Overthunk

and I have been recruited to assist with the business of running it, as well as teach my regular class. That is all for now, though I can hardly stand the necessity of sleep over blogging.... See your stuff soon, peeps!

I've lived in Texas all my life, and I've made it through some damned hot summers. Yet only today, and never before, have I witnessed this: cows going for a dip in the afternoon sun.* Of about a dozen cows standing around in the pasture as I sped past, two seemed a little bit smarter than the others. They were skinny dipping, even, and seemed to be smiling, and perhaps snorting the bovine version of the following playlet: Black and White Cow: "Vaya Con Dios, bitches!! We're swimming!! In your and our water hole, even! We are one step closer to taking down our human oppressors! " Black Cow: "Word! I'm sick of just standing here absorbing the sun's rays!" 'Course, what cows actually say to one another as they graze in the blazing sun will perhaps never be known. Any scientists fool enough to try to trek all the way out to the water hole on a 104-degree day like today while lugging heavy data recording instruments and wearing white lab coats w...

To cleave into one’s innards, like a sharp steel blade slicing into a paper-bag-ripened nectarine: eventually, you’ll get to the mazing, shriveled core, but when you do, it’ll be messy, juice will be spilled, and the prospect of the truth of new life and renewal inside that crinkly brown pit is completely unenvisionable. Everything comes before it: cleaning that long-dead Junebug out of the corner of the kitchen counter, flipping from song to song to song to song on Internet radio, flinging washed clothes into the dryer, pretending to perform an Everclear song to a sellout stadium crowd while the roommate’s off buying cigarettes, watching some exhibitionist on a webcam. Guilt: The feeling that if you do it, if you REALLY do it, you’ve outed some dirty secret about everyone you know in some fashion or other, including, and perhaps most importantly, yourself.

Though I like owning my house, I wish from time to time that instead of in a middle-class neighborhood, that it was in the middle of a hundred-acre wood or something. I have a crappy little bench, that needs either a coat of paint, or just to be thrown out, sitting in my front yard, fairly close to the door. You can sit on it, but it rather lists to one side. I don't sit on it for fear of causing its last day on earth in a sudden collapse, but it looks somewhat fetching sitting alongside the flowers that I usually remember to water in the bed that needs weeding. I pull up to the homestead today, after a day of toil in which every moment was begrudged (seeing as how I AM a teacher and it IS still summer, but today there was a pesky training day that could be finished in 3 hours but took 7 just to fill up the state-required time), a bank trip that shouldn't have taken 45 minutes in the 100 degree heat, and a lengthy stint at Walmart shopping. All of this was done while wantin...