Nothing Selected
Monotone
1 : a succession of syllables, words, or sentences in one unvaried key or pitch
2 : a single unvaried musical tone
3 : a tedious sameness or reiteration
4 : a person unable to produce or to distinguish between musical intervals
Ruts are a funny thing. You never really know that you're in one until you can't get out. Back on the farm, we had a creek that bisected our property. It wasn't espcially deep, only a few feet during the wet season, and the bed was covered in stones. It was actually a nice little creek, rimmed with reeds and adorned with burrs, curling around the slope of the old kiln we found one year. It was hub to a veritable cornucopia of fauna, from raccoons to deer to coyotes to frogs to snakes to deformed fish. Oh, and the cow piss. God, there was a lot of cow piss. Sorry to ruin the idyllic little country scene with talk of deformed fish and cow piss, but that's what life on a farm is like. Deal with it.
Where was I? Oh right. Ruts. On our side of the creek (and by that I mean the half of our property where our house, two barns, horses, and cows all lived), everything was pastoral and well-tended. Even the orchard that we all refused to care for looked pretty damn good, as long as you didn't look to closely at the nauseatingly rotten, worm-eaten apples. But on the other side of the creek....Well, that was the wild. We knew that at least one pack of coyotes lived somewhere on that side, as well as a tribe of viciously feral cats and the cow that got away (which, actually, is nowhere near as entertaining a story as it sounds, unless you like stories where the 7-year-old version of me spends several hours huddled alone in the snow sobbing). Needless to say, as redneck-ish as it sounds, we rarely visited that side of the creek without our guns.
Time to bring this full circle. Mid-summer, which is the tail end of the wet season, brought about enough excitement on the farm (and by excitement, I mean it was hay season) that my parents and I tended to forget all the pent-up aggression and resentment we had towards each other and take it out on the 8 hay fields we had to harvest. Boy, it was a fun time, full of long, long, long days in the sun replete with back-breaking labour, lung-searing hay chaff, and late-night excursions to every corner of the farm to pick up any loose bales. For this reason, I was driving my tiny tractor to the back fields, happy that the day was almost over and I could spend the rest of the night hunched in front of my computer until morning when, in a sick parody of Groundhog Day, I had to do it all over again. I floored it across the creek, completely carefree, until I found that on the other side, I only had two wheels on solid ground. The other two were firmly entrenched in the waterlogged mud that permeated the creek after a week and a half of tractors just like mine constantly driving through it. So there I was, 10 in the evening, mired in mud, spinning my wheels and fully aware of the futility of my situation. And you know what? I just sat there. I shut the engine off and I sat there. It took a while before the fear set in. Soul-crushing existential terror was pretty standard for me, but this was fear of a different nature. It was probably the first time since I'd been a little boy that I felt something, being outside at night. I heard the wild animals in the not-so-distant distance. I could see the shapes moving in the tree line. I could even smell the rotten compost heap we'd started throwing excess manure on. To this day, I don't know what it was, but I saw those things in an entirely different light, and it was disturbing. Because everything had changed, but there I was, driving my tractor back and forth over the same spot, day-in, day-out.
In the end, after a tense, three-way standoff with a feral cat, a coyote, and one of the deformed fish, I swallowed my pride and my nausea and I swam across the tiny creek to go get some help with the tractor. Then I went inside, showered, hunkered down in front of my computer till I passed out, and woke up four hours later to repeat the day once again. Everything was still different, but I was still driving back and forth over the same spot.
1 : a succession of syllables, words, or sentences in one unvaried key or pitch
2 : a single unvaried musical tone
3 : a tedious sameness or reiteration
4 : a person unable to produce or to distinguish between musical intervals
Ruts are a funny thing. You never really know that you're in one until you can't get out. Back on the farm, we had a creek that bisected our property. It wasn't espcially deep, only a few feet during the wet season, and the bed was covered in stones. It was actually a nice little creek, rimmed with reeds and adorned with burrs, curling around the slope of the old kiln we found one year. It was hub to a veritable cornucopia of fauna, from raccoons to deer to coyotes to frogs to snakes to deformed fish. Oh, and the cow piss. God, there was a lot of cow piss. Sorry to ruin the idyllic little country scene with talk of deformed fish and cow piss, but that's what life on a farm is like. Deal with it.
Where was I? Oh right. Ruts. On our side of the creek (and by that I mean the half of our property where our house, two barns, horses, and cows all lived), everything was pastoral and well-tended. Even the orchard that we all refused to care for looked pretty damn good, as long as you didn't look to closely at the nauseatingly rotten, worm-eaten apples. But on the other side of the creek....Well, that was the wild. We knew that at least one pack of coyotes lived somewhere on that side, as well as a tribe of viciously feral cats and the cow that got away (which, actually, is nowhere near as entertaining a story as it sounds, unless you like stories where the 7-year-old version of me spends several hours huddled alone in the snow sobbing). Needless to say, as redneck-ish as it sounds, we rarely visited that side of the creek without our guns.
Time to bring this full circle. Mid-summer, which is the tail end of the wet season, brought about enough excitement on the farm (and by excitement, I mean it was hay season) that my parents and I tended to forget all the pent-up aggression and resentment we had towards each other and take it out on the 8 hay fields we had to harvest. Boy, it was a fun time, full of long, long, long days in the sun replete with back-breaking labour, lung-searing hay chaff, and late-night excursions to every corner of the farm to pick up any loose bales. For this reason, I was driving my tiny tractor to the back fields, happy that the day was almost over and I could spend the rest of the night hunched in front of my computer until morning when, in a sick parody of Groundhog Day, I had to do it all over again. I floored it across the creek, completely carefree, until I found that on the other side, I only had two wheels on solid ground. The other two were firmly entrenched in the waterlogged mud that permeated the creek after a week and a half of tractors just like mine constantly driving through it. So there I was, 10 in the evening, mired in mud, spinning my wheels and fully aware of the futility of my situation. And you know what? I just sat there. I shut the engine off and I sat there. It took a while before the fear set in. Soul-crushing existential terror was pretty standard for me, but this was fear of a different nature. It was probably the first time since I'd been a little boy that I felt something, being outside at night. I heard the wild animals in the not-so-distant distance. I could see the shapes moving in the tree line. I could even smell the rotten compost heap we'd started throwing excess manure on. To this day, I don't know what it was, but I saw those things in an entirely different light, and it was disturbing. Because everything had changed, but there I was, driving my tractor back and forth over the same spot, day-in, day-out.
In the end, after a tense, three-way standoff with a feral cat, a coyote, and one of the deformed fish, I swallowed my pride and my nausea and I swam across the tiny creek to go get some help with the tractor. Then I went inside, showered, hunkered down in front of my computer till I passed out, and woke up four hours later to repeat the day once again. Everything was still different, but I was still driving back and forth over the same spot.