Whoa! Didja get the numbers off that truck?!?

August 30, 2001 - 8:37 p.m.

The bum

The first thing that crossed my mind when I woke up at about 4:30 AM this morning was �I don�t have a job.� Boy, that woke me up! It was strange not hearing the alarm. My neighbor and her friend were coming home at about that time. It�s hard to eavesdrop when you�re half asleep.

Actually this relaxed lifestyle is kind of nice, if it just weren�t for that pesky �you gotta getta job� voice in the back of my head. The dogs like having me around. Slackjaw is the ferocious protector, barking at every window like a demented bully. She never lets her guard down because Evil never sleeps. Tandog always thinks we�re going outside to play.

My older sister is an organic gardener. (Remind me to tell you about her duck based insect control project. It ends with a scene based on Apocalypse Now) She�d be proud of me. My Intended bought me a Bio-Orb a few years ago. If you haven�t seen one, it�s a huge black plastic hollow ball with a lid that snaps on the top. You fill it with grass clippings, dirt, leaves, coffee grounds, hopes, wishes and prayers. As it composts, you�re supposed to roll it around to mix it up and speed up the process. With me though I�m kind of heavy on the grass clippings which mean it gets �sour.� Sour as in it smells like shit. I have to tear off strips of newspaper to sweeten it up. Then I roll it around some more. It gets heavy and hard to steer, and I get to enjoy that nasty smell.

A bag of 10-10-10 at Home Depot is about eight bucks. That�s where Newt and I part company.

So this Bio-Orb has been neglected all summer long. It still has stuff in it from last year. When it got full I just got some of those huge paper bags at the hardware store and let the City worry about my grass clippings. Besides, almost all of my garden spaces are eliminated� I�ve been a minimalist gardener these days.

But I have to mow the lawn and I�m out of bags. Fine. Let�s see if we can roll this big black Buddha of a Bio-Orb and wake him up. He�s probably pissed and has that organic indigestion that neglected compost piles have. Either that or he�s one solid mass.

It was the latter. I managed to get a few revolutions out of it to knock it loose, and it didn�t smell like shit, thankfully. I was getting tired of this rolling game, so I deliberately rolled it over too far sideways, knowing it would knock the lid off and the game would have to end. Sure enough, he spilled his guts.

Wow.

It�s black, rich, damp� and a little chunky. But it looks like dirt! So this is how it�s supposed to work! I rolled it in a semicircle and dumped the rest of the black contents of the bio-orb out onto the ground. I felt so, like, natural man! This organic stuff is really groovy, man!

I shoveled and raked and spread this black magic dirt-like goodness on the bare patches in my lawn. Then I spread grass seed on top of it. I let it rest all day to dry the moisture out. Then just before sunset I was out there in my bare feet mooshing al this black dirt/grass seed stuff out flat onto the ground. I rained a good amount of water on it to get it to set into the ground.

The grass had better fly out of this magical stuff. Maybe if I play some Grateful Dead music in the backyard it�ll speed the process?

Yes, I was a good boy. I posted my resume all over the Internet. I made a few contacts, sent some emails. And I downloaded some tuneage for The Intended�s next CD. I never run out of ideas for her. Oh wait, that was supposed to be a surprise!

And I swam in my pool. Hey I deserve it, I worked hard. It�s still pretty high in chlorine; the algae and I had a little skirmish a few days ago. Algae are no match for huge gobs of Calcium Hypochlorite. The enemy had gained a foothold in some patches on the bottom and on the ladder. Die, you fuckers! I don�t know how many swim days I have left; I planned on closing it this weekend. So I swam around as much as I could and tried to think about next year when I�d open it again. September around here is filled with cold days, and swimming in water that�s less than eighty degrees (for me) is too much character development. I get enough of that from being an unemployed bum.

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