BLEAK DREAMSCAPE

Wicked winds stripped the trees of their autumnal glory and left them naked and shivering in astonished disbelief.

Last week was mild and balmy - in the 70s (Fahrenheit) with blessed bursts of golden sunshine. Then, on Friday (yesterday) the rains came and drenched every semblance of hope. Last night the temperature dropped drastically. I bundled up in bed in a cocoon of blankets and Bosco joined me. 

A restless pack of roaming coyotes shrieked and howled outside the window. Later, the sleepless owls sung a post-midnight lament.

Somewhere between dreams and dawn, loud gunshots woke me up.
Hunters?
Or bloodthirsty intruders? 
Heck. Who knows.

Today (Saturday, I think) it's raw, misty, and cold. Presently in mid-afternoon it's 33 degrees (Fahrenheit).

My supplies are getting very low. I desperately need to make the long journey to town, but - - with no word of exaggeration - - I'd rather starve to death than go. I have so very many physical ailments that I no longer care about anything. This isolated sojourn in the wilderness will eventually kill me.
And nobody cares.......

I'm presently out of milk, bread, eggs, onions, potatoes, and all frozen food - but I'm making due with what I have. I've got plenty of evaporated milk, which I love.

Been cooking and baking a lot. Last night I made biscuits from scratch. Today I ate them with butter and blueberry jam. And tea, of course.

Within the past week I baked bread, cranberry bread, and cookies.

I found a can of oysters, so I made an oyster stew. Later I found a can of chicken meat, which made a wonderful soup with corn and noodles. Canned chicken meat is expensive, but I thought it was surprisingly good.

I'll be ordering supplies from Walmart, as usual. They usually ship within two days. Unfortunately FedEx delivered my last two orders to the wrong address - - I had to contact them and explain exactly where I'm located.

This place is so remote that I doubt if even God could find it.

I stumbled outside today and took a few photos from the safety of the front and back porches.

The golden autumn leaves are gone. 
Only a damp, misty, sullen forest dreamscape exists.

The dreary, dismal front "yard"
(is it a yard?? I wonder.....)

Now that the trees are bare, the surrounding hills can be seen.

The bleak back "yard", where trees were ravaged and toppled from storms.

Notice a few colored leaves in the lower part of the photo.

Cold sunset

Cheers, Jon

FROZEN LEAVES

Why Frozen Leaves? Because it sounds nice. And the leaves (or those few remaining) are indeed frozen solid today. I encountered some on my morning walk in the woods.

There hasn't been much excitement around here since the customer service repairman came (last Monday) to fix my router.
That sounds deliciously salacious.
Actually, he fixed my computer's router. Not mine.
Unfortunately. 
(I just threw that in to unnerve you).

The next day I had to drive to town. A wet, gloomy, damp, dreary, very misty day. It was Gothic. 

For the second time in a row I forgot to buy trash bags. I'm completely out of them. 
Make a list, Jon.
I made a list. I still forgot to buy them.

Whenever I go into town everything is a complete frenzy. The endlessly long and harrowing drive is enough to impede my memory. Then I have to haul my trash to the dump (this time in improvised trash bags). I have to put gas in the car, go to the bank, pay bills (I never pay online anymore - for reasons I won't go into), and get a month's worth of groceries. And cat supplies.

By the time I get done running around I can't even remember what gender I am - let alone what I have to buy.

On the way home, when I finally reached my property, my car got stuck in the mud. With an incredibly bad back and mud up to my knees, I'm pushing and dragging the friggin' car out of the relentless quicksand.

Then I have to drag bags and bags of groceries up the mercilessly muddy hill to the back door. Slipping, sliding, and gasping for breath.

I'm giving you the kind and gentle version. My existence here in the wilderness - at best - is beyond the deepest realms of hell. 

On the bright side, we had two gloriously warm days in the 50's (Wednesday and Thursday). It was so wonderful that I actually opened my bedroom window for a few hours.

On Friday the temperature dropped rapidly. Snow flurries all night. Today (Saturday, I think) the daytime "high" temperature is 18 degrees (Fahrenheit). It's supposed to get much colder next week. 

Here are a few photos I took today - along with sunsets on the recent warm days (Wed/Thurs).

 I mostly take the sunset photos from the front porch. It's the easiest way to do it.

