How not to garden like a dumbfuck 2

Well look at you, all back here and everything, bright eyed and bushy tailed, waiting for me to deliver unto you the esoteric knowledge of the ages, the complicated secrets of encouraging a plant from the soil into the light of day for whatever goddamn reason.

Remember how I told you there are two types of ornamental garden plants.  Now if you're TOS this may or may not apply to, say, Acamarian parthas or quadrotriticale, although if it did, then quadrotriticale would be an annual, and Acmarian parthas would be perennials.  Yes I am that good.  Let's assume that you're not growing fictional plants, though.

Things you will need to know if you want to grow ornamental plants.-
That's what this part is called.  Keep up.

1. You have to learn about your environment.

I don't know what country you are planting your plants in.  Or even what part of your country.  That shit's up to you to figure out.  Now I can oversimplify and tell  you 'Don't grow a saguaro cactus on the slopes of Mt. Everest because it's stupid.'  Cactuses grow in the desert, don't ask me how.  Lichens and moss grow waaaaay up near the top of Mt. Everest, though, with the fungal endophytes and tardigrades (not a plant, but a very, very tiny form of dugong.)  I'm sure other shit grows lower down, but once you get way up there on Mt. Everest, it's pretty much lichen and very very tiny dugongs.  Now lichen, being a diverse bunch of algae and fungus all intermingled in plantal harmony, that shit is adaptable.  It can grow pretty much anywhere, but saguaro cacti cannot.  They only grow in the desert.  That's just the way it is.

Every single plant has it's own particular likes and dislikes.

Muks Gardening Prime Directive:  Do your research.

1.  Your country probably has an agricultural bureau that will tell you what your elevation is, and what kind of soil you have, and when your first and last frost dates are.  They may also tell  you what agricultural zone you live in.  I don't know.  I haven't gone into this because I'm American and I don't have to know anything I don't want to; particularly if it has to do with geography.  But I'd be willing to bet that if you ask around the old people in town, you can find out these very important facts:

Your soil type - sandy, loamy, duff, clay, what have you.  This knowledge tells you about the ability for water, air and roots to move through your dirt.   You have to know this.

Now ask them, or look it up, or fire a flaming arrow with a message attached through the appropriate window, I don't give a fuck, just FIND OUT WHAT YOUR SOIL PH IS.

This is so important it's like the Virgin Mary of gardening knowledge.  That's a Catholic comparison - analogy thing there.*

So.  Know What Your Soil PH is.  What does PH mean?  Look it up.  This information is super vital information.  Soil ph determines what nutrients your plants can pull out of the soil.  It can also be altered without killing the environment as long as you keep your efforts small.

2.  Know what your climactic zone is. (The Holy Spirit of Gardening.  In case you forgot.)  Our standard of measure in the U.S.A  is called the USDA zone, and it's a suggestion at best given the rapidity of climate change. On paper, I rate a zone 7a.  Bullshit!  In actual fact, I'm a zone 6a.  That is a world of difference, although it sounds small.

Your Zone is an arbitrary number given to the information returned from climactic monitoring.   A Zone is an area that has a reliably stable date of first frost,  lowest winter temperature, and highest summer temperature.

That is your fucking USDA ZONE. 

Now, troops:  What is your zone?  All  together:  A Zone is an area that has a reliably stable date of first frost,  lowest winter temperature, and highest summer temperature.

Your version of the USDA is probably trying the best it can to keep up with shit, but they're probably also a government agency.  This is really important information and you need to get it right, so again, you go by the old people in your area, who will know this stuff all the way back to Tutankhamen. Ask.

3. (The Jesus rule.)  Ask your neighbors and keep records of your seasonal temps and weather.  This doesn't need to be anything more than a little notebook.  Don't rely on the USDA. 20 miles down the road from I live, in a small area that is not only protected by surrounding mountains but has a strong geothermal influence, Deming, WA.   It's a straight up zone 8b-7a.  The locals refer to it as 'The Banana Belt'.  Anyfucking thing will grow there, allowing for the natural acidity of the soil.  Acidity of the soil,  you ask?  Look back at SOIL PH, get that straight, and then get back to me. 

Remember Jesus, the friendly hippie dude?  Be like Jesus.  Be friendly.  Ask around.  You see somebody out in their yard with a shovel, stop and talk.  All gardeners are awesome.  Some are unreasonably violent at random moments, but in between those episodes they are very mellow, friendly people willing to help and give you plants and everything.  Until they chase you around with a machete.  They'll apologize afterward.

Muk gardening truism:  The nuttier the person, the better their garden grows.  

This is absolutely true. 100% all the way true.  Crazy fuckers grow incredible plants.  I've seen this so many times it's just stupid.  Take me for example.  I am crazy as a shithouse rat, and I have a garden that people ask for tours through.  Oh yes. Dead serious.

4. OK This is the God The Father level of your garden!!!  This is literally how it all begins.

In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was 

PREPARATION.    

Would you like to make a nice flower bed? 

Then dig it up and prepare it in the fall before. 

How?

Suggestion:  You could begin a compost heap. (We're still on God the Father, so sit still.  You want to go sit in the baby room with all the little wah wah babies?  No you don't. So quit acting up and be still and pay attention. I mean it.)

Anything made of plants goes into compost heap.  Anything made of meat does not. It's just a pile of old leaves, grass clippings, hedge cuttings, whatever is made out of a plant.  Salad.  Turnips.  Just heap it up and let it rot over winter.  Toss it around like spaghetti a bit with a pitchfork or a shovel a couple of times. Either way, it rots into lovely compost, which is made out of...guess.  No, guess.  OK fine.  Worm shit.  That's called humus.  But it's shit from worms. They do all the work!
Simple!
And the best part?  It does not smell bad.  It smells sweet, like after it rains.

More Realistic Suggestion:  Get some bagged steer manure from your local big box home center.  Get a bunch.

4.  Now you begin.

Pick out a section of ground, grass and all, and using a garden hose or a rope, line out a nice shape.   Using a garden hose is best.  Make an outline that looks pretty,  and when you get something you like,  turn up turves to mark it -  and then roll up the garden hose and put it away, dump your COMPOST onto that outlined area and  rototill the piss out of it. Cut that organic matter in there!

Now what does this mean, exactly? Imagine a rotary beater working sideways, with knives instead of vanes. That's what a rototiller does, and you get to drive it!  It's cutting all that compost into the dirt and cutting up all the grass and roots and opening up the soil for air to get in, and mixing it all up.  Kickass, huh?  You are whuppin' up on this garden bed situation.

