Farm News 10-28-07

Sunday morning, after chores, 44°

Barn News

Last Sunday the little bunnies went to Wellsville and back with Alice and Zella, our four year old grandnieces. Four year olds travel well if they each have a small bunny to hold while they ride. The bunnies had a grand time and told Suzette all about it when they got back. Suzette was unimpressed, she's used to her bunnies having adventures.

The ducklings aren't snuggling under their mother any more and their mother seems tired of their company, so I let her our. There were no complaints, the ducklings have more to eat and the mother has the company of adult ducks again.

I've started uploading pictures to Flickr, but I'm not real happy with the process. Already, though, you can see Christmas in November, and Bebe Goose.

I'm listening to Mixing of particulate solids radio3 in Bratislava, Slovakia, as I write; they're playing a long set of the Reich/Metheny/Kronos Quartet concert in Carnegie Hall.

From Our Correspondent in Cambodia

I'm still here. I'm just busy. I'm sorry to hear that things are boring there. I guess that's why I'm here: anything goes. What you got there is security. What I got here is freedom. Freedom is a lot more fun than security. In fact, I'm toying with the idea of moving into the Freedom Hotel. There's a bunch of young ladies trying their best to help old white men enjoy their stay. They like young white men also, but they are fond of old white men: they pay well and are easier on the merchandise.

I hung out on the beach last night for the sunset. They insisted I stay for the fish barbeque. The fish was good and reasonable ($2).

English spoken with a Scottish brogue is impossible for me to understand. Put some amplified music in one ear and Scottish in the other and nothing intelligible comes through.

Ah! 6:15 in the evening and it has decided to rain torrentially. I love this place. A couple of nights ago someone lit up a trash fire on this corner of downtown. He won't do it tonight.

I was heading out for lunch and some ladies called to me from a restaurant near my hotel, inviting me to have my lunch with them. One lady made me an indecent proposal. It's the little things like that that make a place interesting.

Monday I make a run for the border to some place no one has ever heard of to get a business visa so I can stay indefinitely. Now I'm living downtown. I finally found Victory Hill. There are some nice places to live up there and a lot of nice girls to help live it up up there. I can't think of any place else I'd like to live at this time. I don't think I'm ready for the Retirement Ranch.

Ray, take a look at the Green Gecko guest house. The have internet service and their rates seem low enough for a retired gentleman of modest means to live out his few last years in comfort.

My First Apartment

My first apartment, without roommates or overseer, was in the basement of an older house west of East High School in Wichita. I had been living in barracks for the past three years, and was ready for some privacy. It began as a gloomy hole in the ground, but bamboo curtains and India prints on the walls and ceiling brightened it up. A couple of lamps in corners behind the India prints, rugs and pillows on the floor, cool jazz on the super stereo, and a neat sports car in the drive, the year was 1958, I was 21 and ready to be a college student.

Being a college student meant seducing college girls. The Greek was a maiden, or close to maiden, whom I lured into my lair. Ah! She was beautiful! Carolyn was tall, athletic, red hair, pretty, and lost. She stood in the middle of the floor one evening, full of Southern Comfort and Nietzsche, nude, revolving slowly, an incarnation of a great Greek statue, and she became, “The Greek,” one who had already danced before the bulls in Crete. Then my entire life focused into one tight point: the point of the intersection of our lusts.

I remember her body, but never with clothing. In my memories she is always nude, erect, elegant, and beautiful; not in bed or panting with passion. Our lovemaking could well have been carved into marble. We were lovers, not because we were in love, but because we felt we were supposed to be lovers. Ours were the passions of English and Art History majors. Actually, I was in Philosophy and she was in P.E., but we were both in our first year of college, and we wanted to feel like English majors.

Floyd was my closest, perhaps my only, friend at that time. We were pledge brothers, i.e., we became fraternity brothers in the same year. We liked women, Southern Comfort, jazz, Howl by Ginsburg, and On the Road by Kerouac. We began wearing more and more black clothing, and found less and less of the world tolerable.

