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.

Why and Wherefore of these Two F Words

             I am in college i.e. I revel in the obscure. Five second movie bites are at the top of the list. Therefore, when We Seven Roommates decided to hold a vote for naming our house, there would be no chance for the cute and comfy wordplays on the house’s color like Tomato Clamato or Blood Bath and Beyond. Oh no, give us House of No Gables. Give us Between Two Ferns or Stratford Upon Avon. But, as you’ve already guessed from the title of this blog, something was missing from these pretentious little gems of literary or Galafinakian wisdom (I am currently attempting to bring Zack Galifinakis up to the coveted position of ‘adjective’ currently held by Shakespeare.)


           What were these names missing? you ask. Well, as someone old once said, Better it is to sleep under the leaky roof of the heavens than to sleep in a house named after an easily googled catch-phrase. Seek out, therefore, the five second movie bites which have been critically acclaimed by the drunk and giggly. Therefore, when the phrase Fatalistic Farmer was pulled out of the hat on voting day, what really won me over were the confused looks on Amanda and Priyanka’s faces, some of the less bookish among us.

          We were sitting in Round Table fashion around our only common furniture in the house: the kitchen table. (Our living room has become a bedroom to accommodate the last minute roommate, Drew.)

        Amanda, not knowing the reference, became the first to speak.

        “Fatalistic?” she said, in an English accent that she often dons in order to appeal to our academic sensibilities, reminiscent, naturally of Shakespeare or perhaps, a media analyst correspondent from the Daily Show.

        “Do you really want to send out a fatalistic sort of image to the town?” Amanda asked, cocking her head. “I mean, when I think of fatalism, I don’t think ‘nice parties and tea’, you know?”

        I jumped at the chance to explain the reference, as The Fatalistic Farmer had been my idea. “From the movie about Bob Dylan,” I explained in a strictly American accent which I do not donn, but like to attribute to clever leftist political shows such as The Colbert Report.

        Tabitha, also an English major and my best friend, cut me off. “You remember that line when Cate Blanchett’s character is being interviewed and they ask him if he thinks he’s fatalistic, and he says, ‘I’m not fatalistic, I’m a farmer. Who ever heard of a fatalistic farmer?’ It’s ironic, see? We’re not actually fatalistic.”

        “We’re not actually farmers, either,” said Dutch, the pessimist. Dutch, Tabitha’s boyfriend, is going into linguistics. “But I like it,” he said. “It’s clever. Better than The House of No Gables. I don’t know if you noticed, but the house actually has frigging gables.” What followed was a lengthy and detailed definition of the word ‘gable’, which I find very easy to omit since I don’t remember much of it.

         Amanda and Priyanka looked rather less than won over, and I like to think this comes from their common interest in the health care profession, the latter planning for med school, and the former for a nursing degree. My philosophy is health care, shmealth care. I am an English major, and real jobs, along with the real world, bore me.

          “What about Moulin Rouge?” Amanda asked, dropping the accent for sincerity’s sake. Sincerity was needed since this was a touchy subject; Dutch had already denounced this name on the grounds that we were not a whore house, which he then proceeded to do again.

         “But we’re not a whore house,” Dutch said. “And in case you didn’t notice, some of our neighbors seem like the kind of people who’d take that for an invitation.”

         I winced.

         “It wasn’t just a whore house!” Amanda protested.

         “Yeah,” I agreed. “They were courtesans, not whores.”

          I am known for being a feminist, and whenever I am able to make differentiations such as this, I’m in heaven. I write poems with names like ‘Responding to an Ex-Geisha in San Fran’, and once made a poster depicting all of the major figures in Third Wave Feminism. Once, my facebook status actually read, ‘There is no such thing as post-feminism. Get used to it’.

         “I mean, come on,” Amanda protested.. “Moulin Rouge is all about a poet—there were all kinds of poets and writers and theater stuff. It’s about art, and we love art, and music, and all of that.”

          “It’s a whore house,” Dutch said, not making eye contact, but turning visibly red. “We’re not naming the house after a whore house.”

          To be fair, Moulin Rouge could also be seen as a reference to the house’s color, which we’d already established to be rather lame. Reluctantly, then, I gave up the idea on the grounds that naming the house was an attempt to unify us, not divide us.

          “Going back to the Fatalistic Farmer idea,” I said. “We do grow tomatoes.” We’ve got about six or seven plants in the backyard.

          “True,” Tab said, distractedly, and then lit up. Tabitha, like myself, could be considered spacey. She is also a victim of the random English major factoid, and could be thinking anything. For instance, she could be thinking about how Paradise Lost was published in 1667 just one year after the Great Fire of London in 1666, which is just weird considering that, well, that is obviously just ominous. You see?

            “How about Persephone’s Pimple?” she suggested with the suddenly wide bright eyes that seem to suggest that she, in fact, does not give a shit what the house is named, and is being flippant simply to annoy me.

             “How about your mom’s tit?” Isaac said.

          “Also an invitation,” Dutch said, currently engrossed in filing his guitar player nails. Dutch is Isaac’s big brother, and if someone were taking minutes on any of their conversations, that could pretty much be the title for any of them: Big Brother talking Condescendingly to Little Brother.

           The conversation went on pretty much like this for the next fifteen minutes, with Dutch cutting down everything, Tabitha making flippant suggestions, and Drew occasionally being solicited for opinions which he vehemently refused to give. Eventually, we broke up the Round Table, with the tenuous final decision of Fatalistic Farmer.

          Over the next four weeks, our policy for deciding the name, much like the Senate’s policy on the threshold for the national debt, was consistently postponed, debated, or ignored. However, it’s probably safe to say that now, we’ve gotten so fed up with the whole thing, that sticking with The Fatalistic Farmer is the only safe way to finally end it.

          Naturally, the name will not really stick until a sign has been made and hung up on the front porch, proclaiming the philosophy under which we are all unanimously united.

         This experience typifies my indecision track record: a cat named Gandoph/Grey Goose/ Jagermeister, a ferret named Jumpa Lahiri/ Jumpy/ Hopsy IPA, and files in my computer named variously ‘Something in the Washing Machine’, ‘Tulips? Too Lips?’ and ‘Katelyn’s Rolfcoptering Turtle Soup’.

          I imagine myself being the sort of person who’d look at my seven year old daughter and say, “You know what? You’re not a Susan at all! What was I thinking?” For this reason, I will never have children. For this reason, I have six roommates and no current pet, and am now going back to school for a Spanish degree although my first was in English. This indecision is curable, I’m sure. If only, for the rest of my life I had a congress-like group of six other roommates who earnestly argue like Amanda, flippantly disregard like Tabitha, and completely cut my legs out from my under me like Dutch. Without them, how will I ever decide what color to dye my hair next or whether or not to invest in a new tattoo?