If you use a rototiller, do not wear sandals.  Only Jesus can get away with that.  The man wears a thorn garland, kids; he's cold steel.  You are not.

So. If you have a rototiller, fantastic.  If you can rent one, bitchin'.   If you don't, you can do this with a shovel, pray God you have sandy loam soil, because it's easy to dig.  I have blue clay overlaid with a six inch layer of ancient, pure decomposed plant material and duck crap - an ionic black sediment that is like crack for plants. For that matter, so is the blue clay substrate.  (I live on what was a shallow lake back in the late 1800s.)

Any way you can get that compost in there, and that sod broken up, and that soil aerated, you go for it.  And then?

Leave it lay there for the rest of the winter.     

Let it get rained on and frozen and snowed on and all that winter shit.  Let your soil get good.  It needs to mix around, like stew, wake up those fungus-mushroom-mychorhyzae and relationships and worms and microorganisms and oogy things going oog oog through your soil, and just let them play around and swap spit and poop and so forth all winter long inside that rototilled shape you made. Leave it alone.  All winter long.

5.  Next Spring.  Throw another load of compost on there and scuffle it in with a rake.  This is assuming you have nice loamy soft soil.

(Me?  Oh hell no.  I had to dig  4 ft. deep basins, deal?  Like shallow ponds!  In wet clay!  And I used tarps to pile up all the removed soil on.  I dug out the whole shape, not just a hole here and a hole there.  The whole fuckin' thing.  Multiple beds 4 feet deep, on four city lots.  My arms literally burst the seams of my t-shirts when I flex my biceps from doing this shit.  Am I bad?  I can change your tires without using a jack, baby.  Fear this.

Our awesome little town has it' own compost heap.  They even chip the vegetative debris, which made me skippity happy like a little girl. I went and asked could I raid the pile and they looked at me and fell down and kissed my feet and cried with joy, would I take some?  Take it ALL!  They really said that!  So I took that raw, uncomposted plant material home by the truckload and dumped all this undifferentiated new and old squack from the city compost heap - huge branches, leaves, grass clippings, anything that didn't have striped moon snails in it - into the bottom in an even layer, and then it was built back up in layers.  Soil, then squack, then more soil, then more squack, then more soil.

I was much, much younger then.  Would I do that today FUCK NO. But it worked like a charm.)

So, where were we?  Oh yes, standing outside in the early Springtime, getting rained on, scuffling some finished compost into the top layer of your bed-to-be.  You can buy this stuff, like I said, but I use something different.  I live in farm country. I add what  a farmer down the road supplies me with, for free...a magic substance, aged, composted, light as a feather, easy as pie to work with... called 'Lagoonage'.

Remember this word.  Dairy farmers have it. Cow farmers have it.  They are crying to find someone to take it away because it's a nuisance to them.  They will give it to you.  For FREE. It is...

LAGOONAGE.     

It's the solids they skim off of liquefied cowshit and pile aside so they can use the plain nastyass shit liquid to spray on their fields and ruin your whole day, nasally.  Cows don't digest everything they eat, and those solids are just about the best thing going to put in your soil, and to put on top of your soil as well.  It has a neutral PH (oh Goddammit, there's that fuckin' scientific term again. Look it up. SUFFER.)   As it degrades over time, it releases a whole complex of different organisms, fungi, microbes and trace minerals into the soil whenever it rains, or you water, or life and time just happen.  It is magic from a cows butthole.

All this rotted  plant material helps to lighten - open up - the soil structure.  There is no soil that cannot benefit from this treatment.  You need to get some actual OXYGEN in there along with the old plant material so that the breakdown and decomp will  continue, and as it does all that decomposing and breaking down it is also releasing lots of different minerals and compounds into the soil, and that makes the little bugly organism wormy dudes happy, and they poop out humus.  Decomposition and breakdown works much better and faster with oxygen, though. It keeps your worms and bugly buddies happy, and the tardigrades rejoicing.  You use your shovel for this, or a rake even.  Just toss in a shovel of lagoonage and scuffle a shovel of dirt over it.  Very good exercise, light and pleasant, and it will give you the pecs of a young god.

There are other things you can use in place of lagoonage, of course.  Some places sell sewage solids, which is not as gross as it sounds although  it's supposed to be high in  heavy metals, like lead and shit.  I don't know.   You can use feedlot manure, chicken shit, maple leaves...good Lord; you're online!  Look up your region!  Go on Daves Garden.Com and look up what other people in your area are using for organic compost!  I'm not your mother!

So assuming you did all this, which is not as hard as it sounds given a rototiller and/or light soil structure...?

THEN, YOU PLANT.**

Get ready for this one.  Loosen up.  Do some stretches.  No more bourbon on your Captain Crunch.
Using a hand mirror, ensure that you have no catarrh nor any fantods.

I mean it.  This next part is metaphysical!  Gardening is sacred!  This  shit will blow you away if you aren't in tune with the Earth vibration!  NOW  comes the spiritual constituent!  This is where pure mind meets simple soil and the body of Christ digs up old tree roots and pieces of cement!

Next: THE THRILLING EXCITING PART OF GARDENING   

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
*
You got four heavenly important people going on in Catholicism:

a.The Virgin Mary.

 Everybody loves her. No matter what you've up to, She'll just shrug and say "You know what, you be you, baby."  She knows how bad you feel when you do wrong.  She'll give you a hug and a kiss and put a bandaid on your spiritual pain  The Virgin Mary is really, really nice and all kinds of happening.

b. The Holy Spirit.

This is some deep stuff going on.
Nobody quite knows what the Holy Spirit is, but it's important.  They usually show it as a lovely white dove all spread out with sometimes a halo or a circle of glowing rays coming from it.  It's...just important.  It's like what Godliness feels like inside you.  Now, I would have come up with a better analogy that a flying rat, but they did this in the old days.  It is meant to convey a butterfly feeling of joy and love and cosmic union with Universal Godhood and Goodness. 
I told you it was heavy.

c.  Jesus

Now see, even though he's supposed to be the Big Kahuna, the Word made Flesh, God in Man, this is where he lands on the scale of Catholic Importance.

