No man-made thing competes

 

What painting or portrait

gives beauty like the dawn?

No man-made thing competes

with what the Lord has drawn.

How to grow white mushrooms.

 (based on a news story by Christopher Mims, WSJ.)

I worked real hard over the years

 to afford a home on Lake Minnetonka. 

They don't go for nickels.

Still, once I was moved in

I felt that I had gotten a bargain.

The crystal blue water.

The soughing pines all around

my property.

On stormy nights the waves

slapping crazily on the rip rap.

Imagine my consternation, then,

when one morning I awoke

to find an ocean going vessel

run aground on my beach.

I called 911.

They sent the police.

The police sent for the 

Coast Guard 

from Duluth.

When they arrived

they told me it was

an automatically piloted

ship.

Autonomous,

they called it.

No skipper, no crew.

All done by FM signals

or some such thing.

But how,

I asked them,

did the blame thing get

onto a freshwater lake

and crash on my beach?

They shrugged their shoulders.

Coulda been a high tide

said one guy.

 "Thank you, Captain Peachfuzz"

I told him sourly.

It took 'em a month to get

the hulk towed off my beach.

By then it was Christmas.

I was all alone in my house

on Lake Minnetonka.

My family and friends

mostly didn't believe in

wearing masks.

So I didn't join them

for Christmas

or invite them over.

But Christmas Eve

there was another wreck on my beach.

This time it was a tanker,

filled with eggnog.

Autonomous again, so no crew.

The eggnog dribbled out of the tanker

and froze on the rip rip,

making everything smell of nutmeg.

But there was a stowaway.

I caught him creeping out of the tanker,

covered in eggnog and shivering.

"Come on in, friend" I told him.

"Nobody should freeze to death covered

in eggnog."

I had to help him inside. He was almost gone.

I washed him up and put him to bed.

Then sat in the living room by the

lighted Christmas tree, reading

Martin Chuzzlewit.

The next morning when I 

went into his room

he was gone.

He didn't leave a note

or anything.

Just three lumpy woolen socks

and an open can of Vienna Sausage.

When they finally got the tanker

hauled off my beach it was spring.

The eggnog killed all the fish.

Must've contained alcohol.

I sold the house, my fine house,

to some Welch salvors. 

Then moved into a cave

to grow white mushrooms.

Photo Essay: Apartment Doors.

 

The Dry Places

 

He opened the rock, and the waters gushed out; they ran in the dry places like a river.

Psalm 105:41

No stone can withstand His touch

Rock into water will flow

And my arid heart shall rejoice

with green jubilation aglow

Not of this World.

 

(Special thanks to Matt Privratsky for the original idea on Twitter.)

So I went on vacation for a week in August. 

No big deal, right?

When I got back 

someone had weeded my front lawn

and trimmed the edges along the sidewalk.

And planted mushrooms --

because I never had mushrooms before

on my front lawn.

Dandelions and creeping charlie,

sure,

but never mushrooms.

But there they were --

big as life.

I asked around the neighborhood,

to see if anyone knew anything about 

it.

Everyone was silent as the tomb --

but they all looked pretty worried

at the same time.

One of my neighbors,

old Mrs. Henderson,

actually began to sob

when I asked her if she knew

who had been monkeying with my lawn.

"I dasn't tell you" she moaned.

"They'll kill me."

Double-yew, Tee, Eff --

something screwy was going on.

Of that I was sure.

But I had to wait six weeks

to find out what it was.

A shake-down is what it was.

The mushrooms in my front lawn,

which I had sprayed with poison

and lashed with weed whackers,

and which would not go away,

suddenly got up on their hind legs

one fall morning and marched into 

my living room.

"We demand surrender or you will suffer"

said the lead mushroom, in a mushy kind of voice.

"Give us gold and silver if you want to survive" 

the damn thing continued.

"Get outta here!" I yelled at them. 

"We are mushrooms from far away in the galaxy"

intoned the head mushroom. "We will destroy you."

I snatched 'em all up, put 'em in a pot, and made

cream of space alien mushroom soup. 

I gave a bowl of it to Mrs. Henderson.

She said it was real good, but needed more

cream.

Huh. More cream. Does she think I'm made 

out of money?

That's the last time I save the Earth for some

picky old lady.

Torku from stories in today's Washington Post.

 

Police brutality, voting rights, racial justice: Echoes from 1963′s March on Washington.

a perennial weed

cannot say I'm sorry;

it only spreads

with neglect.

