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posted on july 30 2021 by hollywoodjuicer photo by alex dukanov old age is the most unexpected of all things that can happen to a man leon trotsky die young stay pretty debby harry loss comes with the package in life getting old isn t all bad so far at least it beats the alternative but it sure as hell isn t all good either these days i hurt in so many ways and places that never occurred to me in my youth and now i must think twice before attempting anything physical out in the real world i used to run up a ladder to the roof to clean the gutters with no hesitation and although i still get the job done i m much more deliberate in how i go about doing so my eyesight isn t what it used to be my hearing isn t what it used to be my balance isn t what it used be nothing s like it used to be whatever else leon trotsky said or did in life he was right about old age sneaking up on you one minute you re thirty nine and afraid that turning forty marks the beginning of the end and that fifty will be a full on horror show then the next thing you know there s a veritable bonfire of seventy flaming candles lighting up your birthday cake having reached the latter dismal milestone fifty now sounds like the full blooming flower of youth the early years of life seem to crawl at a snail s pace when i was young summer stretched on forever the return to school in september always came too soon of course but june july and august felt endless in a very good way not anymore now a week passes in the blink of an eye the calendar pages flip from month to month at dizzying pace and a new year is upon me before i ve become fully accustomed to scrawling the old 1984 was once an iconic date far off in the future but now it s more than thirty five years past so yeah i m old the only truly good thing about all this is that i m much more attuned to the world around me the way the sun rises a little bit earlier and sets a little bit later every day as winter slides into spring peaks in june then gradually reverses as summer gives way to fall and winter i notice the shape and texture of clouds how the light changes colors shift shadows deepen and the way the wild creatures all around react to these changes as each season morphs into the next i see and appreciate these things more than ever the downside of all this in addition to being oh so much closer to whatever age related illness that will herald the knock of the grim reaper is all the losses i ve suffered along the way people i knew who are now gone because for all there is to see and do in life it s the people that leave an indelible mark and when they re gone so is a part of us there s no happy ending here no reassuring pat on the back and hey it ll all work out because this road goes one way only and the destination six feet under and that sucks i don t know should i be lucky unlucky enough to outlive friends and family maybe i ll be more than ready to join them in the embrace of eternity to take the big sleep from which nobody awakens maybe we ll see posted in uncategorized leave a comment the death machine posted on august 18 2020 by hollywoodjuicer i never intended to build a death machine but sometimes life takes a turn and there you are doing the unintended i wasn t expecting to be attacked by an angry swarm of yellowjackets either and if you re unfamiliar with the sting of these nasty little wannabe murder hornets you re better off believe me so there i was stoically mowing down a thicket of four foot high weeds on the steep hillside below the house to create what the local fire department calls a defensible space in essence a land moat designed to leave nothing flammable around the structure the last few summers have seen catastrophic wildfires do horrendous damage up here in the hill country north of san francisco where we re forced to take the threat of fire very seriously with a noisy weed whacker slung over my shoulders and wearing a protective plastic face shield so scratched and dulled from heavy use that i could hardly see anything while facing into the sun all was going well until i felt a sudden sharp intense pain just above the knuckle of one gloved hand must have hit a rock was my immediate thought as anyone who s run a weed eater in rough country will understand this was a reasonable assumption those whirling nylon strings constantly send all sorts of small hard objects flying out at high speed sticks rocks whatever and some of these missiles inevitably hit home that s why i wear knee high boots coveralls gloves and that thoroughly scratched face shield but man this one really hurt it stung like the dickens as my sainted mother used to say her generation of women being denied the freedom to blurt fuck that motherfucker stings like a fucking motherfucker but this time the pain didn t fade instead it just got worse another sharp stab further up my arm finally prompted me to look down at my gloved hand where a yellowjacket was on the attack mandibles firmly clamped onto the glove repeatedly stabbing its needle sharp stinger right through the fabric into my suddenly screaming flesh note to self next time wear a pair of thick leather gloves rather than these flimsy three for ten dollars home depot specials i bolted like a deer without conscious thought running as fast as my legs and seven decades on this troubled planet would allow which was a lot quicker than i ve moved at any point over the past twenty years fortunately the yellowjackets did not pursue allowing me to retreat inside the house rather than sprint through the woods like a sasquatch on meth with his hair on fire my left hand was already beginning to swell as was my upper arm so i swabbed both with rubbing alcohol and applied a cold compress then consulted google not being allergic to bee stings it seemed that i was in no danger but my hand and arm would remain swollen painful and itching for the next three days every time i had to wash hands and we re all doing a lot of that these days it hurt like hell the yellowjackets won the battle but i was determined to win the war the empire would strike back so once again to google i went where an array of poison sprays promising to slay yellowjackets were advertised none of those would do for three reasons first there s a lovely little bay at the bottom of this hill and i since i often barbecue oysters harvested in those waters i won t be using any kind of poison that could possibly leach into the watershed second without wearing a full bee suit no sane person could stand close enough to hit the target the opening of that nest being smaller than a quarter with a sufficient quantity of poison spray to eliminate the nest before getting stung repeatedly third see reason number one no poison period my eco friendly options seemed limited to plugging the hell mouth of the hive with a bottle or bowl and hoping there wasn t a second entrance exit to the hive or vacuuming out the yellowjackets a tactic reportedly adopted by some environmentally conscious pest exterminators the bowl idea was out since the nest was dug into the dirt at the base of a sprawling fern that would prevent anything like a good seal a bottle might work and i toyed with the idea of shoving a half empty fifth of truly god awful trader joes blended scotch whisky possibly the worst ten dollars i ever spent this swill tastes like sterno mixed with methanol to intoxicate the yellowjackets and render them unable to tunnel out until