Skip to main content

I Heart Fear

Written by steve warrington on . Posted in desire, oh life. No Comments on 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.

We’re Only In It For the Ladies

Written by steve warrington on . Posted in not worth publishing, oh life. No Comments on We’re Only In It For the Ladies

It’s pretty clear after the last week that among all of the couples I know,which admittedly is a godawfully small sample,  we’re really all only in it, men and women alike, for the women. Not to say that we men are total crap, but I think the consensus among us guys would be Yeah, we’re okay. But these women, my god!

Ancient wisdom handed down through the generations proclaims that it shall always be that one individual in a couple is favored by all over the other.  I am here to say that sadly this is true. And it ain’t the guy. Women are every time more interesting, more beautiful, more well-adjusted, more articulate, more energetic, more charming…

What has this world done to us men to make us so… awkward? And what would we do without our women to make sure that we maintain social ties? I know what you’re thinking. That the women like the men better and all is right and balanced in the end. But I don’t see it. No, the women are saved by one another. They are living a life of enlightenment and spirit thanks only to themselves, and they are only humoring us so that they can have their babies. It’s a wonder, given all this humor, that serious coitus is ever achieved and we manage to reproduce as a species at all.

So I say unto you, brothers, comrades, fellow ghosts in comparison, the next time you are together with both your woman and your friends look around you. You too will see it. We are outgunned. Outperformed. Outsmarted. Outdone. Outmanned. Know that this is true. Feel your fortune swell by her side. We have married up my friends, and we have done well.  And never forget, you men, that we may not look as good standing next to her, but we live a life we never could have earned on our own. For as a sage and married man once told me, it is always better to be lucky than to be better.

Crop Circles, Hieroglyphs, Mary

Written by steve warrington on . Posted in plants. 9 Comments on Crop Circles, Hieroglyphs, Mary

Some seductively dark watermelons caught my eye walking through the market  Saturday and I stepped to the stand to peep. I picked up the biggest and turned it over in my hands. The skin had a pattern etched into it. Whoa, look at this baby! Courtney was duly impressed. 

It looks like crop circles, I said, turning to the woman womanning the stall, Have you seen these? She bent over them, Yeah I think that’s a bug, she said, unimpressed. Look there’s more! The pattern was on all of them, to varying extents. I’m gonna buy this one just because of the pattern I told her, you should totally emphasize this, put these out front, they’ll sell like crazy, you’ll be a millionaire! Three bucks she said.

watermelon mosaic virus

I hefted it into the crook of my arm and we walked twenty feet and ran into a neighbor. Hey how’s it going, he said.  Look at this watermelon! I said.  Huh, cool, he said politely.  Have you ever seen anything like this? I persisted, Nature made this! He looked down at it again. Wow, he said. I had succesfully bullied him into affecting excitement. He’s a Lutheran, a professor of theology, I remembered later.  He was probably thinking something else made it.  Plus he’s quiet. But still. C’mon!

papaya ringspot virus

We left them to get some mushrooms. Check out this watermelon, I said to the woman weighing the mushrooms out for me. Oh wow! she said, properly impressed. Finally.  Looks like crop circles she said. Or a hieroglyph, I said.  I see the virgin in there she said. The market is one of the more social events of my week.  It goes without saying I think that I really ought to get out more.

It turns out it’s a virus, not a bug. It’s called watermelon mosaic virus. How it etches those mosaics onto the skin is beyond me, but my first thought was that I needed to infect every melon with the virus just to propogate the cool effects.  Courtney’s first thought was uh-oh, can we still eat it? It turns out the virus “reduces the number of fruit, and retards fruit maturity, but it has no effect on fruit size, weight, or edible quality.” She was relieved that we could eat it (as was I) but sadly I will have to find another way to become a millionaire.

I want to know but still can’t find anything about how a virus can etch a watermelon skin like that.Wasn’t I just saying something about a critter at the helm?  I’m not saying I belee, but dang if that don’t argue strong-ish.


Besoaked

Written by steve warrington on . Posted in desire, farming, gardening. No Comments on 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.

rain-banana-leaf-warrington

belee dat

Written by steve warrington on . Posted in oh life, writing. No Comments on belee dat

I watched the Biggie Smalls biopic “Notorious” last night. The Girl said it was amazing so I had to see it.  Plus that “Note- Note-, Notorious” clip in the trailer gave me goosebumps every time I saw it so of course the movie must be amazing am I right or am I right? Trailer producers are quite possibly the most gifted and fortunate filmmakers past or present. What amazing power to be able to take non-sequitur or even non-existent clips and create for potential viewers a soul-shuddering minute and a half of suspense, an ninety-second emotional rollercoaster… It is godlike this power. I never did see the Note- Note, Notorious scene in the movie.

