We are very lucky here at Rancho Problemo and have a full orchestra ready and waiting to provide heightened emotion to our everyday activities – things like The Luvin’ Spoonful hits on shuffle at breakfast time, “O Fortuna!” when we prepare fish steaks and, unexpectedly, “I’m Going To Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair” when I’m doing the hoovering. But we’ve had “Bright Eyes” on a loop for a week now and, frankly, I’m about ready to reach for a big ole Elmer gun and thort that pethky orchethtwa out.

Rabbits are not like us I observed lazily this morning, the sun shining in the window and bathing my bumble-bee slippers with light. They don’t have our inhibitions and “meta”ness. Their manners in mating matters aren’t like our’s either. They will tear about the garden like lunatic furballs without a care for the circling hawks above, the possibility of a beaky death only adding to the piquancy of their lust. Then a frisky young doe will suddenly turn coquettishly with a shiver of her little bobtail and she and her suitor will crouch face-to-face, ears flat and stock-still for half a minute or more, only their twitching noses to tell us that we aren’t looking at a still-life painting. Their twitching noses and the lack of a frame.

Then, suddenly! she will leap 3 feet straight up into the air and they’re off again, haring round the lawn and sending little clods of turf flying. Moments later they will disappear into a bush which will tremble and squeak for about twenty seconds before two plumes of lazy curling smoke come out of its top.

Later, you see them pretending they don’t know each other, but she has a new looseness about her hips when she hops, and he’s writing poetry in the mud with his nose. Lovesick and unguarded, he will hop out into the open for a better peek at her as she grazes with her girlfriends, forgetting that he, as a bunny, is one of the most eaten creatures on earth. The sky will darken, a hawk will swoop and a bobcat will pounce and collide with the hawk in a puff of blood and fur and feathers as our hero hops a few hops forward forward, oblivious to the carnage behind him, his only concern whether he should have used the Petrarchan rather than the Shakespearean form for his x-rated sonnet. The end.

Hey, it’s just after Valentine’s Day, folks – you didn’t think I was going to kill the bunny, didja? No, he is flattened later by a UPS delivery truck.

Anyways, this is what our pops orchestra played this morning when I threatened to disembowel them with the cymbals if the played one more bar of “Bright Eyes”:

Bunny lovin’ – had me a blast
Bunny lovin’ – happened so fast
Met a doe, crazy for me
Met a buck, cute as can be
Bunny fun, something’s begun
But ooooooh these springy dawns

A well a well a well a…

(Massed Blue-birds and fawns)
Tell me more tell me more does he have an o-er bite?
(Massed gophers and raccoons)
Tell me more tell me more, was her tail fresh and white?

Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huhoooaaah

She hopped by me, nibbled some grass
He just sat there right on his ass.
She went skipping, I caught her eye
He ignored me, I don’t know why.
Bunny treat, doe and buck meet
But oooooooooh, these springy dawns

A well a well a well a…

Tell me more, tell me more, did he sing you a song?
Tell me more, tell me more, was she wearing a thong?

It grew warmer as the day broke.
I spiked her dew with ‘hypnol and coke.
I woke up, about mid-day
Oh she was flat out and I had my way
Bunny rape, too doped to escape
oooooh ooooooooooh these spri-ngy daaaaaaaaaaaawns

Oh oh oh

(Sotto voce)
Tell me more, tell me mo-ho-ho-ho-ore!
(And fade…)

Repost from 2008 to try to get me motivated to start up this cobwebby old place again.

30 hours of straight travel ahead, door-to-door, and all night it’s been Nature loud in hoot and chirrup at my house.  There is a cricket stuck inside in the the sitting-room somewhere, making more racket than you think a single cricket in a house could.  I’ve been up twice trying to bash it/release it lovingly back to the wild, but every time I turn the light on it shuts right up and I can’t find it.  But worse than the cricket were the owls!  Two of them!  I don’t know if they were getting it on or having a tete-a-tete, a heart to heart, dancing beak-to-beak or what but they had a lot to say to each other and it sounded like relationship stuff. 

“Get a room, owls!”  I silently shrieked. 

Silently, because Problemchild 2 snuck into bed with me at about 3 and by then all sleep would remain just a crazy, waking dream.   

