The jungles in my life owe more to Max Ernst than Edgar Rice or William S. Burroughs. The pulp/B-movie ambiance is mostly in my head. The brutal, sometimes beautiful surrealism is reality. My sense of beauty gets further warped each time I deal with it.
I hack away at the alien, invasive crab grass. Why do people, mostly from cooler climates that get hotter every year, want grass? Why don’t they appreciate the incredible desert?
Surviving here is both a struggle and a miracle.
Cacti bite and draw blood as I uncover them. They aren’t pampered potted plants leading lives of luxury indoors or in the manicured gardens of obsessive-compulsives. They bear scars, decaying, cracked skin, still-attached dead limbs. They tilt at awkward angles while new growth reaches for the sky.
It’s a decaying, struggling, decadent beauty that I wallow in.
What a friend called “cactus porn” I used as a metaphor to illustrate my rants about Arizona politics. Now the fascist mind set has taken over the country, maybe ever the entire planet.
In the war between the cactus and the grass, I’m with the cactus. Over the years, living with these . . . dare I call them beings? I’ve become aware of a kind of cactus intelligence, and there’s nothing artificial about it, though it does hallucinate. My beloved Peruvianus Monstrose taught me a lot during her all too short lifetime. At least her children survived.
I never know what I’ll uncover on these expeditions (there I go to my default pulp sci-fi setting again). There have been disintegrating cactus limbs, avian corpses, ant colonies, lost toys, fallout from fireworks and fast food orgies. Someday I’ll find a lost city. Or be captured by the Amazon guards of a clandestine subterranean civilization.
Meanwhile, I slash away at the crab grass to keep the lawn police happy. Who knows, with the the way things are going, they may decide to report us to the New Gestapo, and they’ll cart us off to one of the “detention” camps they’re building, confiscate the house and land, and have an excuse to let developers level the entire neighborhood and install more dystopian apartments for workers of not-yet existent industry, or parking lots for the entertainment center that is growing like a cancer around the State Farm Stadium.
They better watch out. We’ve been getting too much rain with the changing climate. The rattlesnake Agua Fria Freddie saw his shadow, so it’s gonna be an early summer (again). I’ve got that oh-boy-it’s-almost-summer vacation feeling. Mutation is in the air. There’s a new world coming. Heh-heh-heh . . .
So I continue my search and destroy mission, while listening to Venezuelan and Colombian radio stations via radio.garden.
Ice melts fast here. Evaporates.
Gods and cacti need their blood offerings.
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