Xiao Mao & Priest
By Babyldorkgalactinerd
I woke up this morning to the long hairs on Priest’s twitching ears brushing my nose as they searched for the source of a sound outside. Snuggled together in the chilly morning air, I’d been dreaming of the dissolution of the sharp edged contrast of one color dye or paint being swirled into a container of another color until only the third is purely evident. I never know what he is dreaming.
The stirring without began stirring within and we both headed outdoors to relieve ourselves and join the beginning of false dawn a good hour and a half before direct sunlight. The bang of the screen door set the hens to crying out their excited anticipation of fresh food. Along the path by the pond the sound of a hundred frantic little suppings came from the fish for the same reason. It is good to be king when your subjects are happy.
The three free ranging matron hens are in the shed picking up spillage from the feed bin as I dip out the daily portion for my younger coop bound girls. Soon I will let them free range too and the feed bin will empty much more slowly. I know they can’t possibly be hungry when they go into their greeting ritual of fluttering up to get the feed out of the can before I spread it for them because the older hens eat out of the areas last occupied by the rolling coop for weeks after I’ve moved it. Then comes a beautiful lawn of grass from the mix of rain with scratched in poop and seeds even they didn’t eat. It’s all good, nothing wasted. No eggs this early. They wait for the sun to get in the mood.
Although they cannot make sucking noises in pond water or cackle from their coop I am no less aware that my sprouting winter garden needs water despite the recent rains. Drought conditions aren’t relieved by sudden floods near so well as by steady drizzles delivering the same amount of moisture. How ‘bout that — my first farming aphorism. The remaining survivors from summer, three Serrano peppers and three okra, two artichokes and an asparagus bed are making up for lost time as I soak their roots with the hose on full shower into the hay around their feet. A mist setting is gentle enough to feed the sprouting cilantro, arugula, lettuce, spinach, carrots, beets, broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower without beating them down into the well-composted soil.
After turning the compost pile vigorously enough to shed my hoody, Priest and I settle in our sieto to greet the great golden bringer of life from our merry go round seat in the shed. Refractions and reflections of the solar radiance spark on and off with the breeze on shuddering leaves’ fresh droplets and the inexorable change in the attitude of the light itself. Thousands of birds leave their roosts; criss-crossing overhead to inspect fields from on high where dwell billions of bugs and seeds that threaten to overgrow all the rest of us ground bound critters, swoop down upon the juiciest terrain and eat as many as they can. Good birds.
When the brilliance of the day enters the shed at a particular angle, like a preprogrammed robot I stir from my cerebrations, meditations and mid-morning snoozes to return to the shade of the porch and my electronically bewebbed portal to the wide world of western civilization. I consider it the ultimate reality show based on the outlandish question, “How do humans behave when born within a culture saturated in the certainty of human superiority entitled to ownership of the rest of the world; and each other if the price is right?”
In my most anthropomorphically cynical moods my browser news sites serve as an early warning system hot wired to the political scene for hints of when the baling wire that holds together this country’s faith in liars snaps in time to man the compound gun towers against the suddenly starving hoards pouring out of suddenly empty cities roaming the countryside in search of food. On the other stroke of the pendulum, during my most sanguine moods “Ted’s Tubes” allow me to sample individual’s various freely offered reality tunnels and to leave examples of my own observations, ideas and experiences as a measure of connecting, spreading and evolving like mycelium in preparation for the next time the conditions are right for the dirty hippies who groked flower power to come back out of the woodwork and rise to the fore once more to lead humanity back to the garden before the oil runs out.
So I click on Democracy Now! and there’s Amy and Juan at their table on their normal set, but they’re both clad in shades of violet. The first picture of the current events is of peasants in Venezuela wearing either traditional clothing or red tee shirts for Hugo Chavez; seemed pretty normal. Then came a scene from the US congress. It hit me with something as hard to get my head around as seeing a UFO.
