Knowing More

At 4 AM, I find myself in some public housing project, sharing an elevator with a man wielding a cosh and a cotton swab with chloroform...who clearly wishes me ill and would doubtless do me in, but for the timely opening of the elevator door and the appearance of a resident.  I waken and stare at the ceiling.  Do all people have nightmares of this sort?  What does it mean and what, if anything, should I do about it?  Perhaps it is enough that I can get back to sleep.  Which I do.  A full eight hours being pleasantly unaccounted for.

Which brings me to the morning shower.  It is a dangerous place for quadriplegics, the bathroom.  The bathtub in particular.  It's a long way down to the porcelain bottom of the tub.  And a long way up, should someone find themselves there.  That, and the fact that the real danger is never the one that presents itself.  It's the unexpected.  And this morning, having unlocked the front door for the 8 AM arrival of my daily helper, having gotten myself centered on the plastic shower chair, everything safe and accounted for, damned if the cosmic fucker doesn't come after me.  

It's the cold water.  I can't turn the knob.  This is the direct result of the recent 'improvement' my landlord Tom has made to the shower.  Having replaced not only the leaking washers, but the old-fashioned and much more functional faucet knobs, I am now facing a situation.  I cannot turn this cold water on.  The handle won't budge.  Worse, I won't budge.  I have had enough caffeine to get me as far as the shower chair, and this is it.  I am not getting out of the shower to, for example, grab a washcloth which might aid in gripping the stubborn knob.

What to do?  That is always the question.  With a disability, such issues arise regularly, but unexpectedly.  Adaptation is constant.  I am going to have a fucking shower.  So get out of my way.  And this is another thing.  I cannot believe that someone is not doing this to me.  Frequently, that someone is myself.  At the moment, pleasantly, and perhaps having had a good rest, I blame the faucet and absence of cold water on some other.  Why?  Why?  This is my morning lament.  I grab the cold water handle very hard and do everything possible to make it turn.  This includes gritting my teeth.  Nothing happens.  I decide that I will use hot water only, turning the spray on for the briefest of spritzes.  This on and off effort, I am confident, will do the job.  Surprisingly, it does.  In the end, I have had a shower, of sorts, doubtless very water-efficient.  And, yes, anticipating the next day, a dry washcloth does provide the cushioned grip necessary to free the cold water faucet.  Oy.

Thus, my life.  Which, when I think about it, is much easier than schlepping about with fellow Neanderthals in search of berries, dodging the occasional sabertooth, and probably not getting a lot of sleep.  From this perspective, I have little to complain about.  I have the luxury of consciousness.  And these days, much of the latter focuses squarely on death.

'I have a toothache,' announces the student in Ionesco's 'The Lesson.'  Poor thing, her body is already decaying.  This is how it begins.  And it doesn't matter what happens next.  She can strap herself into the most antiseptic of airline seats and fly her bacterial self around the planet.  No matter.  She is still poised on the brink of decomposition.  Me?  I am not only poised, but staring at the heart of the process.  Watching months of kitchen waste go into the compost tumbler in my garden.  Just a little thing, it is, a chamber smaller than a mini beer keg on rollers.  Stuff goes in, I roll it about for aeration, and it grows sodden, odoriferous, then expires in a heap of nothingness.  Just this morning Paul, my occasional helper, buried three months of the compost in a tiny corner of one raised bed.

And to what effect?  Do I not know?  Am I not the Tomato Man?  I have grown tomatoes in these parts for nigh on 20 years.  I am an old-timer, an agrarian, of the earth.  And what have I seen?  Well, I have seen lots of curled and dying tomato leaves.  Every gardener knows about this.  The two soil pests that plague home grown tomatoes.  They are officially known as 'wilts,' and the seed industry invests heavily in breeding varieties that are immune.  Garden websites will advise you against growing tomatoes in the same location two years in a row.

Supposedly, it's that simple, unless you listen to the high priests of organic gardening.  Yes, it appears to be a sort of religion, but never mind.  Some things are ruined by religion, others improved, and many unscathed.  The general idea is that there is something damn close to magical about 'natural' fertilizers, pest control measures, and the like.  In fact advocates of organic gardening go on to boring length about the topic.  Actually, I know precious little.  But I happen to be into decomposition these days.  So quite by accident, I have become something of a believer myself.

First, I noticed that tomato plants may begin to succumb to wilt disease -- but there's a chicken shit solution.  Yep, just drop by your local garden center.  Buy a bag of chicken manure, dig the stuff into the ground, and the wilt will more or less stop.  Organic growers believe in things biotic.  This means, if I understand correctly, that all the bacteria and natural organisms of soil are not only good, but essential.  Is the chicken manure cure for wilt part of this general concept?  I believe so, but don't quote me.  I don't really know.  I don't really care.  More interesting was what happened after I began digging in heaps of smelly crap from my compost tumbler.  And I do mean smelly.  Try decomposing cabbage leaves for several months, and you'll get the idea.

I suppose that I like the efficiency of composting.  Some people are deeply committed to recycling.  All these practices that remind us of the finite earth are a good thing, it seems to me.  Anyway, my eco-minded green thing is compost.  And a succession of smelly mashes have gone from the plastic compost tumbler right into the ground.  Right next to the current tomatoes.  Which are producing tomatoes at a rate that defies belief.

Belief in what?  This and that, is the answer.  Western culture is cracking open like an overcooked egg.  Trust me, one can see evidence in my garden.  The rigid adherents to biochemistry line up on one side, the woo-woo acolytes of organic farming on the other.  Neither understands the other's knowledge, and both could benefit from a month's job swap.  I mean, if you're raising tomatoes pesticide-free and grown with fermented yak dung, it can't hurt to learn about the chemical absorption and uptake of nitrogen.  And if you spend days staring at molecular models onscreen, it can't hurt to grab a shovel and see what my compost does.  Because a physiotherapist can know more than a doctor.  And a widower can know more...than he wants to.