the marked hen

this is not a story for the faint of heart

here on west wind farm there live about 25 mature hens who lay about 25 eggs every single day. in a separate coop there reside about the same number of 3-month old chicks (who are black and blue and slightly brown and haven't grown their red gobble gobbles on their heads), who will replace the others when they become too old (they're near the end of their lives).
russell, the 22 year old from seattle who came to these lands 4 months ago and has decided he will never leave, is the master of the hens. he feeds them, collects their eggs, and spends good time with the chicks, allowing them to become accustomed to the human touch.
about two weeks ago, russell began noticing queer occurences in the coop. at least one, if not as many as 3, eggs were broken each dusk as he went in to collect them. who was the culprit? the mystery continued...
until last week, russell walked into the coop and saw a hen run out of the wall of nests, with a shell and bit of yolk on her beak. she was caught red handed.

quickly she was moved out of the mature hens coop and into the pen with the younger hens where she could not eat any more eggs. but she kept getting back into her old coop, the wily one. she was then splattered in blue paint, for us to more easily identify the disrupter of order on the farm. since then she has remained with the younger ones.

and there are still more gruesome facts... it seems she is teaching the young chicks of her ways; by laying eggs and pecking at them. the young chicks have never seen eggs before and now, it is feared, all they know is to peck at them until they break.

something must be done about the marked hen. it is russell's mission (a directive from peter, master of the lands) to get rid of her. most likely by outsourcing her death to a neighbor who will find some unsavory use for her tough body.

she will be remembered by the few as a boundary-breaking, devil-may-care, rebel with an unknown cause who was murdered for her beliefs.

rest in peace, marked hen.


----
edit at 3:07pm:
russell dutifully placed the hen in a dog crate and about 10 minutes ago coleman (the neighbor) came by with his dogs in the bed of his truck, placed the hen in with them, and rode away. her body will be too tough to eat plain-- she will have to be boiled or put in a stew in order to be tasty. i told peter i hoped i wouldn't get carted away if i started drinking my menstrual blood and he said if people found out, i just might. but then again no one harvests my blood to sell at saturday markets for $4/dozen. this is so fucked up... she is being killed for eating her own eggs (she laid and ate another one today). apparently with chickens these days it's actually bred out of them to fuck. there is a rooster here who lives with 25 hens and only rarely does one of them actually guard her egg and take care of it (it's called brooding) because she knows it's fertilized.
maybe we will have a little ceremony tonight for her by the fire.