But I digress. I really mean to talk about the moment in the movie when everything went sour, when Biggie and Tupac’s relationship took a 180-degree turn for the worse.  One minute they were BFF, and then suddenly, from out of nowhere, Tupac gets shot in the lobby of a Times Square recording studio and blames Biggie. Biggie’s voice-over attributes this shift to paranoia (one that the viewer was not previously keyed in to), and that may or may not have been true, but so suddenly? For whatever reason, the director chose to gloss over this pivotal moment, the moment that effectively created the east coast west coast rivalry that shaped the rest of the movie. And because that moment of weakness was located so close to the spine of the plot, everything that followed rang false.

The trickiest trick in fiction is delivering believability. Nine writers out of ten prefer to sacrifice credibility to a streamlined plot or some fantastic dialogue.  And then nine out of ten crazy Hollywood people convince other crazy Hollywood people to spend thirty million dollars without giving serious weight to the question could this happen in real life. Could Tupac go from Biggie’s homie to his arch-enemy in 17 seconds? No. Did the director ask us to believe that he did?  Yes. And there’s the grub, as my friend Cookie says.

Not to say that uber-realism is the way to go. Because even fantasy works this way. If you can’t convince the audience that the aliens stayed in the detainee camp for twenty years then you’ve got a major hemorrhage in the plot and all your fictive energy is leaking out of it.

We all have complaints about this world: trick knees, the necessity of shaving, too-short days, etc, but what you can always appreciate is that it is utterly real. That the dialogue is felt, that the physics work, that the motives line up, that the timing is right.

We say the timing is wrong but we mean wrong for us. We say that so-and-so’s stupidity is inconceivable, but really, of all the features of this life, the one that has become so workaday and expected and able to be imagined is stupidity.  We say, when the dialogue is not felt, that the speaker has been watching too much bad TV. We say the pain is unreal but there is nothing more real than the sensation of pain. We say that someone’s perversity knows no bounds, that it is infinite, but this is hyperbole. These characteristics are as limited as we are and we may be legion but we are finite as hell. There is nothing of this world that is not of this world, except for our lame attempts to represent it.

And then there’s nothing more real and more human than our subsequent testing of this representation. It’s everywhere this test, it can be applied to every little thing: it’s what makes a good actor, if they seem to be speaking their lines from somewhere inside their chests; what makes a good company, that will at least attempt to add value alongside scraping the meat from our bones; good advertising, that entertains as well as demands brand fealty; good folks, that can reign in id for a little bit of superego; good life, with a little slog through the mud before an ascent to the top; good metaphysics, that suggests that there may possibly be some critter at the controls tweaking my storyline but stops short of promising that the lambs will lay down with the lions.

It’s a discipline this believability, and it’s much harder to pull off than it at first seems. But we wouldn’t buy any of it if it didn’t pass the test.

Fat Blog

Written by steve warrington on . Posted in not worth publishing. No Comments on Fat Blog

I forgot to pack my swimsuit for our visit to Courtney’s parents, and talk of the pool started up and I started backing out.  My shorts, you see, were a bit tight thanks to the summer of travel food and happy happy 4-martini evenings watching the recommended 30 Rock (I miss my Arrested Development) and the Roadhouse takeout party nights. Hey, it ain’t easy being partner to a pregnant lady

It was midafternoon hot and the missus went down to the pool and I bowed out: I just don’t think I want to, I said. Instead I went to our room and read her sister’s snowboarding magazine.  But after five minutes of guys dropping in over fifty-foot cliffs and “I was shredding that pipe and it was sick” I said screw this. I put on my too-tight shorts and went down to the pool. I took off my shirt and I said Ya know, sometimes, ya just gotta rock the muffin-top. and I looked at Courtney’s mom and I said Joan, this one’s for you, and I cannonballed into the pool.

Vegetable Porn

Written by steve warrington on . Posted in desire, food. No Comments on 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).

watermelon

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

white-eggplant

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:

chocolate-stripe-heirloom-tomato

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.

Little Shop of Horrors: Garden Full to Burstin’ (not Ellen)

Written by steve warrington on . Posted in farming, food, gardening, plants. No Comments on Little Shop of Horrors: Garden Full to Burstin’ (not Ellen)

It’s mid-August and things are really heating up around the garden. I’ll pick my first ripe tomato tomorrow, I’ve got more cucumbers than I can deal with, and the pumpkins and gourd vines are threatening to swallow the house.

Despite all the shade I stupidly failed to foresee in the back yard, I did manage to get the passiflora to bloom. Unearthly as usual:

passiflora

Things are getting interesting down at the farmer’s market too. I spoke with the guy I bought my many many heirloom tomatoes from last year and he said he’d be setting up his full display next week.

I bought a couple watermelons from Tantre Farms, just because they were beautiful and caught my eye. A Tigger Melon, and another melon I don’t know the name of. Check it:

IMG_6145

and it:

watermelon