Spooky Halloween Book Post: The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics

Talkin' about the f-f-f-fifty-dollar edition...I'm still using Firefox, of which more below, and it doesn't have my lovely Amazon link gadget, so you can't click on the picture.


Anyway. This hardcover book, all 400-plus pages, is on sale for cash in the Roberts & Jones Gift Shop on Jackson Street. Run don't walk. If unable to get into Gate City for this Halloween special, try this link.

Now the spooky story...(insert ghastly groan here)...it's taken a while, but I've found something to post on a topic a certain sponsor may enjoy.

Once there was a pop group. At the time there were a lot of pop groups. A lot of young people were buying a lot of records, so a lot of other young people wanted to record their songs on them. In order to stand out in the crowd some of these groups adopted funny names. There were The Rolling Stones, named after a magazine, and The Who, who actually sang "Talkin' About My G-g-g-generation," and then there were these guys who'd been in groups with relatively normal names, like The New Lost City Ramblers, who got together and called themselves The Grateful Dead.

They sang a lot of old traditional blues, at first, with a rocking beat. When multiple voices sang with rhythm and bass, even on the expensive sound devices of the 1960s it was very hard to recognize words in the buzz of noise monaural sound equipment produced. On the cheap transistor radios kids carried around it was impossible. So the people who had been making fun of pop "crooners" like Frank Sinatra, Eddy Arnold, Pat Boone and my family's favorite Jim Reeves, who worked very hard to make it possible to hear the words of their songs, and of Elvis Presley, who distracted attention from any sound issues by tapping his feet so enthusiastically he moved his (shudder!) pelvis, naturally had a good time thinking of snarky ways to describe groups like the Grateful Dead in the mid-sixties.

Then in the late sixties people got interested in lysergic acid, or LSD, which some people claimed was a safe drug. It was not. (Echoes of morphine, heroin, thalidomide, DDT, paraquat, chlordane, cocaine, glyphosate...so many promises of "better living through chemistry" disappointed so many people so horribly.) A lot of cool, popular guys, like guys who were playing in pop bands in California, experimented with "acid." The result was known as "acid rock." At its best, when very talented musicians used just a little, it seemed to encourage them to compose fresher-sounding music, although most musicians were not that talented and merely thought they were composing...anything, actually.

(Pause to salute Dave Barry for getting our generation to agree: We are the generation that invented really bad rock music. Classics, yes, but also clinkers. Lots of clinkers.)

The Grateful Dead became one of the bands, like Ozzy Osbourne's Black Sabbath and Jim Morrison's Doors, that were generally classified as "acid rock." They notoriously hung out with some extremely hip and trendy older "hipsters" like Neal Cassady who took lots of drugs, and yes, one of them was with Cassady as he sped out of control and self-destructed that way. By 1970 they recall, somewhat sheepishly, being sort of exhausted, confused, and maybe even grateful to be alive, which several of their drug-experimenting friends from 1969 were not.

Not that all the private drug experiments, or the inadvertent suicides, were over in 1970. While the core of the Grateful Dead trouped on for a full thirty years, other band members dropped out, some due to illnesses whose progress was probably accelerated by drug use. "Pigpen" McKernan, who took a sick leave the year after his close friend Janis Joplin died, was thought to have died about a month before his body was found. Other stories of the survivors and non-survivors are collected and linked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Grateful_Dead_members .

But the band had a solid core of four survivors, two of whom were still up for a "fifty-year anniversary" tour in 2015, and also they'd enlisted a real published poet, Robert Hunter, as their primary lyricist. Several other people, known and unknown, wrote songs the Grateful Dead performed. All of them agree that Hunter wrote the best lyrics. 

What they agree got on their nerves, at times, was the way people who met them kept saying things like "I love your song--what are the words, and what do they mean?" Hunter's long foreword, and John Barlow's shorter afterword, and some quotes the others furnished to David Dodd, explain some of the reasons why this is generally a bad question. A song's "meaning" comes from its sound as well as its words; the phrases that make up a good song don't necessarily parse as coherent prose sentences, even if you allow for things like Hunter's partiality for leaving S's off words ("he say") to reduce the s-s-static tones of monaural sound equipment; there are times when songwriters who've struck gold with a lyric that just fits a tune and a genre realize, later, that they're living out an experience they could only imagine while they were writing about it. The Grateful Dead learned to deflect that question with "What does it mean to you?"