 Here's how to tell if you've partied with Jesus:  He's a white guy, very friendly looking, with long brown hair, a well-kept beard and moustache, and he's wearing a long white nightgown kind of thing with a belt, and sandals.  Like Spock in Star Trek 4:  The Voyage Home. Spock wore a white headband.  But Jesus is Metal as All Get Out.  Jesus wears a wreath made of horrifying thorny vines that jam way into his head with blood coming down all on his face. 
Yes.
If he's wearing any headgear at all, this is what he prefers. 
Also sometimes he's wearing his heart on the outside of his clothes!  Seriously!  And with fire spouting from the top of his heart, thorny vines all wrapped around his actual heart organ, poked into it and making it bleed.  And he always has this loving, gentle expression on his face while he indicates his bleeding, tore-up outside heart with flames shooting out of the top of it out on the front of his clothes, which you got to admit is quite notably Hardcore Metal As All Get Out.
 But think about it:   if Jesus is that hardcore, imagine how rad God the Father is!

d. God the Father

He is majestic.  He is mysterious.  He is The Capo di Tutti Capo.

You piss him off, he will smite you.
 That's what he does. 
You don't get a whap on the hind end. No.  Fire will rain out of the sky and blood will be all in the water and people will turn into salt. 

The guy simply does not mess around when he's doing some smiting. It's best not to piss him off. Now, that said, it takes a lot of bullshit going on for a long time before he gets to the point where he says 'That's it, I'm going to smite you" and floods the whole earth. 

He does cool things too, like make water flow out of bare rock, and create the whole Earth and planets and stars and the entire UNIVERSE.  He is so magnificent they don't even show him most of the time!  There'll be some glowing huge amazing cloud with angels and shit all around it, pretty winged youths,flying babies, flying babyheads, the whole schmeer, with rays coming out of the cloud all done in gold leaf.  I know Michelangelo painted him as an old , yet buff, flying guy in a nice lavender undershirt, but after that everyone figured 'That was Michelangelo!  Who's gonna follow that act?" so they went with the Glowing Cloud of Almighty God the Father and Assorted Winged Beings.  He is the guy who does all the heavy lifting behind the scenes, the Author of All.  And what was the first thing he did for mankind?

Gave us a garden to live in.

If your theology differs, I don't care. I'm an agnostic now.

How not to garden like a dumbfuck

I am a total hotsy totsy gardening lil' muk.  I've grown plants you've only seen online and thought 'damn I'd like to grow that but I am a whiny pee-pants and they always die anywaaaaaaaaay.'

Oh fuck off already.  You can too.  Have a little faith. If your self esteem is that low, join a cult.  They'll tell you how great you are until they squeeze some cash out of you, and then it's nothing but heartache, so don't give them any cash, but talk about how you're going to soon.  Keep'em hungry.  Heh.

If you want to garden like me, which you should because I garden awesome, get rid of your dumb self-talk at once.  I am going to take you through this assuming you are a novice gardener, because otherwise why would this post title have attracted your attention?  Unless you are masturbating to it.  And if you are it's fine.  You do you.

1. Plants always dieeeeeeeeeeee

Everything dies.  Geeze.  That having been said, some plants die in a year, and some wait a while longer.  That is because there are two types of garden plants!  Gasp!  Clutch the pearls!  But it's true. There are Two Different Types of Ornamental Garden Plants. Cue the angel choir!  Just not the freaky flying baby heads.  They just make everyone uncomfortable.

A.
Annuals.  From the Latin 'annus' which means 'year'.  Go ahead.  Snicker.  They were an early civilization; they didn't know.  Their word for 'anus' was 'culus'.  Go back in time and call somebody an anus in Rome, like 'You Roman anus, you' and they'd just look at you weird.  We have to set the wayback machine ahead to 1658, for....wait for it....France.
 Imagine that. 
Now step up to some French person carrying their ancient baguette down the sidewalk and say 'You anus French person with your baguette there,' and they'd look at you weird because you probably don't speak ancient French.  Don't go bothering the ancient French that way.  They have enough problems.

SO.  An ANNUAL is a plant that is only meant to be alive for one year.
One.
Just one. Like your common Garden Petunia, which is a good example of an annual.  You see, they're born that way.  During their short time in this vale of tears they grow vigorously and put out lots of nice enticing blossoms to be pollinated because they have to gather up enough energy in  one year to push into producing seeds; and that's because seeds are the only chance at a future they've got.  That's all a garden petunia gets in the way of a future....a tiny seed.  Posterity is a harsh concept for an annual.   So quit  looking at your deadass garden petunias in the fall and blaming yourself.  It was foreordained.  Part of the Great Mystery Of Life.

B.
Perennials.  From the Latin 'Penis', perennials are plants that stick up all over the place while they're young, and then not so much the older they get.  That's a lie, but you get the idea, and the analogy is sound.
Perennials store energy. They aren't so much into making seeds, although they'll try it half-heartedly. The top part dies off in winter and then in spring it begins to grow back.  It is a miracle.

Actually it is a function of energy storing plant structures.

A good example of a perennial plant is a Dandelion.  Yes it's a fucking weed but it's a good example and I'm aiming at a broad audience here.

The Dandelion has a wide root that begins immediately below the foliage This area right below where the stem and leaves begin, this wide part, is called 'the crown'.  This is the top of a huge long central root that goes far into the ground, and that whole root and crown serves as a place for the dandelion to store enough energy to get the important part of the plant through bad weather.  With a perennial, the important part of the plant - in its opinion - is the crown.  Not the leaves or the flowers.  The root and the crown.  The leaves and flowers and small rootlets all serve to harvest energy to preserve the life of the crown.

(There is a parallel to this in history, back in the Kings and Queens days, like, the farmers would bring food to the king and he'd refrain from burning the farmer out of his thatched-roof cottage for another year.  Kings would do shit like that.  Seriously. The early French called this 'Anus royale'.  They did.

But even if you didn't bring some groceries to the king, your neighbors probably would have, so the King would be living large all winter, producing heirs, eating parsnips and cabbages and farting prodigiously and to appalling effect on that diet, and you're left looking at the smoking remains of your thatched roof cottage thinking 'Next year, brick.'  Except you'd freeze to death.  You: disposable leaf.  King:  crown.  Geddit?  Huh?  King-crown?)

This is why you can mow a dandelion, slice the whole top of it off, pry part of it out of the ground, dump various chemicals on it and the bastard will just laugh and a few weeks later there the little fucker is with new leaves, trying to be all stealth.
Similarly, then, an ornamental , or Garden Perennial.    You stick it in the ground and it dies back in autumn and you fall down on your knees crying your anguish into the empty skies, and then next spring there it pops up again, and you think 'Well what the fuck is that?  I didn't put that there' and you dig it's ass up and throw it out, ya dipshit.

