FINAL RESTING PLACE

While living among the pines of a forest east of Austin in a tipi I'd made of heavy canvas sailcloth and cedar poles thirty years ago, I began working on an all wood version. I abandoned that start to the silver fox family living under the hill on which it sat, but it never left my mind.

Those  memories and a growing dissatisfaction with occupying a defunct RV whose warranty must have expired the moment it was driven off the lot prompted me to renew efforts to bring the idea into reality, first in Illustrator for the planning stage and then in Home Depot for the physical realization through shop tools and material..

Planning stage

TIPI

The initial parameters were to use 4'X8'X1/2" plywood sheets to cover the 16' diameter hole I'd dug earlier, in which to raise tilapia for consumption here at the the Dawgranch, before I discovered the intrusive government regulations into private fisheries. These resulted in 12 triangular panels leaning toward the center around a 15 foot perimeter, more than enough room to do anything I've ever done indoors.

I ripped twelve 2"X4"X12' boards with two 13.1° cuts on the outer edge to accommodate the plywood sheet's lying flat against both cuts of the two 12' 'poles in each frame.  This made 6 complete wooden frames which I then linked with struts cut the same as the ones within the completed frames, resulting in the complete skeleton of the finished form hovering over the hole.

twelve foot rips started at the west end of my porch-cum-woodshop and finished out the east door

single frame in a jig to build all six

One frame launched and another one on the way

KIVA

Putting the floor of the tipi three feet below the ground is an adaptation of the cliff dwellers kiva to the plains tribes' tipi. On the good advice of my rock mason friend, Cyrus, the hole was enlarged a foot or so beyond the intended living space diameter and a foot deeper than the floor. Eleven 4"X4"X4' posts were sunk a foot deep in concrete and spanned by 1/2"X3'X4' plywood walls at a diameter of 170". Outside the walls and at least a foot below the floor level was filled with 12 tons of one-inch river gravel to serve as a drainage barrier against the occasional flood that has approached within a foot and a half of the top of the wall several times in my seven years living here at the Dawgranch.

Cyrus increases the diameter

Cyrus and Jose set the wall posts

The digging of the hole and setting of the posts (above) I ceded to fitter men than I to complete a job in one week that would certainly have taken my feeble frame at least two months in the constant 100°F+ drought we experienced this summer.

Wall wrapped in three layers of tar paper

Gravel filled into the outside of the wall holding cinder blocks spaced at 4' and level with
wall as footings for the bottom of the twelve foot frame sides (tipi poles)

COVERING THE TIPI

Instead of buffalo hides, I spanned the poles of my tipi with Autumn Orange colored plywood panels, the North, East and South tops of which hinge out to be horizontal rooves extending four feet beyond the base to form porches in the summer, to be eventually screened in. In the winter these panels will be snugged in and the small smoke flaps at the top will be closed on the windward and opened on the lee side for a draft to pull the smoke out when the fire pit is used.

Triangular frames linking around the kiva perimeter.

Smoke flap windows around the top

YURT

To cover the smoke  flaps I devised a 45° conic cap that hangs over any open ones, designed on the same principle as the 60° tipi, but made with lighter 1"X2" strips and 1/4" plywood. After it was in place it occurred to me that I'd incorporated another indigenous home design into the mix, a yurt.

Peak Parasol

Looking north through the south porch-to-be

Smoke flaps and Parasol in place.

And now I have moved in so far as I have finished facilities to operate in the style to which I have grown accustomed. I have yet to build the kitchen, fire pit and winter sleeping loft (7' ceiling over the kitchen).

Computer station "Outback"

At home with Monty and Hettie

THE BLIZZARD OF '11

FOUND

“… children guessed, but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew”.
——e. e. cummings

This morning my friend, Nikki, posted just the right thought to trigger my return to this blog after a month of Scrooge-like stinginess in expressing the wealth of inspiration I’ve experienced.

