isn't a rose a wand of fire?
life rx 23 sept 24
the king of wands, and a paragraph from Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God:
“He looked like something come against the end of a springloaded tether or some slapstick contrivance of the filmcutter's art, swallowed up in the door and discharged from it again almost simultaneously, ejected in an immense concussion backwards, spin-ning, one arm flying out in a peculiar limber gesture, a faint pink cloud of blood and shredded clothing and the rifle clattering soundless on the porchboards amid the uproar and Ballard sitting hard on the floor for a moment before he pitched off into the yard.”
the aleatory
There’s a rose bush in front of our house. It grows insane, exuberant, wild amounts of roses, mainly in sherbet colors that look amazing against the high wall of dusty blue mountains behind them. It’s like a pink flame.
When we have our windows open, we can often hear people walking by outside exclaim about how beautiful they are. Sometimes, if we’re coming or going, we get to receive the compliment, which we do gratefully.
But we cannot really take any credit for this rose bush, however—all the landscaping around our bungalow is the work of the landlord, and its maintenance is wrapped up in our monthly rent. And for that reason, my disposition toward them has been entirely 100% hands-off.
And yet—and yet! Someone who is not us and is also not the gardener is always dead-heading the roses, and then telling us about it.
It usually goes like this:
NEIGHBOR: I deadheaded your roses.
ME: Oh, OK?
That’s it. Literally, that’s the whole back and forth.
These conversations upset me because they are so pointless that it seems like there must be some unspoken command or judgment in them. Do these dead-headers want to be thanked? Do they want me to deadhead the roses? Do they thing something about this situation should change? Am I supposed to learn a lesson? No idea. It’s just the same way, every time this happens.
(I understand, by the way, the concept of deadheading roses. It’s supposed to make them grow more and bloom more by conserving their energy. I GET IT. But nobody told me that trimming the roses was my responsibility, and I gather there are best-practices about these things which I do not know. And, also, the bush grows very happily with no interaction from me whatsoever. Whereas the last person who cut it back cut it so severely that it didn’t grow anything at all for months and months.)
Similarly, there is a constant odd commotion going on with our recycling and yard waste bins. There are four of them for the whole bungalow court, and it should be, I suppose, easy enough to keep track of when they need to go out and be returned. But the bins are not all for the same company, so they go out on different days. We’ve lived here for about two years, and I am no closer to remembering which bin goes out on which day.
But there is a constant, low-level passive aggression surrounding the placement and return of the bins. Once, a stranger in a Jeep truck pulled over suddenly and trotted the bins back to where they belong, huffing and puffing and clearly angry. Once he replaced the bins, he huffed off and drove away in his Jeep truck without introducing himself or saying anything to me. (I’m 90% sure this was actually the landlord, because who else would do such a thing? And also, a Jeep truck is a very landlord-y vehicle.)
Previous versions of me would have responded to the above situations by 1) reading assiduously about the practice of deadheading roses, then commit myself to the task with a brutally harsh self-assessment of my personal failures while doing so 2) taking notes on the bin movements and deputizing myself as the responsible party for their travels, anything to keep the landlord or other neighbors from being sniffy about it.
But I am not the impressionable welp I once was. I refuse to attempt to infer the feelings or demands of strangers. My stance on all of the above is: If anybody actually wants to ask me to deadhead the roses or keep track of the bins, they are going to have to ask me with words. And until then, they can fuck 100% off.
Do you want to know why?
Because I am also a rose bush. And I also need to conserve my energy.
the assignment
Divest yourself of at least one silly self-given responsibility.
writing prompt
Consider the most fastidious, boring domestic conflict you are regularly embroiled in and write about it. (And amuse yourself by realizing how much there really is to say about roses and recycling bins.)
a chune
“The Glow Pt. 2” by the Microphones
They say you get old, and you can never return, blah blah blah. And yet, they keep making Septembers. And Septembers are the same of light and the same of blue sky and the same of cold. And there is no way that the part of me that used to live on the 6th floor of Morewood Dorms C tower is not still a little bit with us. (She also liked: Indian food, Pavement, Ghost World, and had a naked poster of Bjork in her dorm room. See? She hasn’t gone anywhere.) Sometimes records don’t make it out of an era, and this can seem like a sad thing, but it isn’t, because they become the most potent signals and the strongest boxes in which time can be smuggled. And any time I listen to this record, I want to cut my own hair and get $10 symphony tickets and eat a tofu-napa cabbage quesadilla from a restaurant called, oh so insanely, Si Señor. It’s all there in the static and feedback.
credits: small spells tarot deck by Rachel Howe
Child of God by Cormac McCarthy
“The Glow Pt. 2” by the Microphones
dear diary, I don’t really like the court cards in tarot decks. I mean, what is there to say about a king? Who cares? Much as I do love the small spells tarot deck, its court cards are even more abstracted than they are in Rider-Waite-Smith (at least those guys are occasionally holding a fish or something, so if you give a reading you can say … “There is something … slippery here” and maybe nobody will notice). Sorry, Cormac, that I didn’t have anything very specific to say to you today. But I suspect that you like it that way. You are so very good at ending a conversation. I bet periods miss having you around. XS