MONKEYS BREAKING GOOD?

Judging by my cucumbers, the monkeys have changed their accounting standard.

Back in the glory days, their standard was to crash my garden, snatch and eat whatever they could on the spot or grab whatever they could carry, run a safe distance, eat the haul, come back for more, if any, then keep doing that until it was all gone or I was still throwing rocks. A simple standard, suited to the mountain forest lowlifestyle.

But civilization has been encroaching, as it tends to do. Historically, the same thing has happened to pirates, highwaymen, Wall Street and other forms of human brigandage, though there are signs that those changes are unraveling. On the simian side, the old standard worked well for the beasts during the good-time years, when I was planting rows of onions for them, I was planting rows of their potatoes, I was planting walls of tomatoes and cucumbers out of boundless admiration for my simian overlords, lots of everything for them, even sweet potatoes, guy from the city, and different varieties of it all, various squashes, even got blueberries, plums and loquats in there, not to mention 2 kinds of gourmet mushrooms, which the chompers really love.

Over the years, as they stole from me, I learned from them. Which was easier than with humans, because owing to certain cortical limitations, as well as social customs, e.g., no pockets, no briefcases, no banks, no Wall Street equivalent, my simian colleagues have evolved only a primitive form of greed, known locally as "paws and jaws," a concept familiar to monkey accountants, but seldom seen in human society other than in derivative markets, where it is referred to as "hand over fist."

For my part in this ever ongoing battle of ethics, I regained my old pitching eye and arm, did what else I could: I gathered rocks and stashed them strategically, put up a fence and gradually stopped planting the types of things that monkeys like, because it's difficult to grow that kind of stuff to fruition anyway, but to then have it consumed by thankless creatures... In time, I got almost as crafty as a monkey; the only thing that held me back was my job.

Despite that handicap, my efforts seem to have pressured the monkeys into changes of their own. I’m hearing more and more that the hairy marauders have started raiding gardens down in the village, which they never used to do. (I'm publishing this only in English.) "You can only get onions were there are onions!" is now major monkey dogma; same rule for potatoes, zucchinis etc.

So lately I've been noticing changes, like the other day - and then again today - I found a ready-to-harvest cucumber hanging among other similarly ready cucumbers, but with only ⅓ of it bitten off by patently monkey teeth, leaving nearly 67% for yours truly. A pretty high vig if you ask me, but it was only one cucumber, and if you also ask me "Is your take better than 0%," I have to say yes. Sooner or later, though, I must consult with my arboreal neighbors, person-to-ape, in mutual frankness, so I can make them an offer they can't refuse.

I also recommend that a human version of my SFD program (Stones, Fences, Deprivation) be tried on Wall Street.

GLORY DAYS

Haven't seen a monkey around these parts for months now; much of the time it's almost as though the thieves have slipped my mind, but I guess the planter part of me is always on watch, because the other morning when I was behind the house selecting a net to put over the new lettuce that one of the crows had developed a taste for, I glanced out back with an instinctual feeling and saw an elderly female monkey limping up the road alone (not a screech for miles around, so she wasn't a scout; anyway, scouts don't limp). She stopped a moment to gaze into my early garden, where, thanks to careful planning, nothing was growing that monkeys like.

She stayed hunkered there in the road, resting and engaging in some form of monkey contemplation, then began limping off toward the property across the way, where the pickings were even slimmer-- zero, to be precise. Looked like she had a bad hip, maybe age, like me; maybe sciatica like me. Her many kids were all gone off on their own; she too was an empty nester. As to the whereabouts of all her former 'husbands,' Who the hell knows? she'd likely respond, if anyone cared enough to ask.

As she hobbled away, she paused and turned to look back at my garden once more, and it seemed to someplace in my heart that she was feeling a monkey version of nostalgia, perhaps wistfully recalling all the fine dining she used to enjoy in her golden years as a wandering young mountain beauty in one of the elite troupes that patronized my establishment in those days. 

The longer she gazed, the more she seemed to be wondering what had happened to all those yesterdays-- so far gone, yet so immediate, for the past has its own gravity-- in her case, of savory summer days with their tender onions and crisp cucumbers, their crunchy potatoes and other monkey delicacies I used to have on the menu at my Fresh Organic Simian Cuisine Emporium, where every ape who was anybody used to hang out with wild abandon in the golden light that lit the skies when she was a girl... 

Was she visiting once more the dining palace of her memories that she had come all this way alone to behold before she-- not retired, but maybe there's an Old Monkeys' Tree somewhere that they go to, way up in the woods there. I've never seen such a place, but as any animal expert will tell you, there's an infinity of things we do not know about monkeys, which I can back up with 20 years of personal experience.

As we stood there looking at each other for a powerful moment, there was no way I could tell her that things had changed because of monkeys like her, that now I only grow stuff that the beasts won't touch, though "beasts" may be politically incorrect these days, I don't know; humans are getting pretty fussy about the old ways, and are whipping up respect for everybody, but anyway, given the nature of the moment I felt I had to be nice and didn't think more than once about throwing a rock, even though respect is something monkeys couldn't care less about - it's always been a power thing with them: You do this or I bite you - and though she appeared to be leaving all that behind as she entered elderhood, you can never be sure; the future, too, has its own gravity... 

Then she turned away and we both limped off into the rest of our lives.

Monkeys Hate It When You Steal Their Beans

The other morning from the deck I shouted a solo monkey out of the garden, a female, not big but bigly disappointed at being rousted from her quiet (sneaky) moment in that peaceful, beanfilled, monkeyloving place. She climbed slowly back over the fence with that over-the-shoulder resignation that monkeys are so good at, because they really own everything. She was a scout; the troupe of beangrabbers would soon follow.

So I got my work duds on and went out there because I'd seen yesterday that there were lots of on-the-verge beans that would be ready now anyway. I opened the gate and walked in to check the damage, saw that there was none; the furry spy had been rousted before she could even nip a cuke-- she'd just memorized the inventory.

As I was going around double-checking the zooks and cukes and rows of climbing beans, nigglethinking what  a fool I am to grow such things in monkeyworld, I noted that the scout had remained nearby in simian confidence, sitting quietly in the shadows between the garden and the roadside trees, keeping an eye on her vegetables, feeling a bit proprietary toward her beans, just now at the front edge of their profusion (I had harvested a large bowlful of them yesterday in anticipation of just this sort of event, even though I'd seen only one stray monkey in the past 6 months). 

