Ticks

Couldn't resist picking blackberries when I got home yesterday, and had a large bowl of them with plain Greek yogurt and a little maple syrup. Itching in the night and I realized blackberries were just the vector ticks used to find a human host. I have to get up, strip down, and, using mirrors, check every square inch of my body. I blot them with alcohol, pull them off with tweezers, and drop them into an inverted jar lid in which I've put a tablespoon of kerosene. When I'm done I carry the lid out to the Weber Grill, set it on the rack, and torch them. Tick fire. Saw the very beautiful yellow Timber Rattlesnake, she was coiled loosely in the patch of berries near the outhouse. I didn't want to kill her, and I didn't feel like relocating her (The Snake Protection Program), so I went back to the house and got a firecracker. I keep a pack of them around, in case I need to work under the house. Snakes hate firecrackers. I don't much like them myself, but it's a short term fix I can live with. It probably damages their rather delicate vibration detection system, but I want those blackberries and the ticks want me to gather them, and I don't want to have another major scene with a rattlesnake. I've had so many run-ins with snakes, Cotton-Mouths, Copper-Heads, Rattlesnakes, and mostly Black Snakes, which are, of course, 'good' snakes, but still can scare the shit out of you. I have to do a brief bio for the Chautauqua gig. I make some notes and it reads like fiction. I can't believe I've done all those things. I'll amuse myself copying it out tomorrow and getting a copy off to Diana. Next weekend I need to pull out twenty or so paragraphs to read to the Chinese students, something sequential (to give them a life-line), especially as Kate (their field-guide while they're here) came over to the museum today concerned that they might find me difficult to understand. I had certainly thought about that, but had thought, what the hell, I enjoy listening to people talk in a language I only half understand. I'll probably read them a tadpole section. I'll need Glenn to come back, before Chautauqua, to teach me how to do word searches, because I'll need a lot of material for that: the frog stuff, the fox stuff, the winter ridge stuff, the janitor stuff. I had a sloth day and sorted screws, made notes for the bio, walked over to the pub to check the state of the new stage. John Hogan, himself, was beaming like a drunken Irishman, oh, wait. It's a substantial improvement, changes the whole demeanor of the space, places the talent, as it were, on a higher level; and they generally do better there, where they can look over of heads of burly citizens throwing tomatoes at their lower parts. I think it needs a brass rail, where the third John cut a 45 degree angle on the edge of the stage .A very good idea. I would have cut each of them at twenty-two and a half degrees, I'm always thinking about attachment. I'll often stop, in West Virginia, to straighten a black velvet painting of Elvis. This is true. I can't stand for things to be out of plumb. The only time I was arrested, it involved a painting, there.as a reproduction of that iconic photograph of Elvis in the white jump-suit, must have been Vegas, in acrylic, on velvet, at a filling station in Flatwoods, West Virginia. I'd stopped for gas and a snack. It looked like a normal Interstate exit, you get off the highway, do your business, be on your way, but when I got off the highway there was nothing there, just some signage saying gas (BP) and food (Subway) was available 4.3 miles west. I needed gas and I was hungry, so I went that way, and I was suddenly in a Stephen King novel, where even the trees were threatening. Not so much that I had gone backwards in time, but that I had gone sideways in time and I was in a parallel universe. Right after I got off the highway, there was a dumpster, overflowing with brown stained mattresses, in a turn-around area that was just dead grass and hard-packed earth; the State Road dipped into a tunnel of trees that was lined with dead refrigerators. I'm a seasoned traveler, not easily spooked, but there wasn't an immediate entrance back to the Interstate and I was committed to a state road through Flatwoods. This is not someplace you want to be, the only people I saw were good-old-boys with shotguns broken across their shoulders, walking in the path above the grader ditch. I didn't want to ask them for direction. Finally found the gas station, and the road out, but Jesus, it was a tribulation.