 I couldn't stay out very long today because my fingers were nearly frozen (I don't have gloves)

Not a living soul except for me (partially alive) and a few birds. I did hear several woodpeckers. 

There were flurries all day long but not much accumulation.

OUT OF THE FOG, INTO THE WIND

It's a few hours before dawn on Saturday morning. A very strong and unseasonably warm wind is blowing - rustling restlessly through the trees, making the wind chimes on my front porch sing.

Several packs (groups? gangs?) of coyotes were howling nearby awhile ago: a macabre chorus in the night. I ran out on the front porch to see them, but it was really too dark (moonless and/or cloudy) and they disbanded rather quickly.

The wind is really raging now as I write. Things are banging around outside and all my cats woke up. The warm temperature is eerie but it won't last (unfortunately). Frigid weather is expected by Christmas Eve.

Yesterday (Friday) the rain poured all day and it was foggy. I've never seen rain and fog at the same time until I moved to Tennessee. I actually like it - very atmospheric.

I snapped a few photos yesterday. Nothing particularly interesting.

 Oranges and apples, and two old nutcrackers that I found packed away.

This snowman used to play music when you pressed his hand, but it no longer works.

The front yard yesterday morning when the fog was starting to roll in (above).

 

.....and the back yard in the dreary afternoon. 

 

 A few autumn leaves are still clinging to trees.

 

 I took a picture of these candles without using the flash and captured my hands holding the camera in the mirror.

SCARY STUFF

It wasn't until this morning, when I unwittingly glanced in the mirror, that I realized there are some advantages to growing older. I'll never again have to worry about buying a Halloween costume. I'm permanently wearing a mask that would win first prize for Best Spook at any Halloween party.

I initially thought I looked like Lurch from the Addam's Family.

 But on second glance I realized that Lurch looked infinitely better. 

On to a brighter note: scary stuff.
Halloween is my favorite time of year and I had planned on writing  a lot of scary Halloweeny stuff.

As I cowered in bed this morning - reluctant to crawl out from under the covers because of a severe back ache and the fact that the room was colder than a witch's tit - I came to the conclusion that my life here in the wilderness is much scarier than anything Halloween has to offer.

Every day here on Hillbilly Mountain is packed with various degrees of horror that would inspire the most staunch Halloween aficionado to cower and cringe.

The long perilous walk to the mailbox is enough to reduce tough men to tears. 

Having heavy boots sucked off your feet by the thick mud and battling 15 foot high weeds is nothing compared to the steep trek back to the house - which saps your breath, increases your heart rate to 300 beats a minute, and renders you semi-conscious by the time you're halfway home.

I won't bother to mention the coyotes that gleefully emit death howls at my back door at 3:00 a.m.
Or the mice that scratch mercilessly in the walls until 5:00 a.m. 
Or the 'possums under the house
Or the Unknown Creatures on the roof that makes my should-be-peaceful nights a living hell.

Did I mention the insects?
The only positive thing is that the temperature has suddenly dropped 400 degrees and many of the annoying insects are finally gone.

Yup, boys and girls, last night was below freezing. Today the daytime "high" was 35 degrees (that's Fahrenheit, for those of you in the Hebrides). There were snow showers early this morning.

And this is the coldest house I've ever lived in. If it's 35 degrees outside, it's minus 40 degrees inside. 

"Global warming", my shivering ass! 

I flatly refuse to put the heat on in October. I (supposedly) live in a mild southern state. If I wanted to put the heat on in October, I would have moved to Iceland. 

Is this post getting too long? Tough noogies. I'll stop for a moment to insert these delight photos that I snapped this morning from the back porch. Cloudy, dreary, frosty.

My cat Scratch (also know as Kitzee) was very sick a week ago. She has never had a sick day in twelve years, so I was extremely worried. Her behavior was frighteningly strange.

I was almost ready to call the vet, but decided to wait. In two days she began eating again. In three days she was beginning to act halfway normal.

Now, she is completely normal again and intent on making me delightfully miserable.

This afternoon she kicked Bosco off the bed and slept in his favorite place - so I am assured that she has made a full recovery.

Bosco was sleeping on this old green pillowcase, and Kitzee scared him off and took his place.

BTW-
the photo of Scratch (Kitzee) at the top of this post was taken when I lived in Texas. She's posing with one of the tiny pumpkins from my drought-stricken garden.

