Episode 7: How to Distinguish Between a Zombie and a Three Year Old

“Most people don’t believe something can happen until it already has. That’s not stupidity or weakness, that’s just human nature.” –Max Brooks (World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War)

Quotes like that are all well and good as epigraphs. It’s just universal enough to use as a metaphor for anything from finding a giant poop under your bed to hearing a recent Wikileaks leak.

But this was quoted to me in an actual zombie context by my friend Rob, a zombie enthusiast. The fact that he quoted it within the wider and even more unsettling context of Harrisonburg is not the icing on the cake, but also the lit candles on the cake, and the tiny naked munchkin jumping out of the cake—in short, the freaking cake.

 My friend Rob is a frequent frequenter of The Fatalistic Farmer, enough so to have earned a name that he shares with our couch—Couch Rob.

            He was down for the holidays this year, appearing as he always does—suddenly and without warning, as if to avoid all enthusiastic homecomings, perhaps anticipating the aforementioned cake-popping munchkin. He’s self-entertaining, and as Tab recently noted, “It’s like entertaining a cat! If we forgot about him, he’d just waste away!” And ruin the couch incarnation of Couch Rob, no doubt. Much like a zombie, awaiting instructions from his bokor….

            But on to the quote, which you’ve been waiting for. It actually belongs at the end of the following Harrisonburg Horror Story, rather than the beginning, so hold on to your seats, readers, because it’ll return like my now tired metaphor of the Munchkin in the Cake.

            I awoke several days after Christmas to the sound of a small child making small child noises outside my window, on the front porch. My first thought, of course, was that a robber was using him as a distraction, so I sat up and pulled open the blinds.

            The little boy, who couldn’t have been older than three, was pushing a skateboard across the planks of the porch, goo-gaggling to it through the binky in his mouth.

            “What the…” I reserved judgment for maybe two seconds, surveying the street for an adult. And then I noticed that the child wasn’t wearing shoes.

            By the time I got outside, after grabbing a coat and discovering that none of my own shoes were in sight, the kid was already out in the street, still pushing that skateboard.

            “Hey, little man! Whatcha doing?” I called to him, aware that this was not a very disarming greeting.

            The kid, however, was apparently permanently disarmed, and goo-gaggled something back to me.

            I finally caught up to him, and was rewarded with an absolutely fruitless interrogation about the whereabouts of his mother and his home. However, a disturbing trend emerged in his answers: “Agoolight!” he would scream, pointing at the headlights of a nearby parked car or “Sunaggg” he would say, pointing, obviously, at the sun.

            “You cold?” I’d ask.

            “Sun!!!” he’d scream.

            “Uh, where’s your mom?”

            “Light!!”

            Oh, okay, I thought. A very natural vocabulary from a child who’s just escaped out of the cage he’s been chained in since birth. Right.

            I have the feeling that I’m not adequately painting the picture here. This little exchange went on for almost twenty minutes, with this disturbingly empty-eyed, chubby cheeked kid, screaming these two words at me as I rushed from house to house, knocking on doors, with no answer at a single one.
            I guess you’re hankering for a Rocky Horrow Show Pictures reference—there should be transvestite scientists popping out to undress us here—but as I finally plopped down on the sidewalk after letting the kid squirm out of my arms again, I could only think of the vending machine aliens from Toy Story, hopping up and down and cooing, “The Claw…”

The kid was empty. And finally I had a definition for that word as applied to a human being—without memory. I mean, my God, he didn’t even know which house he lived in. On each porch, he seemed equally at home. He was a rosy cheeked monster with crumbs all over his face…

            Finally, an answer at one, a forty-something man who was repairing one of the homes.

            “Well, you can keep him if you want!” he joked.

            Needless to say, I didn’t ask for further help from Mr. Rogers here, and finally decided to call 9-1-1.

            Two things occurred to me as I held the wailing kid on my front porch while waiting for the cops: one, this kid obviously did not know the word 'mother'. And two, another quote from Max Brooks: “Use your head: cut off theirs”.

            Damn you Rob, how the hell am I supposed to be a decent citizen when I’ve got quotes like this spinning around in my skull? The most disturbing thing about this kid’s responses were their alien garbled other-worldly sound, the cold sun sitting in the gray sky, with this possibly George Romero motivated image of half-vampire, half-zombie creature sitting in my arms.

            When the police showed up, I was admittedly half-relieved to find that they got pretty much the same response from the kid—meaning it wasn’t my terror that made me completely incapable of communicating with him.

            Sure enough, doors opened up after they showed up, and we found the home—just what I’d feared. Our loud-mouthed, bull dog-owning, family of questionable number and obviously West Virginia origin neighbors. The ones that sit on the porch and egg on the six or seven boys that live there to fight until they see blood. And here, I exit, rushing inside to tell Rob.

            You see, I’d just given Rob a book for Christmas, Max Brook’s Zombie Survival Guide, and was shocked to learn that he’d received the exact same present a year earlier from Tab. When I went upstairs, then, all I had to do was so much as mention the word 'zombie' in connection with this incident, and Rob was ready with his quote. I’m pretty sure he’s got the damn thing memorized.

