How Did That Happen
My Life Here in Candy-Land wasn't always like this. I think there were a couple of days when the Woodcocks first moved into the Moon Stone Development that were filled with harmony and bliss but then we met the orthodox neighbors and subsequently found out they were a little different from us and at first I over-looked the oddness around me and even though I had read about co-housing and I knew a little about it I was not prepared for the in-depth reality of the cohousing arrangement but really I couldn't really begin to believe that my neighbors actually took this idea of co-housing very seriously and they have rules and regulations on how to talk to each other and protocol for behavior in their relationships and really who, on the out-side, would ever believe that co-housing is taken seriously by the co-housers and it did seem to me that these people were educated and all but I guess I never thought about what might have happened to their heads when they were done with the education part of their life and grew up and lived in the world and I guess they all figured out that life was a lot tougher than they thought and maybe we should band together with some other crazy people here and share our crazy skills with them and we can all build more crazy together and that is how the orthodox co-ho's all more or less landed here I believe, if I am not mistaken, but then again I could very well be mistaken.
And the Mrs. and I have made some great friends here at Moon Stone and there are friends here representing the solid cottage industries of knitting and spinning and wool dying and weaving and these friends have become very good friends for Mrs. Woodcock. And we have friends who are Buddhists and Anarchists and teachers of college religion classes and teachers of high school students and sailors and a Reichian therapist who lives somewhere nearby and this therapist has a little old lady inside of him who is desperate to get out And these are the people who live on the edges of co-housing within the compound and I guess that's where I am going to live as well within this co-housing thing and we all get along pretty fine and we have had some great times and good food and good laughs and its wonderful to live so close to people you can kind of identify with in this crazy mixed-up place called Moonstone and in this place that is my place. And like I said, "How did this happen?"
I seem to have unlimited anger towards the co-housers now and its hard to deal with this anger of mine over the co-ho's messing with my home and putting my home in the balance of their little club inquisition of the Woodcock's personal life and the orthodox co-ho's just knew this would upset me greatly to have to go through this process with all of you fiendish persons and all of you people who are the keepers of the clubs desire to get back at me for mistakenly trying to bring reality into the lives of the co-ho's and the club might have well just said really, Mr. and Mrs. Woodcock, all of this inquisition of the club members is because we need to balance out your past bad behavior towards the club with more structured meetings on how to develop your future more positive behavior Mr. Woodcock, you know, and they said this to us in a thinly vieled Pavlovian sort of way.
And I thought about this anger I had towards these people and this anger got very sophisticated and complicated and I even have a strategy for exacting revenge from each individual of the three board members who hit the Mrs. and I with their little horseshit during our architectural review and I have decided on a different strategy of revenge for each one of them separately because you know I really believe in divide and conquer and again my 12th century warrior Scottish man is woken up by these three cohort keepers of the co-houser flame and its because the coho's brought this flame to my home that I am blindly angered and enraged by them and that is what I wanted to tell them, before my lawyer suggested I stop yelling at them, and what I really wanted to tell them is that the co-ho club members can use their co-housing speak on whether or not to run a bake sale or how to seriously debate how to put a trapeze up in the barn against all odds of reason and they can even put their protocol to use when they all have to agree on how to take advantage of each other in oh so many different ways and ways known and unknown and in so many instances .
BUT please, I wanted to tell them right before I stopped talking to them, and please for the sake of god, (and probably for the sake of the law as well) and please take this happy co-housing horseshit away from my home and please take this passive aggressive process away from my home and please take this message as an aggressive aggressive message to never come back to my home and please stay away from my door.
And while I stewed in my crazy juices and I continually creepd myself out over how much my crazy juices were creeping out and most of all I was creeped out by how much I wanted share my crazy with the co-ho's and I wanted to punish the co-ho's for being interminable and intolerable negotiators and I really wanted them to know that I was pretty sure they knew nothing at all about how to conduct an architectural review and really I was so upset I would have agreed to almost anything that meant I wouldn't have to ever hear another word come out of one of the three evil mouths of the people on the board ever again and these were the three co-ho's I directed most of my crazy special attention to you know my revenge crazy crazy and these were the people who I was so angered with over and over with and over in my place, you know, my place at moon stone and my place is #17.
