inside the box
To Collect Something or Everything
I like lots of pretty things, but I don’t officially collect anything. Not seriously at least. I often think it might behoove me to get serious about something, except that I am bad at being single-minded for long. I am great at short intense bursts of interest, but the idea of studying the esoterica of philately or the ephemera of numismatics for the rest of my life seems dreadfully boring. I just don’t consider any one thing important enough to warrant my attention for so long, and prefer to live a collage of assembled shells and books and rocks and plants and bones and vegetables and websites and foods and cetera.
I’m not sure that breadth of knowledge trumps depth however. Is there an objective answer to this one?
I Heart Fear
I took Rosie to a haunted House in Taylor tonight. The Scream Machine. We both were really hoping for a good scare.
We started off walking into a pitch dark room with the door slammed behind us. Rosie squeezing my one hand for dear life I felt along the wall for the way out with the other. I was systematic, rational, not this wall, not this corner, was that a footstep? there’s probably someone in here, they’re going to scare us, okay, not this wall, not this corner, and then my searching hand palmed a cheek. Holy shit! And the room started pitching and yawing and banging. A light went on and there was a dead girl standing in the corner. The light went out. The light came on and she was inches from Rosie’s face. The light went out and came back on and she was inches from mine. The light went out and she was in another corner. Creepy good.
It was quality scary but I was still in control. We walked the labyrinth, black lights, a vortex tunnel (like a cement mixer you walk through, lit black, painted walls, and a bridge in the middle for you to walk on — totally disorienting, makes you want to lean off in the direction of the spin), and creepy guys popped out and screamed at us, but you quickly adapt to that. Then 3/4 through, a grisly room with bloody walls and body parts everywhere, and the strobe light started and two scary things started chasing us and the walls started bending (strobe light) and we couldn’t find the way out then, THEN! my brain started coming loose a little.
That there is my second favorite feeling in the world, when my senses start to fail, when I can’t trust what I’m seeing or feeling, when I know I’m safe but I’m not at all sure what is real, when my environment becomes so startlingly disorientingly confusing that it is all I can do to shuffle slowly forward my eyes peeled a mile wide my hands outstretched waiting for whatever it is next to happen to me. That is total receptivity, that is wideopenness, that is god on the edge right there in a converted retail space in a sad forgotten strip mall next to the Gibraltar Trade Center on Eureka rd. in Taylor, MI. for $15 admission per person.
Short lived as a walk through a haunted house may be, it is probably way better for your brain than LSD. And way legaler.
Besoaked
It’s been raining nearly non-stop for the last two days, and the temperature won’t get over the mid-sixties. I’ve got dozens of tomatoes I’m dying to pick but they just sit there on the vine: plump, green, and tempting. The very picture of refusal. I spent a morning working in the garden at Good Fatherers yesterday and it was the same deal: six, seven, eight maybe hundred pounds of tomatoes weighing down three hundred plants, and we picked less than eighty pounds. I never thought I would be the one saying this, but I could really really use a really really hot sunny day. Just one.
Vegetable Porn
There’s something especial about the turn my sublimation has taken this late summer, something especially dramatically vegetable. It’s no surprise that tomatoes have got me breathing heavy thanks to my falling down the heirloom rabbit hole last late summer. But now it’s spreading.
Tigger melons I bought last week just because I heard their siren’s call, their stripes radiant sunsets and me all photosensitive. And another watermelon because it’s skin got me nostalgic about the brain coral I had brought home from St. Croix a month ago. But it turns out all watermelon have skin that complicated, I’ve just never noticed it before (though the darker ones are far more seductive, there is no no doubt).
We just got home and the neighbor we split our share from the CSA with brought over a ten-pound at least bag of corn and squash and tomatoes and basil and an eggplant and watermelon and the eggplant is bone-white
and the watermelon has me sweating just looking at it. It may take a good bit of creativity to find ways to eat these things, but I can look at them all day long.
Then the first few heirloom tomatoes came in at the market, and I spent twenty bucks on love apples before I had blinked. Chocolate stripes and black ethiopians and green pineapples. I’m in deeper already than I was last summer and it’s still only mid-August. I’ve got more photos than pounds of tomatoes and I’m just not okay putting you through that here so I’ve started a new site just for tomatoes. If you’ve got a yen for heirloom tomatoes and a super-specialized and slightly weird and lustily vegetable libido then check it out. But if this:
kinda thing doesn’t do it for you, i.e. if you’re at all even in the head then don’t bother. check out illegal dojo instead. For it is there that yuks abound.
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