Sometimes there was a private meaning that could be elucidated in prose, as in the song "Cassidy," which was partly a memorial to the recently dead Neal Cassady and partly an expression of good wishes for a baby who'd been named Cassidy, and the instrumental "Sage and Spirit," also dedicated to children who'd been given those names. More often there wasn't.

Sometimes people who were able to read the official printed lyrics (which weren't always what the band members sang in live concerts, anyway) would ask whether they were meant to suggest some other song, or poem, or story with similar words. Hmph. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't. Hunter's lyrics as printed could only be the product of revision by a sober and well educated brain, but that does not necessarily mean they first occurred to a sober mind, nor does it mean that Hunter consciously remembered what might have suggested them to him even if he was sober at the time. Even poets who do all their writing while stone-cold sober don't necessarily remember everything that might have suggested a poem or a song. One major influence on songwriting, as Cecil Adams observed while tracing other popular songs, comes from thoughts like "Hmm, I don't think anybody's used 'Chevy' and 'levee' in a rhyming refrain before," and another comes from the fact that sometimes, if you have a contractual obligation to write a new song and you've not thought of a good one yet, and you sing "la la la" a few times, especially if you run the "la la la" version through monaural sound equipment, sometimes somebody will hear it as something bizarre enough to suggest a fresh-sounding verse.

Barlow tells a spooky story of having written a song just to fit into a genre people wanted, having it succeed enough that he went on singing it until it finally did have meaning for him. Many if not most "creative" people have the experience of...perhaps unconsciously seeking and finding real-life counterparts to things we had "created" from imagination? But you have to read Barlow's story as he tells it.

Anyway the Grateful Dead never were all that popular in any given year. Their image put so many people off that even radio stations that specialized in rock didn't want to play their songs. Their sound kept evolving, featuring different singers and guitarists, because they kept losing band members. Nevertheless they had a fanatical following, the Deadheads, who just would not allow the band to die. They still have. They still have an active web site: http://www.dead.net/ . They are still releasing new music--remixes of old tapes, and new performances by those members who are still alive.

It's downright creepy. The force that's kept an "acid rock" band going this long, after almost twenty-five years of declaring themselves dead and accepting huge fees for yet another "Final Reunion" performance, has to be sinister.

I found this big book of song lyrics on sale cheap in the Friday Market. People who take nice new-looking books into open-air markets are very highly motivated to sell them before the next shower of rain. I offered a dollar for it and a fellow vendor said "I'll take it." I did know better than to sell the book for a dollar, or take it back into an open-air market. I've given some people some fabulous bargains on books that have gained value since they were published. For this one...I gave the gift shop a bargain price, but not that fabulous.

I collect song lyrics, whether or not I know the tune or like the words. Some people like songs I don't. Some songs whose words don't appeal to me have delightful tunes. I didn't know, and still don't know, any of the tunes to a single one of the songs in this book. I do know where to find them online, but since I go online in public places I don't intend to restore the sound on the computer. (Of which more below.)


I didn't expect to like any of the songs the Grateful Dead would have sung. I was pleasantly surprised. Some of the other songwriters commented that Hunter's songs, without making much sense as prose sentences, manage to suggest complete novels. I'd agree.

The book, as a whole, tells a true story. Not that it's written as a history of the band; its annotations do not, for example, mention McKernan's full name, much less the story of his short life, nor do they ever explicitly mention Donna and Keith Godchaux being a married couple. But in an indirect, evocative, Hunter-like way it is the story of how four guys with creative synergy went from being just another garage band, with a silly name, playing old songs about other people's unhappy lives, to being one of the great legendary bands of American musical history, spanning generations, like The Weavers or the Carter Family.

