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As hard as I try to be the ever cynical wise cracker every once in a while, I fall for something I see on TV.
Normally I resist the great Satan known as cable television with as much will as I can possibly muster. That being said I have become hopelessly sucked in by “Dirty Jobs.”
Normally I would spell out the fascinating nuances and complex strata of the show to justify my actions but the gods honest truth is if I could pay to kiss Mike Rowe’s face – I would never stop robbing banks.

I can’t tell you how dissapointed I am in myself for being a slave to such a schoolgirl brand of enthrallment. It is downright embarrassing.
Anyway, great show. Mike your particular brand of self-deprecating charm has completely unravelled me and now I must go reconsider my maturity levels.
The show is brilliant, please be careful and try hard not to mess up your beautiful face.

regards,
Sarah

There is a really skanky convenience store across the street from the art supply place I frequent, so when Paul needed his Mountain Dew we pulled over. I sat in the shadiness of the neighboring lingerie model establishment with the neon sign blazing the letters “O P E N” inside a pair of parted female lips. An elderly man sat on the concrete outside talking the talk of street crazy. When Paul came out of the store the man asked for some money and Paul handed him a ten. The man seemed startled and called out after him, “wait, wait sir, please!” Paul turned around and the man held up his closed fist “Give a brother some bonk!” Paul touched his fist with his own and we drove away.
That old man did not in fact say “brother” he used the “N” word which I am admittedly not edgy enough to say, but I changed it to “brother” because I believe that is what the man intended to mean and that is what we intend to mean when we say it. This is a common household exchange with us now because when you don’t have anything else to give – you can always give a brother some bonk.

Shortly after I had bought my VW bug a million years ago I was gassing it up at the local station. I get a lot of VW stories at gas stations and it nearly always involves some variant of they ‘used to have one but then their (insert persons name here) made them get rid of it because it wasn’t running.’ This guy appeared to be in his early forties, a little beefy with shaggy surfer blonde hair and a matching 5 o’clock shadow. It became clear to me he wasn’t merely nostalgic for his now missing VW; it was like piece of him was missing. His eyes were glassy when he spoke of it and as he ran his hand over the curve of the pale green roof of my little car he choked out. “It is pretty stupid when you end up breaking your own heart.”
Amen.
There are plenty of people walking around this planet willing to do this for you, this was my little reminder to not be retarded and do it to yourself.

The phone rang just as I was walking out the front door to meet Paul for lunch. Normally I would have just walked out, but I put everything down and made the mad dash for the phone. The conversation was surprisingly brief and I hung up, picked up my things and sat in the car in utter disbelief.
I knew I was going to have to do something, make a gesture for posterity. I didn’t want it to be too cutesy but this seemed a situation where avoiding it would be nigh unto impossible. So I drove to the First China Restaurant and approached the desk breathlessly.
“How much for the fortune cookies?”

The woman looked ready for an argument, “How many do you need?”
“Oh just one.”
She waved her hand and dismissed me, “Just take it.” And went back to taking a phone order for Mu Shu Pork.
I sat in the car with my Swiss Army knife and cut the package open neatly. I used the tweezers to wrestle the fortune from the cookie and carefully replaced it with my own. I tucked it back into the plastic wrapper and headed for Paul’s office.
He looked at the cookie with suspicion after I put it on his desk. He cracked it open and read the fortune.

“Confucius say you knock one past goalie”

I silently chastised myself for not remembering to put the lucky numbers on the back. Paul looked up with a great ridiculous grin.
We ate lunch and then stood quietly staring down the baby aisle at Target as if we had suddenly been granted passage to a discriminating club that we had somehow stumbled backwards into.

Soon after the Target trip the hormones drenched me like a sudden storm. Nobody had ever explained about being pregnant, I mean truly truly explained it to me. Generally most people just bitched about being fat and tired and their shoes not fitting anymore, but no one explained about… the super powers.
Everything became so visually crisp and clear to me and I swore that I could hear better; the closest thing I could compare it to was peaking on acid. Most remarkably the “Smell-O-Vision” had been switched on and things that smelled a certain way before now had layers upon stratified layers of smell. Just standing too close to the garbage was like an archeological dig being performed exclusively by my sinuses.

I recall being young and at one of those creepy temporary carnivals that would pop up in mall parking lots. There was always a ride that was rickety and dangerous and threw you around a little too fast. The excitement and adrenaline were delicious but always just below the surface was the real possibility that you would puke up all the cotton candy you just scarfed down. The ride would invariably stop, you would get off a little unsteady, your equilibrium having taken a pounding and you wait to see if indeed would be throwing up on your shoes. As soon as the moment passed you ran as fast as humanly possible to get back in line to do it all over again because the fun always beats out the sick.

That is how it felt, a pure rush of sweet sugar endorphins coursed through my veins while I burned with malice of forethought through innocent jars of bread and butter pickles and entire tubs of Mediterranean red dates with the knowledge that I might have to run for the sink at any moment. Like Moses in the desert, I knew not what force drove me only that I could not fight it as I meticulously scraped the bottom of a carton of Hagan Daas Mayan Chocolate Ice Cream.
My kitchen was the green fertile fields of the Midwest and I – I was a giant locust.