The idea of serving chopsticks is a radical change from China’s usual practice of family-style eating, where people don’t order individual meals but instead get numerous dishes to share, thinking nothing of putting their personal chopsticks in the communal plate and then in their mouth and then back into the plate.

communal thought

blossoms in China;

but not communal

chopsticks.

A professional organizer shares ways to downsize an aging parent, without the drama.

a whited sepulcher

gets no respect

from its children --

only brown cardboard.

Rest in the Lord

 

Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for him . . . 

Psalm 37:7

Wait upon the Lord each day/to find your golden mean and stay.

His rest is unlike man's repose/It's peaceful joy in soft meadows.

Crazy Henry: Journalist

 

CRAZY HENRY: JOURNALIST.

Why should I have been surprised when Crazy Henry, my only friend left from childhood, told me he had become a reporter? The man lived a charmed and chaotic life, guarded over by some fairy godmother with a hangover.

We were shucking corn in his kitchen for a homeless shelter, saving the husks so Crazy Henry could make dried apple and corn husk dolls to give to his nieces and nephews at Christmas. I'd seen him make them before; ugly, misshapen gargoyles that would scare the pants off Boris Karloff.

And out of the blue he says: "I just got a job as a reporter on the Fergus Falls Sentinel."

I didn't bother to reply. Sometimes Crazy Henry will say things just to get a rise out of me, like "I'm going to the Moon next Tuesday," or "Didja hear? They've created a Peter Sellers clone."

Or wait. No, that's not correct. I'm the one who tells him outrageous things from time to time to see if he'll take the bait. That's right -- I should have been the one to say I was going to become a reporter.

But it was Crazy Henry who said it. I waited for more, which I was sure would be forthcoming. Crazy Henry has to talk when he works with his hands. His doesn't like to listen to music or watch CNN -- he likes to shuck corn or shell peas and talk. Once, when I was helping him pull weeds, he recited Hamlet's soliloquy in Ebonics. So I just waited.

Sure enough, he went on: "See, my aunt here in the city, the one that was mayor for a while before they kicked her out, she got me the job cuz she said she was worried I was being stifled by my surroundings and lack of intelligent friends."

"Now wait just a darn minute . . . " I began, but he just kept going.

 "She knows the publisher of the Fergus Falls Sentinel, so she set me up as their new high school sports reporter. I start this weekend. The high school has a big caber toss competition on Saturday."

"Well congratulations" I told him. "What are you going to do with your apartment here in the city -- and by the way, what the hell is a caber toss?"

But instead of answering my questions he went and got a copy of the Fergus Falls Sentinel, and we forgot about the corn to read it together.

"There's no funnies" I said critically. "Can't be a real newspaper without Hi and Lois."

"But look at this" he said. "It's called 'Pet of the Week.' Ain't that a cute little puppy?"

"Bah" I replied scornfully. "That's strictly social media stuff. Do they have any hard-hitting news? Any scandals or double suicides, stuff like that?"

"Here's an article on how to waterproof your clothesline."

"Fiddlesticks!" I told him.

Then the van came to pick up the corn.

***************************

I drove Crazy Henry up to Fergus Falls on Friday, because his car was in the shop. The editor met us at the old brick newspaper building and showed Crazy Henry where his desk was and where he would be sleeping until he could find his own place -- a cot in the basement next to some rusty tanks of carbolic acid.

"We used to use the carbolic acid to mix with lamp black to make our own printing ink" explained the editor. "But now we buy it direct from China -- saves a lot of money."

"Can I get right to work, chief? I'm rarin' to go!" asked Crazy Henry eagerly.

The editor smiled indulgently at Crazy Henry, then handed him a sheaf of papers.

"Here's tomorrow's regional weather forecast from the NOAA. See if you can come up with a two-hundred word rewrite."

I never saw Crazy Henry so excited in my life. He sat at his keyboard for an hour, happy as a bivalve, while I wandered around the newspaper office, which seemed to be completely deserted except for an elderly lady in a side office who was knitting.

He finally showed me his rewrite, which read, in part: Small disturbances in the mesosphere will lead to big problems for local peanut farmers today, as conditions ripen for a derecho of epic proportions. Better batten down the hatches and lock up your daughters . . .

"They don't grow peanuts around here" was all I told Crazy Henry. "They grow sugar beets."

"Peanuts sell more newspapers" he told me, so pompously that I said goodbye and drove back home. He'd be back in a week, I told myself: he couldn't write his way out of a paper bag.

But a month later the newspaper changed its format completely, to become an online dating service -- and they put Crazy Henry in charge of it. He gets a huge salary and stock options. Now he owns the biggest house in town and drives a used Lincoln Town Car.

