Homemade Stuff

The dadblamed adjuster don’t know diddly about the real cost of sealing cracks in thirty-year-old concrete.  You heard me: the real cost.  Only what those soft-headed, clicker-handed youths call a noob would think that a little Quickrete and a trowel’ll do the job right.  Anyway, who in the Sam Hill’s gonna put part of an insurance settlement into a trowel?  The world’s full of flat and rectangular objects.  It was a shameless bilker of a by-gone day that started telling people to hand him money for a shingle with a handle.

No, I gave that agent what for when I heard his little spiel about a ten-ounce tube of mortar repair, and he showed his little scam for what it was when he flatly refused to spend a night in the yard in the half-buried pipe, to experience for himself what a “couple of cracks” would contribute to the tenor of his dreams.  He knew I was serious, because I even assured him that I’d chain up Patsy The Chicken for the duration of the night, and he knew (because I’d told him) that the chain made Patsy squawk like a peahen.

My advice: when the water recedes from the abandoned railyard, and the local constabulary are finally so tired and distracted by trying to maintain the federally-imposed cordon around the federally-designated disaster area that they don’t pay much attention to the abandoned railyard so that you can slip back to your ancestral property to find that your very own domicile, the abode of one’s youth, middle age, and grand dotage has been filled to cracking with the worst parts of a 1973 Camaro, two tons of industrial sludge, a three-wheeled, Kroger’s shopping cart, rotting driftwood, and someone claiming to be Debbie Gibson, don’t bother filing a claim.  The insurance company will only send out one of their rotund dunderheads to hem and haw in classic dunderhead style before offering to let you pay an outrageous increase in your future premium in exchange for a ten-ounce tube of delusion and a slap on the back with a handled shingle.

A better idea is to grab a serviceable piece of driftwood and beat that Debbie Whoever-She-Is until she cleans out the pipe and then gets the Jessie Helms out of your yard.

And the cracks that are left behind?  I recommend a mixture of bentonite, spittle, straw, and vomit—a resilient building composite taught to me by a maternal uncle who was raised by yellow warblers.

Action item!  You are not what you be.  Do, don’t underdo or overdo or, especially, arounddo.  Throughdo is okay.  Do and throughdo, you can get away with those.  But, whatever you do or throughdo, remember that excellent is not an act but an adjective.  Resolve to do the best person you can are:

1. Repurpose your no-mind.

2. Proactivate your boldstore.

3. Eat some leafy greens for iron and potassium.

4. Streamline the trajectory of your intracognitive innersight so that it effects (not affects, but effects) mutually empowering streams of kineti-vision.

5. Inventory your persevection index daily.

6. Cough.

7. Never go to bed angry.  Instead, repurpose that anger on the nearest creature that can feel pain until you’re so tired you’d rather just collapse in the dirt beside the swimming puddle to wait for another spiteful sun to rise.

When you pick up certain bacteria in the water you drink or if you eat using plates and utensils that haven’t been washed properly or breathing in the dust rising from the feces left behind by the vicious guard chicken, Patsy, that’ll do it.

Or, sometimes you spin around too much and too fast, or if a concrete railroad tie falls on your head while you’re building a berm against the rising waters of Kilowatt Lake and you get a concussion.  Concussions will make you vomit.

Blood can make you vomit, at times.  Your own blood, especially.  If you gash your leg deeply with a rusty railroad spike you’re using to dig a bed for your dwarf lily bulbs, you can really vomit then.  And if it’s a head wound combined with a concussion, watch out.  Vomit city.

People don’t really make you vomit, but some people can sometimes make you feel like making vomit noises and movements.  And when a person gets you to that point, you really might as well really vomit, because you’re just being disingenuous, otherwise.

Sometimes you vomit when you’re really, really tired.  You can crap yourself that way, too, sometimes.  Don’t carry a Franklin, potbellied stove on your back for twenty miles because you found it behind a foreclosed flea market and thought it would make the relentless social workers think you have heat.  You’ll get really messy, right around the SuperAmerica on rte 63b.  And the social workers won’t buy any explanations when you come stumbling into camp in that condition.

Several days ago, while on an afternoon reconnaissance on the south bank of Kilowatt Lake (you know the area: the spot where the industrial ooze comes to you with the distinct odor of brugmansia), I came across a cache of discarded railroad ties, sad in their lonely sand bar and plump with creosote.  The discovery felt to me like the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, and, after a brief hymnal in which I offered thanks and eternal devotion, I lugged the squared logs home.

Now, I gotta extract the creosote, and chloromethane has become blasted tough to find.

My mentor, the Right Honorable Commodore Grevious Habber Flugg (may he rest in the bosom of the stars), had a stash.  Fond are the scenes in my head of Commodore Flugg playfully spraying chloromethane about the floor of his butyl rubber plant, and of the delightful way he used to quiver on the floor and drool.

But the Blessed Commodore is gone the way of all the earth, and I am alone, the sole, remaining stake of the Commodore Flugg pavilion, and I’ve got all this inaccessible creosote and a stack of squared-off logs that are yearning to be blocked into the frame of a sweat lodge.

The stars that keep Commodore Flugg’s ethereal spirit are not kind.

