature is red of tooth and claw.
