Glompy Obscura & the Café Beans
live from the Little Store
Since I work nights there are reasonable facsimiles of black-out curtains on the bedroom window, facsimiles because perfection is by its nature difficult to obtain. As the poet once said, there's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.
In this particular case, since the crack is of a particular shape, a camera obscura, that amazing phenomenon of a pinhole in one wall producing an inverted image on an opposite wall, has been brought into existence and yes, indeed, a certain mundane drama played out on my ceiling on this day of days, me having forgotten to put on the added layer of a sleep mask before beddy-bye-time--much to my chagrin.
Not that it would have mattered, I'd have needed to add in anechoic acoustic foam to the mix, for it is indeed that time of the year, ladies and gentlemen, that time that all who rent in the burbs (and work nights) dread, it is the time of the mowers.
I don't know what the fuck it is about burbs needing all that goddam useless sheep grass mowed flat like some drill sergeant's head every thirty-six hours after the spring equinox but here we are. The sheer brutality of the operation is staggering, a wheezing work truck screeches to a halt in the sac's copious amount of parking (ha ha), belches out a work crew that drops clanking metal ramps on asphalt to haul ass with mowing machines that were once some ignoble DARPA skunkworks freedom machine experiment now turned to merely rapidly spinning grass guillotines and this certain... humming...grind fills the air as enemy grass is leveled throughout the cul-de-sac, oh let freedom ring. This operation takes about fifteen minutes and yet feels like forty-five. Sleep has been defeated, we live in victorious times, glory hallelujah.
And then out come the platoon of weed-wackers to finish the job.
Nothing says efficiency like needing multiple types of gas guzzling tools to defeat an enemy that merely needs a bit of water, light, and frog farts to just grow right back the next day as if nothing happened, just one of those things when you're a plant:
Hey, who's that asshole with the blades?
Oh well they gone now time to grow again ha ha.
Repeat Ad Nauseum.
Meanwhile, like some glompy Grendel I lay hands over my ears in semi-darkness listening and watching the battle against lawns play out on the bedroom ceiling thanks to the magic of a camera obscura during a bright sunny day. The resolution isn't perfect by any means, but I can see the lawn dogs with their bright orange shirts zipping around in circles on their hog mowers, waving arms while yelling directions to each other over the roar of air-breathing engines, all secure in their worldly place. Ain't science grand? Where's my popcorn? Where's my gaffer tape? Where's my cure for this wicked machine?
This work first appeared live at the Little Store on Knox in North KC.