it was too late smooth and mellow no god awful swill is more accurate another notion was to use a large bottle of cheap garlic infused olive oil now 12 years past its sell by date in the same manner thus blocking the entrance of the nest and drowning those yellowjackets in oil that was surely rancid by now the downside of both approaches was obvious i d have to get very up close and personal to that nest and if anything went wrong would deeply regret the error yellowjackets bed down after dark but a late night scouting mission with a flashlight confirmed that sentries were guarding the mouth of the hive at all hours ready to rouse the troops and defend the nest from invaders i wasn t ready to call in the pros this was personal now and since i had a small stinger shop vac maybe i could trouble is the intake hose is only four feet long and i had no intention of getting so close to that nest again so off to the local hardware store i went for ten feet of one inch diameter pvc pipe which fit nicely into the shop vac hose with a strip of blue painter s tape to seal the fit i was ready to mount a counter attack i waited until well after dark then very carefully placed the business end of the pvc pipe as close to the hell mouth of the hive as i dared using a few bricks to hold it steady on the steep uneven hillside after making sure the switch was turned on i crept away the next morning with the sun high and warm enough to fully activate the hive i plugged the cord into an outlet on the deck and the shop vac begin to whine shop vac with pvc pipe business end of the pipe at the hellmouth ten feet of pvc pipe provides a margin of relative safety after waiting for twenty minutes i eased down the hill to take a look but instead of the great buzzing mass of angry yellowjackets i d expected saw nothing unusual they were cruising in and out of the hell mouth as if all was normal from a distance it appeared that i hadn t placed the pipe close enough to the hive opening to hoover up flying yellowjackets but i left it running for another ninety minutes anyway then untaped the pvc pipe and quickly shoved the end of the input hose into the exhaust port to trap any yellowjackets inside only then was it safe to turn off i put the shop vac inside a black plastic garbage bag and left it on the deck to let the hot sun to do the dirty work two days later i found more than two hundred dead yellowjackets inside many of which seemed to have died while trying to sting the dirty filter to death although my first attempt wasn t a total failure it hadn t noticeably diminished the number of yellowjackets buzzing in and out of the hell mouth i saw no safe way to get that pvc pipe closer so back to the hardware store i went for a 90 degree elbow joint with a two inch piece of the pipe cut from the end then inserted into the elbow joint i slipped the assembly onto the end of the pipe and taped it all up once again i waited until dark to slide the pipe in position and was now able to rotate the 90 degree intake to point directly into the hell mouth being oh so careful not to alarm the sentries and awaken the hive the next morning i plugged it in for two more hours and again bagged the shop vac in the sun many fewer yellowjackets were coming and going now the death machine had severely depleted the population of the hive this time but there were still plenty left with the queen deep inside birthing new workers as fast as she could after sun baking the shop vac for two more days i opened it up to find that the modified pipe had indeed inhaled more yellowjackets this time between two and three hundred which meant there were now roughly five hundred fewer in the hive victims of the second assault of the death machine i could see light at the end of this tunnel a couple more sessions with the death machine might doom the hive without enough workers to bring in food the queen should not be able to survive and absent a queen there would be no more hive i felt an odd and very unexpected tinge of sadness at watching so few yellowjackets exit and enter the hell mouth although they re distinctly alien creatures in every aspect and behavior they hadn t randomly attacked me but were simply defending their home to me i was just weed whacking but to them i was a godzilla sized behemoth wielding a horrendously noisy engine of death and they d reacted as mother nature intended if that nest had been a hundred feet further down the hill from my house as was a similar nest i d spotted during the spring while trimming trees on the slope below i d have left it alone in the spirit of live and let live but here they were barely twenty feet from my front door too close for comfort too close for anything so i d built and deployed a death machine a weapon of mass yellowjacket destruction and in so doing felt a melancholy kinship with the late robert oppenheimer who after the trinity test of the first atomic bomb said now i am become death the destroyer of worlds so it goes it s hard to get through 70 years on this planet without wreaking considerable havoc intentional or otherwise bringing misery and death to many of our fellow creatures i was planning my final take mt suribachi assault on the hive when a neighbor called i d appraised her of what was going on warning her that the hive i d spotted last spring on her property might still be there she reported that if i could find and mark that hive the county would send someone out to fully eradicate both hives for free this was news to me so down the hill i went but her nest had vanished another twenty minutes of searching turned up another hive however this one much larger than mine with multiple entrances and thousands of yellowjackets i got as close as i dared then dropped a metal fence post on the ground to mark it two days later a truck pulled up driven by a cheerful woman named teresa who donned a full bee suit loaded up her supplies devices to deploy a non toxic desiccant powder and went to work a few minutes later she was done with my nest explaining that the desiccant would dehydrate the adult yellowjackets the queen and any juveniles that emerged after the application by the next day she assured me the hive would be dead she was right i took this photo twenty four hours later which shows the hell mouth plugged with and i presume full of the desiccant powder the hell mouth post treatment she then treated the larger nest on my neighbor s land receiving one painful sting in the process thus rendering it sterile and that was the end of our yellowjacket problem i didn t have the satisfaction of vanquishing the yellowjackets all by myself but satisfaction really isn t the right word killing is killing no matter how you look at it and not something to celebrate besides my improvised death machine had disposed of at least five hundred yellowjackets and certainly made the task of finishing the job much easier they say an old dog can t learn new tricks but this experience taught me a few things courtesy of the joe frazier school of higher education still i m left with one unanswered question what the heck am i going to do with that half empty bottle of god awful blended scotch now posted in uncategorized leave a comment clarity posted on july 15 2020 by hollywoodjuicer while watching patti smith being interviewed on the pbs newshour a while back ostensibly hawking a new book but really just talking about her life i was jerked from my television induced stupor when she spoke about the value of an ...