Seems monkeys are as punctual as bean caterpillars, which emerge hungry at precisely the time the beans are ready to feed them, a bug-bean arrangement finalized many eons ago, long before we learned to plant for our own purposes, despite bugs and monkeys. The bugs don't even bother to laugh at the thought that these are planted beans, and the monkeys don't care, they have the same sort of paleoagreement with the beans and the like: you grow it, we'll eat it. Pretty basic. Way unlike our Nietzschean struggles. 

It's in their genes; the earth's output is clearly their heritage, so in that sense she was sitting there watching me grab her beans and pluck them-- then not even eat them before another walker could get them, but put them in some kind of pointless container that interferes with climbing - What the hell for, she looked like she was thinking, stomachs are all you need... never understand these walkers - but I was bigger than she was, which is the way monkeys roll, bottom line - humans too, in more technological ways that include kill ratio and stopping power...

Once I started picking the beans, Scout finally gave up, ambled on out of the shadows, down the stone steps and across the road to the forest where she found a nice vantage tree and sat in it watching me through the leaves and uttering a regular sort of grieving sound, a single syllable moan, like those Italian grandmothers in my old NY neighborhood used to do when as outfielder I had to sometimes go over the fence into their kitchen gardens where there were the most delicious tomatoes in the world. Yes, I was a monkey in my younger days and this is all a form of karma, though I no longer grow tomatoes because I get so few of them, and none ever as delicious as those were...

Scout sat there continuously making that slow rhythmic lament all the while I went carefully along my net wall of her ready beans, taking for myself any beanpod that seemed large enough to catch a monkey's attention, because I knew that she was just being a sound marker, spotter, guide for the approaching troupe (which showed up before long), her eyes following my every move; a  companion of hers - male, probably retired, was not far away, breaking branches off an oak tree and throwing them onto the ground in a kind of bluster, which didn't work on me. There was much frustration in the air, except where I was.

The troupe arrived, as always with an unexpected flourish. About 20 minutes after gleaning the beans I was sitting at the kitchen table, sipping my coffee, keeping an eye on the garden, my bedding hanging out over the deck railing in the nooning sun, when out of the corner of my eye I saw a brown furry rocket leap from the cedar into the weeping cherry, thence with a whoosh down onto the deck railing, zip across my futon and from there into the plum tree, on into the bay tree and down to the ground, streaking for my garden. 

I looked out the big window and there was brown fur everywhere: there were mothers with newborn wee ones on their backs ambling along, slow loafing males who would get there after the harvest, midrange females just then sneaking over my garden fence but by then I was clacking a stone on the deck railing and whistling, shouting pretty nasty monkey curses and clapping my hands; tossed a rock or two and they all loped away to beyond rock distance, where they would wait until I went back inside my big box...

The word was getting around, though: there were no beans left. The troupe was buzzing; they couldn't believe I had taken their beans, and they were pissed: I could tell by the way they looked at me from the road, their faces an even angrier red than usual; they can't stand it when we steal their stuff.

MONKEYS AND ONIONS     - archives

No, that's not a recipe. Yet.

It sounds increasingly mouthwatering to me, though, compared to the way I felt in my previous ignorance, when I thought monkeys were cute.

Back then, monkeys were those dear little, furry, red-faced almost-human beings in the photos of snowy Japanese hot springs in some distant mountain wilderness somewhere, usually with a big-eyed baby monkey clinging endearingly to its mother's fur. And at that time, of course, distorting the whole reality picture in a major way was the fact that I wasn't growing onions.

Growing onions can do that to your monkey attitude. Because first of all it's no picnic to grow onions on what until recently was pretty much mountainside where onions have never grown before. Second, it takes a longish time for onions to reach maturity, a time measured in almost hourly fatherly glances at the current status of the preciously swelling globes with their practically individual names as the months crawl along in onion time, making the onions themselves all the more like diamonds one has fashioned by hand.

Moreover, as is not commonly known among incipient onion growers, whose legions I joined a few years ago in grade-A ignorance, monkeys love onions. They love onions, in fact, almost as much as I've come to despise monkeys.

It was a day like any other, except the onions were slightly bigger than they'd been the day before, though they weren't yet big enough to harvest. I went off into the sunny morning to work in the city, as humans do. The monkeys yawned and looked at their watches. The leader checked his calendar, said: Zero hour. He's gone to work. The sun is shining, and there's no one home. Let's go get our onions. It's party time.

Now I know I'm the interloper here, in some idiotically rationally humanly obsessive earth-loving sense that comes straight out of Eden, 2-for-1 with the apple core. The monkeys were here first. And I don't mind paying them their vig: maybe 10, even 20 percent if they have a case (sick kids, ailing grandma etc.). But when they come and just take 50 percent and leave a mess, then come the next day and take another 40 percent, leaving 10 percent only because they can't find it in the further mess they've made, I say it's time for monkeys and onions.

I awoke the third morning (a new day off) to the sound of trees thrashing under monkey weight enhanced by my onions. It was the dawn of the monkeys. I peered out the window as an onion-fattened female ambled solo into my garden, heading for you know what.

I ran downstairs and out the door to the deck. She stopped in amazement: what the hell are you doing home? I figuratively swear she double-checked her watch, got out her organizer and scratched her head. She looked again to see if I was real. I really threw a real rock. She took off and joined the crew in the trees across the road.

I went to my onions and began scavenging for my 10 percent. The beasts watched from the trees in growing distress, jumping up and down and talking to their lawyers, saying HEY! He's pulling up OUR onions!! They began to eat mere leaves from the trees in frustration, as monkeys should dammit do at all times, I gritted as I salvaged what was left of my own onions.

I say the onions are mine. I bought the land, I bought the seeds, I planted and tilled, what right do the monkeys have to the fruits of my labor, other than the fact that they get it every year?

