Next!

It's nearing 80° in metropolis. We found our way home through the network of streets, baking slow rotisserie-style in the black confines of our car Cubby. Bellies full of tuna melt from our favorite cafe, Lois the Pie Queen, aptly named for its fabulous sweet digs, though a sprite and melt always suits me fine leaving little room for yam or cream pie.

I'm a free man again, though you wouldn't know it the way I kowtow to my baby day in and day out. Yesterday I shook a few hands and wished the small company I was selling myself to a fond farewell. No more Dickies blue jumpsuits, gloves, and giant Lawrence of Arabia hat to block the sun. No more picking on non-natives that'll die and grow back next year. No more blue herbicidal mist cascading across steep stretches for the reception of a poor broom or gorse.

Let em live I cry...cry all our tears cry them all out now. Let them flow down and clean all the rivers. And the evening sky is the reason why I'm going driftless. We're the same people that miss the clean rivers our mothers swam and grandmothers drank. And yet this is our solution for habitat restoration~ herbicide treatment and the rare case of hand-pulling. And we do this with the complete knowledge that disturbance creates the ideal niche of invasive weeds. We know this as we tromp heavily weighted on steep sliding slopes. We work in wet ravines and in the rain leaving deep prints in the soil. Weeks later the treated plants brown and we look at our work and say effective. Six months later a barren circle where it once was; and, one year later a giant clump of thistle. It's replacement. Translocation. Favoritism. And, quite ineffective. Creating future work with present work. I'm out...

The good news: everything. The bad news: none. A few fresh checks in my pocket and a few interviews ahead for possible vocations. Battlestar Gallactica, the sweetest sci-fi show ever made (minus The Next Generation) is on tonight and a few couples are coming over to beveragify and throw popcorn at the tele. Modern traditions are perverse and wonderful.

Cathleen's starting dinner now and I'm melting in the heat writing. If by chance I'm correct in sensing a cowboy pastlife, I must've been the mountain Montana-type wrangler up where moose and antelope roam. I marvel at 90°+ days and seeing the Latino community walking about in boots and black jeans, button-up western shirts with ten gallon hats on their heads. I mean, what in the flying fuck, right? I'd be sneaking across the border for different reasons, looking northward to the crisp air of the Rocky Mountains...