FEAR OF STRING BEANS

                                                             (from future archives)

Remember those simpler, innocent times, before the “Not In My Garden” movement (when it was already too late), when you could still say “Some of my best friends are root vegetables”? Before tomatoes had a temper? When cabbages had nothing to hide? When an onion could be trusted? Before the great genetic disaster fully empowered rutabagas? Back when you’d never think of using an uzi on potatoes?

 

Well, that was the old past. The authorities still assured us it was ok: "The tomato won’t hurt you, just don’t make any sudden moves." They told us not to be afraid, they assured us that horned zucchini weren’t dangerous, so long as you grabbed the right end; they told us we could eat foods with a few odd genes and safely glow in the dark, that we needn't worry about deformities in our children or mutations compounding in future generations, but those assurances always sounded Monsantoish to me. 

   

By the time I came of age it was still considered unnatural for an adult to be afraid of fanged string beans, but when as a child I got caught in the bean patch— no, I can't get into that, there's little time left...  

   

It’s been half a century since the first rogue DNA escaped into what they used to call the "wild"-- back then you could distinguish cultivated areas, and it was still safe to travel through most gardens, though I’m not sure how they did that. I think they used fences or something, but the sudden emergence of metal-devouring tyrannocorn caught us all by surprise, made short work of barriers. Not long after, the brontomelons began to roll over everything. 

   

I hope someone finds this note someday, if there's ever anyone left, so at least they'll know that vegetables weren't  always ruthless, that there was a time when fiber was passive, that we humans once had a stronghold at the top of the food chain...

    

Have to end here; a squadron of turnip drones has just spotted me; wish I didn't glow in the dark...

                                                 

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?

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...

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...

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...

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.

ONIONS KNOW ALL ABOUT IT

What with all this global freezing going on, here we are in mid-April building a fire in the woodstove to keep from shivering even with a sweater on, I bet this is what happened to the dinosaurs or maybe it swung the other way and got hot; on the other hand there might have been a meteor or it could even have been some kind of major dinosaur flu; whatever happened, the dinosaurs didn't have a chance, except the ones who could fly...

Onions are survivors too; they know all about this stuff. Even though rooted, they adapt on the fly. Which is why all my onions are now prematurely (from my point of view) sending up flower stalks, because they have been paying attention to the weather patterns a la their how many eons of experience and they're no fools, so our diet will be heavy on premature onions for the next few weeks, apart from the monkeys' cut.

As for us neodinosaurs - enraptured with sapience as we are - the upper ones talk a lot about global warming, bird flu and terrorism to keep the lower ones distracted, but the true problem with our modern interregnum is lack of Reality. Not the Action! Cut! reality as portrayed by the upper ones on Faux News or "reality" tv, or by the gladiators of today, action-packed movies and cage fighting - which make the everyday boring in the same way fast food makes true nutrition boring - but capital-R Reality, of the kind that love is and children are, that trees are, that play is. Birth and Life, Joy and Sorrow, Self and Death, that kind of thing. The actual stuff.

It takes a kind of unlearning, an undesiring, to get back to where we were when we first got here, to where we can once more look around and see what is truly there and what life time is, regain the mental status that flies in the face of everything disney, vegas, mcdonalds, survivor et al. stand for, in their respective variations on the Glitzy Premise: that we must suspend common sense in order to find joy and be nourished, that we must step aside and stop looking, stop being like little children, stop noticing the rips in the fabric, the man behind the curtain, instead have a big glass of coke and some fries, buy a ticket, make our bet, settle back on the couch to watch Transformer 42 so that when it's over we'll need more of the same, so that never having won, we'll have nothing to lose by the time whatever's coming comes, so who cares...

Next autumn I'm planting seeds, not sets. If onions can learn that much, so can I.

HAPPY ONIONS

Yesterday after some early morning gardening, while I was busy editing the doorbell rang; it was Mr. H. from Uji, who has some land upmountain. He had stopped by to ask if I wanted any rice straw. He was taking a whole truckful from his home paddy up to use on his garden, and had more straw than he needed, so he stopped by.

I don't have a rice paddy, but I've always kept an eye out for any rice straw lying around that was clearly abandoned, which is the same thing as saying I've never had any rice straw. The rice stalks left over after threshing are an excellent groundwarmer and natural fertilizer, commonly used on the vegetable fields of rice farmers. You can buy it at the farm store in bags for about must be a dollar an ounce, but that's mainly for folks in apartments with patio gardens, where a few ounces is enough.

