Tough as Nails

Goodbye Clint. Hasta la vista, Arnold. Get lost 007. I have a new hero…weeds!

It’s time weeds get some respect. Common as dirt. Indestructible. Permanent eradication is impossible. They scoff at Roundup. They drink chemicals for champagne cocktails. They eat lawns with impunity and laugh gardeners to scorn.

Weeds are smart. They find feasts in newly planted furrows. The fallow field chorus begins when the tiller arrives. They sing, “Mine eyes hath seen the coming of the tractor with the plow.…”

In nature, nothing rivals the resilience of weeds. Unless it’s rocks. Which is why boulders abound in vineyards. They ooze minerals, steroidal leachate stronger than ‘T’ injections. They consort with nematodes, those round earthworms that gobble grass and glorify weeds. Yes, nematodes caress all carcasses. They’ll gorge on yours one day.

Rocks and nematodes are both in a covert conspiracy with weeds. Their subversive activities seek to conquer the world. Look around. Wherever they are seen, nature will soon be reclaimed. Check out a ditch. They thrive undisturbed. Mow ‘em, torch ‘em, spray ‘em…they’ll be back tomorrow.

I sometimes dream of being a weed, not a rock or worm. Rocks are boring sloths. They just lie around like slobs, adding little and getting in the way. Reminds me of some people I know. But not weeds. No sir. Weeds, like worms and rocks, are relentless and invincible invaders. Give ‘em an inch of ground and you’ll lose the battle.

I made this picture of what appears to be a baby dandelion. Lying between the inhospitable cracks of flagstone, it appears happier than most people. That’s assuming weeds can express such emotion. It seems to smile, even gloat, sorta like the Baptist preacher holding four aces at the Friday night poker game.

We bought our first house in 1969, a cute cottage in a neatly groomed subdivision. Neighbors’ lawns were pristine and stood as straight as a Butch-Waxed flat-top haircut. Except ours. Who has time to mow a lawn while changing diapers and paying bills? So what happened? A gang of subversive dandelions took root in the weed patch we called our front lawn. I knew our tenure would be short there. I recognized immediately the negotiation value of weeds.

Mr. Frank was our neighbor. He was a weed-control fanatic. He attempted to tutor me on proper lawn maintenance and neighborhood protocol. He was obsessed with my demonic dandelions. They eyeballed his luscious Zoysia, contemplating marriage. Like a teenager in heat, they encroached on their prey by stealth, inch by inch. Which is a perfectly reasonable thing for dandelions to do. Like the little man in Moscow, exploitation of a vulnerable territory is in the nature of weeds and worms.

In retrospect, I think my knee-high dandelions drove Mr. Frank to drink. One hot day in August it all came to a head. He had to be talked down from the roof with my promise to retard the advance of dandelions. Our relationship went downhill from there when he built a wall. We soon packed up our dandelions and moved.

Weeds don’t deserve the bad rap they’re getting. Weeds welcomed Adam and his bride when they wandered outside of Eden. There is a bias in nature in favor of thorns and thistles, not cultivated gardens. That’s why I want to side with weeds…they’re the long-term winning team.

There’s a frail elegance to weeds. Walk almost anywhere…there they are, these reviled botanical survivors. I pity them. Their tiny flowers are exquisite miniatures of expensive hot-house varieties. Flowers of weeds are free.

Metaphorically speaking, weeds are like the details of life that disrupt our inordinate compulsion for orderly control. We seek ease, avoidance, amusement…weeds remind us that life’s not like that. Left to themselves, details, like weeds, will colonize all carefully crafted gardens of grace and security.

Weeds remind us that life is still wild by nature. It’s bloody, tooth and nail. The instructive virtue of weeds supports the maxim, “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”

All flesh is like grass, folks. All its glory is like the flower of grass. Here today, gone tomorrow. But not weeds. Oh, if only we were as resilient as the dandelion….


Bud Hearn
March 28, 2014

The Boy with the Tiny Hands

Something fundamental is happening. Have you noticed? Things are changing fast. Children are becoming billionaires overnight. Their fingers monetize everything new. Nothing’s safe. Irrelevance stalks our generation.

Tiny hands are at work, at play, at war. Minds are being colonized by apps, digits and pixels. Communication is instantaneous. Societies are in peril of disruption, of overnight obsolescence. Status quo hobbles into the ICU on crutches.

Earlier this week we babysat our niece’s two children. For those with young children, mechanical hand-held gadgets that glow and capture imagination are commonplace. But we were astonished by the dexterity and speed of their tiny fingers. God only knows the speed of their brains.

I sat with the boy, age 7, watching his tiny hands move mountains, build cities, map brains, explore planets and, yes, murder en masse jihadist extremists. The X-box disc, The Call of Duty, is indeed a savage game!

Children are fascinated with war games. Best we could muster as children were back-yard skirmishes with dirt forts, bulwarks and towers built with our hands. We’d outflank our enemies with a few rubber soldiers, a couple of plastic tanks and make mouth noises, tat-tat-tat-tat, that sounded like machine guns. Shooting was different with us. ‘Keepers’ with marbles were the only zero-sum game we played.