Dodd's annotations are informative. A librarian by profession, and the curator of the Grateful Dead web site, he prints each song alongside references to the songs, books, and movies of which the lyrics remind people, with full-length lyrics for several vintage songs, so even if you've never heard a Grateful Dead song you can still sing your way through the book. (A Californian, he's familiar with variant versions of some classic songs that are sometimes even fresh, to those of us who learned the songs in the Eastern States.) He anticipates that every reader can think of a few references he missed, and writes cheerfully that the annotation of these songs will never be complete. After the literary references, or in lieu of them for some songs that aren't especially rich in reference points, come historical notes on when and where each song was first performed and first recorded and how often it was performed thereafter. For a few songs he's able to add reminiscences by band members.

In some ways the leader, the organizer, sometimes the lead singer and/or guitarist and the old friend who recruited Hunter, was Jerry Garcia. A rock star for exactly thirty years, Garcia died just after his fifty-third birthday in 1995, and the Grateful Dead declared itself--as a band--dead without him.

But the band was not quietly laid to rest, as Garcia was.  Toward the end the songs and annotations become a testimony to the way life goes on, though good men die and you forget just why. There's a decline in the quality of the songs as lyrical poems; there's even one that reads like a typical rock song. Then there's a revision of "Joe Hill"...Joe Hill was an early labor union activist, best remembered for a song that affirms that Hill's spirit was still alive, ten years after his death, in activism for his cause. Hunter's version of this song initially envisioned President Kennedy, John Lennon, and Martin Luther King living on (or not) in the continuation of things they were did. Then, he claimed, another verse popped into his head: "I saw the sun explode...I heard a sweet guitar lick...It sounded like Garcia but I couldn't see the face."

Never having been a Deadhead, I opened this story-in-song-lyrics of friendship and bereavement, for the first time, about the time Robert Hunter died. He was seventy-eight.

Writers are, of course, always discovering books, and new favorite writers to add to their ever-growing lists, about the time older writers die. If there's a meaning to this phenomenon, it's that too many public libraries rush to discard older writers' books so they can use more of the taxpayers' money to buy new books by living writers who need the money from more sales to individual readers. Harrumph. Libraries should not be allowed to discard old, hard-to-find books patrons are still reading, nor should they have much freedom to compete with bookstores during the first two years after books are printed. But it's Halloween, so somebody out there may enjoy a good shiver, thinking of a reader discovering Robert Hunter as a poet just as his life ended.

(Status update on the computer:

It is officially a dying computer. I wondered what was going on when Google Chrome wouldn't open any more; poked around and found that the laptop's memory had shrunk down to something close to that of the older laptop I nicknamed The Sickly Snail, a few years ago. It'll still run Firefox, which is a little better than the Snail's Opera, and Microsoft Office, which is much better than the Snail's Open Office, but it won't run Chrome. I talked to the friendly local wizards about adding memory, then realized that one reason why this laptop was runnning low on memory was an increasing tendency to crash due to overheating because its fan's wearing out. Its keyboard is well beyond the stage a less professional typist would call usable. Its mouse pad is wearing out too.

I do actually like playing with new computers--if they're other people's original computers. It's the waste of electronics that bothers my conscience. What Americans call recycling computers (or cell phones) means shipping them to some desperately poor part of the world where the "recycling" process forms mounds of toxic waste, to be handled by people who don't fully understand the future implications for the health of children they allow to earn the local equivalent of pennies by "helping to recycle." That is not something I want to be a part of. I'd rather keep what I have, even if it becomes unusable, until the manufacturers take a hint and start "supporting" it again.

Nevertheless the time has come for this laptop to retire. And that means not even pushing the limits of what Firefox allows it to do. It means minimal use of computers and the Internet, preferably for paid work only, no surfing-for-fun, until I get another computer that can run Chrome.)

Glyphosate Awareness Newsletter 9

This one's disgracefully late...and a bit self-indulgent. There've been more than one glyphosate news headline during October. There's been, so far, as far as I've seen, only one major headline, which is linked below. The others have, so far, consisted of local bans that may or may not be enforceable. I believe Baum Hedlund are curating the list of countries, states, counties, cities, towns, and schools that have banned glyphosate so I'll be lazy and steer you to their site for status updates. Here's the full text (front and back of one sheet of paper) you'd get in the mail if you didn't prefer to read it online:

GLYPHOSATE AWARENESS NEWSLETTER #9

The Glyphosate Awareness Newsletter is published weekly by Priscilla King, c/o Boxholders, P.O. Box 322, Gate City, Virginia, 24251-0322. It’s available free, in plain text as an e-mail or attachment. Printed or audiocassette versions are available for the cost of production. (Audiofiles are free to anyone who can convince me that s/he is blind and can’t read a document aloud using widely available software.) Reprinting, recirculating, and sharing this information at the reader’s own expense is encouraged, provided that all sources of material are credited.

