What's Louder Than a Jack-Hammer?

The machine used to tamp down dirt in the trench.

The Plumbing Troubles are in their closing days, folks, as the workers are currently moving the dirt from The Pyramids in the Backyard, wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow and shovel by shovel, back to its home. The noise from The Machine that Compacts the Dirt is astoundingly loud, even as I sit here typing. Every bit of me is jiggling, and I can only hope I'll lose weight if I sit here long enough. God forbid I should actually wield a shovel or push a wheelbarrow myself.

Dirt dominates the picture, but there's orange on the horizon

Have you or your children ever gotten lice? No, we don't have lice (praise Jesus!), but this plumbing SIT U AH CEE UN has taken over my brain in much the same way as lice did about eight years ago when Henry, Oliver and I acquired it. Prior to the infestation, I turned my nose up at the hysteria of other mothers who were "going through" lice situations at their households. There was all the washing and the bathing and the combing, and then, worst of all, the running off to the fancy de-louse businesses that began to crop up in the early years of the third millenium. I confess to looking down on these dramatics, convinced that lice was small potatoes, compared to -- well -- seizures, for instance.

You know what happened next, right?

There must be a proverb that addresses the woman who rolls her eyes at others' misfortune, then experiences the misfortune and runs pell-mell toward the Hair Fairies, spends nearly $1,000 on de-lousing efforts -- on a credit card --  and talks about it incessantly for approximately one month, even at holiday cocktail parties. Reader, do any of you know of such a proverb?

Anyhoo.

The Plumbing Troubles have taken over my life, my brain in much the same way. I might have dismissed a neighbors' chatter about the very same situation, nodded sympathetically while thinking god, how boring, how utterly bourgeois, you think YOU have problems. I know for sure that I've walked around for a half century never taking stock or truly comprehending what goes into the building of a house in a city, much less the amount of dirt that must be removed from the planet and piled in one's backyard and on the side of the house in pyramids before reaching eroding pipes. I've watched the shirts on the backs of the workers in my yard bloom sweat stains with every thrust of the pick-axe, knowing that all I can do is think and how lame and ineffectual thinking really is compared to back-breaking labor. I've felt a teensy bit embarrassed that my sons roll out of bed about five hours into the digging. Sometimes I fantasize about throwing myself or The Husband into the trench. What if someone forgets that there are no stairs at the side door in the laundry room, they open the door and step out and fall down, down down? I think at 5:00 in the morning. I stand at my back door, snap photos of the dirt pile and realize the useless tangerine tree behind the dirt is in riotous harvest-ready form with what must be thousands of tiny sour, seedy orange fruit. Damn, why can't that be a money tree? I curse. I really can't think or talk about anything else, to tell you the truth -- am effectively using the Plumbing SIT U AH CEE UN to ignore everything else that I should be thinking about or doing.

Reader, what's going on in your parts?

This Is Still Happening, Part Six, But There's an Upside, World War I Re-enactments and Poetry

The trench has now reached into the front yard, and in lieu of other treasure hunts, like yesterday's, or my going insane, I've decided to begin a World War I re-enactment. I will pit The Brothers as the Allies against The Husband as the Central Powers/Austria-Germany. I will be Wilhelmina Owen, the Poet, and stand at the front door shouting warnings about gas and the lie that is dying for one's country.***

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knocked-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

I will watch the three male species of The Family fight in vain to reorganize the World As We Know It and then fall with the 9 million other combatants in four miserable years. 

I, as Wilhelmina, unlike my brother Wilfred, The Brothers My Sons and The Husband, will escape the insanity by climbing into the Airstream that miraculously appears where the trench ends, still reciting poetry, The Mermaid swimming along right behind me.

Dulce et Decorum Est

***I've always gotten a kick out of those folks who do re-enactments -- they seem to take themselves so seriously. It's what I feel about people who watch a lot of pornography, too. I just start giggling and squirming and feeling like it's all so --- well --- silly. Anyway, the warnings about gas and the lie that is dying for one's country and the verses that I've quoted here are from the great World War I poet, Wilfred Owen. I've posted the entire poem here, if you want to read it, but don't if you're one of my patriotic, war-loving, ultimate sacrifice kind of readers. And dulce et decorum est means it is sweet and right and is taken from an ode by Horace.

Egypt in Los Angeles

The Great Pyramids

The Nile

Tell me when you get bored by The Plumbing Troubles 2014. Or maybe don't tell me because I'm hard put to come up with something else to share here on the old blog, two days into the new year. I have a scratchy throat and that tingly feeling of being sick, there is Christmas clutter to put away, and there are bills to pay and teenagers to drive around. There is CBD to administer and waiting for miracles. I am still reading The Goldfinch and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. I would like to see the movie with Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts, but I'd like more to see the Italian one The Great Beauty. I think this year will cement my new aversion to the hoopla of BIG movies with mega-stars and millions of dollars spent and made. Perhaps it will cement my proclivity toward pretension in film, but hopefully not. You can call me on it when you like, right after you tell me that you're bored by the documentation of The Plumbing Troubles 2014. It all comes full circle, no?

Reader, what is happening in your parts?

MMXIV

graffiti artist unknown*** 

Today's no different than yesterday, really, other than it's 2014, four new numbers, a new year, an imposition. Dirt lies in three pyramids in our back yard -- some of that dirt, I'm certain, unearthed for the first time in nearly a century. I fancied something discovered while the men were digging -- pottery, perhaps, or arrowheads, some fine bones, a skull, even oil. The men filled plastic buckets with big brown clumps of it, and they filled wheelbarrows, trundled it toward the pile. The men smile when I come out to stand at the edge, look down. They wear long-sleeved dress shirts despite the heat and the swing of the pick-ax. They speak no English. I imagine they have only recently crossed the border from Mexico, picked up clothes at a Goodwill. They are the Italians and Irish of yesterday who built the bridges and mined the minerals, lay the tracks and dug the wells, raised the buildings, built the country. The pyramids in my backyard are dirt. There are rocks and roots. The clay pipe lies exposed at the bottom of a seven foot trench, the dirt around it clean of anything primitive or even civilized. The trees that grow alongside the trench are a deep green. Their secret is their roots, twisted and preternaturally strong, or naturally so. They've crept through dirt, worked their way through cracks in clay, pushed into man-made cylinders, a relentless search, reaching toward water like fingers and eyes toward light. They've nourished themselves on waste, channeled what's left back up through wood and out toward branches and leaves, thick and glossy.

It's a new year, and we're fourteen years into an age. Our minds are thoughts, our thoughts are thoughts, only, just.










***Henry and I saw this on La Brea as we walked home from breakfast yesterday. Henry thought it might be Banksy, but I doubted it. What do you think? Anyone know? Steve Reed?