Quenching the thirst of popular discontent

...with all due respect to Alberto Fujimori and metalepticfit.

It's a cold, rainy day here in the wilds of South Jersey, a nice day for lazing about indoors and catching up on a little LJ. It's that time of the month, again...the online poker bonus money marathon, so this week I've not done a lot except sit around the house and play poker online. The little bonus I get for that here in mom's house is that I take my laptop to the couch and watch TV while I play, which I believe has not horrendously negatively impacted my game, so that's okay. My mom likes to watch CNN and the Weather Channel, and I like to watch whatever mix of syndicated West Wing, crime dramas, and sitcoms are around, so we get a nice mix of mindless information and mindless entertainment going on in the house. I also see a surprising number of Register.com commercials. It's weird, because I get a slightly uncomfortable feeling inside; it's like seeing something in the real world that I only dreamed about, or something like that.

In any case, the major exception to my housebound, sedentary lifestyle was yesterday's low-tech adventure. We started by hauling a load of wooden bushel-baskets to the upper loft area (the "haymow") of a barn. Next came the hauling of a couple of antique spinning wheels, piece by piece, down from the loft of a different barn. This was made slightly more exciting by two things: a treacherous ladder, and various poultry roaming around. In the off-season, the village lets the poultry run free, which in this case includes several chickens and two large, quite pretty turkeys. The turkeys are reportedly quite friendly, but I find them incredibly intimidating. I don't know how many of you have spent time with turkeys, but there are some creepy noises that come out of those birds. The "gobble gobble" noise, aside from being the pleasent, almost comical call I'd expect, actually comes off to me as a threatening, nigh-linguistic ululation. They also, and I had no idea that turkeys did this, emit this strange popping noise, a sort of weird pneumatic pressure-release sound. Like "puff!" but scary. They saunter around, having apparently little fear of humans, gobbling and puffing, strutting their puffed-up feathers and dense, coiled anatomies...I don't know. They look pretty dangerous to me. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that I stood around for a while chanting a falsetto "Turkey turkey turkey!" like a real dickhead. Ah, life on the farm.

The final activity, by far my favorite, was a couple hours of "cutting cane," which is harvesting the stalks of last year's sorghum crop from the field and hauling them out to the mulch piles. Sorghum stalks are basically the size and shape of corn stalks, but they are much denser, fibrous, and woody, making them more difficult to plow under without pretreatment. My tool for hacking down the stalks was a "corn knife," which, excitingly, is like a machete-sized khopesh, for you D&Ders out there. We're talking a machete here, but the bladed edge is curved inward toward the end. I walked up and down the sorghum rows, hacking away like a jungle explorer and occasionaly carrying an armload of stalks off the field into the appropriate stacks forming at the end of the field. I again appreciated the Zen-like state of a raw, physical labor, and I like the feeling of being outdoors in the sun, working the field, and swinging my corn knife around. It all felt very rustic and manly. Today, of course, I'm nursing sore muscles and blisters on my hands, so...that's what you get.

I do admit that I get occasional visions of myself growing into a new kind of person from these experiences: leaner and buffer, standing in my overalls, straw hat, work boots and gloves with one foot perched on a log, chewing on a sprig of hay, surveying the fields under the red light of a setting sun, squinting into the horzion, tamping out my corncob pipe, thinking to myself, "Ayuh. Good weather tomorrow. Gonna be a good crop." Generally, I then go home and spend the evening playing online poker on my laptop, so...the image tends to fade. Still...it's a good vision.

In other news...I'm largely staying out of other news. The big deals these days appear to be the school schooting in Minnesota, and the seemingly never-ending Terri Schiavo ordeal. I had my say on mass school shootings back in the day (which I think I might still have around somewhere...if there's interest, I can repost it; this was way before LJ). I've generally kept out of the Schiavo deal, too, my views on protein sacks being sort of old and tired at this point. I would, however, like to point out this neato Fanatical Apathy post from Adam Felber. It's not really about Schiavo; it's more about this guy Randall Terry, and it's a fascinating tale and good reading to boot.

That's it for now. Peace out, party people.