             I mean, look at the following reactions to this incident, and tell me which one seems out of place.

            Dutch:  “They should be shot.”

            Tab:  “They should be shot.”

            Amanda:  “Maybe we should call child services. I mean, we really should. If kidnapping the kid is out of the question—” (Here I interject that it definitely is.) “we could always just poison their dog.”

            Drew:  “No, they should just be shot.”

            Isaac and Priyanka are in India, so they could not be solicited for comment.

            Rob:  Insert creepy zombie quote here.

            Right. So I’ll will just take a cue from Rob here, and gracefully exit with a quote which applies both to this godforsaken town and to my suspicions about certain guest members in this blog.

            “The dead walk among us.”

Episode 6: Childhood Memorabilia Meets the Housing Crisis

So apparently the homeless are going door to door now in Harrisonburg. And now, they seem to be offering worthless personal items in exchange for hard cash. I suppose you could almost admire the impudence of this—if this were a trend in a history book, I suppose we’d word it something like this: “a movement drawing on two of the best American marketing strategies, the Yard Sale, which masked the worthless nature of items by associating them with the grass that is always greener psychology, as well as the Take Out/Deliver Convenience which permeated all of America at this time.”

Now, like the Crazies of the previous blog, the homeless probably pull in at a close second on my list of paranoid aversions to the real world. Now, I’m not a snob, I’m just very…protective of my investments. But here—you decide.

It was an innocent Wednesday night—no one would have or should have guessed that Dutch would be well into his fourth beer, and just happy enough to stuff five bucks into the smelly hand of the first homeless man that knocked on our door.

Synesthesiac that I am—he looked like rotten yellow cabbage, wearing what I like to think of as a lower class terrorist outfit—a giant green coat, that for some reason forced him to continuously check his pockets in the manner of someone who’d just lost their keys.

“You don’t know what this means to me,” he kept on repeating, in the disgustingly earnest way of someone who’s entire arsenal of personality consists of earnestness.  “I’m gonna bring yall something, just you wait. I’m gonna bring yall a present.”

“No, please don’t,” Dutch said, looking sheepish. “That’s okay, we don’t need anything.”

“No, I’m gonna!” the man called from the yard, already hurrying away. He stopped to wave. “Just you wait! I’m gonna bring yall a present!” he called.

Dutch closed the door, and Amanda and I, who’d been standing open-mouthed in the foyer behind him, scurried away in the manner of people who’d been caught watching someone double-fisting at the slot machines.

Over the next couple of days, Amanda and I had a series of hasty anxious conversations about the potential dangers this little drunken exchange would provoke.

Amanda would stand in the middle of my room, shoulders slightly hunched as though imagining a defensive conversation with the Duke of Dutchdom, her huge lemer-like eyes filled with worry, glancing occasionally out of the window.

“My thing is, I just don’t want him coming here all the time, you know?” she said. “I mean, I know Dutch has his reasons for doing things, he’s kind of the head honcho and whatnot, but I really don’t think he realizes, like, this guy is going to think we’re the fucking, Mercy House.”

“We are not the Mercy House,” I concurred.

“We are the Fatalistic Farmer,” Amanda agreed.

We sat staring out the window for a minute. These little exchanges between us really got the rat running, if you will, in our fatalistic college minds. You can’t fight homelessness with five dollars and you certainly can’t fight the homeless with drunken Dutch’s around.

Tab walked in with half an avocado and a spoon.

“You know, this really makes me want to write more about politics and the economy,” I said, directing this comment at my fellow writer, and avocado lover. “We’re just so disattached from our time period. We don’t even have a name for it. Like, look at what a botched up job the media’s doing—The Housing Crisis. The Failing Economy. The Banking…Debacle. The Foreclosure…Years. Come on, journalists, we’re not naming an L.M. Montgomery book here—think Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

Tabitha was still scooping the insides out of an avocado, and I guess this made her incapable of the response I was looking for. “Or go back to the good old history books, where we’ve got stuff like The Dark Ages. Yeah, that’s good. Classic, appropriate.”

Amanda laughed, and as is usual with her, broke into a little song-gig. “College students gotta name the years, we’re all almost as screwy as Brittney Spears! Tabitha, she wants to go on back, Maybe she’s still living, in the Love Shack!”

We laughed, and then were brought back to reality by he sound of a van pulling up to the neighbor’s driveway and honk honking. Not pizza delivery.

We sighed, and shook our heads, all feeling a little guilty for not taking things seriously.

Sure enough, not two days later, Yellow Cabbage returned. Same coat. I was on my way to a mid-term, and with all the attitude of a second grader who doesn’t want to go to Mexico no more more more if there’s a stinky fat homeless on her door door door.

“Um, if you’re here for money, I don’t have any,” I said, trying to pull off the epic close door open door move all in one gesture. But the man put his hand up to stop me.

“No, no,” he protested, looking shocked that I would assume such a thing. “No, uh, member I told you I was gonna bring you something?”