Everyone was wearing either red or blue, though it was often hard to tell from all the logo patches covering every inch of their clothing … and the hats most seem to be wearing. There was nothing extraordinary going on; which only compounded my astonishment. I might have accepted a special occasion our elected servants may have drummed up, but there they were carrying on business as usual. WTF!
The area of their left breasts seemed reserved for rows of what resembled battle ribbons. Except for the hints of the background color of their clothing being limited to red or blue, there were no signs of uniforms or rank; there hadn’t been a military coup. Then a close up of a representative sleeping during the argument against a bill he introduced outlawing the use of poor people for fuel showed his colorful shoulder and sleeves festooned by the logos of Shell, Exxon, BP, et al, wrapped around him by his crossed arms.
The speaker, wearing blue covered in logos from the green revolution industry, was not opposing the bill because he wanted to legalize the recent popularity of spontaneous human combustion engines since that high speed camera learned the secret on film. No, he was opposed to the oil industry’s constant attempt to eliminate competition through legal channels behind the cloak of humanitarian concern for the lack of concern for the poor, rather than spend the money to buy them on the open market like everyone else, the free enterprise way. Ah, yes, it was a marathon competition of whose ethics could get under the Limbaugh stick. I checked the URL to see of I’d gotten the Onion site by mistake.
No, still Amy and Juan, in violet. I started frantically clicking around the news sites to finally realize that everyone out there was wearing either red or blue, with or without logos attached, or what I would call “civilian” clothes as seen on everyone last time I ventured into town. People in violet voluntarily wore fabric whose red and blue components came from the color of each thread woven, or dyed in various sized checks, polka-dots and mezzotint, but no logos patches. They seemed to be obeying an ethic lost on the reds and the blues.
I was well aware that someone out in Delaware could be doing something I never heard of and it had been a long time since I’d been to town; in fact, I relish signs of my being out of the loop of societal gossip, but this was stupefying. What could be happening? The habit my curiosity has acquired along with this portal is the Wikipedia button on it. I typed in red and blue clothing, and eventually ran down the history which had been going on so long that it was unremarkable on the street while I began doubting my sanity over what I was experiencing.
It seems Steven Colbert logged an entry into Wikipedia facetiously explaining the non existent Law of Transparency requiring anyone publically espousing their ideology as being good for anyone else to don red if it fell into the category of, “every man for himself in the human race to the top of the free-for-all enterprise heap” and blue if it was, “an even playing field, even if holes must be dug for the tall people to stand in so we all see eye to eye.” And that such espousers declare the sources of their income in logos of the companies who write the checks attached to the exterior of their clothing like thousands of other sponsored event participants.
Apparently a junior congressman from Delusiana, came across the entry and, recognizing Steven’s name from his far right wing TV show knew his fellow ideologue couldn’t be wrong, went out and bought a red suit and plastered logos of every backer from AIG to Tom’s Hardware on it, and wore to his first session of congress. As they say, the rest is history.
Like the Austin hippies turned the song, Oakie from Muskogee, around on the redneck mentality that liked “kickin’ hippies’ asses and raisin’ hell” and made it their back-in-your-face anthem, the fun being made of such a naïve clown on the floor got spun into the idea that the expiation of the guilt laid on them by government ethics watchdogs for gorging at the lobbyist's bribe banquets was at hand, if they could just bite the bullet, man up, own up and brag about their sleazy betrayal of the public trust — and dare their constituents to name a better price if they didn't like it. The violet was a voluntary choice made by the extremely interested but strictly nonpartisan investigative news programs which was only right in such a transparent, arrogantly honest society …
I woke up this morning to the long hairs on Priest’s twitching ears brushing my nose as they searched for the source of a sound outside. Snuggled together in the chilly morning air, I’d been dreaming of the dissolution of the sharp edged contrast of one color dye or paint being swirled into a container of another color until only the third is purely evident. I never know what he is dreaming.
Marcel Duchamp - Nude Descending a Staircase
