Plants

 

But why? It helps me live to help something else live. Plants in the yard, see, are totally fucking helpless. They’re just like domesticated animals in certain respects. You probably think your dog or cat is feral, I promise it isn’t. I’ll tell you how I know. Because I’ve seen hawks and owls snatch unwary animals and take them up into the sky. Often these are mice from my own backyard. My pets have been fine. There are others in Fernley and Fallon who aren’t so lucky. Hawks and owls do NOT fuck around. At all. They will pluck your pet from the yard. Domesticated animals don’t have that sixth sense their feral cousins have, so they won’t feel the hawk’s approach and thus fuck off. They’ll stand there being cute until they become lunch.

            Plants, where the climate is concerned, are the same. In our case, climate is the hawk. Here in Northern Nevada, there are trees and creosote plants, purple sages, occasional cacti, and of course the ubiquitous jack pines that thrive wild in the desert on three drops of water per summer. My plants, however, fry if I don’t water them every hour during the season where Satan rubs his hot tante all over the old west. I don’t know as much about plants yet as I do animals, but I know that my yard plants don’t communicate with the earth the way the wild plants do. They can’t possibly. Like, I have some Mexican pink ladies. I see these thriving in the wild. I know they’re getting fuck all for water. But yet mine need five drips a day when it’s triple digits outside. There’s something to that.

               A drip is an inch of water to some—if you live in the desert, it’s a full fucking saturation, That’s why we have irrigation, by the way. If you have to flood a plant, poke a hole deep down into the roots. About three inches away from it with a dowel rod—just shove the sumbitch in there and your plant will be able to breathe. If it’s a big plant, do four holes.

            I’m finding that I’m the type of person who has to be focused on something all the time or the mountain goat of pathology will ram its ugly head into their much sorter pate. In a nut, pathology is over-focus on uncontrollable things. This overabundance of focus on fluff about which you can do fuck all will make you beast-fucking loony. Focusing on something constructive on a constant basis keeps a person from latching on to them. And it has to be creative. It helps that it’s loving, and that’s also why plants. And I have working out and writing and am setting myself up to add even more to that—which is good—these are things that enhance life, and not just my own.