Oh my God, sentences like that are usually followed by raucous laugher of circumstancial irony, followed by, “Well I did, bitch! Happy fucking birthday!” Bang! Bang! Bang!

I winced and shut my eyes, but when I opened them again, the alarming sight of a musty, moldy stuffed animal met my eyes. The man has his arm thrust all the way out, so that, what appeared to be a frog in tap dancing attire, was almost kissing my nose. As they say, bad association spoils useful hygiene, even in reptiles i.e. the frog smelled like the man. Bad.

“Oh my—uh, thank you. I will, just, pass this on to them, okay?” I gingerly took the animal in two pinched fingers and set it down on the radiator beside me.

“Yeah, yeah, I told you I was gonna bring you something, now didn’t I?” he said, still with that kicked dog expression.

“Yeah, thanks.” I said.

“Yeah, yeah, I thought they might like that. Just tell them that’s what I thought.”

“Okay then.”

He shuffled for a minute on the stairs, moving his hands around like an episode of Inspector Gadget gets Chicken Pox. “Well, you know, you wouldn’t happen to have any cash on you, would you? Anything at all, like a dollar?”

“No. I already said, I don’t have any money for you, okay?”
“Oh, nothing at all?” he asked.

“No, now please go away.”

“Okay, now, but I did think you’d like that, though. And, uh, thank you.”

I watched with relief as he slumped down the sidewalk, and reminded myself to later suggest to Amanda a song written from the point of view of a stuffed animal that a little boy had once clutched every night, who wanted to travel to the White House and protest with signs that said, Childhood Memorabilia have rights too! Don’t let the Homeless use us as thank you presents!

  

Episode 5: On Phobias of Crazies and Why Socks Belong on Feet

               "While introverts have no special advantage in intelligence, they do seem to process more information than others in any given situation. To digest it, they do best in quiet environments, interacting one on one. Further, their brains are less dependent on external stimuli and rewards to feel good. As a result, introverts are not driven to seek big hits of positive emotional arousal--they'd rather find meaning than bliss--making them relatively immune to the search for happiness that permeates contemporary American culture. In fact, the cultural emphasis on happiness may actually threaten their mental health." -- Laurie Helgoe's "Revenge of the Introvert", Psychology Today October 2010

            As you know, dear reader, there are two types of people in the world. Of course, the names for these two types of people differ depending on just which Republican happens to be proclaiming this delightfully reductive cliché, but here’s one you can count on as being a real personality indicator: the first kind of person sits next to a crazy on a bus, and scoots uncomfortably away from him, saying as little as possible. The second actively engages the crazy in conversation, delighting in this entertaining amusement the same way you delight in throwing peanuts at seagulls. I am decidedly the first.

            Unfortunately, the same way in which the delightful Myers-Briggs introverts are quite cozy in Finland, we are decidedly out of our element here in Harrisonburg.

            Among the cast of screwball doddering gagas I’ve met in this town are a 30-something Native American waiter from LA with forty-seven felonies who can beer bong in a second flat and shuts down his Facebook page every couple of days when an FBI agent hacks into his account, a chubby Mexican American, also from LA, who thought that striking up a conversation with me in a long line at Kroger was an excuse to come find me at my job three nights in a row, a smelly man named Paul who, following my car accident at which we’d met, also came to find me at my job and insist that I ask for a continuance on my hearing until he could figure out how to “make the pictures come out of my camera”, and an endless stream of meth-heads with the memory of goldfish (a group of them came into my restaurant to ask if we “had the 2 for 20 deal”—three times in one day).

            Contrary to what you might expect from such frequent exposure to them, I would still rather have lunch with Glenn Beck after a root canal than meet a crazy. This is a culture of prejudices, dear reader, so allow me this one. I can not endure the Crazies.

            So, last night, when I met the self-proclaimed voice actor for Yoda, half the cast of the Muppets, Bert, Elmo and several other Sesame Street characters which my TV barren childhood will not allow me to enumerate, forgive me for being the credulous one at the table. Forgive me for itching for Google or Bing.

            Five of the housemates were there, myself included, huddled around a table, mouths curled into chapped o’s, just as much from the smoke we were inadvertently blowing into his face as from the shock at the stories this man was telling—in various voices.

            “Can we get a tour of Sesame Streeeet?” Priyanka whined.

            “Oh, well I’m afraid I can’t do that,” the Crazy said, chuckling and ducking his chin.

             “Oh, I understand,” she said. “Do Elmo, do Elmo!”

            I stared at the man as he did a series of “Hello Baby” sentences which sounded pretty damn creepy to me. Elmo has a baby? He appeared to be in his fifties, and at least he wasn’t claiming to be the voice of Deep Throat. It could be worse.

            Even my usual partner in credulity, Dutch, was apparently won over by a series of names like Frank Oz or something, and was all but ready to ask for a Sesame Street tour himself.

            “So what are you doing in Harrisonburg?” Dutch asked, smiling sheepishly at the Crazy’s elbow.

            “Oh you know, just passing through,” the Crazy said, clutching his glass of Pepsi. “I’m headed up to New York after this.”

