Poison Arrow

The opening day of Mowing Season is always bittersweet. Sweet, because after my lawn looks nice, I am free to judge my neighbors' shabby landscaping skills; bitter because I have to actually do work before getting down to the judging.

This year, as I was mowing around the flowers on opening day, I found an arrow. Yeah, an actual arrow, as in bow and arrow. I immediately blamed my shitty neighbors across the street, but their arrows were usually sonic. A few minutes later I found another one hidden in the grass. It didn't look like anything on the porch had been punctured, but it's not everyday that you find a quiver of arrows on your front lawn, so I was a little concerned.

I knew that there hadn't been any Indian attacks here in at least a hundred years, and even if the warpath had heated up, why start with me? Why not hit the sheriff or the ... stagecoach manager or something? I'm just an innocent homesteader, trying to scrape out a living here on my property.

Of course, they might not be recent arrows. They might be mystical revenge arrows launched from an ancient burial ground that was razed to build my house. That would explain quite a bit, actually, like why I've had to replace my TV 3 or 4 times, or why that faucet drips blood occasionally.

The cursed arrows. Hey, that's an awesome band name!

Using knowledge of the ancients, I submitted the arrows to a lengthy and intense cleansing ceremony, sort of like the one Billy Jack had to endure before kicking the crap out of those rednecks.

And hey, as an aside, ever notice how many southerners will claim some microscopic amount of Native American blood to make some tenuous claim of...well, I'm not sure exactly. Like, "Well, I'm actually 1/32 Cherokee," or "There's some Creek blood on my mother's side." Who do they think is buying that stuff?

Actually, I just left the arrows on the back porch and sort of forgot about them. 

Last week I put the haunted arrows in a bag of yard trash. You could see the tips of them poking out of the bag. I was a little concerned about the garbagemen getting cursed, but figured they probably had to take training on that sort of stuff, what with people regularly throwing out possessed dolls and ouija boards and whatnot. 

Yesterday when taking in the recycling bin, I noticed something was amiss. The trash bag was still there, but the arrows were gone. Some mystical Native American spirit took them from the Hefty bag and transported them back into the Land of the Dead. That, of course, is the only scientific answer to what could have happened.

With the arrows gone, I'm pretty sure any and all curses on the house have been lifted, but I might have to undergo another purification ceremony just to make sure. Or I might have to embark on an epic quest, like the time I searched for my niece in Comanche territory for five years. But that is a story for another time.

The view from my porch

The Weather Outside is Frightful

It was co-ooold this week. I realize that to yankees reading this, the twenties are reason to wear sandals and wifebeaters, but for Florida, it's cold. Cold enough that I ran around like an asshole covering up plants that will end up dying through my neglect anyway and wondering if I should run the faucets like the news tells me to do.

Since my house was built in the '20s, it offers little in the way of insulation. I probably would have been warmer outside, especially since my heat decided to die over the weekend. I'm too cheap and frightened to buy a space heater, mostly because I feel I've already cheated death with one earlier and I don't want to push my luck.

Back in the mid '90s my roommate Todd and I had a pretty awesome house. I had what was originally the living room as my bedroom, and he had an actual bedroom. It didn't have heat or AC, but I don't remember it getting too hot, mostly because my mattress was in the corner between two windows and there was always a nice breeze coming through. Winter was different, however. The same windows that made summer so pleasant let in a never ending stream of arctic air thorough my sleeping body. So I came up with a solution.

We found a couple of ancient space heaters up in the attic and each took one. These things were almost rusted through with layers of electrical tape wrapped around the cords. They would constantly trip the breakers, requiring us to walk out in the cold to fix it.

Since the heaters didn't have much range, I came up with an ingenious solution. I placed it on a board on top of a milkcrate, aimed the thing at my feet (which were about a foot away, covered in every blanket I owned, all both of them), then went to sleep. To this day, I'm not sure how I managed to not burn the house down with this invention.