EVERYBODY DOES THIS WHEN THEY FIRST START GARDENING.  It doesn't make you any less a moron, but it does mean that you have a lot of company.

So.  We got two different types of plants.  Annual = one year, then kerplotz. Nothing you can do about it.
Perennial:  comes up every year in the spring for at least three years.

OK! We've got that straight!
ANNUALS only live for one year, then they fuckin' DIE.
PERENNIALS live for 3 or more years.

If you plant a PERENNIAL, then, put a marker next to the plant.  A few inches away.  I use a sophisticated stick scrounged out of my compost heap for the class factor.  It lets me know "I intentionally planted something here, next to where this straight tall stick is, here in the ground."  If something grows up close to the stick, let it alone.  It's the perennial you put in last year.

That was lesson one.  You're on the internet; go take a look around.  Look up annuals and perennials.Don't do any buying yet, just look around.  Get an idea of what you're seeing.  Read the descriptions.  Whatever plant catches your eye.  It's a nice way to kill an afternoon.

NEXT WHENEVER I FEEL LIKE ITS THRILLING INSTALLMENT:  A FAIRLY MINIMAL AMOUNT OF BORING SHIT YOU HAVE TO KNOW SO GET OVER IT NOW.

The astronumerology analysis of the abbreviation JDIGB.

OK.  You all know me.  Some of you know me better - now, this is just online -  than others.  Those of you who don't know me as well as the others do should probably give each others big high fives plus 40 ouncers of malt liquor and money because the stuff you don't know about me is all pathetic and whiny and messed up and shit.

But anyway, you all know me.  And you know I bitch about not liking motherhood, and  being glad it's over, and particularly my being pissed off at my daughter because she had this completely unpredictable temper, like "Of course I love cute puppiYOU ARE SATAN AND THE WORLD IS A HEAP OF SUCKyeah, puppies are pretty awesome."

It was really like that.  OK that's an oversimplification but still.  You never knew when her shit would go off like a goddamn bomb, or for how long, or why.
Ever.
And Oh My God, If you asked her "Why are you upset?"
First, she'd deny it.
Then, she'd get pissed off that you'd even askeHISSSSSSSSSSSS 666 HATE RAGE BITCH SHRIEK HEAD SPLITS IN HALF AND FIRE SHOOTS OUT.

None of that happened on this visit.
None of that happened at all on this visit.
Nothing even came close to maybe happening that way on this visit.

Why not?

First of all, she finally got her physical maladies diagnosed, which lead, via co-morbid 'Oh shit I have that' realizations, to her going in to a psychiatrist, who put her on a few pediatric doses of psychiatric stuff, like me, and that was all it took for her to suddenly realize "Oh fuck I am bipolar."

Also, "Oh fuck I have been a rampaging cunt."

 And so, Steely Dan is completely accurate when they attest that "Any 'mount of world that breaks apart falls together again."  It's just that sometimes it takes fuckin' decades of sewage before it falls together again.  And, you know, Steely Dan, I'd have appreciated you throwing that little bit of  information in there.  Walter Becker, I know your ass hears me.

Goading time

Look up.
That's the moon.
Take your forefinger and thumb and make a circle around it.

Who knows that time doesn't stop?  Not you.
That wasn't always true.
No matter how noisy or numerous the the watchers, other animals full of night roamed amid us and what we held, circling, eating, watching, running.  Yours meant nothing to the starving, edging too close, twitching with terror, one moment beyond prudence.

Just wait. Be so, so still.
One buck and five deer with fawns step with deliberate feet through and by.  Look to the right or the left.  They bend their heads to the places your hand has rested, and wait through the heat of the day beneath old apple trees forgotten in your neighbors' back yard, in the clusters of low pine and hemlock all curtained with pincherry nightshade along the alleys, all of the deer soft breathing the day and soft exhaling the smell of crushed grass and sour milk, home where you live.

This is true. Listen.  Animals from the stories your mother read you are asleep deep in tangled gloom,  circle once, circle five times around, sleeping in the softest strands of deep green grass, the kind that grows in the margins between blackberry tangles and the objects their thorns devour. Make your circle around the moon.

When night comes, foxes and bobcats and cougar and coyote and dogs and loping wolves come to break the necks of fool animals who let themselves in too close to you.   Animals with the expectation of of a next day will end their lives in diminishing gasps being carried off to secret places.  Now think of the stars reflected in their eyes or the moonless night. Make a circle around the moon and hold it in one place.

Wild is what cats stare at when you think there's nothing there.  Consider how their claws sheathe in a curl like their kin, who roam in the same ways and hunt in the same ways for blood and meat. They draw dark alongside your garage and stop-
The cat you feed is deliberate and swift making mysteries and unexplained disappearances, peace behind their eyes as they watch you fill the dish.
All cats from all families are one cat gone down ravines, complaining of their love up draws and drawing thin silver v's through the grasses toward the places where they bide. That's cats.

Listen.  This is about dogs. Moon dogs. Calling dogs. Silent dogs listening.  Roaming determined dogs wearing the nonchalance of freedom that look you in the eye with cool minds. These are your fellow citizens, neighbor.
Dogs flow with the wind on their own errands.
Think hard about what dogs mean, in words you won't listen to, the story of generations after generations of shunned dogs, abandoned dogs, lost dogs, tame, gone hungry and semi tame, raised less tame,  noticed by nobody yet walking, nosing, going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it.

Everything is black when a cloud hides the moon.

You should look for where people you forget make homes.  Wise nimble-minded dogs full of luck and worn deep around their throats with old collars and with battered tags that clatter remember.  

 Mice will come. The same mice so dear, the same mice on the grass with broken spines with their small paws folded like praying.
Rats dart and snatch.  Rats are greed and breathe blood.  Their teeth curl downward toward bone.  Break open the roof of their caches and see!  Small gold stones.
Crows cut like scissors.
Ravens tear and sideslink heavily just out of reach.
Others arrive.
Cars drive over a bridge.

More. Listen.
Behind the smile of that dog, those are teeth, and they grab and snatch fast, you see, the wind of their going blowing from when outlier dog-wolves and slinking starved bitches in milk, wolves who ran to save their skins,  circled the dimness and swallowed and swallowed in anticipation.  Smelling, one eye cautious, skittish, maybe toward where a special animal warmth like a moon waits just past the edge of the safe.