Today, tiny hands avoid dirt under their nails, or skinned knees. They don’t go barefoot, fly kites, jump rope, race bikes or skates. They play inside, get obese or worse, and expect instant gratification, which was never a real-world concept…until now.

Today, new world systems and boundaries are emerging. Archeological digs overflow with the compost of castoff civilizations. They’ve been entombed in the dung hills of history. Methane seeps from their final gasps at life.

The Green Movement oligarchs ransack through the junkyards of the past. They recycle the societal remnants and reap fortunes from IPO’s. Cultural carcasses reside in the rust bins of elite universities. They’re cadavers preserved for dissection, chronicled for future instruction in the failed public policies of the past.

Tiny hands dwell in the realm of digital ether. Personal relationships are virtual, vacuous and sometimes viral. They lack the meaning that face-time encounters furnish. They create unmapped universes whose future is yet unwritten. The language in the machine talks to them because they’re writing it. Their fingers do the talking. Tongues are unessential.


I look at my hands. Soft flesh. The hands of a writer of contracts, of stories; a musician, a gym man. No stubby nails. No grease stains. Scant evidence remains of ancient blisters from a childhood of farm work. The calloused palms come now from dumbbells. Tractors and lawn mowers operate by GPS. Drones plant crops and drop bombs. Cars park themselves. Work is outsourced. American economic Colonialism thrives.

It’s said that hands can reveal a lot about a person’s life. Perhaps. If so, then what might they prophesy about the life of today’s tiny hands? Scary.

Take a look at your hands. Gypsies contend the lines in one’s palms reveal destiny. Mystics say destiny is in fate, not palms. However, it’s an indisputable fact…destiny can still shaped by the work of our hands.

The tiny hands of today are unveiling an unfamiliar world. A landscape where surgery is done by robotics, where destruction can rain from the sky by an index finger on a tiny remote in Nevada.

My mind fast forwards to a world of robots. I see myself soon making an appointment with one for a bank loan. My life is exposed, evaluated, scored and a verdict rendered…Yes or No, all in a matter of seconds. The good-old-boy regime is history. Everyone’s equal.

Cat Stevens’ wrote the words of this song:

Oh very young
What will you leave us this time?
You’re only dancing on this earth for a short while.
Oh very young
What will you leave us this time?

The boy with tiny hands…will they become bloody or benign? A greater question falls to us: Will our hands help him make that choice?


Bud Hearn
March 24, 2014

Floccinaucinihilipilification

Webster: “The action or habit of estimating something as worthless, or regarding something as unimportant, of having no value.” With 29 characters, it’s hardly a household word, unless your intent is to impress folks. Don’t overshoot your goal. There are easier ways.

**********

My wife and I share words. It’s not the same as ‘having words,’ but sometimes it gets close. No, today at breakfast we’re discussing the word ‘floccinaucinihilipilification.’ It’s a perfect word to pop a Pepto pill.

She discovers it in a newspaper article. Yes, the New York Times. Would you expect less from that paper? I think the context was a toothless bark by Obama to Putin, “Get off the next exit ramp with Crimea.” It was a rhetorical reach, an attempt to describe something of no interest. Consider the source.

“Do you know what this word means?” she asks.

“No. Why?” I ask, knowing that not knowing the ‘why’ of everything drives her mad. It’s exhilarating to stoke the fires of passion of a spouse at early morning coffee. It sets the day’s tone.

“Why would anybody use such an inscrutable word?” she asks. Her ‘why’ becomes a yoyo, spinning wildly at the end of a long string of inconsistencies. Once in motion, you can’t get rid of it.

“Gibberish,” I say. “Who cares?” Short answers are safe. Less noose to get hung by.

“There’re 1,025,908 words in the English language. Why choose this word?” she asks.

Why indeed? But she has a point. It’s haunting, like the Mary Poppins song, Supercalifragilisticeexpialidocious, that stupid alien jingle that homesteads in your brain. It’s worse than David Frizzell’s hit, “I’m Gonna Hire a Wino to Decorate Our Home.” These were Abu Ghraib torture tunes that succeeded in exposing Cheney’s sadistic infatuation with Judge Judy.

I grab Webster, read her the meaning. “Sounds like a word your father would have used to describe your youth,” she comments.

“Absolutely not!” I say. “My daddy was short on verbiage. ‘Fishing’ was the longest word he knew.” The comment brings back a memory of the man who regularly kept a can of fishing bait—worms—in the refrigerator for freshness. I remind her of that.

“The fruitcake, uh, fruit, never falls far from the tree,” she replies.

She has another point. I remember a confusing comment from my father. I was about ten. “Daddy, what does ‘worthless’ mean?”

“Son, look it up. When you find it, you’ll see your picture.” I didn’t get it. I’m still looking.

Well, returning to ‘more about nothing.’ Floccinaucinihilipilification consists of four Latin words. Bottom line? It’s irrelevant. Like high school Latin. Have you ever tried to recite Latin with a Southern dialect? Besides, where is Gaul today, anyway? Still, her question of ‘Why’ stalks me.

But not for long. All men have opinions. The wise have learned to express them to themselves in silence. I avoid that advice today.