So while I stewed in my crazy I knew I needed to calm down and take a good look at how my crazy had developed here in the co-housing place and I started to reflect on the sequence of nutty and comical events and the events of highly personally charged transgression towards the Woodcock's in #17 and this transgression was coordinated by the co-ho's towards #17.
And how did this happen and that is what my granddaughter would want to know.
So I started to reflect on how did this transgressing happening happen here at Moon Stone and how did this transgression happen to the Woodcock's And I remembered back to when it all began here at Moon Stone for us and I thought about the past and I remembered that back when we first arrived we had a few wonderful days in our new home and we were so grateful to have a new home and the great mini-hall was so happy with my new found journalist skills and they were paying me to bee happy in this mid-west sort of place and the magazine that hired Mrs. Woodcock to write about the state of health here in the Americas was so happy with the Mrs. and they gave her a big raise because her articles were so fantastic and yes the Woodcocks were having a wonderful time being gracious and kind to everyone within our reach and reaching out to those who were out of reach.
And, Anyway the Woodcocks had a few days of complete wonder in their new home and we were so happy and in love with this place and hopefully we were in love with each other as well and in love with life itself and we wanted to grow roses to express our love and to express our belief in life and I dreamt of a classic Rose Trellis with a hint of Asian sensibility and the roses would drape themselves about the Trellis with the sun glowing on the roses and the yard was facing the south and this Trellis would bee of a good sensible design and I designed it by stealing the design from another trellis of an accepted design across the street here at Moon stone and I built the Trellis with the help of a good friend who had a sensible Scottish building background and I thought the trellis was a fabulous trellis when it was finished and I was so happy and the mrs. was so happy and we were also new grandparents and my son in the English Service had had a daughter in West Equatorial Africa with his wife of course and sometimes they had no water and sometimes no electricity and while this was a problem for the grandparents but what Mrs. Woodcock hated most of all was the spotty internet service they had there in Africa and god I didn't even know they had the internet in equatorial Africa.
And now I am remembering that we were so happy at our new home and life seemed to be taking the right turn for us and then one day I found this cranky woman out In front of my house standing in our doorway and she's telling me that she hates my fence and she is going to make me take down the fence and after I assured her that it wasn't a fence but rather the garden feature she was referring to was a trellis and yes that is with two l's if you want to spell it right and she tells me and no I am not going to bee spelling trellis anytime soon but you are going to be taking the trellis down real soon because I might be moving in next door in a few weeks and that fence bothers the hell out of me and just look at that monstrosity it clearly blocks my view. And I asked her how certain it was that she was to bee our neighbor and she said it was a done deal and I am buying this house and I hate the damn fence and I began to brace myself for the inevitability of this cranky person living next door to me and it really doesn't seem like we are getting off on the right foot, neighborly you know, and the Mrs. and I accepted this lady becoming our neighbor in our minds but under no uncertain terms were the Woodcock's going to be taking down the Trellis in our minds and we began to plant climbing roses to grow on the trellis and I climbed all around our little yard and I dug all around this little limited common area of a yard we have here at Moon Stone and I designed and built a garden room for the Mrs. and I to live in outdoors in the back-yard and a beautiful perennial garden with tulips and daffodils and peonies and oriental lilies and crocosmias and dahlias with gazebo garden cosmos in white and pink sprinkled all around and there is blue larkspur and jeweled colored nasturtiums and miniature roses that offer up red and yellow and coral in their blooms and most glorious of all are the princely blue delphiniums and all of these wonderful flowers are in the perennial garden in the front yard and on the other side of the concrete walk-way to our home is a spectacular rose garden and William Shakespeare himself lives there along with some other roses which are……...
