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.