            Right, I thought. To put your hand in a sock and talk to the world. Uh huh, gottcha.

            “So when are they gonna make another Star Wars?” Priyanka asked, clutching her empty martini glass. “Can you put in a good word for us? Let them know that we have to have another one? I have to have at least another Star Wars before I die.”

            Well, she was the tipsiest of us all, but this didn’t prevent my embarrassment and the fleeting thought that maybe there were, in fact, two Crazies at this table.

            The Definitely Crazy laughed obligingly, and, in Crazy-fashion, ignored the ridiculous nature of her question. He proceeded to pull out a wallet full of photos of “The Family”, each picture displaying him with his arms wrapped around a fuzzy creature or his hand in a sock. I had a vision of the Crazy at a laptop, carefully photoshopping himself into the results of a google image search for Muppets.

            Tabitha was certainly the most charmed of us, laughing timidly at his jokes and voices, and encouraging him with questions about his past.

            “Unfortunately, the Star Wars series kind of ruined the director’s personal life,” the Crazy told us.

            “We kind of forget about that, don’t we?” Tabitha asked, warming to the seriousness of the topic, as she tends to do.

            “What?” the Crazy asked, in typical Crazy-fashion, who fails to realize when he’s been acknowledged for saying something serious.

            “The personal life,” she responded, blinking her earnest eyes. “They have a personal life, too.” This seemed to be her attempt to alert everyone at the table that we were, in fact, having a conversation with a human being. We’d been (minus the ‘me’ in ‘we’) asking for voice impersonations and autographs, and even pictures; I could see her self-awareness of our College Student fame hounder status. He must get this a lot when he goes to bars and claims to be a Muppet.

            “Yeah, yeah, they do,” he said. And in the interim of the silence after this, I wondered if anyone else was itching to ask about his personal life. Why was he alone at a bar at fifty-something years old, itching to talk about himself to a bunch of tipsy college students?

            I was noticeably silent, only occasionally laughing at some of his impersonations, so my true Manic Phobia didn’t set in until he turned his huge kind eyes to me and started asking questions about where I was from, who I knew, my major at college. So far, I’d had one cider. Definitely not enough to get me to forget the first rule of entering the social extrovert-eats-introvert world: don’t let famous people ask you about yourself. Especially people who only think they’re famous. This is potentially ridiculous, since it’s always the most naïve who ends up getting made fun of later in front of Wikipedia’s home page reading No Results Found.

            Oh my God. A Crazy was flirting with me.

            “I’m from Farmville, same place as her,” I said, looking at Tabitha as if throwing the conversational ball her way.

            “Oh, okay,” he said. “How long have you known each other?”  I glanced quickly back at him to see if there was any chance of this question being directed at Tabitha. No such luck.

            “Uh, how many years, Tab?” I asked her, clearing my throat.

            “Sixteen?” she asked me back, and I silently cursed her for making it a question, in effect, bouncing the final answer off of me. In a game of Hot Potato, she is obviously not the friend to rely on for tossing it to the Crazy in the circle. (The fact that this game is obviously something never played by ten year olds since the 20s should illustrate to you the extent of my pop culture knowledge, another ostensible reason why this particular game of Interview the Crazy was making me so uncomfortable.)

            “Well, I guess I’m headed out,” I said shortly after, blaming my departure on a Spanish presentation the following day.

            Well, you will never guess my supreme shock when returning home with Priyanka, to find that she was the first to google him. After about a half hour’s search, she came up with a brief mention of his name in connection with the set of the Muppets, but that was it. No picture, no nothing.

            Tabitha, Dutch and Amanda stayed at the bar talking with him for some time, and I am wondering about the ethics of bursting their nostalgic little bubbles. I am wondering about the ethics of bursting his. Sure, I didn’t, but I would have.

            He said he’d wanted to be a voice actor since he was very young; he’d always known that his hand belonged inside a sock. He was a man of big dreams and little actual realization of them, then. Or, as I like to say when things become too difficult to figure out, when google fails you, as does your sense of right and wrong—a Crazy. Now, from my little epigraph, which links introverted behavior with social ostracism in our culture, in effect, lending you the social consensus that you are crazy, perhaps the real problem here is that I've got a little too much in common with these people than I'd like to believe. There's too much there to process. So what can I do but scoot toward my computer and hunch my head, just a little farther away from him.

             

           

Episode 4: Google Dependency and Civic Duty

           When a twelve-ish year old boy comes to your door with an empty glass and asks for milk, do you or do you not google “what to do when a twelve year old boy comes to our door and asks for milk”? 

           It’s alluring to me, this potential for being the only hit Google has on that search. Because, living in Harrisonburg, this scenario has happened to me. But, in the interest of not being another Wikipedia, whose site-followers can best be characterized as Being Really Interested Until I Read the First Line of the Article and Then Get Suddenly Bored, I will digress and come back to the answer later.

         In lieu of a few recent events here at Fatalistic Farmer, I’ve begun to think of our Information Age as a modern manifestation of civic duty. For instance, who in their right mind would sit down and create a recipe of what to do with their mattress when it’s been shit upon by a dog? Someone with an overbearing sense of Samaritan, you might say. Whoever these people are, they come in handy.