And Mr. and Mrs. Woodcock really enjoy looking at these flowers in the front and back yard and so to do the co-ho's as well enjoy the flowers as they slowly walk by and we enjoy looking at these gorgeous flowers and this fabulous garden setting that the Mrs. and I have designed together you know and everyone living at Moon Stone seems to enjoy our garden but I think this enjoyment of our garden setting and our glorious flowers is the only thing that the Mrs. and I share with the orthodox co-houser's eye to eye you know.
And the spring turned into summer and the cranky lady wouldn't go away and she went door to door to the other neighbors nearby and she told them how horrible my trellis was and how horrible I was and really she asked all the neighbors to unite with her to make the smart ass English guy in #17 have to do something for me and have to do something that will bring an improvement to her life and there is a co-housing board member that keeps telling me that it is good ole Woodcock's duty to make my dreams come true and I dream about the fence getting blown up in the here and now and will you other neighbors please unite with me to take the Woodcock's down a step to my level.
And with the threat of the cranky lady making me take down my trellis other-wise known as the heart of my desire to grow roses on to show my love to the universe and to my new life and especially to show love to Mrs. Woodcock and I started to study the by-laws of this place of co-housing and I read their book of agreements and I soon understood that the rules didn't mean anything to the co-ho's and it was more about how they felt about the rules and they made up new urban legend rules that were a part of their spoken legend rules all of the time and they created these legends to deal with the old written rules and the collected minds of the co-housers were not very happy with me because I had upset their shared little apple-cart of understanding and #17 asked them to govern by the rules of the place and guess what you don't have any written rules against trellis' Mr. and Mrs. Co-Housing and you just have made up ideas about trellis' and no it isn't a fence and please just leave me alone and anyway don't you all feel kind of foolish about the effort you have made chasing me around about this trellis and then the cranky lady never moves in next door and the Woodcock's mentioned this many times to the co-ho's that really the cranky lady doesn't live here yet and hey let's talk about this issue when the lady does become our blessed neighbor but no the co-housers had to keep going on about the trellis with meetings and discussions and they called it their "great un-resolved issue" and of course they did this because that's what Mrs. Woodcock said they would do and the Mrs. said that's because meddling is the only thing they know how to do and they are perfectly happy with their nose in your business because they don't have any other business up their nose.
And our trellis really seemed to be gathering steam as a way to bother the co-ho's and they were all talking about it and walking by to examine the trellis and offering up their own opinions of the trellis and one gentleman came by and told me straight to my face that yes it's kind of a nice garden feature but I don't know if I could look at that thing all day long because the trellis has wrong written all over it. And the community was putting themselves into a stir over our trellis and one day this anger awakening stir among the co-housers prompted their self-appointed property manager to come by late one June night and he came by in a stir and maybe someone else was feeding his mind with lies about me and he probably turned to other things that night that probably made him forget himself that night but he swore out loud to the Woodcocks that we had to give over control of our backyard to him because he was the head of the Building & Infrastructure committee and he owns our backyard and we don't want you planting any of this cut-up turf you or anything else in your backyard because you are going to cause a flood by blocking up the drainage of this area and this will cause flooding for all of your neighbors next door and we are going to charge you with a major lawsuit for doing this and I'm not talking about a normal rainfall type year my friend I am talking about when it will rain for 100 years and the Lord will return type kind of rain and it came as no surprise that we started yelling at each other and I threw pieces of the turf out onto the gravel road and I really wanted to throw the pieces of green turf right at his face and I yelled at the other committee member with a clipboard of paper and a pen in his hand who came by with the property manager and this other co-hoer had an astonished look on his face and I think he was afraid that good old Woodcock was going crazy and might do something crazy and I yelled at him to write down everything the property manager and I are saying to each other because I wanted the property manager to remember what I was saying to him and the property manager got me feeling like a 12th century Scottish warrior and I wanted to find a big stick to hit him over the head with and then my 21st century man inside of myself said JP that wouldn't be so good for your current self if your former viscous self would act so violently in this present moment so I just told the property manager to get the hell off my property and he laughed and said I'm glad I have got this problem taken care of because I am retiring from this job in three hours and needless to say both Mr. and Mrs. Woodcock were unhappy about this event for nearly a month and we have sort of gotten over it now because we understand that the property manager has bigger problems than we can visibly see and it seems like he has been working on these problems since he stopped yelling at me and he should probably keep working on these problems of his for a long time and he does seem determined in a goofy collective sort of way to be taking a stab at solving everyone else's problems as well now and let's hope no one gets hurt with all of this stabbing.