1. ST. LOUIS: SHARE, SHARE, SHARE

As you know, St. Louis is the next designated US battleground for Glyphosate Awareness. We need to focus efforts there on the idea that Bayer could actually survive, and even grow—providing more and better jobs for Missourians—IF Bayer can break away from the bad old idea of spraying poisons over the land, and move forward into twenty-first-century ways to control “pest” species. Think nanotechnology! Think robots! Bayer could be building robot wasps that kill mosquitoes, not to mention robot edge steamers that kill weeds growing into roads by watering native plants in their proper place, and robot cutworms that clean weeds out of wheat fields. They have the money. They can train and pay the scientists. They can assign Missouri laborers to safer, healthier jobs!

And we need to be sure every woman, and every woman’s husband, in Missouri sees this...

2. GLYPHOSATE CAUSES BREAST CANCER

Long overdue laboratory study at Purdue University demonstrates how glyphosate aggravates oxidative stress, which is what helps tumors grow...specifically, a more aggressive type of breast tumors, formerly rare, that are more likely to metastasize and kill younger women.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-10-herbicides-breast-cancer-scientists-piece.html

3. WHY IS THIS NEWSLETTER THREE WEEKS LATE?

The short answer is: October stuff. Since a good chunk of my small, 100% non-tax-funded income comes from selling hand-knitted products that move fastest in November and December, October is when I freshen up the merchandise and find a place to park it for those key marketing months. Online time is inevitably lost.

But it’s been a particularly trying October. A friend has died (of breast cancer). A friend who loves to get out and be active has been grounded again by another stroke. A friend’s wife has been hospitalized. A friend’s husband collapsed while we were trying to work the Friday Market this morning. It doesn’t help when people whine tediously about our ages, although seventy is “old” relative to some people’s DNA, and some of my generation are now seventy. I’m having leg cramps and irregular heartbeat and brief recurrences of the headaches that are technically in the migraine category (though mild), and as a celiac I’m experiencing these things as flashbacks to the way I normally felt in my teens and twenties. I’ve been working out of a café, and as we’ve read, the next incoming crop of Colombian coffee has been poisoned...For celiacs it’s cold comfort to know that, because our reactions are so specific, dramatic, and disgusting, they may be less likely to be fatal than our friends’ more confusible, “but lots of things cause cancer” reactions. At least we know why we’re having Bad Days. People with cancer, kidney failure, asthma, etc., don’t know.

I've been working from the local cafe. I’ve guessed that the café sells Colombian coffee because I’ve been tolerating it in recent years. I don’t tolerate Kona coffee, which is poisoned with glyphosate. I’ve had low-grade chronic celiac reactions all month, already. And then we have a little local pest, the kind of visibly atherosclerotic hater who hardly even deserves a moment of annoyance, but it’s using those time-tested fourth grade bully techniques to annoy people other than me.

And my faithful laptop computer is running low on memory; the wizards say its memory might be enhanced, but its keyboard is wearing out and its fan’s not running evenly, such that it’s crashed from overheating six times this week. I hate that even “recycling” electronics involves massive amounts of waste and pollution, but I think it’s becoming unavoidable now.

I need encouragement, Gentle Readers. Send healing energy, say prayers, send money...

4. POSTCARDS, MORE POSTCARDS

It is discouraging to get on Twitter and see, though this is probably due to shadowbanning and censorship, that the Purdue study hasn’t gone viral yet. Have you all printed off a few copies to mail to your elected officials yet? “Properly” stuck-down, bulky envelopes alarm some elected officials, as they’ve been used, in the past, to send things other than information to our U.S. Congress. Try printing with a cover sheet containing the addresses in the top third, like an envelope; fold the document in thirds, as if to send it in a business envelope, but save the envelope. Seal the folded document with a little round sticky bit of paper. This way the congressional mail sorters know they’re handling a legitimate document, and the student interns can count the copies and note that information so your busy Congresspeople need to read the document only once. You can put personal notes on the bottom of the cover sheet for your peeps in Washington (and your state capital) to read when they have time.