THE LACKADAISICALITY INDEX

It's because I'm generally not lackadaisical that my experience with wild pigs is limited. However, because I've only seen one monkey in the last few months, my LI (Lackadaisicality Index) has plunged. You see at once how this all fits together. Monkeys keep me on my toes, LI-wise, and if you're on your toes in regard to monkeys, you're on stilts when it comes to wild pigs. If you're not thus on your toes, then you are a welcome mat for the porkers. That's my deep philosophical lesson of the week.

To begin not too long after the beginning: while making my breakfast tea this morning I looked out the big window in the kitchen and noticed that out in the garden, inside the high net fence, the large bucket of bokashi juice had fallen over. I knew I had not been so careless as to place it in such a way that it could be toppled by a strong wind. Anyway it was ¾ full, and heavy.  I also knew that monkeys would not have toppled it, because there was no reward in doing so, and monkeys do not do anything for nothing; they're almost as bad as Wall Street. I couldn't see any other signs of destruction out there, which also mitigated against monkeys. In rural shamus fashion I would check it out after breakfast, on my way to work.

As to my LI, I've been leaving the garden gate open lately because as I say I'd only seen one monkey in a long while, that one cowering behind a rice paddy downmountain; anyway the thieving beasts don't need gates unless they're infirm, and there aren't many infirm monkeys. A mother with clinging infant might opt for a gate rather than climb the high net, but that's another time of year. You can see I've got this all figured out. The deer take advantage of the open gate when there's Spring spinach to be had, but there's so much fresh wild food everywhere for deer to eat now that we don't even see deer any more, they haven't come into the garden in quite a while; no need for them to leave the forest. Couldn't be Littlefoot, he never leaves a mess. My LI was pretty well justified, if you ask me. So what had happened? What had I overlooked? Were my tromboncino now under threat? My cukes? My peppers and pumpkins? Tomatoes? Nobody bothers hot peppers or goyas, thank goodness...

When I got out there for a quick check it appeared that all was well, oddly enough; then when I reached the far end I saw that the soil of one entire corner, perhaps 6 square meters, had been deeply and violently ripped up. I'd seen this before, elsewhere: wild pigs after earthworms. Also, I had planted potatoes there last year. An irresistible combination to wild pigs deprived of the fresh rice growing all around them but out of reach behind electric fences - you can imagine the frustration - but fortunately Mr. Nice Guy of the declining LI was living nearby. The snouty beasts work at night, quietly, so I hadn't heard a sound. Didn't touch the nearby tomatoes and just missed some goya and cuke vines, though one cuke vine had to be listed as collateral damage; nothing else. Those big porky bodies had no problem shouldering that heavy bucket out of the way of fine dining.

This is the first time I've ever been invaded by wild pigs, but only because of my gradual LI reversal. There's a big lesson for the world somewhere in there, but there's no point in throwing pearls before politicians. For their part, the porkos probably broke up their garden party at dawn, but I bet they'll be back for more: tonight one garden corner, tomorrow you know what. My gate, for one, will be closed.

You've been warned. Metaphorically too.

HIGHER LAWS

Monkeys are puzzled by the human concept of ownership - as manifested in me, in this instance. Always cracks me up, that fuzzy look they get in their eyes as they have a shot at trying to figure out what I’m going on about while all they’re doing is enjoying the onion they were the first to discover, first to pluck from the ground, and that they are now holding in their paw and biting into, ergo they own it, so what’s the problem, dancing man?

Monkey legalities are clear cut, straightforward - no legal niceties in the wild - no liens, lawsuits, adverse possession, bad faith, no secret or hidden possession, no mortgages or deeds and so forth, all unneeded, since trust is not a cornerstone of natural justice, yet the simians are learning creatures, are they not, and therefore naturally involved in evolving beyond mindless brigandage, just as we ourselves once were (doubts of our success notwithstanding), so of course they will have a go now and then at expanding their minds, such as when they have a monkily owned onion in hand, are chewing on it and I pop up out of an opening in that big box over there, jumping up and down in my usual manner, throwing rocks, shouting and gesticulating wildly for some reason, trying to get something across that the monkeys can’t quite grasp, yet-- "That footwalker is so much in earnest, and so redfaced, there must be something to it..." is a thought that seems to zip through their mindspace as they gaze sidelong at me and then finally lope off with their onions, no sense hanging around a rock-throwing nonmonkey...

One might even think they are trying to evolve, given the slight evidence, such as of a conscience, until a gardening season later they steal another of my onions and try once more, fleetingly, to get their minds around this bizarre concept that the hatwearers apparently embrace, that onions far away from them are in their possession, even when in a monkey's grip! Could anything be stranger? Or more different from the keystone of monkey law, to wit: I’ve got the onion in my paw and I’m eating it; could anything be more owned? A philosophy shared, to a much greater extent, by many of our fellow moneyspenders, DC and Wall Street being handy examples.

So, in evolutionary reaction, I have stopped growing onions; but for who knows how long, since this could cause a setback in simian legal evolution. Just imagine the pretty balance there could be to the world one day, if we could get the monkeys and the bankers into the same high court...

THE THIRD BRANCH

When the early monkeys came to that specific evolutionary fork in the big old tree of life and looked forward along the left branch, they saw strange things up ahead, like more intelligence, protoconscience, moralities all vague and misty, and said Whoa, let's not go that way - they had their reasons - so they chose the other branch, took the path more traveled and got to the upper canopy where they are now, which isn't bad, actually-- mostly the tropics.

Then when our own foresimians came to the same fork they looked to the right branch and saw all those monkeys jammed up ahead, said Damn, that is way too crowded, give me some space, so they headed left into all that shifting civiloplasm where they had some room to think and did, and here we all are with a long list of haftashouldy stuff eats up our time.

So it happens that now and then, when I pause in my work at tilling and planting to grow some of my own food on my mortgaged soil, or at patching up my weathering residence, I watch the monkeys ambling houseless past my garden into the food-laden forest or sitting up in the arms of a tree comfy-munching on a natural snack that many humans say God has provided, and I think about the monkeys’ choice way back then, since now they can go anywhere, anytime, no 9 to 5, no visas, mortgages, suits, appliances or infidels... If I was back at that evofork right now on behalf of all humanity up ahead somewhere on the timepike, I think I’d check to see whether maybe there was a third branch we might have overlooked; you never know...

