-Eugene Baldwin's – The Genehouse Chronicles

June 29, 2014

At 3:19 this morning, the power went off. I had fallen asleep with the bedside lamp on and a Robert Parker ‘Spenser’ mystery on my chest. (Robert Parker is dead, yet ‘Spenser’ lives—go figure.) No power meant no white noise from my box fan, which meant the outside frog chorus about which I write so lovingly was reality, and reality shrieked and I attempted to translate the shrieks and it turns out the frogs were taking my existential, personal problems and mockingly performing them in the meadow. And I woke up, crazy tired and about to get crazy hot.

I lay on the sweaty sheets and meditated unsuccessfully. I slept fitfully, more or less killing time until the magic hour of six, when the Clifton Inn would be open for breakfast or the milk store’s coffee (50 cents if you bring your own travel mug) would be brewing. I’m so in a routine now, the milk store clerk will open half an hour early if she sees me hovering near the locked door.

The car was trapped in the garage, so I walked up Clifton Terrace and discovered that there was no power in any direction. I turned east. The café was closed; not even the staff was standing by. The milk store was dark. All the houses were dark. A dead raccoon skull on the side of the highway laughed at me. Continue reading →

June 25, 2014

BS 1: Welcome to Porch Talk. We’re Click and Clack the BS brothers. Today we talk about porches, porch repair, diets, weather, black raspberries, house buying, green tomatoes, burrowing dogs and women. And remember don’t talk like my brother Farmer Orville.

BS 2: Don’t talk like my brother Gene.

BS 1: Boy, do I like sitting on this beautiful wraparound porch at one in the afternoon. I night just stay here for a week.

BS 2: Yeah, you didn’t have to build it or maintain it. See, we are settin at the north and west corners, and the breeze comes both ways—or one—always. Somebody smart made this. Couldn’t have been me because I am dumb. Continue reading →

June 24, 2014

Saturday night at 11, I was torqued into my broken recliner and sound asleep. I had been changing channels because “Saturday Night Live” was a rerun with Seth Rogen as the host, and Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill, who made some wickedly funny coming-of-age movies, are no longer coming of age and no longer funny.

I woke up to loud meowing. I came to, thinking something was wrong with Scout the Cat. I was right. She was watching television.

Specifically, she was watching a show called “Cute.” It depicts kittens in different houses, narrated by an annoying, cloying voiceover. Scout was on her hind legs and propped against the TV screen and pawing the kitten images. OMG.

And then some dogs toting cats by the scruff of the neck appeared on the screen and Scout got all shivery, as cute and funny as a younger Seth Rogen, with her torpedo shaped torso elongated and uh, orgasmic. Continue reading →

June 21, 2014

Now is the summer of my discontent. My right shin and foot have been in a cast for two weeks and I’m relegated to stretching for exercise. Scout the Cat is enjoying my downtime. She sleeps now as I write, her left front leg inserted into my useless, right bedroom slipper. Her lush, striped fur shows red highlights from her nightly brushing.  She won’t tolerate an actual brush of course, but she has her own stone knife which she drags around the house, and I gently slide the blade of the knife over her belly and back and off come softball-size tufts of fur, and the cat makes orgasmic sounds and mewls for more stroking.

I miss the Genehouse walk. I have seen Farmer Orville twice, but I can’t stand long enough to enjoy our usual round of talk and tales and lies and I cannot hold Reba the farm dog in my arms. As to the fates of Hummingbird Man and Dexter and the scantily clad girls on the River Road trail, I cannot say. I can dream.  Continue reading →

June 20, 2014

If it hadn’t been for my neighbor Irene bringing me delicious containers of food, I wouldn’t have sat in the living room for lunch by the box of raisins I left on the floor last night during Letterman. I wouldn’t have felt all warm and . . . warm?

I looked down and saw about a thousand ants on my body, quickly seeing the raisin box filled with teeming ants, quickly realizing the ants were biting me inside my shorts, they were in my groin and biting my boys. I put down my bowl of savory ginger pasta and started slapping. The bowl quickly filled with ants. I threw the raisin box in the sink, I got some ant spray and wiped out the living room contingent, swiped my body clean and went back to the sink . . . where tens of ants were climbing out, Scout the cat licking up the unsprayed floor ants.

The battle was over. I showered and felt something crawling on my lower lip. I limped to the bathroom mirror, thinking Die Ant! and watched the wood tick on my lip trying to crawl into my mouth. I dispatched the tick and massaged the ant welts on my boys. It’s only 12:27. Remember Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds?” Tipi Hedron didn’t get her boys bit.