Well, that's enough scary stuff for now.
Just wait 'till Halloween....

INTERMISSION

I feel lousy and things have been going bad (or badly, for all you grammar freaks). 

This morning, despite my abject misery and negative attitude, I decided to venture outside for a walk in the woods.
It has been raining for the past three days (remnants of Hurricane Irma), so I didn't go far - - just stayed on my own property.

It was a pleasant walk - despite mud up to my ankles and distant gunfire. I always worry that a trigger-happy myopic hillbilly will mistake me for Big Foot.

Despite running into a twenty foot spider web which looked like something from Conan Doyle's Lost World, I didn't have any mishaps.
But I came home annoyingly wet and covered in mud. With remnants of spider web on my hat, face.....
...and in my mustache....

For your viewing pleasure, boys and girls, I brought my El Cheapo camera with me and took some unremarkable and uninteresting pictures of the gloomy wet forest.
The forest won't be beautiful until the foliage transforms into autumnal colors - which won't happen for another month.
A few random leaves just couldn't wait until autumn....

 The entrance of the forest:

which reeks with the possibility of Red Riding Hood wolves and Hansel and Gretel witches.

It was so dark that my camera flash kept going off, but when I tried taking a few pics without the flash they looked really crappy.

The good news is that all the ticks are gone (for the season), so I only had to worry about running into 15,000 other kinds of creepy bugs. Including mega giant spiders.

But I'm a tough dude. I can take it.

 

I never allow my cats to go anywhere near the forest, but I do let them out on the back porch for a breath of air. Scruffy was very reluctant to come back inside this morning.

(I plan to paint the back porch within the next few weeks - because it looks like hell. I already painted the front porch)

I didn't intend to center these final paragraphs, but the Blogger gremlins won't allow me to fix it.

TALE OF A COW

I'm used to hearing cows - they're my nearest neighbors. There's a meadow adjacent to my property where ungulates congregate (I just threw ungulates in to impress you).

Also, far beyond the trees in front of my mountain shack, there are more places where cows congregate. I've never seen these cows, but I can frequently hear their distant moos.

I like the sound of mooing cows around me. It sure as hell beats the agony of screaming children and all the other annoyances of neighbors.

 The cow meadow adjacent to my property. I took this photo last fall.

The other day, one particular cow sounded unusually close. It wasn't on my property, but it wasn't as distant as they usually sound. I didn't pay much attention - until after sunset. It was still persistently mooing, obviously in the same place. I went outside and tried to discern the exact location, but it was too dark with too many tree clutters to see anything.

As the night progressed, so did my anxiety. The moos were unnervingly loud and urgent, sometimes sounding more like a moose than a cow. Despite my Sissy City Boy mentality, I knew the creature was in trouble.

I went to bed and tried to read, but the persistent moos coming from my window were extremely upsetting. My rampant imagination pictured a cow stuck in a hole, or with a broken leg, or half-eaten by coyotes.

My only consolation was that it didn't really sound like it was in pain. It sounded frustrated. Perhaps it got outside a fence and couldn't get back in? 

By 4:00 a.m. it started getting foggy. I got dressed and went outside. That's when it began pouring rain. There was no way I could go out in a foggy downpour, in the dark middle of nowhere, with a painful back, to look for a cow.

And if I found the cow, what could I do? Bring it home and give it a blanket and a cup of cocoa? There are no neighbors around to talk to.

There is a narrow one-way road that goes past the front of my property (far from my house). The cow sounded like it was near the road. Perhaps after dawn somebody would drive by and see it.

Then I realized that it was Sunday and the prospect of any traffic was remote.

This story is getting far too long and I'm in it like quicksand. Be patient while I try to pull myself out.

THEN
I remembered that a few miles up the road somewhere is a little church. A congregation meets there on Sunday. Someone is bound to hear and/or see the cow.

My intuition proved to be right. Sometime around 10:00 a.m. I saw an animal truck going by. I don't know what they're called. I'm a displaced musician, not a farmer.
It was a truck that transports animals.

Shortly after that, the cow stopped mooing. I can only surmise that the poor animal was rescued and brought back home. 

Okay, it took me a helluva long time to tell this pointless story - but you've got to give me some slack. I live in the unexciting wilderness. A cow in distress is a big deal - worthy of a blog entry.