         Recently, Priyanka (another 1/7^th of my roommates)’s dog (which I refuse to deduce his percentage of Roommate Status) shit on Amanda’s mattress. So Amanda proceeded to google her predicament, ostensibly using the phrase:  “dog shit on mattress…help??”

          And of course, there just so happened to be tons and tons of people who were just shitting their pants to help someone who shared her predicament.

         Unlike the good ol’ Ask one of Your Roomates Process, Amanda didn’t get answers like “Uh…tell them to buy you a new one?” which she’d undoubtedly have gotten from Dutch or myself before ten in the morning. 

          Oh no, instead, she got recipes. From people willing to sit down and mix 2/3 cup of ammonia with ¼ cup of bleach and get a Dog Shit on Mattress reversal.

          Who are you people?  Where do you live?  New Mexico?!!!!??

          Online, you can find a website featuring the laborious list of “Spanish Numbers, One to a Million!” It ends with the humble hope that this information has proved useful to you, as though apologizing for taking up SPACE on the INTERNET. Right. Then there’s the websites on how to clean toenail clippers, youtube clips on how to jump rope or step by step instructions on teaching yourself to snap, whistle, or blow bubbles with your bubble gum.

         Today’s Byronic hero is an overweight man on the edge of his rolling chair, staring into his computer and waving his hand in the air:  “I know, I know!! Oooh, call on me, Mrs. Kettlebaum!” Civic duty is performed every time we give our Spanish 201 professor a one star rating, or write a scathing review of the local Midtowne Market for it’s pretentious ‘e’ at the end of its name. But heaven forbid we have to stick a stamp on a change of address form for voter registration. There’s other ways to stay active, like bravely informing your girlfriend’s grandparents that Glenn Beck is a cult leader, and FOX news is full of hot air. (See my less political blog: The Ex-Files: Taking Him Home for Christmas was a Mistake).

          There are other ways to make a difference in Harrisonburg, though. They present themselves every time someone knocks at the door asking for things which they couldn’t possibly need. That’s why, when the twelve-year old boy showed up asking for milk, I should have taken the opportunity to tell him about the dangers of drinking pasteurized milk taken from cows pumped full of hormones to increase their milk yield.  

           The boy held a glass with milk residue at its bottom, and his exact words were:  “Wow, you have blue eyes. Uh, do you have any milk?”

          The odds of my saying yes would have been improved by the following things:  if this were a Got Milk commercial, or if I’d seen him actually ON a milk carton. In both cases, I believe a financial reward would be forthcoming.

            However, not only were neither of these things true, but I also immediately noted the other snickering twelve-year-olds of the Redneck demographic watching us from a porch several houses down.

           “No,” I said. “I’m a vegan.”

           Which isn’t technically true. I’m a vegetarian, but was a vegan for the two months that I spent abroad. (The lack of explanation should be read as poignant here, dear reader.) Strangely, however, I felt the need to make this boy believe me. Or maybe, in the back of my mind I hoped that he’d rush home and google the word ‘vegan’. Raising awareness and all that, you know?

            “Oh,” the boy said. “Well, does anybody have milk here?”

           Amanda was in the hallway behind me, and was rather uncharacteristically blunt as well.

           “I don’t have any milk either,” she said. “I don’t buy milk.”

           “Oh. Well…” the boy stood there, grinning at us. “Thanks!”

          I watched the boy bound off of the porch and across the street, wondering what possible satisfaction he could have received from our responses. As the Good Book says, Being Refused Milk does not a story make. Or again, The word ‘no’ is not a punch line. (Although it would greatly have improved the story of Lot when the Sodomites came knocking at his door).

          And yet, Amanda and I stood staring at each other in disbelief and indignation. Somehow, we’d been made the butt of a joke. And although Amanda might go on to include this little scene in an autotuned song she’d written and posted on Youtube, and I might, and have, gone on to paste it into this Harrisonburg collage, this is not what I’d really call ‘closure’ on the matter.

         “Maybe it was the name,” Amanda suggested as we stood together staring after the boy.

         “Huh?”

         “Fatalistic Farmer,” she said vaguely. “Farmer…?”

Episode 3; The Difference Between September 11th and July 4th

            The guilt that I bear in this next un-neighborly instance can probably be completely attributed to Tabitha’s new class on Buddhism.

            “For every action within the natural world, you are responsible for the reaction,” she reminded me one day over a back-porch cigarette. “You kill a cricket, there will be repurcussions.”

Tabitha widened her eyes and nodded her head, alarming signs of earnestness. I looked for the sarcastic smile that you’re supposed to wear as an anthropologically knowledgable, and yet still primarily American human being, but it wasn’t there.

            “What if it’s an accident?” I asked.

            “Well, that’s not as bad, but you’re still responsible,” she said, flicking her cigarette across the lawn.

            This conversation, in fact, was the tail end of her lengthy explanation of the six categories of ‘being’ which a Buddhist faces at death, one of which is Hungry Ghost. It is only those who achieve the very best karma who are considered for reincarnation as a human being.