And I begin to search in my mind about how this co-ho place has gone so far astray from a healthy human reality sort of place and I have started to examine why the sane people here call this place of Moonstone Candy Land.
And I know that everything and all actions come back to us in this short life and I know that I could be creating massive karmic problems for myself down the road for me by being such a smart aleck with these pilgrims that I am surrounded by and I guess I am willing to take that edgy karmic risk with my nasty actions towards these co-housers and please don't tell my mother about what a jerk I am beeing here in Moon Stone and please don't tell my Mother up there in heaven about my beeing so bad down here on earth because she would probably cuff me on the neck and tell me to cut it out the next time she sees me in heaven but I think I will take the risk with this edgy behavior because I am pretty sure that god won't count this bad behavior against me and he might think I am be-having in the only way a sane and normal Woodcock could behave just now.
And I am working on this mid-west piece with a single-minded purpose and and I am surprised about just how nasty a person I can be when pressed. I will never be able to come back to the Moon Stone housing association once this story gets published so I had better get out of here soon or live with the expectation that torch carrying neighbors will show up with pitchforks in hand and they will arrive in the middle of the night and try to catch me in my underwear and they will make me pay over and over for my expression of the truth or as they would like to say my mis-representation of the truth and really JP that is only how you saw it happen and what we want to think happened is far more like what happened for sure and really JP what are you thinking about and you know reality is on our side or at least obscured by our side and it is shadowy on our side and we will avoid facing reality on our side and at all costs if it threatens our little world and we will fight anything that is less than shady in our world.
And in my mind they have me locked in the wooden stockade out in the middle of the brick piazza in this co-housing association and while I am locked up out there and writhing in pain from the rusty old shackles of the club cutting into my wrists and the trees in the piazza are weeping with me while I am out there in the hot roasting sun or out there on the bitter cold winter evenings or out there in the life threatening lightning and thunder storms on June nights and the super heroes of the co-housing club and the evil vixens and the broken down old socialists of the club will saunter by me while I am strapped into the stockade and these other people will walk by and expect me to say hello to them and I won't and I will look the other way no matter how great the pain is and they will just tighten up the shackles on my wrists and they will tell me that the next time they walk by I should smile and say hello to them and this had better happen or I might find my next punishment at the bottom of our little lake if they are not satisfied with my salutation or my re-worked smile the next time they sneak up on me out here in the stockade.
And then Mrs. Woodcock announces to me, one Saturday morning while I was reeling with all of this pain, and the Mrs. tells me that she loves to garden in Michigan and she likes the lakes in Michigan and she loves the rocks in Michigan and the Mrs. says that she really loves the rocks in Petoskey Michigan and the Mrs. wants to keep Petoskey in her life. And I look forward to going there on some hot summer afternoon in July and look again for Petoskey stones with the Mrs. there on a beach there behind a local grocery store that has a parking lot looking out at the bay and I will stand on that beach and marvel at how spectacular Lake Michigan really is I will be happy I am in Michigan and away from Candy-Land.
And really I had better work on this attitude of mine because in the end all of this effort of mine to inflict revenge on this collective co-we and after all my efforts to just get them to think clearly I should think clearer about this demand of mine and all of this revengeful inflicting upon the coho's might just come back on me too hard and not be worth my effort to be real with them in this reality of our collective here and now and maybe I should give up on beeing real with them in these moments we share.
Ah, and already I miss the fragrance of the tropical flowers and the heroic adventures and all the heroes in the last book I just read you know the Lucca and Malphi story that just came out by that Grimes guy and I just loved all of the expressive and fabulous music in the book and I can still vaguely smell the great food in Lucca and Malphi and why again am I living with the co-housers and why am I sharing all of this pain with you.