We don't own the advantage:  the consensus, the democracy of pheromones.
What we have is height and the predators' face forward sight and the memory we want, of good dogs who lived in homes and obeyed a voice.
Not all memories tell you what you need.

Look at where you don't look. Black bears hide the day away beneath abandoned cars and holes torn jaggedly around the tangled roots of downed trees, half drowsing,  waiting for the night-damp to sharpen the smells of the heaps they prowl around and over and through, rooting and straining with bold black claws for caches of things that are spoiled and soft and fat with grease.  Black bears are stealthy walkers and sliders and whisperers through twigs and crackling frost kill and the grassed brush on the margins of trails meandering through your town, your suburb, your development, eating the food you waste and remembering the taste of your hands and mouth.

Up in the top of a tall tree bark colored owls tear strips from prey held fast in one fist, and their gaze turns to you.  Silence, one hook and eight knives, an owl.
Patient pale owls watching from empty rectangles in city buildings, generations raised in the rising frost of spent feathers and the pin bones of bats, in lath-fallen rooms and stairwells and high in blind tin architraves.  They fly down the narrow hallways white, out into the blizzards of moths and bats around the street lights. 

Did you know that the moon was shining when the imagos split and moths came out of the dirt to fly in confusions and clouds?

These things see.

Cats see, and the smart ones darken away fast, fast between the wheels of cars, fast in front of bicycles, only a fast line moving across a two lane road from one ditch to the next.  Cats see from trees and windows, smart covered corners where they are just another shade of grey on black, a pile of leaves, and they see, and they run fast, climb fast and go quiet.  They see where deer have walked and look over their shoulders, and run from darkness to darkness.

Let go of the moon.
Do nothing and don't wait.  The soil will open.
Do nothing and don't wait.  The three families of dogs circle you and circle you.
Do nothing and don't wait.  The cats will rouse from their cautious sleep and escape before their betters.
Do nothing and don't wait.  Larger presences are just outside the circle and they never learned to heed you.
Do nothing. Don't wait.  The moon goes dark for two days in twenty-nine.

Please Don't Hurt Me Lynda Barry I Will Never Talk Smack About You Again

My best, earliest memory that is longer than a couple of sentences, told with deliberately bad sentence structure because what I said about Lynda Barry totally applies to me as well.

When I was 4 years old my parents dressed me up and took me over to my cousins' house for an important party.  My girl cousin Theresa was turning 'Sweet Sixteen' and her parents were throwing her a big hullabaloo.  Being good Catholic parents, of course, it was teeners in the basement with their jungle music and every guests' parents present,  the daylight basement windows and floor vents open and the basement door ajar.

So there I was at a grown up party, dressed up like a toilet paper dolly, and I was 4.
I was the only person there who was 4.
The closest person to 4 there was my cousin Theresa, and she wanted to put up with me like cats want to put up with dogs. Aunt Lillian said I could go downstairs to the party.  My cousin Theresa right there in front of me actually started crying and begged her mom please don't let her come downstairs and Ruin Her Party.

(Future me:  bad move, ya dumb cow.)

The husbands were outside barbecuing and smoking the cigars Uncle Sonny passed out and drinking Canadian Club.  My boy cousins were in the back playing hula-golf .  The wives were inside, drinking Canadian Club on the rocks with Grenadine and smoking and pretending to eat my aunt Lillians terrible canapes (I've written about this womans' horrifying table elsewhere) and talking about boring things.  I was three feet shorter than the shortest person in the joint.  Everyone was either half-lit or doing the Frug in the basement...so for all intents and purposes,

 I was completely unsupervised.

 I went downstairs and it looked exactly like this:
http://www.carameloffers.com/img/c8.alamy.com/comp/CMR85J/1950s-1960s-teen-couples-having-party-dancing-in-rec-room-CMR85J.jpg

One of the boys was really nice and came over and actually pretended to dance with me!  He was tall and had a blonde crew cut.  I instantly fell in love with him.

Since it was a record party, everyone had brought their collection of 45's and got to take turns picking songs. Some dumb butt put a stupid slow record on.  It was stupid square Little Surf Girl by the stupid square Beach Boys - which immediately alerted the parents to the possibility of Slow Dancing and Kissing.  From upstairs the moms started hollering threats down the floor vents that there better not be any funny business going on.  Little Surf Girl plus moms yelling "You better not be up to anything down there ELIZABETH AND GREGG I MEAN YOU!" equals Total Uncoolness Party.
  I had standards.  I went back upstairs.

Immediately my mother sprang on me and made me take a shitty canape and say 'Thank you' for it to Aunt Lilian.  It was a pimento olive slice on top of a hot dog slice on top of peanut butter on top of a Ritz cracker with a toothpick stuck in it. Can you imagine the horror?  Luckily I was close to the floor.  Here's why.

Before I had even had a chance to begin snivelling, my Aunt and Uncles' black Lab Tommy, slobberingly overexcited, panting and everywhere at once, ran through the room and grabbed it out of my hand, and his enormous red dog ween was totally showing out.

This was not the kind of party guest any good Catholic mother wants to see.

Aunt Lillian freaked. All the moms went into 'rat in the henhouse' mode and more than a few of them were snickering into their wrists even though what they'd just had seared onto their eyeballs was Not Nice.  The cigarette ashes were falling and canapes by the double handful were sneaked into the trash!  Aunt Lilian, bubble do, cat glasses, dirndle and all took out after Tommy the dog at a sprint.  I followed her because I wanted to see what she'd do.  My mom followed me with another shitty canape to make sure I actually ate one, but I caught sight of her and suddenly jinked left and ran behind the house into the evergreen hedge and hid.

Even though it was very poky, being inside the evergreen hedge was cool to the max.  You could actually stand up in it and not touch (almost.)  It was a perfect hiding place in every way.  It made an arched tunnel all the way around the house.  It was also full of play balls of every description, thanks to Tommy, because he'd go around the neighborhood and steal them from everyone and the secret tunnel inside the hedge was his stashing place.

Tommy and I were both in refugee mode, so he found his way into the hedge and soon thereafter found me.