But that’s a lot of paper, even though it recycles. You can also save some strain on the holiday-burdened Post Office by sending your representatives postcards. They like postcards—easy for the students to sort. That’s why I’ve been spending so much online time on Zazzle, the custom digital printing and marketing service.

https://www.zazzle.com/collections/glyphosate_free_new_year_collection-119411323818420070

Gentle Readers, while I’ve been able to use free stock images to create some “hometown winter” postcards especially for sharing with elected officials from half a dozen States, those of you who have good-quality digital cameras could be creating much better ones. You could use images of your specific towns, and sell the cards for a profit if you have the right kind of local gift shop, too.

You’re not limited to the postcards I’ve posted. By no means.

If you like the images I’ve used but want to change the holiday to reflect your representatives’ traditions, Zazzle guarantees that you can do that. Click on “Edit Design,” then click on “Layers” and “Back” and “Text,” to change, e.g., “Merry Christmas and a glyphosate-free New Year” to “Peace and blessings to Rep. Omar in a glyphosate-free New Year,” if you’re represented by Ilhan Omar.

If you want to use locally specific images, to let, e.g., your New York officials know that you’re mailing from Buffalo rather than New York City, Zazzle will let you do that too. You no longer have to take the time to join Zazzle. Click on “Edit Design,” “Layers,” “Front,” “Image,” and “Upload,” and you can send your representatives photos of your town, or even your home or family (recommended for messages like “My children wish for a glyphosate-free New Year”). You could send photos of local animals and plants that are affected by glyphosate, too.

Legitimate Glyphosate Awareness postcards should have pretty images and polite messages. If you don’t like one of your U.S. Senators at all I’d recommend “Senator, I want a glyphosate-free New Year” to communicate, by its lack of warmth, an adequate level of lack-of-affection. (For what it's worth, one of mine more or less consistently fails to represent my views, but since he is at least a member of a church--a Catholic church, wouldn't you know--he gets the "Merry Christmas" version.)

If Zazzle works for you and you’ve taken some especially pretty pictures, you might want to become a member and sell your own postcards online. Nobody gets rich on Zazzle but the site will, in theory, pay if enough people buy your cards—even if you buy them first and resell them at a small profit. You can do shirts and mugs and car seat covers, too. You can network—Zazzle pays more when you sell an e-friend’s merchandise than when you sell your own, to encourage networking—and collaborate to mash up your words with a friend’s pictures or vice versa.

Your options are unlimited. Glyphosate Awareness is a movement, not a personality cult. Obviously I’d like it if youall bought a few thousand of my postcards and Zazzle actually sent me money, but your officials need to hear from you not me. So do your own thing, by all means. If you create a postcard, Zazzle will offer the option of tweeting a link to it; if you add my Twitter name, @5PriscillaKing, to that tweet I’ll add your card to the main collection.

Status Update: Google's First Fail

So I have an e-book to write and don't need to spend a lot of time browsing things other people put on the Internet anyway. So what happens? Last night I closed Chrome and shut down the laptop as usual. This morning I restarted the laptop, opened Word, and then couldn't get Chrome to open. The Chrome window opened showing all the tabs that had been open last night but closed before the "active" tab could open.

Distracting, to say the least...and I don't know how long this cyberglitch will last, whether it's the result of a connection breakdown (on Google's end, since Firefox is working after its fashion) or a hacking or a misguided effort to force me to DOWNgrade to Windows 10.

News flash, Google: people who don't have Windows 10 by now are boycotting Windows 10 and, if you push a little harder, we'll boycott Google too, and there goes all that lovely data you want to collect about us. I was earning more money before you lot came along; I'll not miss the Internet much.

Weirdly, I'm logged into Blogspot, but not into Gmail. 