May as well think about it, since we wound up being able to.

ONIONS ARE A NUISANCE

It was a foggy Saturday evening in early Spring, the way early Spring gets up here when it heightens all the heartbreak. Like any green-thumbed shamus I was standing in my garden, my never quite finished garden, enjoying the fragrances that were burgeoning all over the place. Don't ask me about onions. Ok, ok, I was thinking about planting onions, anticipating that homegrown savor, when I should know way better than to plant onions up here.

Anticipating onions is bound to end in heartbreak, I know that too, but like a fool, again and again I throw handfuls of hope at dreams of the sultry bulbs and all they do is mock me with misty images that fade like the light in the dusk with their luscious come-ons, their tantalizing fragrances, their succulent textures, lead me on into dreams that don't even end in tears...

I was standing there lost once more in the dim reaches of unrequited vegetarianism when I heard a bunch of monkeys arguing. From somewhere below in the mountain forests came that horrible, grating sound all mountain onion fantasists abhor. When you've been up here long enough, you know that noise and what it means. You get to know it real fast if you love onions, it's not like anything else you ever heard, not like any other two creatures arguing, it’s a scrapy, whiny, selfish sound, a sound that knows no conscience, carries no morals or scruples at its heart, it is the sound of creatures that claim all onions, and it means they will be moving closer, they may be here any minute, they'd be coming for my onions, if I'd been fool enough to plant them again. Face it, onions are a nuisance.

Sure, I could wait around, grab some rocks, stand my ground, put up a nuclear-powered electric fence, but sooner or later I'll have to sleep, and then have to go away, do some shopping, buy some onions, go to a dentist, bank, post office... those monkeys may be redfaced but they're not stupid, they know things, they have savage skills, they know your habits and they can wait; they have no jobs, no place to be, no dental appointments no bank accounts, they just wait. You don't have that luxury, you're human: your life is not your own, you have a family, a job, a government, you have obligations, bills to pay, places to be, conscience, morals, papers to sign-- but not the monkeys, they occupy the other end of the responsibility spectrum. All your onions belong to them.

“But not this time,” you say to yourself in the dusk, pulling your hatbrim lower as monkeys argue in the distance...

PARALLELS CAN BE DRAWN HERE

Woke up this morning and as my head came out of my sweatshirt neck I saw out in the garden something that looked as though a large crowd of monkeys had raided my potato patch yesterday, but this wasn't possible, had to be a trick of the morning light, I hadn't seen a monkey for months and months! I rubbed my eyes, but still...

So I got dressed, went downstairs and out there, saw that yes, it must have been at least a dozen monkeys, going along the rows carefully pulling up the plants and scarfing the dirt-encrusted tubers right there on the spot, laying the stems neatly aside and moving along from Brady possession to Brady possession, no doubt noting the greening tomatoes nearby, the baby cucumbers just over there and duly entering the relevant data into their Mpads for about the 12th of the month.

I of course will harvest whatever's even remotely ready before it can ever fall into their thieving paws! But the monkeys already know I'll do that don't they, and have factored that in, you see? Which means that I'll have to act even sooner than soon, and eat my produce way before it's ready, or else! You see what is happening, don't you, as we humans go blithely about our daily lives while... Parallels can be drawn here, you know, but I won't draw them, I have to live here.

[This paragraph is whispered, over in a corner] Yes, there are obvious parallels between this agroeconomic microevent and the global activities of Wall Street, the privately owned US Fed and the US Treasury Department, in re the inside-out pockets of the held-upside-down-and-shaken US taxpayer/pensioner, not to mention the shenanigans of the unnamed country of my current residence, and like the monkeys those entities know where I live, plus now and then I am at the tender mercies of picky-picky immigration and the intimate gropings of the TSA, so I won't go there, you can if you want.

In any case, like the US taxpayer I had once again been suckered by foxy simians who somehow knew I was going to be harvesting some of my hard-earned bounty this weekend - they have spies everywhere, of course, especially in offices, where among many other roles they play pointy-haired bosses and feral officials, you'd swear they were human. I told no one I was growing potatoes, but despite my precautions the ferals found out and got to the tubers yesterday, had me penciled in for the brief window while I was at the office in the big city and Echo was out shopping in the afternoon. They were so efficient as to afford a note of sarcasm, in all the big ravage-patch leaving me one golfball-sized potato, as a kind of fillip.

As I said, I hadn't seen a monkey for months, until a couple days ago I saw from the kitchen window a large male monkey hotfooting it away from my property across the open field on the other side of the road. I figured maybe I had finally put the fear of Bob into those redfaced brigands, until just proximity to my garden was enough to send them packing.. I admit, I relaxed my guard a little at the sight. But that's all part of their plan, don't you see? That's the way they work! They keep you in the dark until one day, just before harvest, all your potatoes are gone.

Globally, quite a few pensioners are about to understand this.

ONIONS AND EVOLUTION

I've been having some rather unexpected success in my latest onion experiment, most of it due to the sudden extreme lack of monkeys for no reason I can think of-- maybe karma applies to hairy red-faced beasts? Maybe there is a just god? You take a guess, I'm busy. Anyway, of my couple dozen experimentally planted onions, all were bulbing, only a few had toppled and only one was about to flower; the others were looking good-- I might actually get to enjoy a full grown onion of my own nurturing!

It was in that general state of mind, onionwise, that on Sunday morning I was on my way to get some new goya plants to replace the now patently inferior ones I'd gotten under the old "a goya is a goya is a goya" fallacy, and was not thinking at all about monkeys (unusual for me) as I neutraled down the hill from the house toward the tunnel, where I saw two adult monkeys (there are always more in hiding) ambling out of the tunnel looking as they always do like they owned the place, scanning here and there the particulars of their realm, as though my garden and its onions were nowhere on the pinpoints of their minds.

Monkeys are terrible liars (lying takes intelligence!) and know nothing of nonchalance. I could see them looking upward out of the corners of their beady eyes and consulting their navigation tools saying Yeah, looks like the onion place, must be just up there, it's called the Brady Place on the map... must be a foreign name... So I speed-reversed the car back to the house a la any old US police procedural, yelled to Echo as I ran out back that there were monkeys on the way! Coming up the hill! (Direction is key) Keep an eye peeled!

