Harvesting this year’s crop of tomatoes, corn, and basil.  A much better outcome than last year’s withered out crop of rotten potatoes.  No joke about it, last year’s harvest was a crash and burn bummer.

This year was worse in a way though.  The weeds kicked us around the block with their modifier-bonus allies the insect brigade.  With morale low, the agriculture worthiness guardians could have easily made us cry uncle.

Hek, our plot neighbors didn’t show up once this year.  I can see the skeletons of their hopes dashed to the ground, in the form of scattered forgotten tools and half-opened fertilizer bags colonized by wind-borne seeds.  Their weeds and brambles are taller than me now.

For a moment I catch a glimpse of another labyrinth traveler’s camp, taken over by the wild.  Could have been us.  No shortage of remains around here!

I might have mentioned this earlier, but it bears repeating.  I emphasize with the weeds, and admire their tenacity and inventiveness.  If there’s something in the plant world that I think of as resembling the hyper-ferocious predators from the Alien movies, weeds fit the bill.  Break ’em up into pieces and they spread doom.  Removing them is tricky and back-breaking work.  If you let them past the beachhead of sprout they soon grow out of control.

Weeds are also our friends in a twisted sort of way.  They move into hostile ground and turn it to their advantage, wresting a baseline of nutrients out of almost nothing and returning it to the ground.  You can’t argue with a series of plants that insist on growing no matter how difficult the repression of our desire for the “order” of a cultivated garden.

Do weeds suffer, and cry out as they transform the land into something from nothing, messing up our plans for an easy go of things like tricksters keeping it real?

Artists today are like weeds.  The environment of inauthentic wasteland monoculture breeds tougher and tougher weeds.  Until those who aren’t committed to growing to their vision, and I mean committed enough to be humbled by the whole thing yet keep doing the work, end up not being there the next time.  You’ll just see their remains, swallowed up by the earth.

If they do suffer, they’re singing the blues, from the ground up mutha-scratchas.