DICKED, Bitches!!!

 I have got my garden dicked.  Dicked!

D, I, C, K - ed, dicked, smashed, under Kon-trol, happenin', chilled, choice, down and done did, Sid! (See above for Sid)  

Early Spring power gardening powers activated! All systems go, all plants weeded and beds cleaned! Got my lagoonage connection firmed up for another year of sweet, sweet strained liquid dairy manure solids; kids, it's all going on here on the ornamental vegetation front.

So I'm officially in week one of Booze Resumed.  This amounts to two Orange Drivers an evening, which are enough to render me a sniggering, guffawing wreck while watching 'Redneck Fails' on YouTube.  I've loosened up considerably, is what I'm saying.  I really think I needed to loosen up, too.  Read on.

The reason I keep coming back to this subject, I think, is that this past Winter was such a motherfucker.  I worried that hell, come Spring, I'd be all broken and frail and shit, the way I remember all the older people being when I was a kid.  That all the stress and isolation would eat me away and I'd emerge in the Spring wihered, tremulous and vague, barely able to manouver a walker (Zimmer Frame to you Brits.)  

The thing is, all the older people I knew when I was a kid were straight off the boat from the Olde Country, had suffered wars, famines, plagues,  poor nutrition and health care at the best of times ( not to mention the literal feudal conditions my dads' folks came from in Finland - my grandfather literally had to run away under cover of darkness because the landowner wouldn't give him permission to leave his estate!  He had the police on his heels until the ship left dock!)  

My formative, first memories of old people are of little, tiny, bent frail people who used two canes to walk, who had swollen and bent fingers, who were all but blind and usually deaf as posts;  who would yatter in foreign languages and drink coffee out of saucers.  They all wore black and they all looked like miniature Ents, gnarled and sickly.  And just about all of them dipped snuss or smoked for some reason, male and female.  So that was my first impression of what being 60 was like - you shrunk up until you were about 60 lbs of 'No English', toothless, smelling like mothballs, salted liquorice and horehound drops, with fingers so knotted and bent with arthritis that you had to have someone else mince your food for you.  The first thing you did was break a hip.  It's just how it was.  They were always covered in horrifying skin conditions or strange varicose relief maps.  The women had thin, cotton candy wisps of hair and the men had long, long, long beards and moustaches stained yellow around their mouths.

Now I'm not going to be posing for coture swimwear anytime soon.  But I'm so far from the above descriptions that it's kind of a strange culture shock effect.  

I expected sixty to be horrible.  I expected to have had my first heart attack and my first stroke long since now.  I'd always figured that by sixty all I'd be good for was sitting out on the porch shouting at passing cars, like my elderly second cousin Leota, who had dementia, and who was kept in check with a bottle of whiskey and a gate on her front porch steps so she couldn't wander out into traffic.  This is what was done in those days, and cousin Leota was happy enough, drunk as shit, sitting on her porch waving at cars, dogs and passers-by, swigging out of her bottle.  I thought that would be me.

Me, I'm out in my Bill Nye t-shirt slinging topsoil and operating power tools. I can speak passable English, and I only wear black because it's metal.  I'm still 5 ft. 5 inches.  I'll shout at traffic, but it's usually "SLOW THE FUCK DOWN COCKSUCKER" and not "HELLOOOOO SUGAR BABY!" like cousin Leota, who was cheerful and nutty.  I am able to maintain a reasonably passable semblance of normality and I'm only cheerful when I feel like being cheerful Goddammit, not because my synapses have turned into mush.  Hell, I don't even pee myself.  WINNING.

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I had the cutest thing happen today.  The little neighbor boy asked me "Do you have water?"

"I sure do," I said cheerfully.

"But do you have octopusses?" he asked.

"No I don't, just regular water.  But I wish I had octopusses, that would be cool," I replied.

"DAVID, COME HERE NOW," shouted his mother, at this point. 

I don't know if it was the octopus discussion or what, but you could hear the cautionary tone in the womans' voice.  Tell you what, I'd rather talk about octopusses with a six-year-old than exchange polite banter with an adult any day of the week. If she thought I would be off-put, she was mistaken.  I will talk about octopusses all day long.  And now the poor kid thinks that he can't talk about octopusses with the elderly.  Does that suck or what?  Shit, when I was little, old people would talk to you about all kinds of nutty stuff, and that was fine with everyone. They'd teach you dirty words in Swedish and tell you weird stories about The Wompus Cat.  I learned the lyrics to 'Down In Da Meddo In Da Iddy Biddy Poo' from a random old person.  How the hell are we supposed to pass on our legacy of demented shit if sniffy mommies in yoga pants keep cock-blocking our efforts to weirdify the young?  They're all going to grow up with no imaginations whatsoever.  Their souls will be fossilized by Minecraft and porn.  

I for one intend to fight this trend.  If you ever come back around, little random boy with a green airplane toy, I will talk to you about octopusses! And hey,  let me tell you about a special octopus, a real crazy octopus guy named C'thulhu!  He is just like Davy Jones in the Disney Movie, only he can make you insane just by looking at him!  He's going to bring about the end of the world! Now go home and spread that tale around to all your little friends!  N'ghai!