The people and property adjacent to my stomping grounds within the Dawgranch have changed, and with these changes a more communal atmosphere seems to be brewing among folks who had seemed to be content minding their own business over the six years I’ve thrived here.

I had to comment on Nikki’s post, …”adulthood is a phase of forgetfulness, enhancing our appreciation of nature when we re-emerge into children’s guesses with such wisdom.”

Fences were torn down, abandoned gardens were weeded, the sounds of hammers’ banging home nails on Homer’s recording studio remodel of Donna’s bedroom and back porch rang out in random overlay of the bird song and dog bark spontaneous symphony of nature, all the dogs and cats and chickens and people mixing like never before. My inner child sees the realization of utopian dreams more possible in the offing than any time since the games I’d played with other pre-school children living along the deep, verdant ravine we made our world - away from adults and world war two. We’re back to gentle guessing, with the acquired wisdom of experiencing the fallacy in the certainty required to make of this same nature a soulless commodity for the machine that shaped us to be eager cogs from the first day of public education.

Who Knows? Time will tell and there’s more of that than anyone here seems to need to know what to do with. Maybe (RIP RAW).

HERE

It's coming from the sorrow in the street,
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin'
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
—Democracy, by Leonard Cohen

I arrived here when nature rained me out of my home in the heart of the city.

I’d only one reason to leave my comfortable cave after sixteen years of settling in and it didn’t stand a chance of my acting on it, what with my proximity to the headquarters of Whole Foods a block away.

When my wife left, I realized I had never fed myself — from mother’s mammon to military mess to campus cafeteria to married meals I’d always been served. Since rejoining the single way of life thirty-three years ago I’ve evolved an organic understanding of my body’s urge for and reaction to what I feed it. I learned to enjoy preparing healthy food from its life reaffirming spirit to the very physical benefits of satisfying my urges in the most beneficial way.

I began cooking for my friends out of a kitchen in our favorite hangout, the Hole in the Wall. The bean counter practicality of quantity over quality eventually reined me in and drove me out by requiring that I serve industrial food. I left with valuable experience of life in the service lane from both the server and the served perspectives as a metaphor for what keeps mankind on the treadmill of this ruinously ravenous experiment that is western civilization.

An unusual spate of rain softened soil around the roots and soaked the leaves of the hackberry that had grown out from under my house beyond the tipping point of its angled trunk. The roots popped the wall and floor beams next door as it crept to final rest across the street over several cars of patrons dining at the restaurant up the block. When the city came out to clear the road they also noticed how out of code the turn of the century building was and notified the owner to comply. The business from patron parking outweighed the rent the restaurant collected on the space, and once again, the bean counters disrupted a groovy gig.

Here is where I have learned to complete that cycle of feeding myself by inserting myself into the natural chain of life as a planter and feeder of the food I eat and pass on. My broccoli is built of the compost of last year’s garden and leaf fall and my eggs are built of the insect protein literally littering this eight-acre spot on the bank of the Colorado. I have yet to do well enough to avoid trips to the grocery store but I have learned enough to know I could with more incentive. My carbon footprint is a bus trip to town and back, pollution of processing and transporting what products I buy and my electricity bill. I have worked out plans for a solar driven tipi and will be working on that for the rest of the foreseeable future.

The only other axe I was grinding, my disastrous relationship with the daughter who’d not been in any of my homes since she was four, disappeared like a bad dream when we hugged each other standing by Ella Falls and Piddle Pond last month.

Here I am, as vulnerable as I have ever been. Hit me if you can find an opening.

Turns out that this is my 500th post.

JUST A LITTLE WHILE AGO…

Me and Mabe and Homer were sitting around Mabe’s front porch enjoying the changing angle of the shadows of the early morning Earth turn, sipping coffee and passing the pipe.

The dogs were either lying around calmly soaking up rays, scratching their back with their feet up in the air or sparring with each other in celebration of such a beautiful dawning day.

A hen announces her proud accomplishment from her nest while her sisters devour some crumbled corn tortillas at our feet gossiping in quiet purring clucks only they understand.