Out in the garden, with ruthless tears (I've been burned before by the I'll Let Them Grow Until This Weekend Syndrome), pulled up the onions, put them in a basket and brought them into the house (Do not leave rescued onions on deck!), then took off on the goya mission. Came back later, goyaful, saw no signs of monkey frustration, asked Echo if she'd seen any monkeys, of course she hadn't. She hadn't because they knew-- the simians knew-- they'd seen me running out back, they'd smelled the scent of pulling onions and from their leafy vantages they'd seen the smirk on my face as moments later I whizzed by in pursuit of goya, at which point they said: too late; let's forget the Brady Place, he's been burned too often-- maybe next year -- let's go visit the neighbors' nice dog, he likes monkeys, maybe he has onions, do dogs have onions? He didn't last year, according to the Onion Hunters Guide, but these lesser species do evolve; look how far these humans have come...

WANTED!

On the bulletin board in my mental post office I have a huge WANTED! poster with a couple dozen monkey mafia mug shots on it, you can jail any one of them if you can find them (they blend right in); they’re all on the lam from one Brady job or another.

I don’t yet have a wanted poster up for bears, which surprises me, from what I’ve been hearing about bears not far from here, but bears aren’t a bother to me, at least not yet, so there isn’t a bear poster. There is room for one, but I’m generally content with bear preferences for acorns, grubs and berries.

I don’t have a poster up for wild pigs either, which surprises me even more, because I’ve seen them go after the rice in these parts and everything else in other parts of the world, even uprooting lawns in some places to get earthworms, but I don’t have a lawn; maybe that’s why the porkers don’t bother me. Yet they don’t want free fresh potatoes, tomatoes, squashes, cucumbers? Not that I’m offering, but it is another of the natural puzzles that seem to be burgeoning everywhere these days. Let the dear bristly creatures enjoy their acorns and wild yams or whatever.

Still, it seems somehow unnatural, and worries the greenness in me. I’m pretty green when it comes to most things, especially being Irish and all. Regarding plants and creatures I say live and let live, except again for the local monkeys. That’s where I turn from green to red. Most folks who don’t live around here and get their vegs at the supermarket LOVE monkeys, those dear furry creatures on tv and in the zoo, so cute and suitably distant there in the magazine or on the net in the hot spring, aren’t they adorable they’re so human!

I have no rabbits as pests either, though rabbits have always in my mind been notorious, gardenwise, ever since Peter. I’ve seen one or two of the hoppies around here in 15 years, so they are in the vicinity, but they seem to be very old-time Japanesey and prefer their original native diet, though the younger rabbits might start going for the easy food available in my garden, you never know when it comes to animals-- they evolve.

But I always trusted the deer...sniff, sniff...Santa has deer... At least, once I’d put up my garden fence to protect among other things my spinach and green onions, after which the deer just went around munching wild herbs and acorns, but then I spotted the Baron himself, the symbol of noble integrity with his crown of antlers, lowering his regal head to filch my shiitake, scarfing them like a king in a pastry kitchen.

Today, in response to severe nocturnal nibbling of some new shiitake buds by ruminant teeth and I don’t mean cows, as I was moving some of my older shiitake logs inside the garden fence and rigging a pro tem net on poles over the bigger, newer logs, I was mentally designing my DEER WANTED poster, I have the mental mugshot of the noble countenance posing before being booked, one hoof holding up the little black personal data plaque, full-face and profile, looking so innocent - Don’t smile please, look straight into the camera...

I wouldn’t press charges, you understand, I don’t want the Baron to actually go to jail, maybe just some sort of mushroom restraining order. The monkeys you can throw the book at, though that has no effect, I’ve tried. Rocks don’t work either, for the long term. I know they were all here first, but I was here second and I had a loan from a bank. If that’s not legitimate I don’t now what is.

THE EFFECTS OF PROTRACTED MONKEYLESSNESS ON WESTERN CULTURE: A Brief Analysis

Can there be too much monkeylessness? Up until  yesterday I would have answered hell no, give me even more monkeylessness than I have now! But perhaps I can't really be impartial on this question, since I come from a historically monkeyless culture that - apart from politics and finance - has no experience with truly guiltless intelligence. The continuous monkeylessness of the West, I now suspect, has put the West at a deep cultural disadvantage, one that Westerners aren't even aware of, largely owing to their endemic monkeylessness. Sort of like genetically never having been exposed to measles.

The above question posed itself to me the other morning while I was waiting for the train, when my thoughts drifted to my innate desire for monkeylessness vis-a-vis the startling intelligence I have perceived in those beasts, who exhibit ancient patience combined with the original lack of conscience, yet bearing in themselves at least the surface manifestations of guilt, like their merely facial expression of the smile-- so much like loan sharks and politicians...

Recently I had gone through weeks- months, in fact - of monkeylessness, and, being a child of the West, was growing complacent raising mushrooms; I was no longer on my toes. I'd get a couple baskets of mushrooms in today and a couple tomorrow, "there are too many, so I'll get the rest over the weekend," I'd mumble to myself in a monkeyless stupor; it was then that the monkeys struck. They knew. They'd been waiting. And watching. Their scout saw me complacently take off on the motorcycle and according to his database I'd be gone all day; then they waited for the red car to leave with Echo inside, when they stuffed themselves at leisure with most of the rest of what in my monkeyless fog I'd naively thought were my mushrooms. I had fallen for the simian ploy, and so had learned once more. By these subtle stages have I become less Western, drifted more toward the other side of the Never the Twain Shall Meet boundary-- which no one to my knowledge has ever attributed to protracted Western monkeylessness.

On the other hand with its opposable thumb, monkeys are integral to Asia and its religions; thus the reality of monkeyfulness and dreams of monkeylessness have intrigued monkey-plagued Asian philosophers since the dawn of civilization, and may go a long way toward explaining the inscrutability attributed to these regions by the chronically monkeyless West. For with the presence of monkeys comes the deepest, most formidable aspect of "Where did we come from": "What is the difference between man and beast?"

