notes from the nice side of the fence

dreams carry violence. swords and guns and reluctant face-offs. “let’s play a game”. and I get to take the surviving hero to the movies with me, once the carnage is over. it’s exciting. it’s romantic. it’s what I want, barely even secretly. 

in the morning there is spring onion, tomatoes, peppers, french toast with maple syrup and cinnamon. there are faces, eyes that don’t ever meet mine. just like in the city, this is a place where people come and go - making contact might not be worth it. this is something that I understand.

Mr. A may have used cliches, but he was often right about me. how could it be otherwise? until I peel away the layers, I am just that - a product of my conditioning. the sum of “I can’t believe you said that” and “please please please don’t go”. when that is good enough, there is nothing else. it remains a game, a competition. a tradeoff at best. 

so here I am justifying my free lunch and lodgings. likening weeding the ground to the cleansing of mind. insects punishing me for keeping still. your image punishing me at night, for the opposite sin. it’s true, it’s true, I ran away. I took away your friend.

so, I spent a week in Lotan last week where I successfully separated red worms from a very decaying heap of compost.

not before inquiring with my reluctant partner in crime, a friendly Jewish graduate who had immigrated to Israel recently and is now an Eco-Volunteer at this remote corner of the desert, or Eco-Freako in the local lingo.

“are these worms… precious?”

I was new on the scene and likely to stay a while so I was thinking when-in-rome but at the same time desperately hoped my point would not go unnoticed. people are generally intelligent but you never know, this one could have just passed them. I mean, surely this isn’t cost-effective. we could be building in mud or something sensual like that, and just dump the compost across the organic garden, worms and all. unless we go at the sifting exercise as a kind of a non-attachment meditation. as in not attaching to the most horrible stench I had ever experienced.

“they’re about a shekel a pop, apparently. in the US you can buy them by the kilo.”

so ok. the kibbutz is obviously not doing fantastically well in the financial front. which pairs great with going Green. and I could learn something from this, I told myself. and I dug in. our team leader was kind enough to equip us with little gardening tools so as not to use our bare hands, which he himself didn’t seem to mind.

the word ewww will never be quite the same after this.

in other news, me and a few friends are shooting a video this week for a song I wrote called “in my blood”. I say that, but in reality it’s an exercise a Very Talented Friend is doing for his degree in moviemaking. he wanted me for the lead, so I said “but also a video” and e-pouted slightly. he liked the song and said ok. the video is about a vampire, and hopefully will be up here soon.

love

S.

the desert