It was also good that Mr. H. had stopped by because, as he is a heavy duty power-shoveling big rock-moving kind of landscaper, and has let me have a lot of firewood from his lands, in small recompense I had mail-ordered a pair of steel-toed rubber boots for him from Gempler's, so now I could give them to him. He has a great smile.

After we'd unloaded and piled up some rice straw next to the garden, he said that today he was going to fill in a slope up there on some old residential land he'd just bought and was restoring, so needed some straggler trees cleared, and did I have time to get started today, I said sure, and so it was that instead of editing words I wound up editing the landscape, felling, bucking and loading firewood both morning and afternoon, a welcome change from raw syntax.

It's raining today, so I get to do some overdue editing, but looking out the window at the new cord of wood beside all the bales of rice straw, I just had the thought: that straw will sure make the onions happy.

THIS WILL ALL MAKE SENSE ONE DAY

The meaning we find in our lives depends on what we look for. Some look for onions, some look for potatoes, some seek to enjoy simple living on a mountainside, say, in a foreign country, with both onions and potatoes. Others look for things of little physical or spiritual nourishment, like money, fame, power etc., which contain no enzymes. For me during the past few years, the meaning of life on a mountainside in a foreign country has focused a little bit on potatoes, but more on onions, thanks to monkeys. This will all make sense one day.

Striving for simplicity can be complicated. I suppose I should be at least a little bit grateful to the unconscionable beasts for my onion focus; were it not for them, I'd probably have piles of mere money or be everywhere nanos deep on teevee, whoopee, and onions wouldn't be so simply symbolic of life's meaning for me - they'd be of no more particular interest than, say, pieces of paper bearing pictures of deceased officials - but having distant relatives of your species purloin the fruits of your labor is sort of like what's happening on Wall Street. This will all make sense one day.

One morning last week Echo was entertaining some visiting lady friends downstairs (I was working upstairs) when she took them outside to show them the garden and saw the dim shape of a beast moving off among the trees shaking some branches, that from her description of his slowness, vagueness, vocal silence and otherwise odd behavior sounded a lot like Littlefoot. When I later went out to the garden I found that he had come and stood right next to my purple onions, such as they are - they show above the ground and everything - but he ignored them completely! He stood there and TURNED HIS BACK on my onions and instead dug down into the ground, to get at my still minipotatoes! This will all make sense one day.

Later that morning I heard a truck stop briefly out front. When I went in for lunch I saw that the farmer who had earlier this year seen my attempt at making the earth say onions better than it did last year had brought us a basketful of just-harvested large, healthy, firm, strong-necked onions. Then the very next day the elder farmer we buy our organic rice from stopped by to deliver the bags of rice we ordered, and with them left us a basketful of just-harvested large, healthy, firm, strong-necked onions. Word of my wimpy onions was getting around. Next year I'll do better, like I did this year. Next year, by damn, I'm gonna grow onions that are worth stealing! This will all make sense one day.

FAKE SNAKE FIASCO

Last week, you remember, I posted about my fake snake project, the next ramp-up in my ongoing efforts on behalf of humanity to keep the monkeys away from my onions. The original idea was that the jibbering beasts would take one look at my expertly snakish arrangement and run screaming onionlessly for the hills. Well today, the results are in. Talk about tenterhooks!

According to the data, you can mothball your tenterhooks, folks. Once more the monkeys turned out to be smarter than this particular so-called homo sapiens gave them credit for. They didn't exactly point at my fake snakes and laugh, or anything like that, they didn't hold their bellies and roll on the ground or slap their thighs while gasping for air at sight of the so-called realistic serpentry, like I probably would have if the shoe was off the other foot and these were monkey onions spread out before me.

However, it's not as though the hairy marauders were gracious and forebore; to monkeys, graciousness and forebearance are just a couple of the many incredible ways in which humans simply throw time right out the window, even when there are onions at hand! However, the fake snake incident will no doubt be featured on the local simian news, in addition to serving as a standup comedy theme in hot monkey night clubs and on popular hairy late shows.

According to my detailed onion forensics, the monkeys were not hindered in the slightest by my slinky arrangement; the snakes were left mockingly in situ atop my onion nets, right where the monkeys could smirk at them while munching pawfuls of you know what. Monkeys have their ways of giving humans the old elbow.