Small birds nervously drop down to the chicken feed cast in the yard, relying on their fellows in the trees to warn them of the cat. The cat, in his new, improved, tail-down stealth stalk, approaches from the direction with the tallest grass, still unaware of the lookouts above. Although I keep his bowl full and he has yet to even get close to catching a bird, his instincts demand he try just for the sport of it all. A grackle joins the game by flying directly at him a mere three inches higher than the crouching cat’s vertical, claw extended paws outstretched explosion a good six feet straight up.

The chickens, cat and small dogs run for cover when the giant red hawk’s shadow stains their open play ground while the big dogs chase the dark spot in hopes the hawk will come down close enough to pluck out of the air as they have several panicked chickens and a peacock.

Sparky, the bass player in his and Homer's band, the Cramdens, let’s himself in through the gate across the road to here and is greeted by all the dogs. As he strolls through the dappled light beneath the trees, a thought of Kurt Vonnegut’s uncle’s mentioning paradise whenever he recognizes he’s in it let’s itself into my consciousness of now and is greeted by Homer, saying, “You know? There’s a lotta people in this world that would commit suicide if they had to live like we've learned to.”

It was the first time I ever laughed at one of Homer’s jokes.

I still am

•

Addendum: There seems to be some question as to this description of a day on the porch having any application to reaching the summit. Other than actually climbing a mountain, all summits to be reached are ideals in metaphor. Pisces Iscariot got it so well he suggested using "un-learned" for the striving to reach the summit I speak of, since he knows, as I do, that it is our introductory education into the spectacle and faith in the authority of its mythology that must be questioned to reach a life more symbiotic with the nature of the planet whose dependent cells we all are by realizing how belief in man's ownership of it all increases our destructive usury every day. The invisible prison is insidious.

Where do you grab a naked man? — Awestun, Tejas circa 1978, UT Campus

I sometimes feel like this fellow who lost it in public trying to get through the walls to let the civilized world know what beauty is being destroyed outside by it. Added 6/8/10

TIME MASTER

His people called him Cronot, the time master. Little did they know he had nothing to do with time — absolutely nothing. His vocabulary contained no temporal terms of either the chronological or spiritual variety, which he considered the same thing. Nor did he refer to the material world in terms less lively than event or being; there existed no mere things.

Off the track of time, that clothesline from which the spectacle airs its latest developed film, he became like the camera left in a field throughout spring whose film when played back at an accelerated rate reveals the interrelated lives of its plant and animal denizens. Knowing he was the accumulation of all the events of his life experience he could observe the any period in the same way by enveloping the succession of events in the event of recollection at any time he chose.

So too could he serve as a fair witness to the minutest changes in what those distracted by time’s impatience would consider a rigid thing. Knowing that the eternal present is the only instant of existence he maintains stability unachievable within the spectacle.

While all around him his people pursued promises of a carrot just like they eat in the penthouse in the tallest building in the world through a maze of multiple multiple choices and tricks to be performed, he reached down and pulled a fresh one from the fertile loam in his garden.

As his people schemed on capturing the golden goose for the perpetual something-for-nothing golden eggs promised to be out there somewhere he collected his breakfast daily from his hens.

Knowing all too well the race as intimately as any of his people still nipping at each other’s heels on the stairway to the penthouse, he laughed heartily at his dogs frolicking in the open field while he massaged his healing heels.

Having worked from dark to dark to earn a brighter future that never came, as most of his people yet feel compelled to do, he took profound delight in watching the Earth expose and hide the sun any now it was a good idea.

Once the willing maker of better traps for gawking mice along the spectacle midway, he sympathizes from the distance afforded by the internet and the wisdom to realize it is still the midway, gaining more variations and seeming more real every day.

To his people it seemed like he could disappear — at times.

Ceci n'est pas une maison*

This is a PICTURE of Donna's home

The following paragraph is what I was typing when the ensuing paragraphs ensued, er, ah, events occurred (gotta keep the reality and its story distinguishable from one another or I’ll be back in the invisible prison).