At 4 I did not like any dogs.  Either they were taller than me and knocked me down, or smaller than me and bitey.  And here Tommy was all up in my grill, needy and overexcited, slobbering and panting and smacking the side of the house with a tail like a baseball bat, wanting me to play fetch.  He kept picking up every ball and bringing it to me like if he found the right one I'd play.  Totally no way Jose, dog. Tommy was gross.  He always had long blops of foamy slobber hanging out of the two flubby parts of the side of his mouth, which also stuck out and flubbered and looked like something washed up on the beach.  Now here he was all a-wag, with his slobber full of hemlock crud stuck in it hanging from his flubby dog lips wabbling and swinging all over the place, and the ball he proffered was all covered with dried slobber that was mixed with wet slobber and ball fragments and Christ knew what,   so I took the ball and threw it as hard as I could out into the street and a car almost ran over him.
Almost.  Sooo close.
I did not like that dog.

The people in the car screeched to a halt and got out and ran into the driveway!  My Uncle Sonny, tall, bald and built like a fullback came hustling out of the garage with his shiny head glistening in the sun to meet them and they all had a screaming argument!   When the people told Uncle Sonny that the dog had been chasing a ball I froze.  I was quiet and waited, but nobody came looking for me because Uncle Sonny immediately blamed it on the boys.  The people finally drove away while my uncle Sonny was still yelling at the boys for throwing balls into the street.  I was safe!  So I hauled down my skivvies and peed and got it all over my little lacy ankle socks.

When you are 4 and a girl, you are way down in the weeds when you squat to pee so it goes everywhere.  And never pee in a hemlock hedge because it will poke the crap out of you and you could hoist ass and get pee on your socks.

Nothing daunted, I crept my way around the foundation of the house, using the natural tunnel the plantings had created, the rock-n-roll music coming from the basement through the open daylight windows, feeling very secret-ey and tuff. There were some good go go music playing and I wanted to dance too.  I got thinking about my mean stupid cousin Theresa and her me only you have to go away party.  Oh yeah, Theresa? Oh yeah?

  I went back to the first open window to the basement, collected as many tore up play balls as I could carry, and threw them into the basement through the window.  Every window I passed I'd grab a few balls off the ground from the hundreds there and throw them into the basement as I went.  It was so great and fun because it made everyone start screaming and the records skip.  Happy Sweet Sixteen, Cousin Turd-resa!

Once I was on the opposite side of the house, in the back yard, I figured I was as safe as I was going to get.  I ran out and WHAMMO  a bummerball (a used golf ball with a red ring of paint around it's equator) smacked into the side of the house right next to me. (It wasn't on purpose.)  While I was marvelling at that, I got caught by my boy cousins and their buddies who thought it was puss to dance with girls and were the ones out in the back yard playing hula golf.  OK.  They said I had to go run around the whole back yard and find all their stupid golf balls or they'd tell on me that I wasn't in the house. Looking back I can't remember there being anything said about me needing to stay in the house.  It worked, though.

My oldest boy cousin Raymond  was 17 and he looked exactly like the oldest boy in the T.V. show My Three Sons and he was sooo handsome.  Mostly he ignored me.  My next older boy cousin was 15 and puggy and snotnosed and mean and looked like a dumb stupid butt and was named Richie.   I was wearing a little polkadot dress that looked like this:   https://witness2fashion.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/mc-5365-and-6384-1960-and-1962.jpg

So ok man, geeze, be cool.  I ran around the edge of their huge back yard and I filled my skirt with stupid bummerballs.  When I couldn't fit any more into the skirt of my little dress I ran over to my cousin Ritchie, the one who looked like a dumb stupid butt and who was dog poop also.  I acted like hey here's your golf balls but instead I flipped my skirt out at him and all the golf balls hit him and rolled everywhere and all the other boys laughed and I ran into the garage where my dad was.

My dad picked me up just because I was there.  My dad smelled good, like gasoline, tobacco, outdoors and booze.  I was so safe.  Cousin Ritchie came in all bluster faced and waa waa waa'd she hit me with golf balls to Uncle Sonny about me. All the dads made fun of Ritchie and Uncle Sonny grabbed him by the arm and kicked him out of the garage and out he went, crying and with snot hanging down.  Which, HA on you, Ritchie.  He never changed either.  He was the exact same when he was older and married.  Ew.

My dad held me for a long time. He was standing in a semicircle around the engine of the car with some of the other dads, smoking a cigar.  It was nice.  I was way up high to where you could look down and see right through parts around the engine to the floor of the garage!  But the cigar smoke was bothering me, and I was getting squirmy and bored, so my dad put me down.

I had an amazing idea!

I crawled under the car so I could surprise them!  And I did!  Lying in a puddle engine oil and metal shavings and dirt I shouted "HI!!!"  Boy, were they surprised!   Suddenly I had a bunch of arms trying to grab me.   I was laughing and scrabbling around on the floor under the car trying to escape.  Someone grabbed my shoe, which looked like this: http://www.thedetoxwarrior.com/image/cache/data/category_139/superior-mary-janes-polo-ralph-lauren-alyssa-mary-jane-little-kid-girls-black-742-800x640_0.jpg

Too slow, gotta go!  One shoe on and one shoe off I ran back into the house and down the stairs into my girl cousins Sweet Sixteen party again.

The boy I was in love with danced with me again and I asked him to be my boyfriend and he said yes.  Then he danced with another girl and I cried.  My cousin Theresa told me to bug out of her party and get lost, but another girl told Theresa she was mean so I got to stay.  I got to take turns dancing with all the boys.  Someone put on 'Do The Twist' and everybody showed me how to do the Twist!  I climbed up onto the ping-pong table and I did the twist like a go-go girl!

When the record was over I tried to climb down but one side of the ping pong table collapsed.
I slid down, clanged off the snack table and  dumped over the punch bowl which was almost empty anyway.  Wow!  Humungous Freak-O-Rama!!!!!  With my enraged cousin Theresa close behind, I shot upstairs and scuffed my knee on the stairway (and got a case of gross ringworm later on in the same spot), cousin Theresa with murder in her eyes, in tears, disheveled, trying to catch me and probably eat me.  But she was too slow because she was wearing heel shoes.

Of course she went straight to Aunt Lillian waa waa waa and tattle-babied on me that I was ruining her party.  She got in HUGE trouble!  Aunt Lillian grabbed her by the arm and actually SPANKED HER at her own first grown-up party in the middle of all the moms and my mom started yelling at me and tried to grab ME by the arm but I ran upstairs and sat on the top step and and refused to come down for a really long time and everyone forgot about me.  My cousin Theresas' cheerleading megaphone was on the top step.  I sang 'I Love You Yeah Yeah Yeah' into it, not loud enough for anyone to hear but me.  It sounded pretty good like my voice was coming from a record.  I sang all the Beatles songs I knew, then I got bored and came back downstairs.

