Boring day today, we're playing lots of online solitaire to prepare us for our imminent dotage and coming to a slow burn because the duplicitous game won't let us win. We forewent our morning nap, taken at our desk, because we're tired of drooling on our shirts and then having to go to the bathroom to wash them off.
Welcome to the high-stakes world of government bureaucracy.
What we really want to do is blog, like we're doing now, but the imp of the perverse who doesn't want us to blog is busy whispering in our ear, "Shut up, you poltroon, you have nothing to blog about."
Which is true enough, our head's a garden of unruly shrubbery haunted by the ghost of a caretaker who once tended the flowers there. The flowers are gone too. The ghost caretaker's name is Letke, and we're not sure of his nationality. He acts like a Balt, with his green face and restless hands that want to pluck and prune what is no longer there. We try to have conversations with him, but can't understand a word he says. He seems unhappy. And who wouldn't be. A gardener needs a garden, just as a pilot needs an airplane. As for the pilot, he occasionally wanders into the garden in his WWI flying outfit as if looking for someone. Perhaps a fiancee who died many decades ago. His left hand is terribly burned, as we noticed the one time he took off the black leather glove he covers it with. Occasionally he buzzes the garden in his aeroplane, and shouts "Huzzah!" over the roar of the engine. The cockpit is open to the wind, and his blue and white scarf trails behind him. He is a dashing figure with ginger hair, the same exact color as the bobby who stops by occasionally, whistling and twirling his nightstick. He is, presumably, keeping his eye on the Balt, or maybe he's just bored, who isn't bored in our garden?
Anyway, it's a boring day today in the garden, even the Balt has the day off. That is if he is a Balt. He could be a Croat, or Ukranian, or merely a simpleton whose nonsensical utterances we mistake for a foreign language. It sounds like a foreign language. Sometimes he throws himself face down in the garden, and gnaws at the tufts of crabgrass with his teeth until his mouth is full of crabgrass and rich, fetid earth. We avoid him them. He is obviously in great pain, that or taking his lunch.
Wow! You have a garden, albeit an unruly, untidy garden. But one with a ghost and a pilot and a bobby....Me? I have a wasteland peppered with the occasional advert for the latest psycho-pharmaceutical cocktail.
Salud!
xxx
Posted by: red dirt girl | October 28, 2011 at 07:42 PM
Fucking brilliant, Mike!!
Posted by: Bryon | October 29, 2011 at 06:58 AM
Fucking brilliant indeed.
Posted by: Jan Martin Löhndorf | October 29, 2011 at 04:13 PM
Sounds like maybe you're spending too much time up in your garden....just sayin'.
Posted by: Rick Piel | October 29, 2011 at 04:43 PM
Thanks, folks. Your words mean a lot to this failure. Thanks to your encouragement, I intend to continue to fail to the best of my abilities... which are not all that considerable.
Posted by: UF MIKE | October 31, 2011 at 08:42 AM
"Keeping his eye on the Balt"...I get it.
Posted by: bannedfrommikes | October 31, 2011 at 11:56 AM
That's funny! And I didn't even think of it!
Posted by: UF MIKE | October 31, 2011 at 12:00 PM
My man! Those are the best kind! You are on a roll!
Posted by: bannedfrommikes | November 01, 2011 at 10:20 AM
I yam!
Posted by: UF MIKE | November 01, 2011 at 11:15 AM