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Barbarella wrote:
Today, instead of working on the hoarder pile, I RAGE GARDENED
I tore up a fuckload of weeds, used a hand hoe to break up hard soil and roots
I planted onions and bulb mustard, didn't quite get to the carrots and radishes before it started hailing.
it was cathartic as fuck, and I managed to not even notice injuring myself.
-----
it always makes me think of this short essay from 1939, called "Working Off a Temper" by Grace Verne Silver
“There was a week when I was intensely jealous, bitter, justifiably angry. I wasn’t ‘seeing’ red, but my thoughts were black enough. The more I thought the more angry I became. If thoughts had the power to kill anyone there would have been a death all right! As I walked up and down the floor I said to myself, finally: 'If I don’t snap out of this, there’ll be a funeral for so-and-so and I’ll get as much time for killing him as if I’d killed a real man!’
I went out to the garage and got out the pickaxe… .On the next lot to our house–vacant, with an absentee owner–were three neglected, uncultivated, unwatered trees; we had no garden of our own then. The ground was baked as hard as pavement; the trees were shriveling in the dry August heat. Instead of taking that pick and killing the man I wanted to kill … I used the pick to dig up and turn over that hard soil. Now, I weigh just a hundred pounds, when I’m fat; but I swung that pick high over my head, down and up, up and down, all through one long hot day. Black thoughts kept racing through my head–every bit of injustice I’d endured from that person–and there was a lot!–was rehashed, silently. I thought of all the things I’d like to do to him if I had him on a desert island; I said–aloud, for there was no one to overhear–all I wanted, yet did not dare to say to him. Relentlessly, as though he were the ground, I swung that pick at him, and it, the two being unified in my mind.
By night I was tired enough to sleep, sore all over–but still plenty mad. The next day was a repetition of the first, except that I borrowed a heavy hoe and started chopping, cutting, all the weeds in sight; occasionally I even forgot to wish I could cut down my enemy as easily. By the third day it was pretty well out of my system. The ground was pulverized, my anger had gone; never did I forget or forgive, for the injury was too great, too often repeated; but I achieved a state of mind best described by the man who said that his enemy 'wasn’t worth the powder it would take to blow him to hell!’ My enemy was not only 'not worth killing’; I realized that 'life’ is a worse punishment than 'death’; I’d let him live til he wished he was dead!”
------
Any of y'all gardeners? I feel like talking about gardens.
Is it time to plant anything where you live yet?
Today, instead of working on the hoarder pile, I RAGE GARDENED
I tore up a fuckload of weeds, used a hand hoe to break up hard soil and roots
I planted onions and bulb mustard, didn't quite get to the carrots and radishes before it started hailing.
it was cathartic as fuck, and I managed to not even notice injuring myself.
-----
it always makes me think of this short essay from 1939, called "Working Off a Temper" by Grace Verne Silver
“There was a week when I was intensely jealous, bitter, justifiably angry. I wasn’t ‘seeing’ red, but my thoughts were black enough. The more I thought the more angry I became. If thoughts had the power to kill anyone there would have been a death all right! As I walked up and down the floor I said to myself, finally: 'If I don’t snap out of this, there’ll be a funeral for so-and-so and I’ll get as much time for killing him as if I’d killed a real man!’
I went out to the garage and got out the pickaxe… .On the next lot to our house–vacant, with an absentee owner–were three neglected, uncultivated, unwatered trees; we had no garden of our own then. The ground was baked as hard as pavement; the trees were shriveling in the dry August heat. Instead of taking that pick and killing the man I wanted to kill … I used the pick to dig up and turn over that hard soil. Now, I weigh just a hundred pounds, when I’m fat; but I swung that pick high over my head, down and up, up and down, all through one long hot day. Black thoughts kept racing through my head–every bit of injustice I’d endured from that person–and there was a lot!–was rehashed, silently. I thought of all the things I’d like to do to him if I had him on a desert island; I said–aloud, for there was no one to overhear–all I wanted, yet did not dare to say to him. Relentlessly, as though he were the ground, I swung that pick at him, and it, the two being unified in my mind.
By night I was tired enough to sleep, sore all over–but still plenty mad. The next day was a repetition of the first, except that I borrowed a heavy hoe and started chopping, cutting, all the weeds in sight; occasionally I even forgot to wish I could cut down my enemy as easily. By the third day it was pretty well out of my system. The ground was pulverized, my anger had gone; never did I forget or forgive, for the injury was too great, too often repeated; but I achieved a state of mind best described by the man who said that his enemy 'wasn’t worth the powder it would take to blow him to hell!’ My enemy was not only 'not worth killing’; I realized that 'life’ is a worse punishment than 'death’; I’d let him live til he wished he was dead!”
------
Any of y'all gardeners? I feel like talking about gardens.
Is it time to plant anything where you live yet?
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