Now you know why I so often write about my exciting Hollywood past.
Once - in my flamboyant youth - Rock Hudson was smiling at me..... 
Now, I'm smiling at cows in neighboring pastures....life is an ironic piss.

Which reminds me - - I have another critter story which I'll tell next time. This one scared the shit out of me. 

ROUNDUP, MY ASS!

First of all - before I launch into my post-Memorial Day rant - I want to thank the kind people who left comments on my previous post Death of a Soldier.
I wrote that essay long ago and have been posting it on my blog every Memorial Day for the past decade (almost).


It's one of my personal favorite "literary" efforts. Ironically, it is always the least-read post on my blog.

Okay, take a deep breath. We're going into Rant Mode. 

 morning

So how did I spend my Memorial Day weekend?

Wait a minute, Jon. Why did you change to a larger font?

So that you can actually READ this fricking post. I'm tired of visiting blogs that offer 10,000 word diatribes with a microscopic font. It assaults my eyes and pisses me off. When I write something, I want you to actually see it.  

We see it, Jon.

My Memorial Day weekend can be summed up in a few words: heat, wasps, weeds, spiders, mice, cats. Did I mention weeds?

Thanks to the perpetual rain (it rains here about 360 days a year) the weeds have assumed Twilight Zone dimensions. They are now nearly as tall as myself (I'm 6'1" without my boots) and far more obstinate (than myself). They have completely engulfed my house and are threatening to consume it.

The last time I was in town somebody suggested "Use Roundup on your weeds".
(Roundup is a popular weed killer here in the U.S.- - for those of you in the Hebrides).

Roundup, my ass!! (hence the title)

Hey, I'm in a forest, surrounded by wilderness acres. My weeds have taken on H.G.Wells proportions, with Amazon animosity (I'm not talking online shopping Amazon - - I'm talking jungle rain forest Amazon).

Roundup is for warts on potted petunias. I need plows and teams of horses, heavy trackers (as opposed to light ones), sickles, machetes, and Divine Intervention from God Almighty.

I've lately been spraying the weeds with a wicked mixture of bleach and salt.

And the first one of you prissy-pansy environmentalists who tells me I'm destroying the environment is going to  get a liberal shot of the bleach mixture right up your (you fill in the blank).

I used "liberal" just to annoy you.
You think Donald Trump is outspoken?
Just thank your booties that I'M not running for President. I'd make Trump look like Shirley Temple.

 a jungle jumble of weeds

Today I braved the humidity and jungle bugs to attack the weeds with a humongous pair of shears. 
I keep the shears outside and - just as I was about to pick them up - I saw a HUGE black spider on them. Having to kill it only intensified my misery.

Spiders and wasps are everywhere. The wasps are extremely aggressive and chase me as soon as I step outside. They wait by the door. The spiders pop up unexpectedly and scare the living Jeeters out of me.

I was in my bedroom late last night, reading (Russian history, in case you're curious). Suddenly -
I looked at the window and saw a huge black spider creeping in (must have been the other black spider's big brother).

Yes, I do have screens on my windows. But spiders ignore them.

I jumped up (not an easy task with my bad back) and ran outside on the back porch to get the bug spray (I accidentally left it out there).

By the time I got back to the bedroom - let's all say it together -
THE SPIDER WAS GONE!!!

I looked everywhere, and then looked everywhere again. Where the hell did it go?? It probably crawled into my bed and is waiting there for me to go to sleep, so it can nest in my hair.  

About half an hour later (I'm still in a terrified sweat over the awol spider) my cat Scruffy runs in carrying a mouse by the tail. Holy shit! 

She drops the mouse and it quickly takes shelter behind a big chest of drawers.

I'm on my hands and knees, trying to coax the mouse out - while still glancing around everywhere in fear of the spider. While my back is still hurting.

After the passing duration of a delightful hour, I finally manage to trap the mouse in a cardboard mailing cylinder that I happened to have.

 mouse in cylinder

The mouse looked so cute that I didn't have the heart to kill him (I'm a sweetheart). I ventured outside at 3:00 am and dumped the hapless rodent in a nearby field.
He'll probably return to the house, but what the hell.  

And that, my friends, is only a fraction of what I did on Memorial Day weekend.