FIVE MINUTES AS A TURTLE GOD

Caring about everything except monkeys can be a pain. But even excluding monkeys, 'everything' is a large category. It naturally includes turtles, who carry their houses wherever they go, so they don't care about much other than sandbagging until the next meal comes around. And under the Big Law of caring about almost everything, it goes without saying that sooner or later a turtle will show up.

In keeping with the Fine Print, I was driving up the mountain road when I came around a curve and there in the middle of the way was a big old turtle, named Shelby as it happens - must be some international history there - enjoying a sandbagging interlude on his way to a session of heavy-duty sandbagging somewhere on the mythic other side of the road. He was just sitting there like a -- sandbag. Midroad was a good clear spot, warm, in the sun, lotta space around, kick back,, chill,,, hang loose,,,, why not,,,,, what’s the hurry......

His naturally selfish location forced me to pull over to the side of the road to get around him, which I was doing when I thought: if he just stays there, some car or even worse truck is gonna come zipping along in meteoric human time, so I'd better get him to move. I pulled up and stopped with my window right above him, rolled down the glass and gave him a few considered words about how he should hightail his molasses before somebody heedless comes racing up the road in a big turtle squasher.

Shelby turned his head to look up at me with a reptilian onyx eye, in a "What the..." kind of look. I'll bet it was the first time in his long and carefully considered life that he'd ever seen a talking human head sticking out of a big red turtleshell way up in the sky, so far above him that it must be a Turtle God. He seemed to take my words to heart, for in turtle haste he began to maybe lift possibly one leg with the distant intent of perhaps one day arriving at the wayfaraway side of the road for some world-quality sandbagging. Since at that speed he would likely never arrive alive, in a louder, more Godly voice I told him to hotfoot it and he did, in his coldfooted fashion.

He reached the roadside in what must be a Turtle Olympic record of just a few minutes that will likely stand forever. While he panted his way across with my encouragement, I stayed in place so that any car coming up behind me would have to wait, but none came. None came because some real Turtle God up there cares about caring about almost everything, though you never know this until you join the club. To say nothing of the chance to become part of Turtle Mythology... They've been around way longer than we have, so we're talking Big Time here.

KEEPING GODS HAPPY

At last the sunny cool spring day came when I could harvest my oldest compost, that has been nurturing for a good three years now, so I went out there and set to raking the two long piles into one center pile, a manageable form for bit-by-bit shoveling ad hoc onto my garden.

I was pumped, man: that rich black loamy goodness born of leaves and cuttings, kitchen leavings and wood ash topped off with occasional additions of nature's helpful organisms like a big organic hot fudge sundae would in time elegantly transform the sunrainair and my soil into rotundo potatoes and onions with silly grins, dancing lettuce, rosy-cheeked radishes, a maharajah's weight in ruby tomatoes, golden squashes galore and zucchini choruses fuggeddaboddit, so you can imagine the dimensions of my chagrin when I raked over the first side mound into the center and about a dozen huge kabutomushi larvae tumbled senselessly into the sudden light like big helpless baby aliens and just lay there silently going Huh? Wha? Huh?, slowly grabbing with their suddenly useless little arms at mere air of no purchase.

This I was not expecting. Turns out that the kabuto dynasty had really taken to that patch of compost, made a family tradition out of it even though this year there were no more used-up shiitake logs, which they had flipped for a couple years ago, so there I was just a minute ago all ready to go and now leaning ponderously on my rake realizing that there were probably a couple hundred kabutomushi gonnabes hanging out there in my compost, and no other place to put them even if I wanted to bother winkling them all out and and putting them elsewhere, so I couldn't help thinking along the lines of hey gods aren't we supposed to be sort of working hand in hand here or what, you keep throwing these off-wall problems at me how'm I gonna get this garden in shape, ok, ok, ok, I will...

So I raked it all, the whole thing, into a pile like a huge kabutomushi cake and according to the new rules I have to wait until all the larvae grow up and leave home to pursue their individual beetle careers, which maybe start in June sometime I hope yer happy, gods.

THE BIG PICTURE

So there I was back at home this evening following a longlabor afternoon of sectioning oak logs (ones I'd felled on Wednesday with H-san), to get branches and upper trunk segments of the right size for my next batch of shiitake logs, the rest to go for firewood. Got home worn out, unloaded the shiitake logs from the car and stacked them on the stones of the porch, not on the ground, so they don't get alienly inoculated by wild soil spores while I wait for the jumbo shiitake spore to come on the seasonal market.

Then because it's going to rain heavily tomorrow, I covered the treeshrugged firewood I wrote about earlier (no time for restacking today, busy morning, Echo off up north this AM to visit family) and did some other essential dayend stuff till everything was done, after which I shuffled tiredly up to the deck to go into the house and have some tea, chill out before dinner, when I realized I had to go around to the front-- I'd locked the house before I went out, and had only the front door key.

As I was plodding tiredly back across the deck and down the stairs, grumping in the base human way about the camel-straw troubles I have to go through, my motorcycle (parked by the corner of the deck) rose up in my field of vision and I realized I had to cover that too-- that was why I hadn't gone full-wittedly straight to the front of the house: I wouldn't have seen the uncovered motorcycle!

I knew this from the dialog that was echoing in my head: clearly a little godplay had gone on in wherever heaven is, an elder god saying to what sounded like a teenage apprentice deity:
"Brady forgot to cover his motorcycle again; make him absentmindedly go up on the deck and try to get into house that way so he'll have to come around the other way and see his motorcyle; then he can cover it before dark so it won't get rained on," and the teenager said:
"Me? Why me? Why do I get all the nothing jobs?"
"Because if you want to become a full-fledged god you'll do what you're told, that's why! If you don't, you'll wind up human again; is that what you want?"
"No, no, ok, I'll do it. Sorry, I-- I don't know what came over me."

Thus it was that I did what I did and was now ungrumped. I was made to cover my motorcycle cause it's gonna rain hard tomorrow, and the gods didn't want me to forget. So as I went around to the front door with everything now done, I sent some waves of thankthought heavenward so as to maybe ungrump that teenager, told her to hang in there. It helps to see the big picture.

IT'S OFFICIAL...

Hello Kitty is now a Shinto deity.

Spotted these Hello Kitty general-purpose omamori at Tarobo (one of Japan's top 10 most beautiful shrines, especially on a day like yesterday; will post of it anon) and they were selling like treacle-covered hotcakes for about twice the price of omamori bearing the conventional blessings of the standard old gods of no brand name, who never made it in show biz or hung around Cameron Diaz...

As I took some pictures in light of my disbelief, one of the shrine clerks said Look! The foreigner is taking pictures of the Hello Kitty omamori! (No one takes pictures of such everyday items as omamori.) Another clerk responded Of course! Because Hello Kitty is so cute! Little did they know my true reason or my opinion of Hello Kitty, the embodiment of cuteness as vapor in a desert. To say nothing of sacrosanctity.

Is nothing sacred? I mean is everything sacred? Sure, you could say, after a few hits of whatever, that everything is sacred, but... EVERYTHING? Then nothing is. The older gods, with millennia of experience under their obi, must be very upset. Look for problems ahead in Japan-- big problems, of oddly indefinite origin, emanating - sort of - from a sacred mountain... If anything is sacred...