LOSS LEADERS #2
Sometimes Autumn comes between Summer and Winter. Two stories, October compost update, and a Night Committee show.
Assumption #2
You can avoid committing to a pattern for a while provided you aren’t concerned about the eventual size of the pattern.
Top of the Eighth, Wild Pitch
The catcher throws his mask over his shoulder and runs after the ball. Steps on the crouching ball boy’s shoulder and vaults into the stands. Runs up the steps. ‘That way,’ fans shout, pointing up to the stadium lip. Fans tie jerseys together into a rope. They hoist the catcher over the wall and lower him down, into the world.
In the parking a little girl shouts ‘that way!’ from the window of her minivan. The catcher leaps concrete barricades. Runs down the avenue. Road crews stop jack-hammering and cheer. An infantry veteran steps into a cross walk, holds out her arms to stop traffic for him. ‘That way!’ shouts a shawarma vendor, pointing with his electric knife.
At the pier the coast guards wave the catcher to the open submarine hatch. ‘It’s the top of the 8th,’ explains the catcher, climbing down the ladder into the dark interior. ‘They have runners in scoring position.’ ‘Yes, yes, we know,’ say the coast guards.
The catcher watches the sun disappear upwards, dimming beneath more and more water. The pilot points into the gloom and says ‘that way.’
The submarine captain trims his white beard in a tiny mirror. ‘Think about what you will trade, when we catch up to it,’ he says. Rubs fog off the mirror with his sleeve. ‘It won’t just be given back without reciprocity.’ The catcher has a wedding ring, a tattoo of the Archangel Gabriel on his sternum, his grandmother’s recipe for thanksgiving turkey stuffing, a story about falling hopelessly in love with the woman behind the counter at a used bookstore and going back the next day only to find a locked door and a foreclosure notice, a safety deposit box key he swore he’d never use, a memory of his daughter rushing the intro of Chopin’s Nocturne No. 7 in C# Minor in a dark auditorium. The spotlight passes over ladders, steel girders, twists of rebar, empty window frames, crane booms. Everything skinned in mud and waving weeds.
‘There,’ says the submarine captain, pointing into the darkness. The catcher, still deciding, opens his mitt.
Compost Update: October 2023
This week we’re raking leaves for tree mulch and a source of carbon through to next spring. We’ve finished moving the heaps into their next bin and seem to be in good shape for winter.
We moved the bin one heap to bin two in September. Six months worth of kitchen compost, coffee grinds, and garden trimmings.1 Everything but the tough stalks and fibres have already broken down substantially. The nitrogen from a daily supply of coffee grinds helps while trying to do all of this in a subalpine desert. Depending on how damp and warm we can keep it over the winter it should be ready for bin three when the snow melts.
Once bin one was empty we filled it pretty quickly putting the gardens to bed: corn stalks, zucchini vines, marigolds, cosmos that never flowered, huge clumps of supertunias. We chop everything with shears to speed things up. The flowers all did excellently this year in the heat and the supertunias especially created a ton of mass, which is good because we didn’t plant tomatoes and didn’t get all the green mass of those vines.
Bin three (which started in bin one last fall) should be ready for spreading in the spring.2 I think that we’ll have two or three wheelbarrowfulls in there.
Night Committee Show Alert
Night Committee plays at High Line Brewing in Inglewood on Friday, Oct. 20th with Vailhalen, our dear friend Chris Vail’s fantastic band that also features our drummer Joel and former very brief Night Committee member Aaron Booth. We’re going to play the new record3 start to finish to prep for going into the studio in November.
Doors at 7, bands at 8. #113 1318 9th Ave SE. See you there!
Mid-Issue Poll
The Vole Barbers
All across the meadow, the vole barbers give haircuts to their neighbours: the mice and moles and gophers. They trim their clients hair with robin’s beaks. Apprentice barbers sharpen beak shards on gravel pebbles. Heat clover-leaf towels in hot dew drops. The barbers’ hands move precisely. But sometimes—their clients assume accidentally—a razor trimming close to the skin scrapes a bead of blood.
The barbers converge at midnight at the meadow’s centre, under the dead wolf willow thicket. The pour their hoarded blood pearls into a hollow stone. The Magistrate Barber stirs the blood with a pine needle.
In the bright morning the youngest, quietest vole climbs the spruce tree at the edge of the forest. All the way to the nest. The sun is high and the old barn owl is fast asleep. The youngest vole carefully paints the sleeping owl’s legs with the blood.
The owl wakes up surrounded by voles, leaning in a circle around the edge of the nest. The Magistrate Barber points with her pine needle. ‘You do what we tell you now,’ she tells the owl. And the owl feels the blood on its legs and knows this is true.
‘What will you make me do?’ asks the owl.
The barbers cackle and answer. All the plans they have. They cackle and cackle.
We don’t do weeds because we can’t get the heaps hot enough to break down seeds and thistle roots, so weeds go in a separate pile a distance removed. I need a different plan for it though because I’ve effectively created a self-seeding thistle farm that seems expansionistic.
I know, I know: you’re supposed to spread your compost in the fall as the last step before you put the garden to bed. We’re on our own clock.
In other news, we’ve written a new record. Coming soon!