Status Update: Busy Is How My Age Is Meant to Feel

Back when the real baby-boomers (as distinct from those of us who came along at the end of the demographic generation, and were more like baby-busters) were in their fifties, a popular song went, "If you don't look ahead, nobody will! There's no time to kill!"



Ever since then I've been observing my generation, and what I notice is that--actually it seems to span the years between forty and seventy, with some people, like Grandma Bonnie Peters, extending it to and past age eighty--the feeling that "there's no time to waste" is to fifty-somethings what the feeling of "in love" is to twenty-somethings. If we don't feel that way, something's wrong.

So, pulling out of this week's Glyphosate Awareness chat with some major breaking news for this week's Newsletter, I have left to do, in this week's online time:

* Another 10,000-word e-book

* This month's Zazzle project (and what about the Glyphosate Awareness postcards for other States?)

* Catch up on Goodreads book reviews (I actually wrote a long book review while eating dinner on Sunday, and eventually I'll probably make the time to post that too)

* Review an e-friend's latest e-book, which I read, and which won't be easy for me to review considering that I am and most of my e-friends are outside its target demographic, but it was beautifully written

* E-mail someone who's most active in real life, about a real-life project

* Two more "real" posts on this web site

* The Newsletter

* Try to read the Twitter feeds of everyone who interacts with me on Twitter; this cannot be guaranteed

* Try to read at least the individually typed e-mails; this cannot be guaranteed, either

* Also, take time out of scheduled online time to rent and set up this winter's real-world store

* Also, take more time out of scheduled online time for the Friday Market, unless it's raining

* Also, follow up with some real-life reporting on the residents of the retirement project being able to get help cleaning their flats after simple food poisoning episodes: they're claiming that some sort of bureaucratic snafu is keeping them from getting the housecleaning help to which everyone's been told they're entitled, free of charge, which is why their children/nieces/nephews aren't doing it.

Plus the usual October stuff when I get home, and oh yes, at some time this week I'm supposed to sleep, but that's only penciled in. The thing about going online from a cafe is that when you're busy you drink a lot of coffee, and then at the end of the day when you go home and you're still busy and you're a light sleeper anyway, you tend to forget to sleep. And the thing about that is that, although you can still pull an occasional all-nighter after age 50, it's easier to reach the point of adrenal exhaustion and harder to recover.

One cure for feeling busy is delegation. Middle-aged people I know check in with one another. Well, one real-world acquaintance was feeling too busy minding a store, so person sold a half-share in the store, then used the money to invest in something else that takes even more time and energy. That's about the only person I know who is between ages 45 and 60 and isn't absolutely frazzled by the demands of parents or children or, for a lot of us, both at the same time.

When seriously looking for someone to delegate something to, which fortunately I'm not, this week, we look at the supposedly retired sector of our demographic generation, the Real Baby-Boomers who are in theory too old to work. I mean, they've quit their jobs, sold their businesses, and Settled Down to live on Social Security. I talked to a few of them this weekend--fortunately not about working for me. Well, one of them's looking for a new store, and one has the fall clean-up to get done, and one's looking for a part-time job, and one's taken a new part-time job...

Busy. Busy. Busy. That's the way middle-aged people are. But it's the way we're meant to be. We have to do all those things we want to do before we become too old to do them, so there's no time to lose. (I didn't even mention my fear of not living long enough to knit up all the yarn in my wool room...I'm resigned to the fact that if I kept the use of my eyes and hands to the age of 150 there's no way I'd knit up all the patterns, but that's not a problem since the pattern hoard is mostly for prospective knitted-stuff-buyers to choose from anyway.) If someone forced us to slow down, we'd howl. If you know a middle-aged person who is not busy, something is probably wrong with that person.

Tortie Tuesday: Samantha and the Bad Neighbor

From the human's point of view: There is a house in my neighborhood that is starting to get a bad reputation. From the 1920s to the early 1970s, it belonged to an old couple who eventually retired to a bigger house (that used to be the ideal). Ever since they rented that house to someone who was in the divorce process, it's been the home of couples who divorced and ended up selling the house.