Over the millennia, monkeyful societies have perforce pondered the in-their-face fact of natural intelligence in natural combination with natural consciencelessness. Europeans, Americans and Middle Easterners, in contrast, have never had to confront this daily reality in all its nakedness, never had to deal with the deeper implications unrelated to nature/nurture. Thus there are no monkeys in their holy books or shrines. This may be why they needed powerful, angry gods, strictly stipulated commandments, hardwired messiahs and suchlike.

It is my thesis, cursorily examined here, that much about the East that the West characterizes as inscrutable has to do with what I call the Simian Index, which concept I may pursue in future, if I ever start an anthropological career, and lots of luck on that one; or I may not, depends on whatever. I was, after all, raised in a culture where free will is heavily promulgated, though I have since lived and traveled for over three decades in rampantly monkeyful cultures that are less individualistic and more collectively serendipitous, so at the moment I'm not sure of my true place on the Simian Index, but I'm definitely closer to something.

ONE LESS FOR THE MONKEYS

As if those events weren't enough for one day, home alone after the morning described in The Approach of the Weedwhackers, and after I had later in the morning chased the monkeys out of the garden because the chain alarm sounded as described in The Me Squad, as I was even later trying once more to get some work done in the loft I heard a loud CR-R-RACK! and a leafy thrashing that could only have been caused by a newbie in the plum tree - young monkeys nowadays, I'm telling you... why, when I first moved here, even the youngest monkeys could climb, but ever since they've gotten used to the cushier modern lifestyle - o yeah, the plum tree... so for the third time that day I ran downstairs, this time toward the big glass doors, through which I could see a plum-filled monkey - the project supervisor - sitting on the rail of the deck picking his fangs with a pinkynail, savoring the flavor of my nearly ripe plums in a distant attitude that reminded me of a wine gourmet I once knew, until the ape heard the sound of my feet, turned, spotted me through the screen and took off redtailed, screeching to warn his crew still operating in the branches "The guy who has a thing for these plums is coming, so take off, now!"

The newbie crew in the tree itself, one of whom had snapped the branch, were not used to being chased by humans at such close range; they were but clouds of leaves whirling in the heart of the tree as they made for the exit and hit the ground running, also redtailed, the supervisor ahead of them looking back redfaced over his shoulder at me (redfaced and shaking my fist), to see if I was seriously in pursuit (a common concern among thieves of all species). I noticed that under his arm he was carrying a good cache of plums for later; unlike the empty-pawed newbies, he had anticipated a rousting. I also noticed that while supervising the hairy work force, he had eaten his take of plums fastidiously and not thrown the leftovers here and there, as one might expect a wild and unmannered monkey to do; rather, he had left a pile of peels and pits laid out along the railing in a sort of spontaneous natural nyah-nyah...

But although the monkeys had gotten a few of my plums, because I had reacted quickly most of the fruits remained on the tree and outside monkeys, so "One less for the monkeys..." became my loud mantra for each plum I picked on the spot as I walked around and beneath the tree, climbing the ladder in the hot and humid afternoon, plumbing the leafy reaches, squinting upward among the green-plum-colored and shaped underleaves, looking for orbs that might be barely tinting red but still indistinct against the glare, using my extended branch cutter when I couldn't reach high enough. I intoned "One less for the monkeys" at least a few dozen times, so the pickings were pretty good. I'll enjoy those purple goodnesses over there, by the big kitchen window.

You'd think that by now, after 15 years here with a garden and over 5 with a producing plum tree, I'd have known instinctively (how long does it take to acquire an instinct?) that after such extended rain and inactivity the monkeys would be hungry and out in force, coming for their vig-- and preempt them 100%, finally get to see a mob of monkeys nowhere near my plum tree, looking at me with respect. Maybe some day. For now, my dawning hope is that they acquire even more of a modern, processed lifestyle, maybe get a thing for couches and junk food, develop an aversion to fresh fruits and vegetables...

But I'd never stoop so low as to leave out a bunch of jumbo bags of potato chips...

THE ME SQUAD

As if the panic of that very morning's weedwhacker incident weren't enough (that 40 minutes had used up a day's worth of energy), I'd finally begun settling down with a good cup of coffee in the loft, savoring the fact that at least I'd managed to show my harried face out there and do a couple of useless things to assert and maintain my part in the community effort, vowing that I would do better next time - maybe even use an alarm clock, just in case - and was getting back into the mood for some editing work at my computer when, having just finished a couple of paragraphs, I heard the sinister sound of my chain alarm.

Some time before, in apishly devious fashion (am I now I aping the apes?) I had draped a long length of chain over the upper transverse poles of my garden cube so that when any totally unscrupulous life form such as - and pretty much only - hairy red-faced marauders climbed up the supports, the chain would rattle against the metal piping, bringing the Antisimian Commando Squad (i.e., Me) on the run, ancient hi-tech weaponry (i.e., rocks) at the ready.

Not surprisingly, my unpatented chain alarm has the major flaw of only being effective when the Me is at home. (If a chain moves against metal tubing in a forest, does it make a sound?) But I was at home this time, so is there no rest for the weary, I ran downstairs and looked out the window, gathering crucial combat data. The chain alarm had been set off by a teenage monkey who, like teenage humans, was in a hurry to arrive. He and his buddy were already hefting the green tomatoes.

A big healthy female, infant on her back (monkeys teach rampant brigandage right from birth) was ambling slowly toward the open gate, taking the easy way (she'd clearly been here before, and was sharing her wisdom with the little one) when I burst from the doorway hissing and screeching like... like... a monkey, I guess, would be the closest thing, we're not really that far apart, if you think about it; it hasn't been that long since we came to that fork in the road and took it...

My tactics worked, the female took off like a carnival monkey shot from a cannon, the infant loved the ride and will no doubt be back one day, the teenagers were hairy blurs that were there only a second ago... Thanks to the prompt action of the Me squad I only lost a couple of the bigger green tomatoes, and grabbed the rest for myself. I'll let them redden in the kitchen window, where I hope the monkeys can see them.

DEJA VU AND POTATOES

Came out last Saturday morning and found that an eccentric monkey had gotten into one row of my potatoes, but only slightly-- pulled up just a few plants, simply laid them down in place without even taking a bite of the egg-sized potatoes on them and went away, ignoring the much taller potato plants in the next row! I at once harvested the now exposed small potatoes, replanted the stalks and enjoyed potatoes in the soup I made for lunch.