And totally someday I will have to read the sequel to the Lucca & Malphi story that I just finished last week and laid face down on my bed stand and I will have to read another Lucca & Malphi story in order to feel the Venus effect again. And just like falling in love everyday over and over again feeling the Venus effect would be good for me and not bad for me like so many of my current neighbors are bad for me.
And yes what can cure me of my bad behavior is more Venus effect behavior. And I will write to the great mini-hall of economics tonight to see if I can take a new assignment on the island of Malta and I will see if I can get assigned to the Mediterranean bureau there in Malta
And report on the new coming mini-economic crisis, you know, the bottoming out of the Greece that we have all come to know in the present and write about how really the problem with the Greeks is that the Greeks just don't have any money anymore and really a bunch of greedy governments in Europe just stupidly gave the Greeks a lot of money a few years ago and guess what they don't have it anymore because guess what they spent it already and guess what the Germans are going to have to finally pay the Greeks back for all the trouble they gave the Greeks in the last world war and that is the only way this not enough money problem is going to go away in Greece and maybe the English could pay the Greeks back for some of the great museum attractions that bring in a lot of money they have in London as well that guess what were stolen from the Greeks and if any of the other European states want to face reality and pay the Greeks back for a lot of stolen goods they seem to enjoy on a daily basis then the money thing would be a lot better thing for the Greeks but then again I guess we can all count on this payback thing not happening.
But at least this might bee my way out of this remote eastern mid-west sort of real estate quagmire that I live in and I will have to write to the great mini-hall tonight.
And the last few days have been exciting at Moon Stone and really I don't make this stuff up and really the co-ho's just keep giving me more stories to write about without trying very hard at all to say and do ridiculous things and now their has been an announcement that the orthodox co-ho's are going to have a gathering of the minds down at the local fire-pit and they are going to share their mutual support for each other and the causes they hold deal and a man of great sustainability is going to tell stories about the mythic early days of Sunward when super hero giants roamed the sub-division with great mutual dis-satisfaction with each other and I hope the co-hoers don't drink to much down by the fire pit because you never know they might want to roast the Woodcocks on this fire-pit to finish off a perfectly wonderful night and I guess I will get it one-way or another with this coming fire-pit night as the smoke from the fire-pit comes directly into #17 and I think the orthodox co-ho's take please in that and the co-hoer's are hoping the fire gets real smoky that night. I told the lady who was sponsoring this heroic event that she needed to remind all of the co-ho's to tell each other just how fantastic they all are but she didn't get my ironic little joke and she just said well I guess you are right about that.
And there has been a lot of conversation lately about some of the co-hoer's not taking care of their front and back yards and there is a sort of hill billy element taking shape here at Moon Stone and letters have gone out about people beginning to respect their investments in their homes and hey this isn't the Kentucky back-woods people and many of the neighbors have responded with beautiful gardens this year in the front of their homes with Lupines, and lilies and more and more Hollyhocks and poppies and I must say I have even told some of the neighbors that it's killing me how nice their place looks but there is one poor soul who I think is tormented in his isolation from reality in a landscaping sort of way and this soul is the man I told you about before who is a driven over-gatherer and his name is Borges.
And Borges lives just a couple doors down from the Mrs. and I, and he lives in the ultra revisionist co-ho club wacko section of our development along with me and some people call it orthodox candy land and the approach Borges has used to landscape his back-yard has mystified so many people in the development and there is growing concern that Borges needs to take care of his landscaping in a more pleasing way and the neighbors talk about the ultra ugly carpets that Borges has spread out on his back limited common area on all of the lawn there in order to keep the weeds down and the neighbors smirk and point at the carpets and there is a large pile of broken concrete slabs spread out on the lawn as well and while most people just hate this landscaping of Borges, but after much careful study I am quite certain, and also after much keen observation, I have determined that Borges back yard is certainly a landing spot for inter-continental aliens in cone shaped space ships, and somehow Borges is related to these inter-continental space aliens, and they land their ships on top of Borges concrete pile to re-charge their special batteries on the broken concrete rubble type pile and only the most highly trained eye can notice that this concrete pile is shaped into a primitive pyramid there in his back-yard and the concrete pile is connected with a deep shaft of energy coming from the earth that recharges space alien batteries and the aliens can easily find his back yard, from outer space, and they can find Borges pyramid for their very important battery re-charging needs by the many funny old carpets he has laid out on his lawn and these carpets are easily spotted from outer space because they are just so ugly that they can't be missed even by aliens in desperate need of a battery charge for their spaceship. And I think the alien in Borges communicates with the ever circling space aliens out in the outer-space around us And the alien in Borges brings the space aliens to Moon Stone and no one notices, not even I, because the space aliens fit right in with the rest of the crowd.