I was sleeping hard early on a Friday morning and dreaming of wandering aimlessly in an emergency room. Rosie Grier, a very large football player from the seventies was on a gurney in obvious distress. I approached him and realized he was in labor and was about to give birth. I stayed by his side and tried to flag down a doctor. A hockey player in full regalia approached and asked Rosie if he could have his autograph, I angrily snapped back that the man was in pain and wasn’t going to be signing anything. When he persisted I grabbed his face mask and shoved him backwards. A doctor in a white coat walked up and started checking Rosie’s condition. “This seems very unlikely. How did this man come to be having a baby?” I asked. He smiled in a funny sort of way, “Nature makes some weird mistakes sometimes, but she gets it right eventually”

I woke up with a feeling that something was amiss. Suddenly the cramps hit and brought my knees up to my chin.
The next couple of hours was a surreal swirl of blood and pain and frightened phone calls and everything quite literally fell out of me. The fabulous narcotic hormones that I could almost taste like candy crystals on my tongue at any given moment had fallen away in what seemed like the blink of an eye. My shock at being pregnant in the first place and my disappointment that it did not stick was completely overrun by my fascination of how fucking efficient the human body is. The bun was not cooking up correctly and the oven simply flew open it’s doors and cast it out.

I know this sort of thing affects people differently. Some people have a profound sadness that reaches all the way into their bones and it takes a long time before they can even talk about it which I completely respect and understand.
I however feel so damn fortunate that I got to have my superpowers for even that little bit that any kind of bitterness has been diluted for me. Maybe there will be some kind of retroactive darkness that will take me in coming days but for right now, I feel okay.

Anyway the fun always beats out the sick.

I watched the clock intently as the long arm ticked closer to the 3:00PM mark.
The bell usually rang at 3:15 but Ms. Walters, my second grade teacher would always stop class early.
One of us would get chosen to read from our favorite book for 15 precious minutes while the rest of class looked bored enough to die right then and there. I recall Sheila reading aloud from “Where the Wild Things are” and a kid named Earl brazenly reading from his older brother’s “Mad magazine” until it was quickly confiscated.
The day it was my turn I brought my copy of Alice in Wonderland that was disintegrating from wear. Ms. Walters was thrilled at my choice and said that once everyone in class had their day to read, that I could continue every day after reading a little bit from that book. She confided to me it was her favorite.
After I got entirely through with Alice, Ms. Walters lent me her threadbare copy of “Through the Looking Glass” to read that aloud to a sullen crowd of seven year olds at Jim Cherry Elementary.
As I read through chapter eleven a weird little seed was planted and my obsession started as simply as that.
Every night I went to sleep dreaming of a large garden; an exotically beautiful place with a creepy undertow. It would be something mysterious that would belong entirely to me and keep me safe from precarious outside forces over which I had no control.

I would of course require a very very large chessboard, just like in the book.

After school I escaped unnoticed into the woods behind my parents house where my very own “house” stood. It was an empty Kenmore box with holes cut out for cathedral windows and plastered with glued bits of foil paper and flotsam. I had squirreled the box furtively from the garbage pile a few weeks earlier and it was beginning to wilt from the moisture of a weepy spring in Georgia. I knew I would need to “build” again soon.
Undaunted I crawled inside with my horse head writing tablet and markers, shooed away the silver fish and began to crookedly draw my future.

I can’t say exactly when the other projects came to mind or were modified again and again like honing an enormous stone to its final shape. I only know when they became cooked all the way in my head. It is at once liberating and mortifying to be so in love with your own art. I would often bother my father’s drunken coworkers who came to the house for the odd martini. It always turned out much odder than they anticipated. “See? The giant concrete Pegasus goes here…” I would tap on the paper containing my elementary school blueprints and stare into red rimmed eyes waiting for the recognition of my little demented genius.
I wanted so badly for somebody, anybody to understand and appreciate my madness even just a little.

Somewhere in my late teens I began to consider the real world challenges associated with being compelled to make something that everybody else will think is entirely retarded. I didn’t even have a good excuse. Historically most people who built strange giant things tragically lost a family member or had God giving them directions or like the man in Mexico who built his alien landscape using ceramic bits and pieces of glass said the butterflies had whispered instructions to him. I was pea green with envy as I had no outward mental illness on which to rely as a plausible excuse, perhaps in a way that made me slightly crazier than they were.
One thing was for certain – I would need a LOT of property.

When terrible awful things would happen to me I would retire emotionally in my place that didn’t exist yet. My poorly rendered drawings and half-assed engineering gave me shelter when I had not a soul to turn to. Mentally I could always float in my own lake in my personally built rowboat with the cheery fiberglass head of the lochness monster at the bow to lead me though troubled waters.