So on Saturday afternoon, probably still suffering from cognitive impairment from the last round of glyphosate poisoning, this divorcee who's trying to sell the house went out and poisoned his yard to get that Astroturf look. Somebody must have told him that that scorched-earth look will help the house sell.

Hah. If house buyers know what's good for them, they will look for "weeds." If I were buying a house, I'd look for clover. I'd look for dandelions. I'd look for everything but Bermuda grass, which people use glyphosate to protect even though it's a useless, ugly, invasive nuisance that looks like a poor imitation of a plastic mat at its "best," and Johnson grass, kudzu, and Spanish Needles, which people may hope glyphosate will kill but which it actually encourages. In fact, any Spanish Needles, or any browned-out, prematurely dead-looking tall "weeds" like goldenrod, would lower any offer I'd make. Say, if land normally sells for $1000 an acre, glyphosate-sprayed land might be worth $10 an acre...if someone wanted to be charitable to a poor fool who should never have been allowed to own land at all.

September was a very dry month. Everyone suffered their usual reactions to glyphosate spraying earlier in the month, aggravated by reactions to dicamba spraying, which some people hoped would be a less harmful alternative. Dicamba is known to be more toxic in the long run, and makes people cough, but in combination with glyphosate vapors dicamba seems to aggravate whichever of the fifteen or so types of reaction people have to glyphosate. Those of us who've identified the cause of our now chronic symptoms--and no, it's not age, because some of us are children--looked forward to heavy rain as the usual "edge of the hurricane." We got, for a change, sultry weather, with high levels of humidity and occasional micro-mini-"showers," and no real rain all month long. Reactions subsided slowly; the poisons began to break down in the air, but they had time to soak into things.

From the "tortoiseshell" cat's point of view, for Tortie Tuesday...

The humans seem surprised that my four grandkittens are dead. Why? I've known that for weeks, just by sniffing at my daughter Serena. Yes, of course she's still nursing kittens. Why not? Healthy cats enjoy nursing kittens, and Silver and Swimmer are still kittens! But the four new ones died long ago, when the nasty smell was in the air.

That was a loss, but as the human said, the Cat Sanctuary has seen a lot of late summer kittens come and go. Often they've come up here because their mothers died, and old Heather and her relatives would always try to adopt motherless kittens...although Heather herself never had much milk to give them, and couldn't keep her own kittens alive without her sisters' help. Only once, only two of one litter lived through the winter--the second litter poor little Patchnose weaned just before she died--and they were sickly kittens who grew up to be defective cats. Otherwise, we may feed them and groom them, but it seems that that's just postponing the inevitable. Nasty smells blow in on the air and the ones who hadn't already been sick just go out like lights.

Of course I like nursing kittens too. I induced lactation to help rear Silver and Swimmer. I'd do it again, but frankly I wasn't really counting on it. I knew Serena's second litter were undersized at best.

Serena didn't whine. She's a Queen. She's still rearing and teaching her two daughters, protecting me, and looking after those poor helpless humans who can't even catch a fieldmouse for themselves. Or smell things that are as plain as, well, the noses on their faces, apparently. How can such big noses be so useless to their owners?

Just to show how numb human noses are...As our readers know, we keep possums around to get rid of nasty stuff. Our paws weren't built to bury things deep enough to keep nasty smells from spoiling the air around our homes. Our wild relatives cope with that by freshening things with their own individual scents, then travelling around widely enough that the mix doesn't become overpowering. We have learned to exploit the natural tendencies of other species, such as humans, who bury things deeper, and possums, who simply eat them and magically transform them into almost odorless compost, to deal with all kinds of waste material we cats must unavoidably leave behind us.

When that nasty smell blew in, just before the pawpaws, persimmons, and apples started growing off the ends of the trees, the humans were hoping rain would keep the toxic chemicals from soaking into the fruit. Poor humans! I can't imagine why anybody would want to eat fruit, anyway, but they do.

Possums will eat a little of whatever we cats eat. Mostly they eat what we don't. They love fruit. They climb up trees to get at soft, squishy fruits like peaches and persimmons before the humans do. They use their short legs and long scaly tails to hold onto the trees but they can't actually swing upside down by their tails--not without falling off a branch, anyway.