Guy DeBord’s spectacle is what I call the tautology of the invisible prison. “When analyzing the spectacle one speaks, to some extent, the language of the spectacular itself in the sense that one moves through the methodological terrain of the very society which expresses itself in the spectacle.”

Oh, the irony of it all. In the midst of discovering Guy DeBord, often referred to by Troutsky, and reading his Society of the Spectacle, the Dawgranch dawgs break my concentration with their raucous greeting at the gate of perhaps forty members of a TV entourage here to scope out an upcoming scene for an episode of Friday Night Lights in my neighbor’s uniquely styled home evolved as an outgrowth of her life in the bus she parked under a giant pecan eleven years ago.

Ack. The very tentacle of the spectacle has come to annex my everyday direct experience of nature here in my retreat from the grid to integrate it into the spectacle lived by the never-left-the-couch dolts plugged into “Reality TV” 24/7 even when they believe they are out in the “world” discussing the latest episode of Office at the office around the old water cooler bottled water machine.

And wouldn’t you know it, if I sign their disturbance agreement paper, my premeditated tolerance of whatever the hell they decide to do in the course of their production for the spectacle will earn me a hundred dollar share of the big bucks lavished on the preservation of the invisible prison. If they don’t run off or over the hens or tromp through my gardens it’ll be a breeze to do my share, with the first hand direct experience of witnessing the creation of the latest spectacle to be decoupaged onto the ever denser walls of the invisible prison thrown in as education. Yahoo.

*After Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" he lettered beneath a realistic painting of a pipe just to keep the invisible prison visible, and not a prison when one is conscious of tne myth.

DAWGRANCH: SPRING '10

After an unusually cold snap for winter in my neck of the woods defrocked several plants that have stayed green year round 'til now, I am glad to post evidence of the resilience of plant life in the greening of the pond, garden and indigenous foliage.

Happy Earth Day!
Hope you didn't drive anywhere to celebrate.

LAST WEEK OF THE YEAR

late rising at eight

to a morning dark as seven

guided by the light

like the chickens

who greet him

meet him at coop door

run between his feet

for feed mix in the yard

‘til chill chases him back to his pod,

his yellow and sunset orange submarine,

too toasty ‘til he acclimates

then not warm enough.

from the bridge above it all

he surveys her immediate position

along the never dry river of time

outside her surround-around port holes

blocked only to the south:

imac portal back

to the man-made world

saying news he fears to hear

paying dues left by his career

playing diversions still held dear

posting thoughts finally come clear

touching minds far and near

quality beyond the hit counter

variety of insight incited

tethers to the myth examined

patter on soft skin drum heads

looses rhythm in complexity

gains rain’s tapping attention

another frosty foray for feed

for the dry beneath the roost

to their cackle bitching delight

three more dashes during the day

through rain drops

to catch egg drops

beckoned by loud hen cops

today’s done deeds

entered as 169-171 in his egg book

times, dates and mom’s took

along with omelets eaten

friends who got treated

running cost of the feed

being happy where he is

friends know where to seek him

season of return

spontaneous reunion

catching up the years

yarns of daring do

sympathies of aging

venture wiser view

future all too new.

FEAR IN SHATTERED COLOR

Maybe if dad hadn’t gotten laid off in October he might have gotten to open the usual present before bed time that always took the edge off the season long anticipation of the wonderful rewards for his good behavior Santa put under the tree while he slept through the night that felt like eternity.

Maybe if mother and dad hadn’t been such good hosts, they might have done their little helper chores sooner and been in bed sooner.

Maybe if children understood all the words grownups use to cover the holes in their fabrications they would be less skeptical of the words they did understand.

