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AlligatorsMarch 31, 2008 When you're up to your ass in alligators, it's hard to remember that your initial objective was to drain the swamp. This has been ringing through my head lately, and with visuals so vivid that I must have picked them up from a long-ago poster. I was about to write that alligators are branching out at my feet (way to mix a metaphor, girl!), but let's say instead that the alligators keep crawling off and getting into trouble that I then have to deal with. If that suggests that I have a vested interest in these alligators, or that their behavior is my responsibility, so be it: it's true. Let "drain the swamp" = "get Mud of the Place ready for publication." My winter assignments are either completed or well on the way: have photos taken for the back cover and PR, hire an artist for the cover, solicit blurbs for the cover (I've got almost enough in hand, and they're more glowing than I would have dared write for myself). The current task is The Once-and-for-All Last-Chance Editorial Pass. This is going well -- the editorial subconscious has come through yet again, nagging little problems are pretty much solving themselves -- but it's taking for goddamn ever. Damn alligators! I'm not even counting the full-time job (editing) or the part-time job (horse). Those have been around so long that they're more like background noise. Background noise isn't anywhere near as distracting as alligators. Background noise doesn't keep biting your butt. On the other hand, fending off alligators seems to make the background noise more noticeable and more annoying -- the last few months I've been thinking more and more not only that having a horse is insane but that I don't want to do it any more. The insanity part isn't new, but the notion that life without horse might be preferable to life with -- that's drastic. It means the horse is starting to resemble, at least part of the time, an alligator. I know from experience, though, that when you're up to your ass in alligators, you don't do your clearest thinking and even your nearest and dearest start to look like alligators. Put that way -- well, the alligators don't look all that bad. One of them actually looks like a dog -- the as yet indistinct dog at the end of my Search for Dog. The Search for Dog alligator is actually morphing into background noise: after several weeks of searching and corresponding and having Rocky come to visit, I last week put down a deposit on an Alaskan malamute puppy born in Canandaigua, New York, the week Rhodry died. I don't know which puppy yet, and probably won't till I get there. Settling on a course of action is sort of taming the alligator, or maybe it's more like sedating it. It's too soon to be worrying about the trip to upstate New York I'll be making toward the end of April. There are plenty of alligators to keep me busy between now and then. F'rinstance . . . Uhura Mazda flunked inspection last week. I'd hoped the tires might make it another year -- NOT, and while we're at, the left front suspension was found wanting, maybe ball joints, almost certainly due to the dirt roads I spend so much time on. Haven't ordered the tires yet, but Uhura's got an appointment at Courtesy Motors a week from tomorrow. It couldn't be sooner because I'm doing morning horse chores for a client all this week (alligator), and next Monday morning I'm supposed to have a physical (alligator) in preparation for the cataract surgery I'm having in Sandwich on April 17th (alligator), for which my ride fell through so I have to find another ride (alligator). From where I stand now, driving to upstate New York at the end of April and coming home with a puppy looks like my reward for wrangling all these alligators, but I know damn well that as the end of April draws closer, making ferry reservations and the prospect of re-learning how to deal with self-serve gas (about which I am almost, but not quite, phobic) will start looking a lot like alligators. Somewhere in there is a dentist appointment that had to be rescheduled from last week because my hygienist was on vacation, but that's no big deal. The cost of the dentist appointment, the tires, the front-end work, and the ferry reservations doesn't even look especially alligatorish -- yet. Being up to your ass in alligators does put some things in perspective, temporarily at least. The other thing, totally unrelated to tires, teeth, eyes, and puppies, is this ongoing West Tisbury property tax thing, like yesterday morning I went from horse chores out to Tisbury Great Pond to meet my town's principal assessor at my family's camp, whose valuation doubled from FY2007 to FY2008 and thus set a whole passel of alligators loose in my little swamp. In the last couple of months these alligators have made me write an op-ed, a letter to the editor, and a letter to the selectmen, and they've made me attend a bunch of meetings all of which seem to begin at either 4 p.m. or 4:30 p.m., which is right in the middle of when I'm usually doing barn chores. These meetings are attended by alligators, some of whom think they're trying to drain the swamp too and others of whom just go around snapping at people's butts. My hunch is that these particular alligators responded to a casting call for Squatters' Speakeasy but times being what they are I've got way more than I need. Yeah, Squatters is bubbling away swampily even though it's been weeks since I actually wrote anything. It just dawned on me that "swamp" is another way of saying "mud of the place" and maybe these alligators are all trying to help me out?
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