            “Ha!” I seized upon this obvious oversight in the logic of this and simply pointed my finger next door. “So how do you explain…”

            Over the next month, the nexus of the Tabitha college information intake became Buddhism. A magazine on Yoga became an inroads to her Buddhist-prone psyche.

            “ ‘Letting your thoughts flow like a river’?” she read, following me through the kitchen. “ ‘ Be aware of each thought as it comes into your mind, and then be aware when it leaves’. I already do this! This is me! I’m a natural Buddhist!”

            I thought about this—how much enjoyment this girl can get from eating a damn peach, or watching a youtube clip, and how mysteriously strange this seems to me, who get up at six o’clock in the morning just to have as little as possible in common with college students, and though I watch my own fair share of youtube clips (minus the cute kitty ones), I never feel completely comfortable with doing anything…fun. I would rather memorize a stack of flashcards with the currencies of Spanish speaking countries than, say, go shopping.

            And so, at this moment, I decided to pull out the Zen Garden.

            I sat at my corner desk which faces the only two window-less walls in my room, and ran the tiny rake through the white sand, but before long, I was scrolling through New York Times articles on my laptop. Basically, instead of petting a cat while I read, like any normal twenty-two year old female, I was raking sand. This meditative experience had become, rather, a manifestation of the kind of company I perfer to animals.

            And this is when it happened. The sound of fireworks. Disturbing close to my window. It was September 11^th. Who would be blowing things up? Or had they simply confused September 11^th with the fourth of July?

            Half expecting to see Terry Jones outside with a box of Korans, I tiptoed to the door to look out.

            I would like to say that it was a shock to find that two neighbors from the House of the Girl Who Can’t Jump Rope, were throwing fireworks at my car. Unfortuantely, since this is also the House of Many Neighbors who Come to Make Two Minute Visits which consist of what I’m sure is a very fulfilling exchange through a car window, I would be hard pressed to call this a surprise. For Christmas, perhaps we should loan them a copy of Weeds, Season 1. Disturbingly, I suspect that I know more about inconspicusou drug dealing from this TV series, than they do.

            “Are you throwing fireworks at my car?” I asked the two black men on the porch opposite me, using a technique I call ask the offender something in a tone of voice which will make them tell the truth.

            “Naw, yo, that’s some car backfiring,” one of the them said, snickering fittingly afterward.

            “Stop throwing firecrackers at my car.” I responded, and stood there for a minute to let this set in before returning inside.

            I went inside to find Tabitha’s cat gnawing on my beautiful bamboo plant, which sits inside a vase with two Buddha-like figures smoking together. I smacked her with all my force, and that’s when the explosions continued.

            I whirled around and ran outside, slamming the door shut behind me. I then offered to just stand there until I spotted a car that could backfire fifty times in one place and which would also elicit their laughter.

            “How bout you don’t talk to me like I’m your kid?” one suggested.

            Meaning that this rather reminded the thirty-ish looking individual of a conversation he’d once had with his mother. How surprising.

            As someone old once said, better it is to heap malediction upon the two drug dealing fellas from your own front porch than to go inside and get one of your male roomates to do it. Ding ding, I believe a first-wave feminist just got her wings. This will hopefully be the Buddhist redemption for the time that one of our female neighbors actually had Dutch and Isaac open her front door with her own keys simply because she couldn’t seem to do it that day.

            Returning back to the heaping of maledictions, that is exactly what I proceeded to do, in a tirade which would make Lewis Black proud. Having released this bad energy upon the street, I returned inside and called the police, listening to the frequency of the explosions increase.

            The cops came, and in a characteristicly brilliant move, the neighbors simply went inside as the officer pulled up. He was instantly rendered powerless, and performed a skit which was almost a satisfying substitute to seeing the neighbors get arrested: the officer walked around the house several times knocking on the windows, and even once looked in their shed, about as effective as looking for your keys in the freezer.

            When I returned to my Zen garden, I realized that it smelled. Or to be more specific, my whole room smelled. After a short search, I realized that Tabitha’s kitten had shit in the middle of my floor. Not in the logical mini-litter box just earlier today I’d strangely percieved to be a Zen garden. Nope. Right in the middle of the floor. Now, if this were once of those heart-warming E.B. White tales, she would have at least had the decency to squirt out words like, oh, I don’t know, Karma is not, and never will be on your side. Or, don’t try to enjoy anything. Ever. You suck at it. Something of that fire-under-the-ass, get-back-to-your-flashcards-you-old-stick-in-the-mud nature.

            And then I watched that thought flit by and wondered what it’s going to be like. Being a Hungry Ghost.

Episode 2: Thoughts on the word Neighbor

Anyone raised in a Christian household knows that the first step to becoming a neighbor is to find someone beat up on the side of the road. The next step is to return on two separate occasions dressed up as members of your least favorite nationalities and then finally to come back and help him while dressed as a Christian (or in other words, non-descript attire such as a polo shirt and kaki pants).