Came out Saturday morning a week later and found that the thief had come again (as per his scheduler, he apparently comes on days when neither of us is home), pulled up just a few more plants in the same row, simply laid them down in place without even taking a bite of the egg-sized potatoes on them and went away, ignoring the now even taller potato plants in the next row! I at once etc. in the stew I made for lunch.

This odd monkey is apparently a stranger and, unlike your average marauding redfaced beast (who throws stuff everywhere after taking at least sample bites of everything just to spoil it for whoever has wasted their time growing it ha ha ha!), has some deja vuey obsession involving potatoes and fastidiousness (e.g., I don't like to eat them but I do like to pull them up and watch them in private). He's quite neat and organized, and maybe each week will do a few more plants until he's finished with that row, then he'll move on to the next row with the much taller potato plants and harvest some more tasty tubers for me on Saturdays.

I wonder what he does for a living.

FOREST MONKEYS, STREET MONKEYS

As a sapient being and anciently practiced discerner of patterns amidst chaos, I can't help but perceive the similarities between the lowdown thieving conscienceless behavior of my local simians at one end of the Intelligence Spectrum, and the lowdown thieving conscienceless behavior of Wall Street simians at the other end. The forest monkeys in their basal integrity come and take a few onions, bite a radish or two, then are gone till they're again hungry in this neighborhood and there is nothing better around than my onions. They never get bonuses or flaunt the success of their scam, they never make off with more than they can carry.

The Street monkeys, in contrast, find that integrity gets in the way of their desires; they want more than just the onions of it all, they want the yachts and the golf courses, the 25 million dollar houses, they want the respect of folks like themselves, who can only envy. So they package a dozen actual onions and millions of promises of onions and trillions of onion IOUs into tranches that they get rated AAA 100% ONION by some bribed rating agency, then sell the Fully Onionized Derivatives at declared value to widows and pensioners, mayors and governments all over the world, who then believe they are rich in onions and will be even richer when they cash in their fat onion portfolios in 20 years.

Both parties of perpetrators know, somewhere in their "Heart," that they are committing dishonest acts, the main difference being that it's easier to perceive in the forest monkeys. You can see they feel guilty when stealing - which they know must be clandestine - and they look guilty when caught red-faced. The Street monkeys, in contrast, feel no guilt; in fact they reward themselves all the more handsomely the greater their dishonesty. What's more, they even flaunt their actions, lately praising themselves for so many brilliantly (and honestly impossible) profitable quarters in a row, achieved by further milking the biggest scam in the history of sapience.

Forest monkeys, with their ingrained integrity, would never stoop so low.

A SMALL JIG

The monkeys of course know when I am at home, and they know that when I am at home I am ever on the watch, gardenwise, that when I see a monkey in the vicinity I am a man of fast and accurate rocks, loud scary fireworks and other advanced forms of dastardly insistence upon vegetable possession.

Of course the monkeys know these things. But they also know that I work in the city on Tuesdays, and that Echo is away on errands all Tuesday afternoon. So they are patient. They don't often come on those other days, unless they're strangers, who are easily chased off. The native monkeys wait, hold the kids back, restrain themselves. They come on Tuesday afternoon, after the red car has been spotted and confirmed as coming down the mountain. "Red car descent confirmed, let's move out..." the monkey Godfather says into his virtual wrist mike.

So it wasn't really a big surprise when on Wednesday morning, one of my at home days, I awoke and looked out the window upon my garden, where I perceived even with sleepy, eyeglassless eyes that that the few onions that had remained did so no longer. Some form of lowly, crass and uncaring beast had paid a visit to my onions, as depicted in those impressionist flecks of white scattered there among the long, blurry brushtrokes of toppled green.

The reason I wasn't jumping up and down possessed with Gardener's Rage, however, was that I had been quietly and inyerfacedly harvesting and consuming my very own onions for some time now, as per reasons posted of previously; hence there weren't that many onions left, and those of lowest value. I had also scored 99.99 percent of the shiitake in my daily log scans, so when the drooling beasts came upon the empty logs after the paucity of onions there was likely much gnashing of simian teeth in that quarter, which pleases me immensely.

I don't really mind the monkeys taking their vig in exchange for my use of their ancestral turf, especially a radically diminished vig, such as I've been contriving of late. It's not like we have a contract or anything. Also they left the garlic alone and don't like spinach, chard, radishes, shungiku or peppers, among other things. And there aren't yet any cukes, tomatoes or squashes, which I will hawkeye like I do the shiitake, so all in all most of my garden remained mine, a matter of not-too-small a jig on my part, even before I found my glasses.

THE LIGHT

I had to slow down on the curve, which was why I noticed the monkey.

It was that curve behind the school, where the road turns sharply to the left on the way down to the station. As I slowed I observed a youngish monkey sitting alone atop the red roof of the school. The solo part was unusual, especially for a youngster, but even stranger was the way the monkey was sitting, as though in complete dejection; didn't even lift his head to look at the human passing by not so far away on a motorcycle. His pose was part Rodin thinker and part the guy sitting there head down, with right leg extended and left arm flung straight out across his left knee in a kind of exhausted despair.

In the simian part of myself, I took a good measure of delight in this. Seeing monkeys in unpleasant situations is a form of pleasure for a mountain gardener. But then my higher faculties jumped in with their righteous batons and moral direction signs and I felt the stirrings of sympathy, because perhaps I was beholding an early version of we humans ourselves, as the proto-human first raised his or her head to look upon at the world around and thought... Hey, I just had a weird experience in my head! What the hell was that? as the first iota of memory found its place, held on, stayed there, and knowledge was born in us: lo, we had perspective - time perspective, emotional perspective - there were tangents and pathways, there were decisions... and so the path led on, to roads, schools, motorcycles...

But this monkey hadn't reached that point yet, he was an early branch of us sitting up there alone in simian despair, perhaps hungry in a way he could not fathom; perhaps he had looked in the school windows yesterday and seen all those furless kids eagerly poring over books and symbols, learning about everything around them, but it wasn't even Greek to him; he thought what are they doing in there, why can't I do that and why would I want to-- then perhaps came the realization, in some proto-human way, that he could not get in: he did not have whatever qualifications were.