If the birds and the ants and the dogs joined forces we’d be screaming for our mommies.

June 16, 2014

The greatest literary character of them all, Leo Bloom, a rather nondescript, middle-age man, wanders his city of Dublin on June 16, 1904. He confronts friends, enemies, shopkeepers and bartenders, vendors and grifters. He journeys from eight a.m. to two a.m. the next morning. Hard on his mind is the fact that his wife Molly is having an affair, his male sex drive, pending war and his own ordinariness. Every unconscious thought in his head is recorded in stream of consciousness soliloquy. Mr. Bloom is performing Irish jazz and his subconscious is his instrument, and the people he meets are a big band.

Three literary artifices dominate this simple plot: Modernism, in which writers across the globe are experimenting with stream of consciousness; mythic storytelling, in the guise of Homer’s “Ulysses;” and attention to the common man as a tragic figure, as in the works of playwrights Eugene O’Neil and Arthur Miller and novelist John Updike.  Continue reading →

June 18, 2014

When I was a kid, my Grandma Olive told me that mourning doves only favored houses where people were about to die. (She also believed that the moon had a light switch.) I believed her, of course. And since I heard a lot of mourning doves, I waited around for people to expire, and I was not disappointed.

But one superstitious woman’s certainty is in fact a sexy cry. “Coo-COO-coo-coo-coo” translates to “Why don’t we do it in the yard?” in the dove world. So when Dovestoyevsky appeared on top of my metal clothes pole, above the finch feeder and the hummingbird watering hole, I watched for his main squeeze and some dove porn. Continue reading →

June 11, 2014

In Soybeania, spices are salt, pepper, ketchup and Famous somebody’s barbeque sauce. A few years back, some folks opened a shop in downtown Alton dedicated to hot sauces. I didn’t hold out much hope that it would last. It didn’t.

New Mexico State University in Las Cruces leads the nation in hot pepper research. There is no store in that fine town that does not carry hot sauces. Restaurants feature bottles of hot sauce the way bars display liquor bottles. Continue reading →

Dear Mr. Baldwin,

Since you enrolled in Medicare, a mere fourteen months ago, we find that you have broken four ribs, a collarbone, one neck vertabrae, and your right foot. You have exceeded the amount of injuries for which you are eligible.

This to inform you, your Obamacare Death Panel has convened and gone over your case. It is our decision that an assassin will kill you prior to July 1. You may choose between a.) shooting b.) garroting c.) poison or d.) Michele Bachmann talking you to death. You may elect to be killed by a.) a professional b.) a friend c.) an old girlfriend or d.) Michele Bachmann.

As part of your Obamacare package, you may be sexually gratified one time by a.) Jennifer Lawrence b.) the U.C.L.A. women’s volleyball team c.) Beyonce* or d.) Michele Bachmann. *Extra fee for leggy singing

Since you cannot afford to be buried or even cremated, we will be mummifying and displaying your naked body, as a cautionary tale about alcohol and self abuse, in a.) a Catholic girls’ school b.) the National Penis Museum c.) the Dave Mungenast Chevrolet showroom in St. Louis d.) Michelle Bachmann’s senatorial office.

As you may have heard, God sits on the Obamacare Death Panel. It is His directive that you a.) roast in Hell b.) watch “Beverly Hillbillies” reruns for eternity c.) have a second life as a castrati in ancient Rome d.) join the Tea Party and have endless two-way seafood buffets with Anne Coulter and Michele Bachmann

Sincerely,

Chelsea Clinton

p.s. All your writing will be published by Random House, after your death.

C. C.

June 8, 2014

To pee or not to pee is not a question. Neither is it an answer. I have been peeing all my life, in public, in ratty road restrooms, in palatial bathrooms, accidentally on floors, in jars and bottles, in showers, on flowers, on scorpions.

My mother called peeing piddling. As in, “Gene, have to piddle?” The family was dirt poor when I was little, so we took cheap vacations, traveling to Texas, Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Nebraska, to the homes of Mother’s many brothers and sisters. The piddle question always came up on two lane back roads. Dad would pull the car over to the shoulder, Mother would open the passenger side front and back doors, and my sister and I were expected to pee in the area between the doors. I’ve never talked to my sister about this, but I developed quite the shy bladder, trying to pee with cars and trucks driving by. Continue reading →