After years of being reasonably happy and yet piss poor as an artist for hire, I felt my long term garden goals were not being met. My internal voice would not be silenced. I quietly got a respectable job about ten years ago. I hated it and still do but I knew that sometimes you have to give up everything to get everything. So I socked away twenty five percent of my pay, I wore Salvation Army clothing and used shoes like I intended to in the first place. I drove a vintage car and pretended it was because I was cool instead of not wanting to dig into my cache for a down payment.
During this time I worked and reworked my ideas, sometimes bringing books of my weird sketches to inappropriate places like parties or bars.
“You see? the bats fly out of the nose here.”
I would stare into red rimmed eyes and tap the pages for emphasis.

Eventually I stopped telling most people about my plans.

Fast forward to today.
Today I drive two hours to my NEW PLACE, the one I sign the papers on – my precious and bizarre garden that has been waiting so patiently for me to build it finally has a physical place for it to be born into. The import has welled up in me. The gravity of what I am doing is at once astounding and completely and mercifully ridiculous.
My place is 50.73 acres with a creek bordering on two sides. I called the county extension office to see if the creeks have a name, they don’t. I get to name my two orphan creeks.

Now I have to build a house where I can go wash up after a hard day of building the weird stuff. I will likely have to sell everything I own to do it.
Here is the view from my future front door.

fucking huzzah.

One of the things that I love about my giant chunk of land is that every weekend when we go up there, nature has shaken the great Etch-a-sketch and drawn an entirely new picture for us. When we arrived Saturday morning and I unlocked the gate, the whole place was yellow with wild coreopsis.
I made mental note that I really need to sand the metal gate down and repaint it. Less as a preventative measure and more for the fact that every time I unlock the gate I want to ride it while it swings to its destination and yell “yahoo!” cowboy style.

We had made the questionable purchase of a GPS unit earlier in the week so we could trace the dozen or so logging roads that exist all tangled up with each other. Paul wanted to create an official map so we could start assigning names and so I would stop referring to the path that runs parallel to the West border as “Scary Tree Road.”
The GPS unit turned out to be invaluable as we kept coming across intersections that we would mark on the unit and be able to swing back around and go the other way when we came back through. There were quite a few that went absolutely nowhere and I think I will keep these little spurs that dead end into “projects.”
Somewhere around the center of the property we realized that there was a fairly deep drop off. We marveled at the mini view for a moment and then decided we really needed to head home so we could make it in time to let the dogs out. So we did a hairpin turnaround if what appeared to be a small clearing, the truck ran up into some scrub trees and stopped.
It wouldn’t go forward, it wouldn’t go back, and the wheels were not spinning.
After a lot of wedging of things under the tires, yanking of aforementioned tree and LOTS of swearing we grabbed our bottles of water started walking towards the road.
We knocked on the door of the house across the street and introduced ourselves to Cyndi. She invited us in and listened to our tale of woe. She tapped her chin and looked straight at Paul and said, “You know how to drive a tractor?”
Paul shook his head.
“No problem!” she smiled and got on the phone to the next door neighbor Troy to see if any of his sons were around, Troy said they weren’t but he would be glad to come help us out. He drove right over and while we explaining to Troy I saw an animal come bounding out of the woods, I honestly thought for several moments it was a bear.
It was Troy’s Akita. I have never in my life seen an Akita that large and when he came galloping up I took a few steps back. He circled me three times, licked my kneecap and then urinated on Cyndi’s car with a mighty yellow flood cascading down the fender.
Cyndi shooed him away, “That dog just LOVES to pee on my car!”
We all got into the truck and forayed into our property; we located our vehicle thanks to the GPS and hooked up a big fat chain. After a couple of hard yanks Paul was able to throw our truck into the low gear and back it out.
We all rode back up to the front of our driveway. Troy’s wife had heard the new neighbors were in town so she drove over to meet us. It was like a weird little party in the middle of nowhere.
We gained quite a bit of knowledge, Cyndi’s husband drives a semi and they have 13 year old twins in Junior high. Cathy works over at the school and Troy likes to hunt, fish, drink micro brewery beer and play WOW. A kid named Alex went speeding by on ATV and I got informed that “Alex was the one who cut crop circles over in Ben’s cornfield last month but his momma didn’t believe it cause, you could show Alex’s momma video of Alex doing wrong and she would say you doctored it.”
Cathy blurted out that as soon as we moved in she could finally have a block party she has been wanting to have, even though our street has no blocks… or asphalt. It began to dawn on me that us moving in was a big deal and in a town with a population of 181 I guess it would be.
Everybody was as generous with us as I could have hoped for and I even though there is a lone bamboo pole with a red handkerchief tied to it marking where the house is going – it feels just like home already.
When I got home I sent everybody a box of mailorder meat in thanks.

Here is the website.
http://www.gardenfantasma.com/
It is nowhere near finished and a lot of the project pages only have place holders there. If you want more info about a specific project just ask me. I LOVE talking about it.
Allow me to offer up my apologies, I did the website myself and since I am not a web developer it is clunky and weirdly designed – much like its author. Paul is generously fixing the site for me so if things suddenly disappear while you are digging through that is why.