Maybe if a frog had wings he wouldn’t bump his ass. He doesn’t so he does. Dad was, mother and dad didn’t, children don’t so they are and he couldn’t sleep for worrying that something besides the leering face in the glowing stars on his ceiling was afoot. By the time he got to the stairs he knew no one was afraid of being caught being naughty by Santa or his helpers. For each step crept his skepticism bloomed until he could see the whole lurid scene.

The implications were so vast he could only beat a hasty retreat back up the stairs before his discovery was discovered. In turning to go he snagged the garlands decorating the banister and loosed a hanging purple ball from the fir frond upon which it depended. Lunging for it he missed, deflecting it into the path of the paper loop chain, which caught its hook and stopped its surely shattering on the hardwood living room floor.

Maybe if the Christmas decoration had completed its journey on the winds of gravity his parents would have realized the jig was up and would have welcomed him into the fold of the first stage of adulthood like anyone who announces their discovery.

Maybe if the fear of being found out during the tedious chore of hauling the delicate pendulum of ball and chain back to safety hadn’t shocked him into a unique realm of realization for a five year old, he might have been one of those that spitefully announces his discovery to all those who are still fooled by the fable or still telling it.

Maybe if he’d blabbed his secret insight he’d have never learned to spot prevarication whenever it belies his own experience of nature or the body language of the teller of tales.

Maybe if science actually knew what it was talking about they could calculate that bumblebees can, in fact, fly. But they don’t so they can’t. The ball didn’t so he wasn’t, the fear did so he wasn’t, and he didn’t so he has never burdened anyone with his trust, belief, faith or himself with the bruises for which they’re always cruising. Maybe

IT ALL A.D.D.S UP

Marcel Duchamp - Nude Descending a Staircase

She awoke at day break

Fast of frying eggs and bacon strips

Off her PJs and jumps into the shower’s steaming stream

Lined by subjecting a block of sand to a wind tunnel

Vision kept George from taking the trouble

From her face when she thought he was lying

South of the equator, just East of the Glapagos

Ninja Turtles kept the kids out of her hair

Brush 97, brush 98, brush 99, brush 100

Times, if she’d told him once

Upon a time stories to tuck

And Little John were merry men

Can’t jump or tell the truth

Her kids found in stories she used to make up

On her face and sheath on her torso

By Rodin being born from the rock

Music coming from the kitchen

Reeking of delicious and so nutritious

From hens not stuffed in a box

Lunch for other women’s appitites

For adventurous exploits on the ocean

Of motel bedsheets

Of water washing away

Dreams of doubt in a blink of an

iPhone call from Timmy still in bed

Of roses when seen from the outside

The sun cleared the tree line

Of excuses from here to

“Hello, lazy bones. Come down to breakfast…

At …”

People said she looked like Audry Hepburn

The toast if she hadn’t ejected it.

“Good morning, dear.”

5 CHICKS & A TOMCAT

I realized the hits I may invoke only after I finished typing the post title and am loath to change it just because it may disappoint the voyeur in us all. As my role model in reverse, Chance the Gardener (Chauncy Gardner {Peter Sellers}) likes to say, "I like to watch." These days it's these chicks.

Be that as it may I am hereby updating the breathless world on the news of the crew's cruise 'oer the land of the free and the home of a knave. Watching Priest's predatory instincts wax and wane with his feline curiosity is quite intriguing. He can sit obviously enamored amidst all five scratching, pecking and chatting about the smorgasbug offerings as sedately as I could hope for and I've watched him stalk low all the way across the yard as if they were his last chance to eat or maybe his long gone sister, Vera, prone to play like kids' cowboys and indians. No matter how many times I catch and scold him he manages to carry out his faux fear mongering as often as not — enough to evoke a squawk and a flutter, no more serious than their own pecking order arguments over food — and, having grown up with him every day of their life, they come right back to what was so playfully, rudely interrupted, while I still mother hen them two weeks into their free range adventures.

As the video demonstrates, if I can spot one I know within the hypoteneuse of a 6'x12' triangle where the others are.