It was yesterday.  The mid-Spring sun was just clearing the horizon, glancing its rays off the heavy mist spread like white, lugubrious honey on the abandoned railyard in South Montrose, North Dakota.  The air was chill.

I was thinking of the sands of Iwo Jima as I clambered out of my half-buried, concrete sewer pipe to face the morn, bitter as a moldy turnip.  In my thoughts, misty like the morn itself, the abandoned railyard and the world beyond it felt like a song I hadn’t ever heard.  I did my toe-yoga.  My stomach grumbled as I chewed on a moldy turnip, ruminating on the vicissitudes of life.  The sun paid me no mind.

Past the swimming puddle—the skating puddle for most of the year—past Patsy on her chain, pecking vehemently at the ground as if there might be chicken feed there for the pecking, past the pile of tin cans and the strips of truck tires, past the cola sign from the days of certainty, past the field that the government wired off for public safety, to the county route where styrofoam once grew like manna, I took my morning constitutional.

Furious the Railyard Dog was nowhere to be seen.

The blacktop warmed beneath the sun and my feet.  Treasures of the night before floated by in the sea of tall grass on either side, empty bottles, Red Plum coupons in thick sheets, a rusted sprocket from goodness-knows-what.  Don’t know how I overlooked that on constitutionals gone by.

Then, jackpot.  A corner of poster paper caught my eye, a good thirty feet out.  ‘Twas folded into sixteenths, and when I peeled them all apart and spread them out, she gleamed at me a smile unmatched in its gleaminess.  The sun may as well have run for shame.

Whether I gazed at her for seconds or hours, I cannot tell (although the Cincinnati-Fargo B&O rolled by shortly after I got back to the abandoned railyard, so it was probably minutes).  When my consciousness returned from its swim in her teeth, I folded the dame carefully into the sixteenths that one before me had creased, and I returned her to the earth.

I did think of bringing her to the half-buried, concrete sewer pipe I call home.  But how could I slap her to the curved concrete of my domicile using old gum scratched from the underside of a discarded church pew I stumbled across in the landfill?  (In this economy, who can afford tape?)

She belonged in a matted pile of undergrowth under the morning mist.

April ain’t the cruelest month.  March is the kind of month that starts with titty-twisters and moves on to the serious stuff.

A few days ago, I go to sleep in the crusty bottom of my half-buried, concrete sewer pipe in the railyard, like a normal person, and I wake up to the sound of a rusty bugle bein’ blown by what turned out to be a skinny Scotsman with an unfortunate skin condition that was exacerbated by the frigid breath of a pre-dawn, March railyard in South Dakota.  I know he was a Scotsman because he yelled Aye! when I gave him a titty-twister.

The blasted International Ragpickers Convention was in town.  They camp out at the railyard every year, and every year I forget until I hear that dadgummed bugle.  Why they can’t hold this meeting someplace else, I’ll never know.  It’s March, ya half-boiled Maine lobsters, go someplace warmer.  Like Maine.

So, I set to swinging the trusty, rusty nine iron I won from Chi Chi Rodriguez back in ’68 when he couldn’t ingest the whole quart of motor oil (I know what Filament says about this, but there was enough oil left in that can to treat the mange on Furious the Railyard Dog, which is exactly what I did with it).  Wouldn’t you know it, before I’d bruised even eleven of those sack-wearing roller-ball-pens, they asked me to be the conference’s keynote speaker.  Just like that.  Whump.  Scream.  Whap.  Squeal.  Whop.  “Would you be the conference’s keynote speaker?”

Friends, what the gumball do I know about rag-picking, hm?  I got more self-respect than that.  I also know an opportunity when I see one.  Almost anything can be turned into a resume item if ya just put your mind to it.

So, I tucked the rusty, trusty nine iron into my pantleg (wanted to keep it handy, doncha know), and took my place at the podium to deliver my speech, entitled, “Seven Things I Wouldn’t Recommend”.  Hastily composed as it was, it failed to be a complete list.  I forgot completely not to recommend swimming in Kilowatt Lake, drinking used motor oil, and buying a car from Chuck Hutton Chevrolet, for instance.  Heck, if I’da been thinking a little faster, it mighta been fifteen or sixteen things.

But, friends, I didn’t forget not to recommend holding the International Ragpickers Convention in an abandoned railyard in South Dakota in March.  No siree.  And that advice didn’t fall on deaf ears, either, except in the case of the Deaf Ragpickers Working Group (which, you might as well know, actually wields a lot of power in the international organization).

I didn’t even have to pull out Chi Chi’s trusty, rusty nine iron, again.  Immediately upon the standing-o, that painted maypole Arvid Prattibal walked up to me and said they’d be schedulin’ next year’s conference for early May.

Which is fine by me.  I go to the Worldwide Guttersnipe Conference in Malvern, Iowa, every May.

First, How’s Wendell Willkie, then?

Second, put your money in cattle.  That there tape recording device ain’t never gonna get off the ground.

Third, I can too dance.

Fourth, I think you oughta record “Little Drummer Boy” at least one more time.  This time with that Eminem.

Fifth: Road to Kabul.  Whadya think?

Sixth, there ain’t no way I’m getting on that bus.