So, up, fully dressed and leaving an hour earlier than I thought becasue I couldn’t check-in online last night for some reason and that’s making me nervous.  Why? Why can’t I check in?  Why is that?  I figure if I’m there an hour earlier, more shouting and bawling can be packed in if there’s any problem, and shouting and bawling is a more efficient use of my time than listening to owls getting it on while a cricket plays its mournful, incessant dirge for freedom.  On the other hand, maybe cricket-squashing and owl-slaughter are more efficient uses of my extra hour.  Oh, If only I’d remembered to exercise my constitutional wotsits and become a gun-owner. 

Byeee.

xx

My dad’s getting married next month to a lovely Bulgarian lady.  She is a polyglot Bulgarian translator at the American University over there, and that’s nice because my dad has neglected to learn Bulgarian in his whole 62 years on the earth, the wastrel.  Their’s is a story of such beautiful and affecting romance that I was moved and tautologically stirred to spoil it all with a poem.  Also I can’t sleep. 

Very Romantic Poem.

More than the fleas on a zoo-full of bears
More than both tres and beaucoup
More than marzipan’s icky and vile
That’s how much I love you

More than the squeak in a violin
More than a chicken is feathered
More than the spots on a teenagers chin
More than Al Greenspan looks weathered.

More than a teller can tell, do I love
More than avoiders avoid
I love you as surely as death will come true
Just as surely as eggs is ovoid.

More than Obama can stir with his speech
More than W couldnae
More than the good Sister Wendy will NOT
And Clinton, he did but he shouldnae

I love you more than feelings can hurt
More than a wee brother’s pesky
More than collagen trouts up your pout
Making you look all grotesquey

As loud as the sound of a fart in a church
And more than that last line was dirty
More than a butler called Igor doth lurch
And more than a grapefruit is squirty

More than, climactically speaking, we are
So thoroughly now in the poo
O! More than this poem’s romantic, my dear
That’s how much I love you.

The End.

They say it’s sunny there right now and, in the larger sense, I suppose it always is*, but some days the clouds don’t agree. So in the hopes of luring a behatted sun out to shine on our wearied, jet-lagged, holiday-making limbs, I am going to spend most of the fortnight in a canary-yellow jumper singing wholesomely in various groovy positions upon a boat, like my most current crush, the enigmatic Mr. Daniel Of Donnell. I think you’ll agree that this is him at his finest (and dishiest. *Blush*).  Aren’t his moves just the Very. Living. End? *Swoony*. I don’t know about you other girls, but I’m going for a bit of a lie down. 

Anyway, Danny Boy…baby… I dedicate this holiday to you…

*Looks into middle distance profoundly, contemplating the larger resonances of what I just said.  That’s profoundly, see? Profoundly.  Not vacantly, dreamily, absent-mindedly or constipatedly, OK?  I don’t care what anyone says, that’s my profound look.  Shut up. 

Daniel O\’Donnell, I Can See Clearly Now

Abob in this pot there are: vegetables torn from the dark, sunless soils of the mind; there will be forks and green smoke and heaped tablespoons of joy; there will be prickle of hedgehog and chortle of child (or maybe that’s a choking sound…?); there will be snarfs and sagacity, soft sighs and boogersome sniggers; and a bit of rage will be boiling at all times in one continually moving spot of the pot; there will be meat of unidentifiable origin and not all of it will be fully dead; but most of all there will be coddle which is a kind of Celtic sputum consisting of bile, tears, spittle and sunshine.  Bet you thought I was going to say gism there instead of sunshine, didn’t you?  That will depend mostly on…well, I’ll not name names.  Anyway, you’ll be fed a most unique and unforgettable stew-like stuff or, to put it more accurately, a stuff-like stew, and you will not be sorry you supped.  Here’s Coddle Pot!  

PS: Still on hiatus for a bitty longer.  Back soonly.

I’m only back now to collect some clean underwear and to explain to the children that I still love them and “abandon” is really too strong a word.  My work will end in or around the second week of July when, unfortunately, I predict all three remaining members of Robert will be dead.  They are old tremendously old for one thing and, for another, the centre-island is due to be demolished in late June to make way for a billboard publicising Bob Hope regional airport.  The shock is sure to kill them.  This would be, narratively speaking, very neat as my research funding runs out about then too and I shall have to leave my luxury suite at Sherman Oaks Hyatt for the (bloody) real world once again.  Also, the irony of the hopeless, hapless Roberts being wiped out by a Bob called Hope will lend a poignancy to their story that’s sure to translate well into book-sales and movie-options.

I’ll be back to visit all your lovely blogs then, then, and, then, possibly, also begging you for money to support the lifestyle to which I’ve grown accustomed on my State of California research expense account.  So, til then, “SKUGGILSCREAMYWAILWAIL!”  (That means “Your (pl) continued good health and fortune,” in Robertese.)

He never laughed, just cried.

In all the Gospels, tell me once

Did he see the funny side?

Poor, lied-to, broken, holy man,

Who suffered for our sins,

If you believe, or not, by God,

He paid for all our grins.

Then don’t we owe it back to him

That we should crack our face,

With heavenward heads and howls of mirth

At our sweet, cracked, human race?

It is true that, though he weeps several times, Jesus never once laughs in the Gospels.  The only record of God laughing in the Old Testament is when he is deriding mankind’s weaknesses or laughing at us as he punishes us.  He relishes our pain.  If anyone can offer me another interpretation of that I am willing to hear it, I really am, because that is chilling whether you are a believer or not.  I don’t believe in God, who seems to me indifferent at best – and that’s using all my human charity – but I do believe in powerful stories and that they can be, in mysterious ways, truer than the “Truth.”  I think I believe in an extraordinary man called Jesus who had some sort of a handle on some sort of truth, and that’s the best I can do. 

Brought to you by a pain in-the-arse-day in bed with some virus that is making my neck feel like a knotty sapling.  Gah!

Errol: Don’t slouch, Problem, Boadicea would never have slouched.

Me: Look, I don’t think I’m Boudica, OK?  And don’t use the language of the Oppressor.  She’s Boudica, got it?  Not that sissy Romanized appellate.  Besides, that whole warrior queen thing was only for a day, like – not even a whole day.  As soon as I had impaled Nurse Seezer on the drip stand with the blood-curdling yell of freedon for the Iceni, I came right to!  I was able to calmly assess the difference between right and wrong and, as the filthy Roman, Nurse Seezer melodically bubbled blood from her windpipe, I also had the capacity to realize that maybe this was one of these non-right times.  I calmed right down after that and thus it was with noble resignation and a defiant chin that I raised my vein for the swimmy swimmy shot I knew must come.  History is against me and my tribe, after all.  I know my part.

Errol:  Anyway, you couldn’t be Boudica, your breasts aren’t big enough.  Her’s were mighty and pointy*, almost like Madonna’s.

Me: Sputter!  That’s an inappropriately personal remark, Errol! Another of these and I’m telling the doc. and
that’ll set back your release another week at least.  Anyway, you call that scrappy little line of polarized iron filings a Flynnian moustache?  It looks like your top lip is perforated for easy detachment or something.  Like a teabag.  How come you’re back in here anyway, Errol?

Errol (eyes narrowing in recollection) : It was a snowy day just after Christmas and I had nowhere I had to be. Inside its sheath, my bendy fencing sword shivered, imploring me to use him in the cause of Justice.  I walked and walked and then I took to lurking.  Outside a large house on the hill, I lurked in the shadows, buckles clanking against my epee, swashes moist with anticipation.  I twirled my moustache as I lowered the brim of my black Spanish hat over my keen eyes and sneered as I surveyed the pleasant scene inside the room.  What I saw enraged me.  Men in new Pringle sweaters were standing pleasantly with their also pleasant wives, all dressed in the bright colours of the season. But I knew the cost of all that smart-casual.  High in the hills of Pakistan, thousands of cashmere goats were shivering their way through a brutal winter just so richos like this could stand around and laugh as they spilt sherry on their stolen fleeces, dyed and criminally knitted out of all recognition.

Me:  That’s terrible, Errol!  I know your fondness for the goat. I bet your blood was boiling!  What happened
next?

Errol:  There was a blur, and that blur was me as I flew through the air at the patio windows expecting to crash through in a glorious hail of glass and wood trim.

Me:  Cool!