I panicked when I touch the soft shelled egg in the nest until consulting goog ole goodle and found it to be common among hens' first eggs after moulting among on line eggery folk like me. Now I've made it more common, just because it calmed me down. Robin is the name of the hen I inherited in a mixup when my buddy, Chuck, retrieved his three chickens I baby sat over a week of his vacation. She was moulting because she is about eleven months older than her new coop mates. When the the mess her feathers were calmed down into smooth new plumage the turned out to have mousey brown feathers with pin stripes of their quills shining on her wings and back and her breast turned as red as a robin.

You may have noticed the markings on the radiant blond I've been calling Whynot, evolved from Wynona out of "Y" for the markings on her infant forhead, which have prompted me to now call her Dax, for the Star Trek symbiot and my buddy Babyldorkgalactinerd. The shot below is of Nameless One who watched me move that chair, my sieto, to get her food at every dawn of her life, so has stationed herself there and pooped in it to show her appreciation. I'm waiting for eggs.

If course, being the Simon Legree of all I feed and feed off of, I have devised a task for them to do when they're not busy laying those eggs they're always in process of making: I pile several shovels full of compost into the sifting screen and a token sprinkling of feed which they jump up to eat and remain to sift through the whole pile of juicy bugs therein, pooping all the while … the benefits of symbiosis never end. I like to win-win.

GRADUATION DAY

Yesterday afternoon found me with unusual optimism for the future of my class of '09 debutantes when I opened the coop door and tore down the mesh barrier to their just walking out. It took no time at all for them to escape their seven month home schooling and test their training on the real world. I am quite gratified that, with only one warnining, Priest was satisfied to observe them rather than attempt to eat the chicks he watched grow more constantly than I.

They have yet to encounter the dags, which were in Donna's house for the three hours they were out before returning to roost at their usual shade of evening, but seeing them keeping to the the 12' x 8' area of proximity to one another within which they spent their previous life even while they roamed all over the garden area, I imagine they will hold their own en masse.

The setting sun catches their exotic feather colors and patterns to perfection, if only my camera did.

•

I swear, I must be psychic. Watching this a couple of times after I slapped it together by equating giving the chicks the right to roam the same ground I do with Democracy, loving Leonard Chohen's song by that name and quickly publishing it I noticed the music sounds just like a bunch of chickens to me. Then again, maybe I'm not psychic at all, merely psychotic.

LATEST COOP POOP SCOOP

Dateline: Dawgranch, somewhere along Fetchit Drive this month, six former debutants came out once more in the technicolor parade of Aurucana testimonies to a new level of maturity in pastel shades from lilac to sage. In just the short span of three weeks they have hit the three eggs a day pace of maternal extrusion. I have notified the egg eaters who have taken an interest in their development that they are welcome to help themselves up to the last three eggs in the collection basket. And we’re off …

With any intention there comes analysis of progress according to even the most nebulous of plans; if that intent is of an ex-engineer who enjoyed analyzing data in matrices for patterns, like myself, you employ something similar to the nearly completed first page of egg size and color per hen plus her choice of time and nest for her latest issue.

Humorous anecdotes along the way are referenced by

the asterisks on the first month’s egg chart above.

* Positive identification of the hen and the time: I looked in just as Shiva shuddered her egg out and I heard it hit the box floor. I left her in her post laying trance. When I came back thirty minutes later I learned hers was the second in that nest and there was already a third egg warmer than hers, but I couldn't be surer who laid the second one, I was looking right in her glazed eyes at the time..

** Positive identification of the time: I heard someone call my name several times in a beckoning falsetto. I looked out along Fetchit Drive, got into a brief conversation with Hank of the Hennery and then checked the egg nests since I was out in the sprinkle anyway. There was this egg as fresh as they come — has one learned to cackle my name?

Ongoing research into improved mobility seems headed for the time when I begin letting them free range. With the roost and nesting boxes the only functioning part of the rig, there’s little reason to move the whole thing to greener pastures. Another case of perceived necessity being obviated by inevitability.

•

Addendum: As a sign of the individual shifts to more home based food sources I offer this example in obtaining 100 pounds each of layer mash crumbles and hen scratch a month and a half ago for $25 compared to the $40.50 I paid yesterday for the same thing. The real question here is, is this representative of individuals changing their food source or my local feed store predicting a trend and heading it off like any greedy capitalist would with their 62% increase of the cost gouging those with the intent of going independent of chicken factories? My guess is: the probabilities are against my better wishes.

WHEN IT RAINS IT POURS … EGGS!

After the worst heat wave and drought on record this summer, two days of rain around autumn equinox flooded the Dawgranch with six inches of relief. Tomatoes I hadn’t pulled up rebloomed, the three remaining okra dwarfs burst out with three buds where only one would normally be, the puny Serrano plants are drooping from so many new peppers, there’s a lawn where I spread grass seed in the wake of the chicken tractor and — the chickens have cooled off enough to lay their first eggs.

I have no way of knowing which of them are contributing short of a motion detector/surveillance camera rig, because I still cannot tell the sex of any of the six birds I feed and observe every day. Their combs are all very undeveloped compared to the older hens free ranging for a couple of years, but otherwise they are slimmer versions of their seniors. Maybe I didn’t get any roosters. I guess a cock-a-doodle-do ringing out some dawn will settle that.

NOT A ROOSTER IN SIGHT

CAN YOU TELL THEY'RE GREEN?


EMBRYOS ABOUT TO JOIN MY GALAXY


THE FOUR EGG OMELET I WAITED SIX MONTHS TO EAT
YUMMMMMMMM!

YODOODLES 4

Music: Baka Beyond — Ngombi

IT MUTHT BE THE VAPORTH BECAUTH THE MYTHED ARE SO THICK

The threshold was virtually tangible
As the aura of the action
A beacon beckoning attraction
Spiced the night air so frangible
Drawing awe from all those who saw
What they were told/wanted to see saw
A martyr speaking words quite hangible
About love and the greedy to those who have not
Promising a hybrid car in every lot
Band-aid on harm to nature grown gangible
Dopes the gap in the myth for now
But Monsanto has new fields to plow
Helping civilized gangs be more fangible
Chewing up earth like they’re fighting
Offering up their necks for the biting
For the masters, bending over, ever so bangible

They shan’t have my ass

I grow my own food
In an ancient car hood
And a barrel that used to hold oil
A tangerine tree
And six chickens for me
And a hammock treating me royal
A babbling brook
The cat naps in my nook
I seem active minus the toil
Sir David’s camera speeds up the plants
As in my slowed down garden gazing trance
When they too do seem to so actively dance

As in its time this myth too shall pass
While all its dupes remain quite harangible
Mister Natural - R. Crumb

STATE OF THE COOP POOP

The six, over four month old Auracana chickens have continued to grow in size and beauty as their plumage varies day to day through a spectrum of from never-quite-black deep russet red through a palomino butt (or psilocybin button) golden orange to the palest of cadmium yellow, all flecked with graceful long dark ovals on each thin, otherwise pale neck and back feathers running down and draping over the sides of the rump at the base of the tail. They remind me of the spots Dax’s hosts wore. They grace Erica as well. The colors catch fire when first ignited by the direct beams of the lighter that smokes us all. They will look like plump old hens someday, but for now they resemble nothing more than wild game birds, slim and quick and flapping four feet into the air doing the chest bump. No sexual determinations here in their 18th week, but Nameless One has sprouted some extra long tail feathers!


She/he has also developed a milder case of the cross beak mismatch that devastates Fucluck’s ability to grasp leaves, or seeds on hard surfaces. Although slight at first, use has forced the lower half further out of contact with the upper tip, which itself seems to becoming hooked like Fucluck’s or a predator from lack of mutual support during the incessant pecking at everything. In the long run I think the hook may come to serve as a scoop as they all learn to deal with their environment.