In his spare time he runs the local 'Defund Garrison Keillor' campaign. He offered me a job up there as manager of the Fergus Falls Sentinel Antique Shop -- apparently they're selling off all the printing press equipment piece by piece as well as the carbolic acid carboys in the basement. Or maybe he wants to turn it into a museum -- I wasn't listening very carefully when he talked to me.  

I'd been evicted from my apartment and was shucking corn at the homeless shelter where I'm staying. I told Crazy Henry I'd think about his offer and get back to him. You never want to appear too eager when a job offer comes your way.

Torku from stories in today's New York Times.

 

Amazon.com unveiled Amazon Halo, a health and wellness tracker that the company said also tracks its users’ emotions

track emotions of a cactus

in the brittle sunlight of August

to impress the healthy green moss.

Using tax dollars to move whole communities out of flood zones, an idea long dismissed as radical, is swiftly becoming policy, marking a new and more disruptive phase of climate change.

a single shutter flaps in the silent breeze:

a green frog rests on a yellow lily pad on a sofa:

finches drown at their bird feeders.

New Video Shows Largest Hydrogen Bomb Ever Exploded

flying in the dark of day

a moth collapses on a cold ember

glowing sickish orange. 

As a sale of the National Enquirer collapses, some wonder if the tabloid is too hot to handle

a blue flame licks at the temple of folly:

as the weeds burn but are never consumed:

a muffled tocsin in the summer silence.

Congress left town and let jobless benefits lapse. Unemployed Americans say they won’t forget it.

The rich are a minority so small we hardly see 'em/trouble is, we all would very much just like to be 'em/And if we can't we toady to their ostentatious whims/while the poor and needy must make do with pious hymns/If Congress can't be bothered with the problems of a pauper/it's time their reelection plans all now should come a cropper!

Crazy Henry's Cure for Melancholy.

 

I was mourning the love I had for a woman long ago in my life. The tears welled up in my eyes, but instead of streaming down my cheeks they trickled down the inside of my throat -- scalding it.

Bam!

Someone had run full tilt into my front door. It was Crazy Henry; he always forgot that I kept my front door locked so he collided with it while trying to turn the door knob.

I was weary of his buffoonery, and thought to ignore him. But I knew he would not go away -- he would simply stand there patiently, sensing somehow that no matter how quiet my place was I was still inside of it.

So I let him in.

He bustled about like a dust devil, picking up magazines and throwing them down again; grabbing a handful of stale orange circus peanuts that I kept on the coffee table to discourage guests from staying too long; and rattling the Venetian blinds in a vain attempt to get them level.

"How's tricks, boychik?" he finally asked, settling into the rattan chair I had just brought in from the patio before the snows came.

Boychik. So he wanted to play Yiddish today . . . 

"Oy vey iz mir" I replied glumly. "I'm in mourning for a long ago lost love. She still haunts me."

Crazy Henry began to look truly concerned about my predicament, until he noticed that the Venetian blinds were still crooked. As he got up to go monkey with them again he said: "Let's go get something to eat -- that'll cheer you up. My treat."

I immediately shot out of my slump to stare at him open-mouthed. This was unprecedented; Crazy Henry never paid when we went out to eat. I always had to foot the bill.

But suddenly I resented his attempt to distract me from my melancholy. So I suggested we go eat at The Sisters, a very expensive deli and sports bar next to the stadium. That would put a monkey wrench in his fun factory.

"Okay" he said cheerfully. "I'll drive."

But when we got there, The Sisters was closed. On a weekday, yet. 

There was a sign in the window saying: 'We lost our lease."

"Let's try the Lebanese Grill over on Hennepin" Crazy Henry suggested.

But they were closed, too. The sign in the window said: "Closed by Order of the Secretariat." 

"Third time's the charm" said Crazy Henry, while I slumped lower and let my mind slide back into nostalgic misery.

"She loved Elvis Presley movies" I said morosely. "I hated them. Still do."

"Guess we can try a drive-through" said Crazy Henry hopefully.

But at Chik-fil-A the kid in the window said "We can't serve you without a ration sticker on your windshield."

Crazy Henry didn't believe in fighting against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, so he just turned to me to say: "I'll cook you a steak dinner; how about it?"

"Whatever." 

There was no meat at the supermarket. Instead there was a big banner saying: "Welcome Vegans to the Promised Land!"

This discouraged even Crazy Henry, who drove us silently back to his place where we had a bowl of popcorn with tap water to drink.

But the more Crazy Henry brooded the better I began to feel, until at last I slapped him on the back and told him happily:

"Here's looking at you, boychik -- and don't forget, we'll always have Orville Redenbacher."