He had a girlfriend, too, several of them, in fact. One of them came with her resume printed as the centerfold in a men's magazine. She was pretty exotic. She said she was trying to get away from her husband, who bought her from her parents for $300 when she was 15. Two years later, at 17, Floyd found her; she was a 4' 10” package of hard-driving sex appeal; and at less than $4 per pound, I thought she was a hell of a bargain and didn't blame her husband for buying her.

We weren't into group sex or anything kinky, we were just into lots of sex. What can I say, “The hormones made me do it?” Damn right they did, and I turned myself over to their demands without a whimper. The basement had two bedrooms, on weekends The Greek and I occupied one and Floyd and whazzername the other. We came out of the bedrooms occasionally to drink more Southern Comfort, play a reading by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, smoke a cigarette, and start thinking about going back to bed. This was good high quality college debauchery, by golly.

It never lasts for long. Whazzername decided to stay with her husband because he needed her or something. Her farewell was operatic and included several quick trips to the bedroom with Floyd for a quickie so she would have the strength to go through with this. I've never noticed a lot of sex giving much strength of any sort, other than smell, of course. Finally, though, she left, straightening her makeup as she went out the door, and The Greek, Floyd and I all breathed deep sighs, The Greek's a sigh of hopelessness, Floyd's a sigh of relief, mine of sorrow because I never had the chance to bounce in bed with that sex bomb.

There were others. A troupe of student nurses who satisfied their need to help others by coming over mornings when they were off and I was in class. They had their own key, would let themselves in, clean the place top to bottom, drink a small glass each of Southern Comfort while listening to music, and leave shortly after I returned from class. I didn't have anything going on with any of them, but it was great for my self-image to come home from classes several times a month to find 3-5 nice, wholesome, young women in my sparkling neat and clean apartment, lounging around on the pillows on the floor, drinking Southern Comfort and listening to Ahmad Jamal.. Ask Janis Joplin, she'll tell you how good that is.

The Greek taught me a lot about classical sculpture. She was perfectly proportioned, when I looked at the statuary of Athens and Rome I saw abstractions of the woman at the focus of my consciousness.

When I think of that apartment, the thoughts are always accompanied by memories of The Greek. I don't remember anything about her clothing, in my memories she is always nude, gracefully moving through space, using her entire body to separate the air in front of so she could pass. It was an intense affair. Only descriptions of experiences remain, the now of it is gone forever. Then, she married someone; I think she was pregnant. She came to my apartment the last night, and after we had made love, she said, “I'm getting married tomorrow. This is our last time.”

She dressed, gathered up a few belongings, asked for and received a small porcelain elephant, and left. I never saw her again. I imploded. I wasn't ready for our affair to be over. Floyd visited only a few times a month, and the faint scent of The Greek drifted around in the air for several months, pheromones tingling my nerve endings.

Is this beginning to sound like some sort of Russian story? Those heart-wrenching, soul-searing Russian stories? Pah! Melodrama! But, at 21, there wasn't a lot of other stuff going on in the neighborhood. We were students, we acted like students, and we felt like students. The Greek, Floyd, and I were caught up in the space where students start acting a little crazy. We drank too much, we engaged in casual sexual relationships, we neglected our studies, and we committed sins which would stay in our consciences for the rest of our lives. Okay. If one is going to be a complete asshole, it's best to do it when everyone involved is young, and people will have time to recover from the wickedness. Also, your conscience then helps keep you from being that kind of asshole again.

Floyd went from his hard living 17 year old sex machine to Kate, a serious, sober student who insisted he spend less time at my place and more time in the library. He graduated a semester before I did and walked into a good job, married Kate and they had three daughters. Then he flipped his sports car and killed himself. Shit happens.

The elderly couple who lived above me moved out and a family moved in with a pre-school kid and a large dog. Every morning, seven days a week, at 6:00 am, the kid and the dog would start taking turns jumping off the top of the refrigerator, rolling large stones across the floor, and driving nails. After a few months of that I knew I had to leave, and, naturally, the perfect opportunity appeared: I moved into a dog and cat hospital.

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