Although I have moved the coop four times since the run was completed ten weeks ago, I have yet to let them leave the run, they have great excitement in keeping up by running with the run as it rolls to new grass and bugs. I don’t plan to let them out to free range until they have gotten used to using the laying boxes for a couple of months so they’ll know where to take that urge, and then let them out only a few hours before roostlight when I can be sure Donna’s dogs are locked up and I can know they’re all aroost when I lock them up before the dogs again are free.


If the title of this post were literal I'd spend it talking about the wonderful addition to the compost the poop laden alfalfa hay I add when I clean up the leavings at the old spot and the floor of the hen's pent house, but I am so discouraged with the garden devastation in the drought this summer there's nothing more good I can say about that. But … how 'bout them chickens!



Although daily contact has made us familiar with one another such that they will all now, in their new maturity, let me pet them, Black Jack remains the most gregarious one by far. Nameless One likes to jump up behind me and peck at the back pocket button. It reminds me of an old cartoon, Smilin' Jack, whose fat friend was always accompanied by a hen that ate the buttons he popped off his shirts. The familiarity has spread to their constant companion and keeper-away-of-all-dogs-but-Ella, Priest, who now, instead of reaching an entire arm in through the chicken wire holes to reach the naive younger, peeping, cuddly chicks to … ahem … pet them, now is greeted at the wire by several who peck gently at the paw he raises for them, careful to keep it on his side. It’s affection on both sides. They are further beyond being predator/prey than one of my neighbor is with rest of the world, fer sher!

THE "GIRLS?" AT 15 WEEKS

What can I say? Although time is an invention of history buffs and hope fiends, I have little doubt about the natural existence of constant change as evidenced by the six growing chickens I've been observing to be different every cycle of the sun. In none of those days were they the same nor did they exhibit any characteristics of being roosters; No comb, no spur, no exotic colors in their tails. In the consistanly 100-105°F temperatures these days, I've taken to misting them from the garden hose around 3pm when they're panting for air. These guys are at the midway point between three and four months old and could begin laying eggs any day now — they even cluck now instead of peep.

I am so enamored of them and the whole process of caring for them by hauling the rolling Hank's Hennery to new grassy pastures every couple of weeks that I am building a section on my website exclusively for my babies. Below is my preliminary intro to it.

If I can't say something good about my summer garden, I shan't say anything at all — which is all I am going to say about that. How 'bout those chickens?

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Time is required for language to tell the story of the experiences contained within the immesurable minuteness of the instant of now. We observe it all and admit only that which we can tell ourselves about.

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I want to mention that the music to the video is by Deep Forest's album, Boheme, and to recommend watching their uplifting video, Sweet Lullabye.

HANK'S HENNERY

The first dawn on the completed run for the now seven week old burgeoning chicks, halfway to the age of egg laying found them already up at the crack of false dawn a good hour earlier. With the exception of incorporating the rolling mechanism the plans below have been completed leaving only the preservation of the wood by painting it to dissolve into the loquat background using Hunter Green, Sunlight Yellow, White and Black for camouflage.



As for the chick’s development, no matter how we might speculate on the outcome, none of the babes seem to be sporting rooster characteristics such as aggression, larger size and comb or spurs. Could we have chanced on six layers?

Until I sat with them I considered the gushing reports I read on line of their entertainment qualities to be a bit on the “I CAN HAS CHEEZEBURGER” side. There are many interlacing patterns to the behavior of these motherless orphans who I seem to have taken under my wing as they imprint on me with exploratory pecks and perchings and poopings upon. My flute sends them running to the farthest corner. The most interesting aspect to date is the seemingly simultaneous, unanimous mood changes from all getting together to preen, dust-bathe, sleep, bug pick each other, drink, or eat from the feeder to each putting as much distance as possible between themselves and the others to peck and scratch on their own turf. The game is on if any one of them finds a bug big enough to be seen or stolen, which they seem more adept at than finding them in the first place. If there has ever been a classroom for studying genetic memory, this is one of them. I’m a happy man.