And speaking of recent spectacular events happening here at Candy-Land And just today, if you can believe it, a neighbor just down the way who you know as the dancer guy and this dancing neighbor down the street has had more girl friends in the three years I have known him than any American guy is allowed to have in this place in the mid-west and I am always amazed by how beautiful these girls are and how they all seem to love the dancer guy and I just shake my head and wonder how does that happen and this dancer guy has a serious co-ho living and breathing women room mate living with him already and she's kind of a policy maker type co-ho and she is kind of a political ringer type person and the candy –landers made her an associate partner and now she goes around making policy and making it stick here at Moonstone and she is making a lot of policy but I don't think the dancer guy is on the receiving end of any of that policy making co-housing stuff happening at his home and anyway the two room-mates are going to take in a couple of acrobat friends, into their townhouse, for a few weeks while the friends get themselves grounded on the planet earth again and the dancer guy's place is all set up as a sort of re-entry to earth place and he seems to have guests all of the time and these friends of the dancer guy are going to vibe with the dancer guy at the dancer guys place which is also JP Woodcocks place, theoretically speaking, and these karmic friends of the dancer guy will stay across the street from me until they are able to get out again and to get out onto the earth again and venture out into the world around us again and these friends of the dancer guy arrived today and the Mrs. told me all about their moving in day at Moon Stone and the Mr. had been at work late that day, and the Mrs. told me that when these new friends of the dancer arrived it was just like the circus had come to town and the Mrs. waved her hands around in such an illustrative way speaking to me and she described the silly patterned pants the new yoga instructor acrobat friend of the dancer was wearing and these pants are kind of outrageously crazy looking if you just think about it and he was wearing a threadbare cotton plaid shirt with a well-worn t-shirt underneath it and he had acrobatic hoops of copper around his neck hanging down past his waist and she wore a torn summer dress with long dangly earrings and hair down to her knees and a big floppy hat and she was barefoot and these people and these friends of the dancer guy had traveled around the world like this and god can you imagine how difficult it would be to travel around the world with such burdens as these people had and you know it's the burden of not having to work in this life and the burden of growing up rich in this life and having your head on backwards because of that entitlement and this entitlement causes people a lot of problems in this life and I think there are a lot of alienated people here who were on the receiving end of this entitlement thing and they really want to stick you with the other end of this entitlement stick as well and the candy-landers talk about a lot of stuff and they get under your skin when they talk about you and you are extremely perplexed sometimes by the candy-landers because these people are off in another kind of world it seems and thank god all the candy-landers seem to be capable of is talking about doing such and such because they really never really do anything other than talk about doing it with one very evident exception and that exception is that they make sure that the candy-landers are also really good at coming after the Woodcock's and the Woodcock's mis-guided idea that they are wanted here in Candy-Land and what the candy-land group is really saying to the Woodcock's, in a veiled threat sort of way, is please take your business elsewhere and really you people in #17 make us nervous.
And somehow the Woodcocks will find a way to go on here at Candy-Land and when we leave Candy-Land will go on with out us. And really I do hope you get to know some of the nice people here at Moon Stone and who knows they might even open their hearts to you but probably you won't get that chance.
And what-ever you do if you should travel to Candy-Land please don't let on that you know the Woodcocks in #17 because that could lead to your receiving some unpleasantness from my neighbors and probably more unpleasantness than a just a frown.
J.P. Woodcock
Ann Arbor 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment