Hiring

I've been a bit dark lately. Contemplating the end of a relationship, the potential loss of my house, the end of cheap and abundant fossil fuels, 2012 and the spectre of rampant apocalyptic insanity. It gets to be a bit much. Exhausting. Lonely. And then...

A great gift! I've been hired to manage a Halloween store in Uptown. Seasonal work, of course, but it's good to be social again. To be invested with responsibility. One of those responsibilities is the task of hiring staff. See: Craigslist, Minneapolis-St Paul, Jobs, Customer Service, Halloween.

What a gift! Just when things started to get all existential and I began to wonder, again - What is the point? A few old friends step up and offer me a job that is almost guaranteed to be fun. Thank you, thank you, thank you, my friends, my Goddess, My God, the Divine.

Incidently, is there a muralist interested in an outdoor, semi-permanent stucco canvas, in a prominent location in Uptown? Also, an artist or plural interested in setting up the basement of our building as a halloween-themed destination site, haunted house or otherwise?

Planting late summer seed tonight: peas, spinach, cilantro, mustard greens, lettuce. I found a potato tuber growing above ground. Gathered about ten pounds of bread at the church give-away this morning. Time to start canning tomato. I'm drying plums in the sun. More sungold tomatoes from one plant than a man can eat. I need to do something with the eggplant, though I'm not sure what. Looking for neglected fruit trees, specifically apple and pear. I'll be making Frontenac wine soon. I'm revising my estimate of 50 pounds of storage beans to ten or fifteen pounds, but the potato estimate I'm raising, from 300 pounds to 500 pounds. Question is, where am I going to keep them?

And I suppose it's time to start thinking about a shower. Aside from a dip in Lake Nokomis during a twilight thunderstorm a few nights ago, while eating a pint of my favorite ice cream (hint, it's named after a musician I've never had much interest in), I haven't bathed since...well, I'm not quite sure. Two weeks? Biking ten miles a day on average, dancing every night for an hour or two. Either I don't smell much or people are overly polite. Running out of clean clothes, though.

It's a good thing I got this job, or I might have descended into defacto barbarism. I sometimes forget, I didn't choose to live off the grid. I love my little house but it has come to seem a burden, thinking about how much money would be required to prepare it for winter. Something smaller, modest, simple, is starting to sound attractive. Something shared.