“Honey, only showoffs and blow-hards use such arcana. Think politicians and you’ll get closer to the meaning. One might say they’re hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian.” Pride swells within me at the mention of folks who use big words.

I want to evoke the word used by Duke Ellington, antidisestablishmentarianism, just to make a point. But I could see it would fall on deaf ears. Who cares about the Church of England anyway?

I continue unabated. She sits motionless, stunned by my erudition. “Sweetie, users of such nonsense are just trying to impress people. You know, like women trying to out-do one another with clothes.” I should have left that last part off.

I shift the subject, dredge up a maxim by La Rochefoucauld: “In every walk of life each man puts on a personality and outward appearance so as to look what he wants to be thought. You might say that society is entirely made up of assumed personalities.” Now there’s a thought that will separate the Erudite from the Troglodyte.

**********

As in most things, women have the last word. So I ask her what she thinks floccinaucinihilipification means. She takes a long look at me. “I think your daddy had you figured out…you aim for nothing and rarely miss.”

Bud Hearn
March 14, 2014

Sketch courtesy of Leslie Hearn

Somethin's Gotta Go

The pressure builds. The fat’s in the fire. Hell’s gates rattle. Demons run wild. Starvation begins. Lent has arrived. Somethin’s gotta go.

**********

Lent…a forty-day fast, the penitent’s primordial curse. Conscience compels sinners to re-consecrate their bodies and rebuke the devil. The carnal pleasures of the flesh are sacrificed for the sanctification of our souls. It’s worse than a root canal.

WWJD? We’re afraid to ask. We won’t like the answer. Stones will not become croissants. The approved give-up list doesn’t include Vienna sausages. Cell phones and all sweets must go; but, Oh, God be merciful, please not pork chops!

Fasts are abominable afflictions. They set on fire the course of human nature. People become mean and desperate. They disfigure themselves with ashes. They’re zombies in sackcloth. Hunger drives them wildly into the streets. They wail in grocery stores, drooling on the cookie aisle. They swoon in visions of ecstasy at the very sight of a Hershey bar.

This madness began in the 4th century at the pinnacle of the Epicurean era. Like today, everyone was fat and happy. Hedonism ran rampant, collection plates ran empty. Preaching lacked efficacy and sin lost its sting. Churches needed power to convince congregants of the reality of Hell, the punishment of sin and the ubiquity of the Devil.

An ecclesiastic convocation was called. St. Leo was chosen as its leader. He was an itinerant preacher experienced in river baptisms. He concocted the theory of a forty-day fast. The experiment was based on the clever, but perverted contextual precept of the Holy Writs. Its leitmotif was to affirm that Lucifer, the lictor of the lower regions, controlled the gene pool of the descendants of Adam. That’s us, by the way.

In the scripture story is a river, a bird, a spirit, angels and a desert like Death Valley. The wind is a restless spirit. Rocks, like popcorn, crack and pop in the stifling heat, not unlike the sound of a prison chain gang. Large ominous black birds hover overhead, looking for another carcass to pick.

I re-read the story. The bird adds a nice touch. I once had a pet bird. A parakeet named JoeJoe. I used to baptize it. It drove the creature mad. It flew in crazed circles. It often lit on my shoulder or head, whereupon it would deposit the remnants of its latest meal as a show of displeasure, or appreciation. Who could tell from such an unstable bird? I was a child then. I often wondered if its droppings were signs from heaven.

St. Leo’s theory had legs. Along with the fast came the Devil and his legions of minions. Like carnival barkers, they made absurd promises to those who were driven mad by hunger. Promises of omnipotence, self-prominence, immortality, invincibility and renown. Hordes of weak penitents relapsed. Laughter rang in the halls of Hell. Church pews filled as backsliding recidivists returned to the horror of primal sin.

The Catholic Church discovered Lent was a solution to the shrinking treasury. It offered to sell ‘indulgences’ to converts for compensation for their weak fortitude, and to buy repentance. The ruse was revealed. The Pope loathed the deception but loved the lucre.

The devil’s real! Avoid him. Never publically admit to fasting. You’ll be cast as a religious nut, an ascetic. You will be despised, reviled, shunned by society. Verily you will have your reward.

Always fast in secret. Never consume things with expired labels or green mold. Let no alcohol stronger than kerosene touch your tongue. It’s ok to gargle with elixirs over 100 proof, but don’t inhale or swallow.

If you’re rich, join the Baptists. They operate a black-market in the re-sale of unused indulgences. And contrary to popular opinion, they cannot turn stones to bread either.

While fasting, never step behind a church pulpit and recite publically the Apostles’ Creed. Forget ever cleaning off the pinnacle of the church’s roof. Angels will not bear you up if you fall.

Also, stop wishing your name were Buffett or Obama. Delusions of grandeur are the devil’s domain. The penalty for relapse is having to purchase indulgences from the moneychangers of the Democratic Party. There’s no escape from the horror of that abyss.

**********

We also have the Holy Parchment. If St. Leo appropriated it, so can we. Therefore: When thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth…especially if thy right hand holdeth a coconut cake.

Did I get that right?


Bud Hearn
March 7, 2014