It was a very agitated group of women downstairs there in Aunt Lillians front room.  In the wake of the upset, all the moms were cranked into high gear, ice cubes crackling as drinks were freshened,  lighters sparking as they lit up,  and cigarettes sizzling as they were stubbed out angrily into the half-eaten canapes on Aunt Lillians' good saucers.  The smell of Ronson, cheap Maybelline lipstick and tobacco smoke filled the air.  They were all complaining really loudly about their terrible kids and how horrible they were,  and they were comparing punishment techniques (they'd been hitting the Canadian Club pretty hard.)  It was like they turned into monsters!  I just stood in the middle of it all with a little paper cup full of Aunt Lillians crappy diet Koolaid someone had given me and was kind of appalled, as much as a 4 year old kid can get appalled anyway.  And in the middle of all that my mom just swiftly took me outside and then we all got in the car and snuck home.

It wasn't a very long drive.  I got out and my mom finally got a good look at me.  There I was! I had on one shoe and my white tights were tore out on both knees and I was covered in dirt and dog slobber, my socks were wet and I smelled like pee and I had hemlock crud in my hair, my braids were all coming undone, AND I had grease and red koolaid ON MY NEW CHURCH DRESS (Total lie. It was a hand me down from my cousin Theresa.) Plus I had engine oil and grease on my face because it had got on my hands and I kept smelling it because it smelled good.

I could see her cranking herself up into an end of the world as we know it fit, but my dad saved me.  He saved me because when he came around the side of the car it was obvious that he'd been driving Three Sheets To The Wind, as my mom always put it.  So the fit that was meant for me turned into she got angry at him for driving Three Sheets To The Wind and she blew up and it was like an atomic bomb.

I got totally forgotten about AGAIN.  So HA on everybody!  I rule everything!

I deliberately ate glitter one time, but it didn't turn out how you'd think it would.

Told in the style of Lynda Barry and I hope she sees it too.

This has been bugging me and bugging me for 100 YEARS ever since I saw the 'Poodle With a Mohawk' poster plastered all over Hells' half acre in Seattle Washington.  OK well it first started bugging me after seeing her strip in The Stranger, but it changed with the poodle thing ANYWAY.

This is what's been bugging me:

LYNDA BARRY DELIBERATELY DRAWS SHITTY.

But she's completely screwing herself, and here's why.
 
She's so good at drawing fake shitty that every now and then she slips and draws something, just a little corner of something, really well and it TOTALLY gives her away.  She could be drawing so many things acceptably but she's deliberately drawing badly.

Plus!   Her people in the comics have really really bad grammer from the 1960's. But even then!  Every now and then she can't help it maybe but I think she totally is doing it deliberately - she writes a really good passage, and while she thinks 'Whoo, deal with that flash of incredible brilliance!' it's actually so obviously like "See, I have superfucking mad skills when I want to but I just don't want to because you couldn't handle it" but AHA ya mothercluckerbucker, because see, that really, really means "I freak out when I think of actually doing things well all the time because then I'd be held to that standard and no way in blazing hell am I going to be able to bring it 100% of the time so I'll just dole it out in dribs and drabs and people will think Man, this is such an incredible work of urban primitive art/literature".

Also in her mind she's thinking "Everyone can draw a table lamp and make it look like a table lamp, and a few people can draw a table lamp and make it look like a photograph, but nobody cares because it's a table lamp when everythings' said and done.  But when I deliberately shittify a drawing of a table lamp it's because that's my shtick...the shtick I lean on so I don't have to worry about being judged by my artwork because see it's already bad so ha on you.

This having been said, Lynda Barry, you are one of my top 3 favorite writers of all time forever.  But you should quit being all plastic and phony and draw right for a change so people can tell what the fuck they're looking at.  And you should start using regular drawing things like a pencil or a pen instead of a tree branch.  OK.

Noodles, Where Are We Going?

Shortly after we moved into our present home, I began noticing that there was something 'off' about the folks living next door.  It was a combination of things, like the wildly untended yard, or the aerial walkway through the trees and around the house someone had cobbled together for the use of the ten or so white cats that lived there.  In the late gloom of evening, it was an eerie sight; these cats walking slowly about in seeming midair.

Then there was the graveyard.  About thirty or so white crosses jammed into the soil between the house and the garage, moving slowly, death by death, toward my property line.

Relax.  It was an animal graveyard.  Not a Pet Semetary, sorry.  It didn't need to be a Pet Semetary because all the other weird in combination would have overshone it's evil Pet Semetariness.

Like the mysterious guy who started living in their garage.  Just showed up one night.  He'd step out sometimes on a warm summer evening and take a steaming elephant-piss back and forth across the blackberries that covered a good part of the garage and the backyard.  I don't know what this guy ate, but what he baptized stayed dead as fuck.  And this is the mighty Himalayan Blackberry we're talking about - the god-king of all invasives. You could hear this guy from indoors at my place as he cut loose like a fire hose.  I peeked a couple of times, but they were quick peeks.  One day he disappeared.  I did not ask.

The family of five that lived there were not too visually peculiar; you'd see them buying huge sacks of Cheetos and Purina Critter Chow at the store, looking a bit wore out and unwashed, but this is farm country, and we all look like that.

Let's look closer, shall we?  

Mom was a trembling wraith, like a Grey in a wig.  She refused to speak. I know this from the few times I tried to visit...all she did was stare at me until I left her line of vision - then she'd scream for her daughter to go see what the visitor wanted. You could see her in there as you passed when the light shone a certain way, just sitting, wearing a nightgown and a stole made of live rats, serenely pissing in place until you could smell it across the street.  You could see the marks on the floor where they overflow had turned into an amber colored, syrup-ish, fiendish form of adhesive.  The bottom half of the chair didn't come up when they lifted, so they took a hammer, broke it apart and slung it out the door.  

There was another spot just like that in the kitchen, where I'm assuming Dad had his throne, you'll excuse the pun.  The place where his armchair had been was a square of hardened piss-glue and old fecal matter from various sources, sunk an inch or more into the linoleum, which was black and fuzzy and had danger tape around it.  Linoleum did not come in black and fuzzy.  You can look it up.

His chair made it into the side yard in one piece.  One piece that had been tunneled and eaten and rotted black and molded over with blue freakiness, a ghastly pit of tobacco colored horror marking the spot where his Highness sat steeping in his own whiz.