Lord of the Flies

I'm not fanatical or anything, but I'd like to think that I keep a fairly clean house. I don't keep food out, and yeah, the dishes might linger a while in the sink before their trip to the dishwasher (what, like I'm going to hand wash that stuff? It's the 21st century!), but I'd like to think that I keep up at least minimum standards of cleanliness.

So why do I have swarms of flies in my kitchen?

Couple mornings ago I noticed a few flies on the window. "How dare you invade the sanctity of my home," I thundered, as I swatted the offenders to their death. I came home from work that afternoon and had a new gang of flies buzzing around the window. I have just enough of the OCD that I can't let that stand, and would swat flies until they were all dead, their nasty little insect carcasses littering my windowsill. Then the next day I'd start all over again.

I'm familiar with plagues, having dealt with both fleas and swarms of locusts before, but these flies are really freaking me out. A co-worker told me he had the same problem years ago, only in the bathroom, which is of course a thousand times worse than my problem, but it still feels like I'm living in an unclean house. I've been told to pour bleach down the sink and also to cover the drains with dishes, ensuring that when I move the dishes, I'll unleash swarms of bleached, angry flies all over me.

Plan B is bringing in an army of spiders which would not only eat all the flies, but would also give me an early start on my Halloween decorating.

Let My People Go

Well, my possum friend has finally died or moved on and the bathroom doesn't smell like rotten marsupial. I'd be happy with this development except for the fact that in willing the poor wretched creature to die or disappear, I seem to have unleashed forces greater than that of mortal man.

I now have a flea infestation in the bathroom, I'm assuming from the decayed possum underneath the floor. I also assume that these fleas are carrying all sorts of exotic diseases and pestilence that will require lots of painful tests, probably involving the butt.

This is fairly puzzling since the bathroom is tiled and they don't have anywhere to hang out before attaching themselves to my legs when I walk into the bathroom.

Then I'm working in the yard Saturday and notice all these baby locusts. I guess they're locusts, they're bigger than a cricket and look like what I suppose a locust looks like. What am I, an entomologist? I just know they're hard to kill and travel in packs and they're going to destroy my crops.

Well, OK, they'll destroy my lawn.

So already I've been struck with two of the 10 Plagues of Egypt. I'd say boils are coming next, but if you've seen a picture of me from 15 to about 25, you'd realize that one is a little late.

But what I don't get is what did I do? How did I piss off Moses? I don't have any slaves building my pyramids, hell, everyone knows I'm a friend of the Jews. Why, some of my best friends are Jewish. Wait, that might be the wrong thing to say.

Is it possible that some sloppy celestial bookkeeping caused me to get some Egyptian pharoh's (they still have those, right?)bad juju while he's getting all my rewards? Who do I see about this? I don't want my water to turn to blood.

Playing Possum

For the past couple weeks I've had a possum under the house. Oh, excuse me, Mr. Hahvahd La-De-Dah Fancy Pants, I've had an opossum under my house for a few weeks.

It hangs out in the area between the bathroom and the bedroom, so sometimes at night I can hear it gnawing on support beams or electrical wires or important plumbing. There's a small vinyl door in the back of the foundation that allows you to get under the house, and every morning I'll reinforce it with bricks and boards, then the next morning I'll see where the filthy beast has dug a hole or moved the bricks to get under the house once again.

I've been under the house exactly once. If you like the feeling of crawling on your stomach with about one inch of clearance between you and the floor above you waiting for some feral animal to bite you in the face, you'd have a ball under there.

I've been trying to ignore my new tenant, but he's really making my bathroom stink. It smells like a wet dog or something in there, although since I'm single once again, that's probably the least unpleasant smell in there, what with the absence of potpourri or whatever it is that the ladies use to make the place smell like less of a cave and more of a place where civilized people can attend to their bathroom needs with some modicum of taste and class.

However, the last few days I've caught a different odor. I'm thinking my little furry nemesis has finally died, because something is definitely rotten under there.

So basically I'm a newly single guy with a rotten smell coming from under his house. This can't look good to the neighbors.