madonna and machetes... a perfect sabbath for heretics.

perfectly good sabbath for subcommandante terrordrome to chop the fuck out of some invasive ivy. with madonna blasting in from across the way. ¡real material girls know how to swing!

community organizizing

The beds in the front are coming together which means Smokey Joe doesn't get to play ball out there any more. Once Papa and I (and the new WWOOFers) did the double dig and added some compost, they started looking more like burial plots than vegetable beds. So T and T are going to use some of the extra flagstone to make head stones for each bed. (Can you tell some of us are obsessed with Dexter?) Like Little T said, "the more food we plant, the creepier we can be."

Since Superbowl Sunday, we've gotten all the stone up and planted about 75% -- carrots, squash, red peppers, spinach, kale, melons, lettuce, broccoli, onions, cucumbers, beets, and cilantro are all in. A bunch of other seeds are germinating in the window, too. Oh, and the fruit trees and strawberries are on the side.

test test test 12121212

Is this thing on?

from the grave...

kinda sad diggin' up 80 years of other people's memories. the old toys. the bottle caps. the broken fanbelts.... but brussels sprouts and persimmons may just make up for it.

the process banana

the bricks came up with a beer or two. the worms looked a little chuffed that we'd undone their asylum and opened the dank riverbed soil to the light of day. but fuck it. we had a banana pup to transplant. and besides, we were processing. life. love. loneliness. gayness. straightness. connection and those that miss. lots of experience but still navigating through life heartfuckingfirst. 'cuz what else is there when it really comes down to it?

sunday morning coming all the way down...

 

"...and the beer i had for breakfast wasn't bad, so i had one more for dessert..."

big mexican cenón the night before. bottles were sacrificed in the name of good friends and love. wake up late to find T and black metal C rolling in with a fresh case of Tecate... K and F resurrected the leftovers into an amazing feast... which led to gettin' sassy in the front garden... what was once a shitey patio is now a garden to be...

la avenida is all the way live...

been a wild couple of weeks. with all the rain and cold weather (40º nights! brrrr) the kale has been going off. brohim set us up with some dwarf fruit rootstock and guava bushes which have gone in to provide much needed greenery to our otherwise bakersfield looking scene... the hardest part about all this is having the patience to realize that turning a neglected, compacted compound where the prior owners did all they could to kill everything green into an edible compound of love doesn't happen over night.

in fact, much as the WWII nerve gas chemicals were turned into pesticides and fertilizers, we aren't gonna be free of the 50 years of neglect any time soon. everytime we turn over a bed, dozens of bottle caps and broken toys come up. like the Homie version of La Santisima Muerte that our german wwoofer friend unearthed from his sepulchre under buried flagstone. it's a little disheartening to be finding plastic shit everywhere and the old bonfire pits where the last renters started random fires to burn their trash. but little by little, things are changing. the blueberries and strawberries are reclaiming the brown. the silverberry and guava hover over the artichokes and collards with their almost birdlike coloring. the passiflora vines are slowly beginning their steady creeps over concrete and stucco...

things will come around. like the 1978 carving on the sidewalk says.. "the avenue is all the way live..."