I have the suspicion, however, that very few of our neighbors are aware of these heart-warming all-American traditions. In reality, the word neighbor has about as clear cut of a definition as the word lover does in New Mexico. (There is nothing particularly scandelous about New Mexico, but in my experience the word 'lover' never has a clear cut definition.)

In the following scene, a forty-something black man walks into the Fatalistic Farmer and actually wanders around until he finds someone to introduce himself to. For those of you who could be unnerved by this scene, I’d like you to pretend that instead of an adult who has managed to live in the world for forty years without learning the simple concept of of trespassing, this character is a very small child who is looking forward to Halloween. Because unlike forty-year olds, children have an excuse not to have any sense of what is, say, socially insane.

I was cutting up mushrooms in the kitchen when he appeared at my side.

I was wearing an apron over a sundress and flip flops, and he was, well, black. I am a white college student. My evolutionary fight-and-flight response: You had me at What up.

“Can I help you?” I asked, my knife poised above a mushroom.

“Oh, hey—I was just stopping by cuz I saw all them boxes on the front porch. You guys moving in?”

I looked around for a second, wondering about the effect of a sarcastic sentence like—“No, I’m the non-Mexican maid” and then said, “Uh, yes. Who are you?”

“Oh, yo, I knew the kids that used to live here. This still a party house?” He stuffed his hands in his pockets.

Um, no, that sort of thing doesn’t come in a lease, jackass.

“We go to college, but we don’t party.” I said, conscious the whole time of my four roommates just outside the back porch who were preparing for tonight’s cookout. Hey, it was a cookout, not a party. Sure, whatever, am I making excuses for not being completely honest with the stranger who has just walked into my kitchen to hurl sentences in my face which don’t even have verbs in them?

The man proceeded to repeat his reasons for walking in, “Well, you know, I just saw some boxes and I was just wondering who dis was, what’s going on, you know…”

I’d like to think that his awkwardness at this point was a result of the look I gave him that—that universal look which means why-are-we-on-the-same-planet: head tilted down, eyebrows raised above wide eyes. It was almost a maternal moment, like shoving a ridiculous hat on your child's head before shoving him out the door.

I watched the man walk down the sidewalk through the kitchen window, and proudly reflected on the good that I'd done by snubbing him. This snub may have been one of his first lessons in proper neighbor dealings. I’d like to think of this moment as one of my first neighborly contributions to Harrisonburg, a point on my Karma log. We can pull a Daily Show move and take this look through the ringer of Six Degrees to Neighbor-Makin’.

I gave the ghetto man a look

which made him realize it was inappropriate to walk in strange houses,

which intercepted his meeting the Bearded Lady next door

which made her make friends with the Cat Lady instead

who now gives all her dying, leukemia-ridden strays to the Bearded Lady

instead of us.

Now this is an example of a social lesson which must be learned. But before the Great Migration from the Front Porch to the Back Porch, Dutch earned The Fatalistic Farmer a few bad points on our Karma log by teaching a lesson which may perhaps have been a bit preemptory.

That night, we came to the disheartening realization that nothing is more annoying than a girl who cannot jump rope.

“Wow,” Dutch said suddenly, in a voice loud enough and monotone enough to alert us to the undoubtedly inappropriate words about to emerge from his mouth. “That little girl sucks at jumping rope.”

To put this in perspective, if the little girl had been singing the Cinderella song that most girls sing when they jump rope, the song would have only ever been about a cinder. She couldn’t get past two. On top of this, the girl was in the middle of the street and had the annoying habit of looking over her shoulder every so often to make sure we were watching her.

After a few minutes, the girl moseyed inside, and returned several minutes later with her mother, who made a big show of clapping in loud bursts.

This girl will never grow up and follow her dream of being jump roper. Neither will most of us. I get it. She’s stuck forever now, in this life of crime.

Of course, this is the same little girl that once came over at midnight to ask for a cigarette for her mother, who was still sitting on the front porch, perhaps catatonic from drugs. Of course, this is the same girl who probably will be stuck there forever. Anyway, it’s not helping my karma at all to have this great karma drain of needy kids I could be helping swarming around me, forever flicking me off in my dreams, or appearing randomly in my metaphors to completely destroy my English Major karma points. You know, every time you complete a perfect sentence, something harmonious happens in the spheres, doing whatever it is that spheres do when they are harmonious. It’s all part of the Chain of Life. That’s right. Not the circle. The chain. The woman the Ball and Chain, the man the Balls and Chain, and the children failing to jump rope over their mutually crippling and crippled…chains. And us watching on, with our raised eyebrows and our karma logs, hoping to make a difference. Or raise awareness. Of differences…

Episode 1: Harrisonburg's Bearded Lady

Harrisonburg is like a little kid with pigtails jumping rope in the street, who when you wave kindly at them, flicks you off. There are pockets of meth-heads, Russians left over from the immigration in the 80s and whole back roads which get more traffic from rollerblading Mexican children than they do from automobiles.


Not that I mind this. On contrare, it’s very interesting. However, when it enters our comfortable little world at The Fatalistic Farmer I have a tendency to balk. To stand aside and listen and record, and hope that someone picks up my conversational slack.