Present Possum ate some persimmons and died. We cats knew at once. The humans didn't seem to. They looked at the sand pit and said, "Looks as if our Prezzie's eating up all the persimmons." They scooped out stuff and burned it in the trash barrel.

Phil O. Possum from up the road didn't know right away. Possums are only dumb animals, not as intelligent as cats or even humans; they don't hunt together, or spend much time together, but they do visit each other once in a while. Phil hadn't seen Prez for a while so he came looking for her. He got quite close to the body, but in his case his not noticing the odor was understandable. He was bringing her a pawpaw. Of course, being a possum, he could hardly carry a big pawpaw fruit any distance in his long, pointed mouth without dropping it. The greater part of the fruit would break off the part between his teeth, and he'd eat what was in his mouth, then pick up the fruit again and carry it until it fell apart again. But he carried it for several yards, and how he could even see with the sweet, heavy scent of pawpaw in his face, I can't imagine. He brought more than half the pawpaw all the way from the foot of the tree into our not-a-lawn.

Then he set it down, and he knew. Well, he knew that the job of cleaning up our waste material was now his if he'd have it. We encouraged him to take it. There was just one nasty smell he refused to do anything about, and you would have thought even a human would have noticed it by that time, but they didn't.

The days the humans call the weekend were especially sultry for the time of year. The last three days of September were hotter than most of the days in July and August, was what they said.

The old human up the road went back into town to stay indoors. He said he was too "old" to work in such hot weather. He had worked in hotter weather on days when those two horrible smells weren't so strong.

One of the humans down the road, who is smaller and younger than ours, but fatter, told our human, "I am close to having another 'mental breakdown'."

"What does that mean? Does she turn against cats?" I was wary. I worry less than I used to, knowing that Burr, Serena, and my human are all on my side, but I know some humans can become vicious.

"Oh, no, there's not a violent bone in that girl's body," our human said. "That smell we smelled on Saturday is 'Roundup,' which contains glyphosate. When that girl smells that smell, her thyroid gland falters. A weak thyroid gland usually just makes people sleepy. If it's really bad, they can get stuck in between sleeping and waking. They don't do much of anything. They're likely to sit down or lie down, where they are, and try to go to sleep. They just don't understand what's going on, and since people who have thyroid-related 'mental breakdowns' are usually very calm, sensible, businesslike people who don't waste much mental energy on emotion or imagination, when they start talking nonsense it's very noticeable and disturbing to other humans. Especially little children, like that one's."

Then at last the wind blew a wave of unbearable awfulness toward us, such that even the human said, "What is that horrible smell?" and went to look. It was, of course, our poor little Present Possum, or what was left of her, which wasn't much. Heat, humidity, and flies had been working fast to compost our composter.

I am not making this up. All the flesh on the top side of Present Possum was gone before any human even noticed she'd died. They are big, strong, useful pets to have, and very clever in their own way, but sometimes you have to wonder--however much you may like humans, and I am fond of mine--how it's possible for anything to be so thick and live.

"Possums never live very long," my human said sadly. "Their unique place in the ecology exposes them to a lot of microbes. Their unique metabolism makes them immune to almost all the microbes that make other animals sick, even unable to carry those microbes very far, but it undoubtedly makes them vulnerable to other diseases that only possums can get."

"Especially after they've smelled that 'Roundup' smell that makes so many living things sick," I observed. "It wasn't in the peaches and summer apples you ate. It was in the pawpaws and persimmons you ate yesterday. Prez ate some of those, and also a sparrow that I caught but didn't eat--too nasty."

"That fool down the road!" my human growled. "We need laws that punish people like that for 'Reckless Endangerment' of their neighbors, human and otherwise. The penalty should be that they have to move into 'housing projects' in cities for the rest of their lives, and their poisoned land is sold to their neighbors for a dollar an acre, just to make sure that fools who like the look of a poisoned lawn can't move in."

Actually, quite a lot of other living creatures think humans are just too thick to live. Serena and I are fond of ours but I must admit, even in our immediate family, that's a minority opinion. In some species, even moderate positions like Burr's and my granddaughters' ("Take the food they leave lying about, when they're not looking, and otherwise avoid them") are minority opinions.