Bucket

I am writing this blog in no small amount of pain.

My muscles are screaming for oxygen. My skin is covered in red-speckled areas of stressed skin and bug bites. My joints pop and buckle slightly, my voicebox feels like it's been torn to shreds, my spine feels fluid, my fingers are stiff and imprinted...

I can't begin to tell you how great it feels.

This weekend, I needed extra money. I also needed to get out of the house. This marks the fourth month of starting a business with no income or contact with the outside world. The money's running low, tempers are high. So I asked a friend to bring me along on a few landscaping jobs.

He's a tree surgeon, and he takes odd jobs around the state for friends/acquaintences who need dead trees out of their yards. I've been a ground man for the last 36 hours. First, there was prepping equipment and power tools, tying heavy-duty rope as rigs for pulleys and et cetera. Then came a few outstretching branches, which I counterbalanced as I hoisted to the ground(wouldn't want them to fall onto cars or into power lines). Then the big moment where the trunk comes down: I had to pull with all my weight in a specific direction while my friend sawed at the base-- and then the satisfying CRACK-SSHHH-CRUNCH-THUD, where small twigs get spintered under the stress of wind resistance and unforgiving ground. Tiny bits of bark sprayed against my clothing and goggles while the blacktop vibrated.

I collected the midsized branches and bundled them while my friend sectioned up the trunk. In all, the tree must have been a good 60 feet high. We took it all behind the shed in semi-neat piles; my biceps got a good thrashing while I clean-and-jerked four-foot blocks of tree that easily could've weighed over 100 pounds each.

In the midst of clearing, my friend finds a hollow section of trunk that was rotting away, serving as a host for vermin and fungus. One more winter and that tree could've fallen on a car, house or(god forbid) a person. Later, we find it was also a opossum nest. Three babies, each too young to have fur, were writhing in a bed of ivy. One shrieked while we decided whether to call the SPCA, animal control, or kill them quickly to ease the suffering(and rid the town of another potential rabies threat). Well, we eventually decided that they would be OK long enough for the mother to find them and take them to another nest.

More raking, lifting, and clearing... and now I'm here. Despite the aching, I was more than relieved to get out and put my hands to good use. DMS is going to kick my ass tomorrow, but it'll have been worth it. I recommend that everyone get a temporary job in manual labor-- men and women alike-- it cleanses the mind. Or whatever... you can prefer to be progressively more frail and pasty throughout your lives.

I'm going to find myself an athletic woman so I can keep up my own strength. A massage would be nice, too. I'm officially out of my droopy, brooding, smoky beatnik stage; I'd like to go back to frolicking like a highlander and fucking like a stallion.