While Dad was still in residence, his only form of daytime entertainment involved an occasional waddle out to the side yard in nothing but his huge, stretched-out, baggy jockey shorts, bringing up faint memories of the cattle ring at the county fair - where he'd poke at the dirt with a rake. Nothing about this was beautiful or appropriate.

There were two separate camps which arose to explain his sudden disappearance:  1.  He abandoned the family and went to Arizona, or 2.  The rats got him .  Once the developer breaks ground, I guess we'll find out.  Either way the guy is going to freak out when all those skeletons are unearthed.  Maybe one will have a gold tooth...? (Fried Green Tomatoes reference. Is so clever!)

The twin brothers would sometimes appear during the daytime, and I'd wave and be a nice neighbor, hand them a beer, you know.  They smelled like an old bookshop full of used hamster shavings, but they were OK.

Sis I have written about.
I wrote about the time she picked a dead cat up off the road and strolled home with it, talking to it and petting it all the while, causing huge swathes of cat fur to slough off marking her trail all the way to the front door. 

I wrote about the times I'd seen her out mowing the field in a mans' deep-cut sleeveless t-shirt, a  gargantuan boob swinging cheerily out either armhole.

I wrote about the times she'd cut loose at 2am in hair-raising, werewolf howls, screaming and growling incomprehensibly.

I've recounted the episodes when she'd stand at the back window and have vicious screaming arguments with the pear tree.  (When she was capable, that woman could cuss like a bag full of cats.)
When she was in her right mind, her personality was that of a quiet 6 year old girl. Once her father disappeared mysteriously, she began to get normal enough to hold down a job, and she's been doing better and better ever since. 

Another tale I've written already was about the time their tame rats (wild and pet stock; any rat that wandered in was welcome to learn how to take a Cheeto daintily from the lips of Sis....shudder) tried to move into our house, their little ratty minds having learned to associate the human voice with the dinner bell.  They begged prettily, in a semicircle, like little poodles of evil while my husband barbecued steaks on the grill...they ambled in though the dog door whenever they felt the need for a snack, languidly sunned themselves in my front yard, licking their balls, scratching themselves; and the resultant Mad Biker rampage through the house with a broom and a shotgun.

What I never realized that as desolate as things looked outside, what was going on in that house was so very, very much worse.

When the buyer came over to speak with me, he asked me if I wanted to see inside.  I was already halfway to the door, because I have no sense whatsoever.  Old fucked up hazmat house full of filth?  Color me there!

It goes without saying that there were places of lunatic carpentry attempts where the roof, wall and floor had been completely eaten away by rainfall.  A couple had ferns growing out of them.  I'm all for bringing the outside in, so let's move on.

The entire house, with the exception of a few items, was empty. Stopped in time at 1955.  From that time onward, nothing had been touched, cleaned, swept - nothing.  The old wallpaper, once beautiful, was shadowed over and brown with age. This aspect creeped the shit out of me until I realized that it had all been covered with cardboard boxes pushed tight to the wall and towering all the way up to the ceiling.

Anything that could be outlined by horror was outlined with horror. Horror with hairs all stuck in it. And cast snake skins.  And white cat hair. You could tell exactly what had occupied the spot by the perfect outlines left.  And everything that was wide enough for a turd held multitudes of them and dared you to play 'Guess the Poopie'.

The only stink in the place was ammonia.  Like on Jupiter, the underlying single note of ammonia, motherfucker, mingled in various amounts with the signature pee aromas produced by incontinent humans, dogs, cats, snakes, rats, bearded dragons, more cats, way more rats, possums, rabbit pee, rabbit eau du love squit, raccoon pee, more possums and other various creatures created a series of invisible, semi-stationary atmospheric continents of OH GOD FUCK THIS.  Ask anyone from Jupiter.  They'll tell you.  Some spots on Jupiter, you can screw up your resolve and tolerate because fuck, dude, you're on Jupiter right?  But others are...not...vacation territory.

Of course, the smell was only part of the horror.  Let me draw you a little word picture here so you understand what I mean.

Two story house.  Downstairs, you've got people and random creatures pissing where and when they would, ambling around, eating Cheetos and admiring their stacks of cardboard boxes.

Upstairs...upstairs was where the rats lived.

Because rats have no thumbs and cannot play video games, they chew on things.  They are mad bastards for chewing on things.  They don't care what they chew on.  They don't eat half of it anyway, they just leave rat saliva-coated chew-flitters heaped up in random places for whatever ratty reason.  The second story was their kingdom.  They had the run.  The water was left trickling in the bathroom sink in case they wanted a drink, and the toilet was, I don't know, their rat spa or something.  I think they used the tub for some kind of rat initiation ceremony, because why the fuck not.  

A couple times a week the humans would tear open a bag of Purina Vermin Chow and sling it across the floor up there. And thus, the rats were good.  The rats were taken care of.

But since they were rats without video games, they began chewing.  The rug.  The linoleum.  The underlayment.  The baseboards. The insulation.

THE WALLS.

ALL THE WALLS UPSTAIRS HAD BEEN CHEWED AWAY TO THE BARE STUDS. Floor to ceiling.  Gone.  Only the nails left.  Those, and flitters. 

They'd started on the ceiling by the time moving day hit, so there were a few meandering holes...but oddly, the walls and ceiling of the stairs that lead up to their kingdom had been left alone, for the most part.

The paint on the stairs was 1940's Apple Green.  Just one coat.  But bubbled and heaved; almost as though there was gravel beneath it.  There wasn't.

It was caused by what was above the stairs.

The ceiling sloped upward, as stairway ceilings do.  In the center of the wallboard there on the ceiling of the stairway, ran a long, stained, sagging black fissure with black...something...dangling from it.  In that one spot, there on the stairs, was the worst stink I have ever encountered. Ever.

The rats had been enjoying themselves over the years by scrambling up and down the slanted boards that backed the stair ceiling, like an antic game of Let's be Rats and Run Up and Down Slanted Boards.  And remember, as rats go along, like mice, they piddle constantly. Drip drip drip.

Now imagine a person living up there on the second floor.  Every time they walked up that stairway, the paint of which was so saturated by rat pee that it came off in spots and then was glued back on over the years whenever someone trod on it, our stair climber was also being showered every day, every night, by a constant mist of warm rat piss.  Yes.  The weird black dangling crud?  Was made of melting wallboard and rat pee.

The sister lived up there. On a mattress on the floor.  And she didn't sleep alone, either.

No go enjoy your dinner.