On Shit, and Choices
I texted a friend the other day asking her to remind me to write up my experience of making chicken shit meringue. She was understandably concerned for my mental state at that point, but I promise that it does improve slightly with some context:
We wound up, through a combination of my partner’s soft-heartedness and a lack of a heated garage, housing some injured chickens in the basement over the winter. They are generous creatures, and provided a steady and ample supply of free fertilizer and allergens. Nominally this was contained to one corner, but in reality they were entirely capable of escaping to go on crapabout if they felt like possibly there was something edible outside their improvised rehab ward. Also, they both turned out to be roosters after all that — including the allegedly pre-sexed Brahma with the now somewhat awkward moniker of Ruby (to go with Diana, Anne and Jane who were doing perfectly normal outdoor hen things.) At any rate, it seemed wrong to eat either of them after spending all that time not letting them die, and the weather got nice enough to evict them into the general population (currently at 8 roosters, which is at least 7 too many and arguably 8 too many, and 13 hens, at least 4 of which are in henopause so really we don’t have a useful flock so much as a collection of decorative and yelly feather dusters) and I set about de-chickening the basement.
We are fortunate to own an old school commercial grade floor buffer for those stubborn fertilizer gifts, and it was whipping the homemade concoction of degreaser, sanitizer and who all knows what else into the most beautiful, velvety meringue texture. I’ve done my share of manual labor over the years and it’s remarkably easy to just kind of zen out and admire the patterns and ignore the part where I’m whipping some chemical carpetbomb into a delicate foam in order to remove actual chicken shit from surfaces in my HOME, for fuck’s sake, I don’t care if it’s a partially finished basement, it still counts.
I had a similar shit-based revelation in my mid-20s, when I was providing personal care to a gentleman who had a habit of fingerpainting (if you’ve done nursing home care, you know; if you haven’t, just smile and nod and move on, trust me.) Here I was, at the peak of my life, taking a lukewarm washcloth to the hirsute backside of an elderly bedbound man, trying not to gag while I picked the clumps out in between dodging blows for interrupting his artistry, when I was struck by a thunderbolt asking exactly where I had gone wrong in my life that this was how I was spending my evenings when other people my age were presumably enjoying being literally anywhere else on a Friday night.
All of which is a shitty (pun entirely intended) way to get to the realization that I am of an age when the possibilities for lives I could live is no longer limitless, and I somehow still don’t know what it is I want to do with my life.
Don’t get me wrong, I am proud of being the sort of person who knows how to raise chickens, and build coops and outbuildings and fences and repair tractors and pickup trucks and drive a stick and ford rivers and cut down trees and grow food and make home cooked meals from scratch and sew clothing and curtains and would you like to see the sweater I just darned because I’m really, really good at that, you’d never even know a stupid insect ate a thumbnail sized hole in it. I enjoy it, because there’s such an immediate impact on the material world — look, I took these seeds and then there were carrots and now there’s carrot ginger soup with homemade bread! — and because I do believe that being involved in keeping plants or chickens or sweaters or machines alive makes you appreciate them more, and also because I’m apparently just going through life trying to collect a full apocalyptic skill set, in case I find myself needing to wire solar panels to power the radio for my ragtag band of survivors after stitching wounds, making a forage and game stew, and repairing everyone’s outerwear in a depressing YA novel someday.
[Dear preppers: the survival skill you will need most is not preparedness, or fire starting, or tractor repair; it will be adaptability. This tends to be a thing that people who believe they can anticipate every future scenario and protect only themselves and their family against it are sorely lacking. Sorry not sorry.]
But I am tired of country life. After hearing everyone strain to adjust to this new pandemic normal, I looked around and realized that 1) I never saw other people anyway, thanks to a combination of living in the rear end of nowhere and a partner in grad school tossed with the seventeen million home and land improvement projects we somehow signed on for and 2) I would sure like a job that can be done entirely remote, as if I were a fully realized adult who could accomplish things without getting in a car and driving 20 miles to sit in a chair and have people watch me do so, or going through the trouble of putting on socially appropriate pants for the occasion. I do not *need* to be the kind of person who can do all of these things before noon on a Saturday in order to maintain some kind of sense of self-worth.
I’ve toyed with the idea of moving to a city again (although we still grew tomatoes on the porch, and fixed cars in the luxury of a long-but-narrow gravel driveway, mostly out of economic necessity). Imagine only owning ONE car that doesn’t need to be able to ford rivers, traverse godforsaken mud bogs that call themselves roads or get to my allegedly essential job through a foot of snow and can just be a cute, fuel-efficient roller skate, or — dare I dream — a car share, where if it needs an oil change next week that can happen without my intervention entirely! A weekend, where “working on the house” means cleaning and maybe some laundry, or furniture Tetris, maybe even painting or fluffing up a container garden on the porch, but definitely not “constructing a kitchen island from the floor up” or “putting on a Tyvek suit to lay in my attic and put in an actual fan box while I sweat out 5 pounds of water that somehow cannot evaporate out of the suit, which for the record is totally gross.” And HUMANS. Real, actual, other human beings to whom I bear no genetic or legal relation, doing human things like consuming food or artwork or the ambience of the subway car, everywhere you look.
But also at the same time I want to throw away two thirds of my belongings and “simplify” my life by taking on the challenge of designing and building an energy efficient adorable box which is somehow considered an anti-trailer despite being a 700 square foot living space which is portable and requires all kinds of special considerations for things like running water to work in it, which is somehow billed as all of the effortless chic minimalism of city life with all the scenery of country life and definitely not a bespoke pain in your ass trailer.
And then I start pricing windmills and battery walls and thinking about goats and more fruit trees and how mad it makes me that both knowing how to build a fence and being able to go to museums somehow have some moral significance attached to them, and why on earth there aren’t more people who can do both, because honestly, other than a little bit more urgency in showering, lack of free time, and physical distance there is nothing in our pseudo-farm life that precludes also being able to sip wine and eat vegan hors d’oeuvres and stare at politically charged artwork or appreciate a subtitled film, and there is nothing in having gone to Satan’s School for Gay Communism that bars me from being able to punch myself in the face when the wrench slips off the nut for the hydraulic line for the fourth goddamn time and then give myself a nice 90 weight smoky eye when I try and rub my cheek to see if it’s bleeding.
And I am mad that I am aging and can’t live all the lives that I wanted to and I am mad that the world is barrelling towards disaster on so many fronts and I am mad that there are people actively making it worse so that they can amass a larger pile of money, and I am mad that people assume political leanings from your zip code and I am mad that street smarts and book smarts and country smarts are all treated as if only one can be “real” or valid when they’re all just a reaction to the particular flavors of bullshit that you encounter in life.
[When they describe older women having a slow descent into madness, you would assume this refers to melancholy or hysteria or something but no, apparently it’s just plain old anger, who knew?]
Mostly it just comes down to feeling like there’s more riding on the choice than just what I do with my free time, that it’s somehow making a decision about what kind of person I want to be. Much like hair colors and genders of sexual partners I am both greedy and indecisive [nudge, wink] here, and my answer is all of them. I want all of these things. I want seventeen lifetimes to experience it all and learn from it, because there’s so much, so many little tricks of all the trades, and I want everyone else to be able to be more than one thing and not feel like you need to be any one of them in particular to be smart or real. I want every farmer who thinks that city folks are soft and useless to navigate the process of running an errand that requires a train ride with 3 transfers and two kids. I want every rich businessman who thinks he’s the cat’s ass to try and coax a single goat into a pen or mount a tractor tire and see how smart he feels at the end.
At least we’re in agreement that the suburbs are right out.
