Dead Men's Tales.

St Patrick’s Day is the second best holiday of the year. Horray for Halloween. A new year is born as winter encroaches. For one night the barrier between worlds is dropped. Girls respectfully follow tradition’s demands to dress revealingly.

Believable scary stories make me cry. Or, at least, make my eyes well up uncontrollably. I love to cry to scary stories.
Kenyon College is old and established and lib’brul and rich and haunted. It’s about 14 miles from the farm. On Saturday night Dr. Shutt was to lead his renowned ghost tour of campus. I brought two friends to enjoy, but it was cancelled for fear of rain. I believe them Kenyon whelps aren’t constituted of strong enough stuff.
Sunday night was a weak sauce Halloweeny event put on yearly by the students. A candlelit scary-story “reading” (Poe. more Poe. a little more Poe.) in the old graveyard on campus. By pulling a series of levers and bells I had gained the confidence of Dr. Shutt’s daughter. Clever me. She arranged a small personal tour from the man himself to follow the funereal readings.

Kenyon has lots of ghost stories. It’s really a tremendous body of work. Dr. Shutt is the self-appointed keeper of this vein of Kenyon lore. He has heard so many. But he tells a select few. There are two types of ghost stories tellers. Those you want (at least a little) to believe. And those you can’t help but believe. He is the latter.
A couple of the stories he would tell in grand fashion, but at the end poo-poo. But the majority were true as he told them. It was good.

Some of the stories were old. In a fraternity initiation, a boy was tied up and placed on the nearby train tracks. He was hit by an unscheduled train, perhaps on it’s way to Mt Vernon for repairs. He haunts his old room. It’s possible that his dad helped tie him to the tracks.
The oldest building on campus burned down in 1949. Several kids died. The last seven trapped inside went out singing songs together. The building was rebuilt almost immediately. The ghosts appear walking where the floors would have been before it was rebuilt.


The best reported ghost of Kenyon is the ghost of Capels Hall. In 1979 a drunken boy in room 811 went down to visit his girl in 611. He was returning to his room via elevator after being rebuffed when it stopped working. He fell down the shaft in his attempt to leave. Ever since, girls who stay in rooms 611, 711, 811 and 911 report over and over again this: they wake in the night, unable to move. someone sits down next to them on the bed. and then the someone lies down next to them. It’s actually ridiculous the number of times this has been reported.
The Capels ghost was also implicated a couple of summers ago in an incident involving phone calls of screaming to the switchboard coming from those rooms. It was summer. The place was locked. Security found the lights on in those rooms. And the hot water on in the showers on those floors. But no one around. As soon as they left Caples, the switchboard operator fielded the same screaming calls. Security ran back. Found the same thing. No one there. Lights on. Hot water on. And this time the phone jacks were plugged in, but the phone cords were yanked off.

OSU should beware.

Gopher Trace.

Log looks like a woodchuck.

Desmond Dekker Sings "Israelites"

Three mornings ago I saw two men looking with intent at the woods across from our drive and up the hill about 30 feet. Two days ago they came in with a bulldozer. I wonder when they’ll get the house roofed, they seem pretty intent on getting this done fast. If it’s a pre-fab shit-box and the contractor has his utilities ducks in a row we could be looking at new neighbors within the month. Where we want none.

I sat in on the interview my friend gave my dad. He told her of a word that he wanted to see introduced to our lexicon. Subrualites.
Makes sense. Suburbs formed when people moved to he cities, but didn’t want to live in the cities. They clustered around the edges and then, suburbanites. But now we’ve got a strong swing coming back to kick us in the ass. People have tired of the city and the suburbs and want to make a heroic return to “country living.” They come out, buy an acre or two and set up shop. Subrualites. They drive clean trucks and commute hours and buy concrete geese from Home Depot and buy concrete geese outfits at the small town main street stores that have become little more than tourist attractors. They think they are country.

This is all very bad and irritating stuff. But that’s not why I’ve brought you here. The point is, it’s a good and useful term that didn’t exist. Now it does. Use it.

Brome Cover.

Saturday was the Worst Day of the Year. The day the babies are forcibly and vociferously removed from their mothers. The day the little bulls begin the slow decline to steerhood. The one day out of the year that Cow Jail is designed for. We hired help. It was going down. …and I slept in till noon.
My friend, an art director at a shop in Chicago, won a grant to write a book in the next year. It’s about developments. Sprawl, cookie-cutter houses, Levittowns, McMansions, suburbia, WalMart, bedroom communities. The format is interviews and photographs. I am said friend’s token farmer. Our schedules (her schedule) worked out best to come out this last weekend.
Friday night and I wanted to show her a good time. So I took her to Columbus to drink a beer and see a show and smoke some shi sha and drink some awful chai. And then we both got sick. Don’t smoke lemon-flavored tobbac before vomiting.

So, I missed the awful day. I still have yet to take anyone’s masculinity.

Today I sowed wheat. Sowing wheat is real easy. Setting up the wheat-sower (it’s called a drill for some reason?) took five times the mental effort and elbow grease. In front of the grain drill rides this thing called a cultipactor. It smushes dirt. Ours is old old old. The patent date pressed into it says 1921. I managed to bend the piss out of it’s tongue (the part you attach machinery to a tractor with). Here’s how I fixed that.
Tractors are neat-o.

How Now?

Brown Cow.
Here is what you all want to know, for one reason or another:
I am sticking around the farm for a second year.

I am not a farmer. This is simple. But this summer I made a pact with myself in that if my dad was released within the first year of his sentence I would go through a year’s cycle with him. To learn how I was supposed to do it. To spend time on the homestead. To be able to run things more properly in the future if need be.
That wasn’t an easy decision. Part of me would really like to pack up and head out tomorrow. I don’t belong here. I have things waiting elsewhere. This is not the very first step of me never leaving again. Hell no. If you knew me elsewhere, I will be back.
So this blog will continue. I shall remain to be a poo flinger and a lord over barnyards.

Tomorrow dad teaches me how to castrate a bull. Err, how to castrate about 20 bulls.

Part Two.

It seems it's been much much longer than a month.
Here are some things that happened:
The hay season ended.
My two corn fields are harvested.
My mascot, Fat Joe, became hamburger.
The weather turned.

But the only thing that really happened is
I am no longer a captive of the farm.
Three weeks ago my dad was released from prison. He is no longer a felon. We won our appeal. The case was sent back down to the local prosecutor/judge.

He is back.
I am back.

More to come.