Errol:  Wait Problem, wait.  I’m not finished. Although, yes, I was very cool indeed, the upper-middle class bastards had only gone and gotten reinforced non-scratch perspex for their windows, hadn’t they?  Picking myself up off the patio bricks I heard the crunch of my elbow, and the bitter tinkle of silver plate and laughter continuing uninterrupted from inside, made me taste bitter gall and shattered mercury amalgam in my mouth.

Me:  Bloody window fixtures to fit your lifestyle!

Errol:  Then I saw all too clearly what I must do. Clutching my useless elbow and whimpering manfully, I mounted the slippery roof of the house, via their wheelie-bins.  Scaling the slippery roof to the chimney, the orchestra, my orchestra, started up, urging me on and on with Excitement Music.  In non-jarring backing-tracks I could hear the far off plaintive bleating of the cold and terrified goats. Jeeringly unconcerned about soot on my clothing because heroes don’t worry about things like that and besides i was all in black anyway, I didn’t hesitate as I leapt down the chimney in a single panther-like bound.

Me:  You sure are brave Errol.  People might criticize your hammy acting and your questionable personal life, but nobody could say you’re not one brave s.o.b.

Errol:  Well the cashmere-sweatered party were sure surprised to see me land in their fireplace, I can tell you.  Many of them said some of the more polite swear words like “Damn!” or “What the hell…?”  It was only the vicar who screamed “Holy fucking shite!” over and over, before sucking his thumb and pressing his head to the hostess’s bosom for maternal comfort and some light stroking.

“Who are you?  What do you mean by leaping down our chimney like this?” said a man with a crap moustache, which rather pathetically affected that of Tom Selleck, I thought. Well, as you know, Problem, I am a hero of few words.  I prefer to let my actions speak.  Therefore I trusted my audience to know that when I slashed furiously and Zorro-like at their sweaters I did not mean to hurt them!  I was just making a timely political point about goat-cruelty.  In my passion I might have blurted out “How could you, you beasts?” a few times, it’s true; and yes, I expect a few tears did fall down my sooty cheeks.  All the work I’ve been doing with the doctor, has left me no longer afraid to express my emotions. I know now that crying doesn’t make me less of a man.

Me: Errol…I don’t know what to say…

Errol: Suddenly I noticed the orchestra music had stopped.  Why? I looked up from the floor where I was now lying curled-up; hugging my knees and a fragment of slashed jumper; softly yodelling the high, lonely Song Of The Goatherd.  I wondered who all these people were and why were they staring at me?  Confusion, cursed, poisoning confusion rushed my senses and it was at that point that the cowardly vicar hit me from behind with the candlestick.

Who knows how long I was out. As I came to, a small child dressed all in white was crouched beside me looking at me.  “I guess I messed up the party pretty bad, didn’t I, little girl?“  “Yes.” she said softly. “Yes you did“.  “I expect you think I’m a bad man, don’t you?” I said. “Well, you did eat the head off my teddy-bear,“  she said.  “That was a mistake, little girl,” I said shaking my head sadly.  “That was a terrible mistake.  but I am Errol Flynn, Hero, and I always admit my mistakes.  Remember this night always, child.  Remember the dark stranger with the fantastic moustache who taught you always to admit when you’ve done wrong.”

And then the ambulance and police and the firemen arrived to put out the fire I’d set under the arrangement of snow-globes.

Me:  You know, Errol.  You’re not so bad.  I bet that little girl won’t forget the lessons of that night. Oh wouldn’t be great if every breed of sheep and goat bred not for their personalities, but only for their fleeces and cruel men’s gain, had a champion like you?  A true legend on their side?

Errol:  Well to be fair, Robin Hood over there by Calligula, has Angoras covered but you’re right. Wrongs need to be righted and we each need to pick our wrongs-that-need-to-be-righted carefully and according to our own passions. We can’t go at it all half-assed and 50p-in-the-collecting-tin about it.  The world’s a crazy place after all.

And with that, Errol lapsed back into his habitual silence, twirled his moustache and sucked his big toe thoughtfully.

*Contemporary accounts prove that Boudica’s breasts were only apocryphally pointy.  The popular but mistaken belief resulted from the mosaicist-of-record at the time only having triangular tiles left when he came to do her boobs, which, because he’d been away from his wife on campaign for the previous three years, he’d left ’til last to tesselate.