Thus I have been driven to the next extremity (is there no end to extremities?), upon which I will report as it wraps me in its folds. Needless to day it will be another acute arc on the learning curve.

Be sure to keep your tenterhooks handy.

SIMPLE VEGETARIAN RECIPES


Thinly Sliced Tomatoes

Ingredients: tomatoes
Slice thinly.
Stare at slices until satisfied.

**

Onions comme ça

Ingredients: onions
Do whatever you want,
they're your onions.

**

Fresh Green Beans

Ingredients: green beans, fresh.
Serve while fresh.
Discard immediately.

**

Carrots aux Terre

Ingredients: carrots
Pull carrots from ground;
eat with dirt still on.

**

Green Peppers In Situ

Ingredients: green peppers
Kneel on ground;
eat peppers from plant.

**

Okra a la Gravité

Ingredients: okra plant
Lie on ground beneath plant
until desired okra pod falls into open mouth.
Change position for additional servings.

**

Corn on the Cob

Ingredients: corn; cobs
Just make sure the corn stays on the cob.
Nothing more is required of you.

**

Aubergines a la Idée Fixe

Ingredients: none
Think of nothing but eggplants.

**

Zucchini sans souci

Ingredients: none
Don't even think about it.

**

ZERO MONKEYS

Every time I go down into the flatlands below and, say, wait on the platform at the train station or wander through the village, stroll country roads, viewing farm fields and kitchen gardens here and there, left and right, in every sunny nook and cranny, I can't help but suffer extreme salad envy as I admire the lush vegetables I behold as if in some kind of cornucopious church-- the towering bean plants, the voluptuous tomatoes, the resplendent lettuces and fat pumpkins, to say nothing of the Cullinan-diamond quality of the onions they should be kept in strong-boxes is my impulse, the jade richness of lush cabbages just sitting there in rows like well-fed bankers-- or the beans, the okra, cucumbers, the fruit-laden trees inyerface and whatever the hell else they got coming up like thunder down there at any given time of year and gnash my teeth at their luxurious lack of monkeys.

Few persons from other parts of the world appreciate the luxury of monkeylessness, or have zero-monkey cravings, for nearly all have always had zero monkeys, or at most only occasional zooey and therefore illusorily fascinating exemplars of simianhood, as I myself have had in several naive stages of my former monkeyless life (how do you appreciate what you don't know you have?). I confess that zero monkeys has for some time now been a dream of mine (surprise, o faithful reader!), for the fact is that countless monkeys is part of the price of living up here on the mountain.

I therefore must seriously begin planning my Vegetable Fortress...

A PUZZLING LACK OF RUBBER SNAKES

I’ve given up on growing slow-swelling onions, at least until (if ever) I move or build my mountain garden stalag, but some kind of madness comes over me each Spring and I cannot help myself: I plant tomatoes, the first garden plant I grew when I was a kid. For me, there is no kitchen garden without tomatoes, even if I don't get any of them. According to my careful statistical calculations, there's a reasonable (but not necessary) possibility that I'll get to the tomatoes before the monkeys do; it happens sometimes, the same way people find large gold nuggets sometimes, as earlier this Spring with my mushrooms.

Tomatoes grow fast and abundantly, and even though there's a good chance I'll get some of them, maybe even most of them, to better my odds I surrounded the tomato plants with takanotsume (hawk's talon) plants, the small but prolific hot Japanese red pepper, just to see if their flaming presence had any deterrent effect on the red-faced monkey tomato thieves.

Another trick I think would work is to put one or two brightly realistic rubber snakes among the tomato plants, since monkeys go bats at the sight of snakes (love to be on hand to see the effect of that!), but for some interesting reason, realistic rubber snakes are not easy to come by in Japan, where it would appear they could be most beneficial. This brings to mind Japan's serious lack of cherry pie. Now that I think of it, I have never seen a realistic rubber snake in Japan. Rubber snakes of whatever kind have never played any noticeable part in Japanese society that I can recall, as they do in the West, from the toy and practical joke level to serious realistic snake collecting. I must investigate this, not only for the cultural aspect, but more importantly for the sake of access to the tomatoes of tomorrow.

MONKEYS AND ONIONS

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.

Monkeys were those dear little furry red-faced almost human things in the photos of the snowy Japanese hotsprings in some distant wilderness somewhere, usually with a big-eyed baby monkey clinging endearingly to its mother's fur. And back then 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, and then the next day come 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 increasing 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?