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High-rent hotel, originally uploaded by olivander.

This was posted in the bathroom of the motel we stayed at outside of Kansas City last weekend. The motel was not far from Kansas City International Raceway, and perhaps not surprisingly, the room key-cards had NASCAR advertising on them.

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Battersea Power Station Pt. 2, originally uploaded by Susan B..

The historic Battersea power plant is being turned into a shopping mall/condo/cineplex. No doubt, there will be a gift shop selling Pink Floyd CDs, and t-shirts bearing the Animals album cover art–maybe even pink pig balloons for the kiddies!–totally oblivious to the screaming irony of the band’s messages of non-commercialism.

Or perhaps the complex’s owners just don’t give a shit, which seems entirely likely.

Frequently, I’m subjected to seemingly interminable meetings, and oftentimes my role on the stage is limited to but a few lines. Think the gravedigger in Hamlet. When that happens, and I find myself losing consciousness in the face of jabbering developers, I like to play a little game I call Casting Call. Pretending that this meeting is a movie (albeit the worst movie ever made), I try to decide what actors what play each person around the table. Here’s who I came up with today:

–Colin Farrell, with a wispy goatee.
–Richard Dysart
–Sam Shepard, with a lazy eye.
–Gordon Clapp, with a moustache.
–Christine Baranski
–Nicholas Lea
–Doris Roberts
–Daniel Stern
–Brad Pitt, in Oceans 11 mode.
–Anthony LaPaglia
–Vladimir Putin. While not technically an actor, he does have an IMDB entry, so I figure he counts.

Keep in mind that every single one of these actors–even the ugly ones–are far more attractive than the actual people they’re portraying in my imagination.

I don’t like to put chemicals on my lawn. There are enough chemicals poisoning the soil and getting into our systems through the junk we eat. Our house’s previous owner used Chemlawn religiously, and it was two or three years after we took ownership for the ants and the earthworms to return. Before that, it was hard, sterile soil that could barely be broken with a shovel. A lot of backyard wildlife that many people consider pests are actually very good for the health of your lawn. As for weeds…well, some of them are downright pretty.

However…

I used to like clover. Countless hours of my childhood were spent searching for elusive four-leaf clovers. They blossom first yellow, then snow-white, and gradually fade to purples and reds as the summer heat arrives. They attract crickets, one of my favorite insects.

But Oh. My. Gods. do they spread! We’ve just come in from weeding the gardens, and I took it upon myself to pull up at least some of the clover overgrowth. Partially because I don’t like chemicalizing my lawn, and partially because I enjoy a bit of metitative manual labor now and then, I sat down in the grass and began to trace and pull each clover runner. I can lose myself for hours at such occupations. I love seeking things out, discovering and following new leads. Such activities also help occupy the chatty surface of my mind and allow my deeper thought processes to work undisturbed. This is why Buddhists like to chant “Om”. It means “yes”, but with repetition, the word ceases to have any meaning, and the monkey-mind surface of your brain gives up and stops trying to talk back, and finally you’re able to think!

Anyway, it occured to me as I pulled clover runner after runner, leaving vast bald patches where the grass had been choked out*, that grass is actually a non-indigenous plant. In any wild field you come across, there are all sorts of vegetation mixed together, almost none of it this uniformly green, evenly spaced stuff we cover our yards with. A few years ago, we built a new, larger garage, on the other side of the yard. It necessitated tearing up pretty much the entire yard and reseeding it with grass. I know we didn’t plant any clover, nor was there any in the rest of the yard when we did this. And it made me wonder, as my butt formed a large depression in the lawn and tiny bugs fled from the barren soil I had exposed, maybe grass is the alien species, and clover the native plant attempting to reclaim its turf.

* I am fairly certain that H.R. Giger, upon weeding the clover from his yard and seeing the mats of overlapping tendrils weaving in and out of the soil, tangled like mating pythons, derived most of his artistic inspiration from it.

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Please don’t Crush Me, originally uploaded by !efatima.

Words from a friend that moved me greatly. You can see it in its original form by clicking the photo.
—-
Who am I? What I am I? Why am I here?

I’m a very simple being here to find a sense of belonging. It’s not fame nor immortality that I seek. I just want to be recognized as a humble being – a being without any bar of color, culture, cast or creed. My motive is to find peace and hope in everything around me. I’m just a limited life in the path floating at a slow pace without disturbing its surrounding but only wanting to add beauty including the place where I fall.

Please, please don’t crush me – not now, not when am down.

–Fatima

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DSCN0807.JPG, originally uploaded by olivander.

The rockets hiss into the night sky on writhing smoke tails and explode into fountains of flaming colors. The sun-hot embers burn gold, red, green, blue, and white, meld for an eyeblink with the starscape, then burn out and fall back to Earth as lumps of black cinders.

Black cinders in the black night.

No one sees them land.

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DSCN0825.JPG, originally uploaded by olivander.

Didn’t feel like fighting the crowds at the lake or the parking ramp roof, so we watched them from the driveway, which afforded an acceptable if partial view.

Clematis
Originally uploaded by olivander.

We were wandering around Kohl’s this afternoon (big dept store for those not familiar). As we passed through the women’s clothing dept, I saw a despondant-looking man standing outside the changing rooms, holding an armful of women’s clothes. Obviously this was a husband, dragged along as a clothes hanger, his manhood reduced to less than that of a mannequin. It was then that I realized what large department stores like Kohl’s can do to make husbands look forward to the clothes-shopping experience. Every department store should set up a minibar in the women’s clothing department, preferably just outside the changing rooms, or among the lingerie. There should be a leather sofa. And a television that only receives ESPN, Speedvision, and Spike. Heck, men would be begging their wives to take them clothes shopping!

As it was, Kohl’s did have the foresight to put the Star Wars toys just across the aisle, so I suppose it’s a start.

The joys of home ownership (an ongoing series)
Originally uploaded by olivander.

The first day in two weeks it’s been dry enough to mow.