So when The Bearded Lady came knocking at our door, two weeks after we moved in, it’s no wonder that I stood aside and let Isaac take over, the great listener and conversationalist, who will one day get paid for his curiosity as a biologist. The only reason I came out of my room at all was in hopes that it was a religious solicitor that I could confuse by saying, “Hold on just a minute” and then never coming back to the door. However, this visitor was a bit more promising.

“I’m sorry to bother yall,” she said through the storm door. “But someone done broke in my house and stole my purse. Yall haven’t seen it, have you?”

“Uh—no,” Isaac said. “I’m-I’m sorry, wow. How did this happen, ma’am?”

I sat down tentatively on the stairs where I could see them, while Isaac went out to join her. Always on the look-out for the infamous meth-heads-who-come-off-I81, I watched the woman’s body language for signs of strange tics, but there were none. This was a woman devoid of body language, standing with her huge chest poked out and her pudgy hands hanging limply at her sides. The strangest thing about her was the likely unwanted beard, and equally unwanted bald spots on top of her head. I vowed to later google which kind of narcotics makes you have hair where you don’t want it, and none where you do.

“I don’t know,” The Bearded Lady answered, still using the same loud voice as if she knew there were six more of us in the house, and was speaking to each one. “Someone just done broke in when I won’t there, and took it. It’s not about the money,” she said, as if reading my meth-head suspicions. “It’s just that I had all stuff in there, you know? All my stuff that means something to me, like my I.Deeees, and my pictures of my kids, and my all my things and whatnot in there. It’s just such a pain in the ass to get that stuff back you know?”

“Oh, yeah, yeah,” Isaac said, sitting down on the stoop. “So you have kids? Do they live around here? Do you live with them?”

“Aw, no, you know, I’m orig’nally from North Carolina, that’s where I was born and raised, right? Most people can tell from my accent…”

What followed was a lengthy story which I avoided by creeping off to go find at least one more roommate to bear witness to this. This turned out to be Pryanka, who, at 4’11” and drop dead Indian, is undoubtedly the cutest of us. Being Isaac’s girlfriend, she was not incredibly interested to learn that he was grilling a complete stranger, but curious about the beard, nonetheless.

We tiptoed back to the door, and unfortunately, the woman spotted us.

“Well, hi there honey,” she said, looking Pryanka up and down.

“Ha ha, hi,” Pryanka said, opened the door just a crack, with that paralyzed smile that she gets whenever old people or transvestites hit on her. Sure enough, that was obviously the bearded lady’s pick-up line.

“Honey, I hope you don’t mind me saying, but you sure are a pretty woman. Now, I don’t swing that way, but if I were a lesbian, you’d be the first one I’d go after.”

Pryanka laughed and said “Well, nice to meet you!” before giving me a look that obviously blamed me for this encounter, before going inside.

The Bearded Lady turned back to Isaac. “So you haven’t seen it, huh?” she repeated, and continued on without a reply. “It’s not about the money, you know? It’s really not. It’s just that some things are irreplaceable.” She paused, apparently to allow us time to marvel at this hefty word and wonder as to its meaning, before proceeding to define it as ‘stuff you just wouldn’t give away, not for ten million dollars’. Well, sure, that made sense now. Things like old pictures of times before the beard.

She paused and eyed Isaac for a minute. “Would you mind giving me a cigarette?” she asked, in the tone of someone who’d just lost their job and then asked their boss if they could make a phone call from the office. You’d have to be a little shit to say ‘no’.

“Yeah, sure,” Isaac said, because that’s what Isaac says, who by no means is a little shit.

“Thank you, honey, thank you,” the woman said, before continuing her story about the purse, a sermon which, due to length, repetition and ragingly Southern catch-phrases, might as well have been a Jehovah’s Witness sermon anyway.

This may not seem like a strikingly memorable story, and perhaps would not have been if the Bearded Lady had not returned on at least four other occasions, searching for such variously mysterious and odd possessions as keys, a cat, and even once a friend, more irreplaceable things for which she would not accept a million dollars.

Finally, though, Dutch pointed out the rather dismaying trend of her requests for cigarettes.

“Just say no, man.” Dutch snapped at Isaac one day, sounding rather disturbingly reminiscent of an anti-drug commercial. “What’s she gonna do? Scratch you with her beard?”

As I have already identified Isaac by the fond title of ‘not a little shit’, you can imagine Isaac’s understandable inability to refuse her. So Decisive Dutch donned his D² cape, and instructed us that the couches, cigarettes and lesbian-converting behinds would now be porch monkeys on the back porch rather than the front.

Sometimes, from the safety of the back porch, we hear her bellowing out a story of a currently missing item at a random stranger, and we speculate on her motives. Is she hoping for a handout?

Whatever her motives, I’ve found that the only way to make sense of this woman is to do what I always do when I can’t categorize a person—use them in a metaphor. This woman is like the Harrisonburg version of an ice cream truck. And now, the sounds of her bellows are like the tinkling tunes of said Dessert-mobile, inviting little children to run towards her with generous hands full of quarters.