July 10, 2020
Been reading a lot of Borges… It’s all about keeping it short. Short gardening fantasies are the soul of wit! Sometimes you are able to convey the whole idea in two or three sentences. Do you see what I am doing here? All of these long drawn out sentences to convey the simple idea that I want to present a few short, concise, hair-raising, thought-provoking, spine-tingling gardening fantasies. This intro… it is so self-referential.. so ironic… you are now experiencing the overwhelming wittiness that is present in every bit of benkbradywebsite dot com!
Mosquito Bite
In a garden bed of a client, near the Mississippi river, I am bitten by an infectious mosquito. While the bite does not immediately register as out of the ordinary, over the course of a week I notice that the area around my lower thigh, where I was bitten, begins to swell and purple. I will not elaborate on this more, as all Men know this to be the correct etiquette: Even though the swelling increases and my mobility, both around the thigh and in general, begins to diminish I do not seek medical help. I begin, without any suspicion on the part of my coworkers, to wear pants to work to conceal my grotesque body, and the sweats caused by my infection-driven fever can be excused by the humidity. And, very similar to the pridefully stubborn death of Al Capone at the hand of untreated Syphilis, I too, “The Al Capone of Gardeners”, die in the night of an untreated infection caused by a mosquito bite.
Bee Sting
I am on all fours (not shameful in the gardening business) pulling a weed in the back of a client’s garden bed. I feel a sharp pinch on my leg near my ankle and with godlike swiftness I maneuver out of the garden bed to grab my leg just in time. My brain — a compendium of sharp pinches — is able to recognize, in the instant after the pinch, the sting of the North American Honey Bee. As is commonly known, a honey bee’s stinger has two barbed lancets that, when inserted into the skin of the victim, cause the bee to rip out its stinger as well as its muscles, nerves, and part of its digestive tract when removing the stinger. Because of this, I immediately reach to keep the bee inserted, stinger-first, in my leg while I take out my Benny’s Bee Removal Tool (a tool of my own design), whose purpose is to carefully remove the bee’s stinger from the victim while preventing the death of the bee. Then, holding the bee to my leg as it struggles to suicidally pull itself out (Relax Now, Buddy, The Hard Part’s Almost Over) I use my Tool to carve out the chunk of my leg where I was stung (which is a much more painful operation than just being stung), freeing the bee and sending it safely on its way to pollinate the garden and keep humanity alive. I smile and return to my weeding while the gash on my leg continues to bleed untreated.
Over the course of a few days this gash becomes infected, and due to my own stubbornness I do not do anything about it. 3 weeks after the initial sting and stinger-removal procedure I die of infection while sleeping in my twin bed.
Impossible Creeping Charlie Extraction
I am in a client’s backyard weeding a field of Creeping Charlie.
AUTHOR’S ASIDE: There is this bit I do when a client asks me to weed their garden where I go “Why did you plant so many weeds if you just wanted me to pull them out?”
I start pulling out a thatch of it and see that I am also pulling out (inadvertently) the neighboring thatch of Creeping Charlie. Well that’s odd, innit?
AUTHOR’S ASIDE: The roots of Creeping Charlie can be linked across an entire field. Imagine the roads of a Google Maps image of Nottingham. Ope here it is:
Carefully now I start to pull out the neighbor of the neighbor of the original thatch of Creeping Charlie I was pulling out and find that all of these weeds are still linked together, intact, at the root. I begin to realize that, if I am careful, I may be able to pull out the entire field of Creeping Charlie without breaking the root chain.
AUTHOR’S ASIDE: I have always thought that being “handy” just meant knowing how to be very careful. I can think of no better proof of being masterfully handy than successfully removing an entire field of Creeping Charlie without breaking a single root chain. And while this is technically “fiction”, I know that I, and probably no one else, would be able to achieve this.
Over the course of an hour I am able to pull out the entire field of Creeping Charlie without breaking the original root chain, so that it lays out in front of me like a blanket. I experience a moment of bliss at what I have achieved. This is one of the few moments of weeding mastery that can be achieved as a gardener.
I toss the carpet of Creeping Charlie into one of the compost bags (a weed is a weed) and immediately return to my default emotional state of feeling nothing. I drive the compost to the waste yard and as I am tossing the still-perfectly-intact field of Creeping Charlie onto the 20-foot high pile of weeds and dead leaves, I ask the ranger in charge of the waste site “Where do all of these weeds go when you get rid of them?”
“Dunno.”
“Sure.”
Messing with the EQ
This has less to do with gardening, I guess… But it is definitely a fantasy!
I am at a stoplight in the company truck driving to a client site, so I mess with the EQ. I turn the bass to -5 and the treble to 5 (the opposite of how you want your music to be) and set the balance to L5 (this way the music blasts out of the left speaker but does not come out of the right speaker).
Later in the day I am riding in the passenger seat with my boss. We are listening to the Rage Against the Machine CD and she says
“Ahh what is up with this music?!”
“I was just gonna say… The EQ is all goofed up in here… here let me fix it.”
I reset the levels (bass all the way up, treble down, fader to 0).
“Wow that is much better. Well look at you!: ‘Mr. DJ’!”
“Oh stop it.”