Monkeys can raise their eyes and behold the land and its character all around them, but it has no meaning, for they know nothing of topography, have no inkling of geography, history, biology, mathematics, all the human labels for humanly organized categories of monkey-useless things (no doubt an instantly sapient monkey would come up with completely different categories that better suit the simian mindset). The world that monkeys see is just as it is, without heuristic depth or duration, for they cannot build upon memories the way we do (to whatever end), not only because they don't desire to, but mainly because they don't need to. Which was our own status at one time, until it changed for reasons that can only be approached mythologically.

Sitting up there alone the young monkey looked as though he had just beheld for a brief moment what we call The Light, and then had lost it, could not hold onto it, as may have been - indeed, likely was - the case back at our own beginning, so as I passed on by I could not but commiserate, a little bit.

Hang in there, buddy; no matter what happens, just stay away from my onions.

INTELLIGENT EVOLUTION: LEARNING FROM OUR WILD NEIGHBORS

It is good for us to live amongst the wild creatures, carry on with our lives amidst their close vicinity, the better to learn from those evolved beings the truths we need to know about our own proper place in this world of which we fancy ourselves the overlords.

In fact I had such a lesson this morning, when I almost stepped on a baby monkey. The tiny wrinkled creature, even then in the midst of learning to sneak up onto my deck to get as many as he could carry of the winter potatoes that in my negligence (half the soul of human kindness) I had left in a basket there, afforded me some further insights into our respective places in the universe, and how we civilized, hardworking, largely altruistic creatures and the thieving beasts around us fit together in the big picture.

The unexpected lesson (the best kind) began just as I was putting my lunchbowl into the sink, when out the big window onto the garden I saw a bigass monkey ambling like a lord into my garden through the gate I'd negligently left open (I'd just been out there putting some rice straw on a couple places, left the gate open for after-lunch garden tweaking).

I ran out the door at once yelling and handwaving in regard to my respective place in the universe blablabla vis-a-vis monkey lust for my onions, a complex philosophical question that I gave no consideration as I headed instinctively - like a monkey toward an onion - for the little pile of antibeast rocks I keep handy on the deck railing.

Anyway, to get back to the infant thief beneath my foot, as I pounded onto the deck to chase Bigass out of my garden I came within a monkeynose of stepping on the cute little artful dodger wannabe as he was edging toward what were almost his potatoes. You should have seen the look in his beady already criminal eyes-- he had never seen a monkey as big as me, pale face yelling for justice, a huge beast covered in different kinds of multicolored nonfur, in his entire life. He'd just been born of course, so had but a short time range to choose from, but that only magnified the experience for him; he tumbled backward in disbelief and fell off the deck right in front of I guess his mother, who was grubbing among the lily roots and also freaked at sight of her falling child with me above.

At the same time, I saw that Bigass was out there with his numerous tribe (there must have been a few dozen of them, all ages) all around, so I had to yell louder and gesticulate more threateningly until I had reached a crescendo sufficient to dominate that many monkeys (there’s a formula I use) and they all took off carrying babies and other monkey luggage (though not one potato or onion, I’m proud to say), legging it for the property nearby that has a big dog who is nicer to them, only barks and possible bites. No long-distance definite rocks from a big loud beast suddenly out of nowhere.

I learned much from the experience. From the look on that little big-eyed face, for example, I learned that I am in fact the overlord of this particular fraction of the world, and that little brigand had better believe it, like the rest of his tribe. But most importantly of all, I came to realize that the monkeys in their natural state have an ecological role to play when, in the depths of winter - as they have done since the first tick of monkeytime - they subsist on roots, seeds, bark, whatever the wild provides. Like us, however, the monkeys prefer an easier way if there is one, though they haven't the will or the wherewithal to create it themselves, so they want ours. Thus is their natural role - which historically does not include onion consumption - critically unbalanced when they steal my produce; so in yelling at and pelting them with rocks to drive them from the garden (much like ourselves, in our own mythic times), I am doing my part to restore the natural balance, thereby helping forestall the possibility of global warming, among other growing perils.

Yes, it is good, as I say, for us to learn from and teach our fellow creatures our respective proper places in the world. The little crook and I pretty much have that down now. He'll be back. But I'll be waiting. With more than a size eleven.

Doing my part for a cleaner future.

TRUE EVOLUTION

Hope is good, though not as good as potatoes. Anyway, I think I'm getting better at this. Yesterday morning I was doing something in the kitchen when I happened to look out the big window and saw, beyond the cord of firewood, the head of a monkey. In a familiar landscape, random monkey heads sort of jump out at you.

I instantly deduced that the monkey wasn't hanging out on the other side of the woodpile like a teenager at the mall, but was in the vegetable garden. I knew this because on the monkey head was a monkey face and on that face was a monkey mouth, and in that mouth was not a monkey potato, but a Brady potato. Monkeys are too dumb to grow potatoes.

At that point I ran out and threw a smartstone at the instantly distant monkeys. There were three I could see now, where they stopped to pause and look back upon their thieving past (to ponder and perhaps begin to repent their evil ways, turn upon a righteous path, now there's a laugh, though some of our species have allegedly managed to do it), two females and a troublesome youngster they were welcome to.

I went out to the garden to assess the damage and found that only one beast had gotten a potato; the others had been distracted by the leftover and finally reddened tomatoes I'd left hanging from the fence netting for just that purpose, and it had worked: two of the three brigands had opted for the right-there easy and old tomatoes, rather than the underground dirt-covered maybe potatoes, onions or carrots. That little margin of extra time and monkeybelly fullness, plus my increasingly acute sensitivity regarding simian proximity - I like to think of it as a sort of monkey radar - had enabled my prompt response in chasing them off.

As I watched them watching me from across the road, though, it occurred to me that although I might offhandedly think that monkeys are too stupid to grow potatoes, it may be that, since they can have my potatoes even when I'm home, they may in fact simply be not dumb enough to need to grow potatoes, and they know it. There's always that unsettling quality in their eyes, when they look back from a distance beyond reach of my mere stones, their cheeks stuffed with one of my big new potatoes.

The course of true evolution does not run smooth.