After Erika Fromm interviewed wee UD for a job as her assistant at the University of Chicago, she wrote a brief note to herself about your 20-something blogueuse, at which UD peeked —

V STRONG EGO

— and I’ll admit those three little words have rather followed me around all these years later. (Yes, I got the job and it was very strange – she basically invented hypnoanalysis…) I mean, it’s true that my VSE has blasted me through lots of doors in life (or as sour old Larkin puts it, I’ve repeatedly “burst into fulfillment’s desolate attic”), and that has more or less been a good thing.

Even this very day, when my headstrongism led me astray, my corrective action turned up some interesting stuff.

So for my meditation garden project, I bought a bunch of bulbs, which Xavier the Savior and his guys were going to plant for me. I knew in general that you plant bulbs in the fall, and I was way gung-ho to get them in the ground and start dreaming about the astonishing arrays of reds we’d get; but last-minute checking revealed that these particular bulbs, for my particular planting zone, must wait for early spring planting.

In my merry VSE way, I scoffed at and denied and ignored all of the impeccable sources telling me this, telling me something my freight train of an ego refused to hear, until, as the guys began climbing the hill to the garden, I finally put on the brakes and told them not to bother.

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I could store one set of bulbs for the winter – I put them in a cardboard box and found the closest cool dark place I have to a root cellar – but the other two needed indoor planting. And this meant finding soil and containers to place along some sunny windows. I found four orange plastic containers with the skeletal remains of some plant or other (mums?), and I figured the soil was probably pretty good, so I began digging, and instantly, from all of the containers, multiple large healthy earthworms ooched out. Each of which I lifted and tossed gently onto the lawn so I could bring wormless soil inside.

But those worms – the surprise of them working away all this time, eating, aerating – it got to me somehow. The invisible worm, That flies in the night etc.

Xavier the Savior and his crew are prepping the soil, getting rid of stumps and bricks, finishing the path around the garden, and taking down some dead trees. Tomorrow, lots of red blooming spring bulbs go in, etc.

The Russian soldiers talk disdainfully about the incoming North Korean soldiers, … at one point referring to them as “the f**king Chinese.”

The intercepts also reveal plans to have one interpreter and three senior officers for every 30 North Korean men…

“The only thing I don’t understand is that there [should be] three senior officers for 30 people. Where do we get them? We’ll have to pull them out [of combat],” one Russian serviceman says.

“I’m f***ing telling you, there are 77 battalion commanders coming in tomorrow, there are commanders, deputy commanders and so on,” a serviceman says in another extract.

Doing a plausible imitation of An Outdoor Girl.

Shooters in Memphis don’t even need other people to shoot. If nobody’s around, they shoot buildings. America’s most dangerous city begins to look like Warsaw after the Uprising: bullet holes everywhere.

Well, you know what they say. Firearms in the home are far more likely to kill you than save your life by allowing you to kill an intruder. Here’s a rather blatant example – you grant your dumb fucked up 15 year old access to your weapons and watch him slaughter all of you cuz he reasons that the best way to deal with flunking a test is familicide.

Dumb? He tried to palm the massacre off on his younger brother, telling police the kid killed himself after blowing everyone away. Except that his head had ‘several’ holes in it.

The hapless Gresham High School principal unable to perceive, and respond to, the carnage over which she presides has resigned. (Background here.) Certes, whoever replaces her faces the same appalling violence and gunplay; but almost any form of leadership is better than Blanche DuBois sashaying around, spraying perfume, throwing paper shades on bulbs, and insisting everything is peachy.

 An Arizona prosecutor said the man arrested in the shooting of a Democratic National Committee office in suburban Phoenix had more than 200 guns and over 250,000 rounds of ammunition in his home, leading law enforcement to believe he may have been planning a mass casualty event.

Maricopa County prosecutor Neha Bhatia said at Jeffrey Michael Kelly’s initial court appearance on Wednesday that federal agents told her about the large seizure made after Kelly’s arrest. Scopes, body armor and silencers were also found, she said. A machine gun was discovered in the car he was driving.

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A teenage boy allegedly killed his engineer father, his mom and three of his four siblings in their home …

Mark Humiston, 42, his wife Sarah and three of their children were found shot dead on Monday inside their rustic mansion in Fall City by Lake Alice, about 30 miles east of Seattle …

A 15-year-old boy was taken into custody after allegedly murdering five of the family’s seven members. 

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When Olmos Park police obtained a search warrant for [a] residence on Monday, authorities found an AK-47 manufactured in China [hidden from police] behind a TV mounted inside of [a] bedroom, the affidavit stated. A video obtained of a walk-in safe room full of guns inside [presumed wife-murderer] Brad Simpson’s house showed what appeared to be the same weapon.

Through further investigation, authorities confirmed that the gun was an AK-47 that could switch between full and semi-automatic …

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The largest number of gun-indebted Americans are the tens of thousands of dead depressives in our vast Suicide Belt.

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UPDATE on the fanatic:

“A rough calculation estimates that this guy spent somewhere between $75,000 and $100,000 on ammunition. It’s hard to imagine it was to defend his life and property, unless he was preparing to defend them against the North Korean army. And I don’t think he spent it for sportsman’s purposes, unless he was hunting a T. rex for Thanksgiving dinner.

This country’s insane affection for its firearms is enough of a problem in normal times. But finding a guy with his own personal heavy-weapons platoon in his bedroom at this particular time in history makes me want to hide under the couch until it all passes.”

… photographed by Mr UD as he takes his first hike of many.

… an owl’s attack on a rabbit in UD‘s backyard. Or a cat’s attack

on a bird. Many predators visit UD’s land.

Deason built a small private, elevated beach for lounge chairs. Not a fan of the coarse California sand, the billionaire spent about $40,000 to import the Georgia sand found at Augusta National Golf Club …

“Everyone who watches the golf tournament knows it is a spectacular shade of white.”

Here’s the list of all the goodies (many of them baubles) Rudy must turn over to the two women whose lives he ruined.

… goes to Poland this week.

It’s happening at Albany State!

Background on Guncoming here.

It’s impressive to see Americans finally perceive the reality of much of the amazing bloodshed around here. Literary types like UD know this as a variant of Chekhov’s Gun Principle:

“If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.”

If you’re going to hang weapons in every corner of your state, the weapons are going to be fired. We tend, like traditional playwrights, to affix motives to this firing, but the world has moved well past Chekhov and Ibsen, into Beckett and post-Beckett, and this is a world in which people just do things. No reason.

“Vladimir: What do we do now?
Estragon: Wait.
Vladimir: Yes, but while waiting.
Estragon: What about hanging ourselves?
Vladimir: Hmm. It’d give us an erection.
Estragon: (highly excited). An erection!
Vladimir: With all that follows.
Where it falls mandrakes grow.
That’s why they shriek when you pull them up.
Did you not know that?
Estragon: Let’s hang ourselves immediately!”

What about shooting into a crowd of people?