i think the gay rodeo is this weekend

on saturday justin and i took the 8:10 ferry from port angeles across the strait of juan de fuca to victoria, the capitol of british columbia. 
where we didn't get any stamps in our passports, so we might have not gone at all.
we intended it to be a day trip-- most of the time we walked around looking for food. we found a vegan buffet called "green cuisine" which charges you by the kilogram! i ate 5 kilograms of food once. we bought yummy beer and wine and drank it, and then stole magnetic hematite from the royal museum of britsh columbia (which wanted to charge us $18.50  piece to get in). we have this new code of ethics where if you want something and it costs too much then you take it... i think i've only paid for chocolate once or twice on this trip. there was this AMAZING chocolate company called organicfair which we got a TON of different flavors. also got a baseball cap and beauty and the beast. basically the day was spent feeling bored and illegitimate beausewe didn't want to spend money and yet we spent a lot of it. 
we went to catch the 6:15 ferry but it was full! we decided not to take the 7:30 (and have to get picked up begrudgingly at 9pm) and just stay the night. immediately we began approaching moderately hip young people to ask what was going on that night. we got varied responses and decided to hit up the vegan buffet again before it closed at 8. we asked the cashier with platinum blond hair shabed on one side and 8 inches long on the other...she told us some new places and then we asked her the real question "sorry to ruin this pure exchange, but where can we get drugs?" "look, this is not a pure exchange, this is victoria." and she ran out to get a buddy of hers who had just left. after dinner we hung out with this buddy and 2 others behind a dumpster, drinking beer, smoking spliffs, and talking about rocks and breakups until it was time to buy acid from the bouncer of a nearby metal club. i have never so obviously bought drugs in my life... amazing. about 7 US$ for a hit, pas mal. then we followed colin and john (i'll call him john, i never learned his name the whole night!) to colin's house where a party was growing. colin lives in a magical relic from the 19th century-- used to be the mayor's house. wood paneled with a cozy kitchen, a co-op full of seemingly interesting hip indie mid to late 20s types. colin was growing kombucha in his room which was delicious. and then the DJ started. i danced and took breaks all night, learning so many names (mine was elliot- which i've used before i knew ali used it too. after all, our real names are similar), eating fresh mulberry cheesecake, talking about permaculture, dancing, not getting high (bogus acid grr), feeling not at home and out of place, being worried, turning down an offer to dance with megan who had just complimented my dancing because i dont think i actually know how to dance with someone. and realizing that no one there was actually that interesting to me...  that was strange. it was like everyone had died sort of. i would never want to live in victoria...
so at about 2:30 j and i approached colin and asked to sleep on his balcony. he made a nest of blankets and it was cold outside but we were very warm, burritoed in by our sweaters and comforters. we pretended we were on a ship, sleeping under the stars with sheets as sails and the badly played clarinet (somewhere in the distance) as seagulls.
woke up 5 hours later to creep out and catch the ferry, and uneventful and nappy ride. we weren't looking forward to hitching the 10 mile ride back to the farm (buses dont run on sundays), but we met a guy in country aire (the health food store) who drove us all the way home! he lives right in town and he drove us out to the farm... wow. people like him are great to find when you are tired of being errant and just want to sleep. his name is bill, he used to work for 20 years for the rock division of warner brothers records, in artist relations. he says john fogerty is a jerk and the barenaked ladies are nice guys. we gave him one of our many stolen chocolates.
it's nearly noon here and i haven't done any work yet. bean picking? uprooting canadian thistle? i hate working here. i just want to eat and play and hike. and find psychedelic mushrooms.
so that was my 26 hours in canada. a little alienating and a lot of chocolate.

Gabe's Ballad: Balmy Summer Nights

Frankenstein appeared on the river and he leapt into a pile of smoldering leaves. He turned and saw the herd of oxen bearing down on him. "I'm really not that artistic, but like BAOOOOAHHHAOOOHAHHHHH," and scarred for life in the best way ever, the boy leapt down the rocks and pummeled to his death. But an old woman found his shoe sticking out of the junkyard of life. She unwrapped her shawl and filled the shoe with her spit. Pass, she threw it to the leapard that had appeared in drag on the rocks. The leapord adjusted his polka dotted tophat and smiled with a devious grin. "My my, what have we here." I'm just listening to this, but I'm bored BAOOHHHHAAOOWWOWWW. I think I see the development of a crazy cat woman. The woman drenched herself with the loafer-spit and laughed manically. My head is empty! said the leapard. No, that's what they said. Fake fishing. I'm leaving this room, BAAAAHHAWWOWWW. Now stop a moment, fuckwad, let's backtrack.
Frankenstein, looking for meaning in his life, decided to teach the leapard to dance. The leapard stretched out his elegantly painted claws to flip the switch on his stereo which began to blast songs of the old ages. She stood on one paw, her whiskers quivering in the moonlight. They meet a dolphin that can walk on land. It teaches them techno. They entered into a romance, all three of them, that will go down in the annals of polyamory. But their love affair did not last long. It shone brilliantly like a star, and then burnt out. That is all. Shortly thereafter, and only briefly before the apocalypse, there was a festival of mammoth proportions. Hamsters on a wheel, a human ferris wheel. They were celebrating the coming apocalypse and engaging in orgiastic raving. Religious leaders commanded them to eat 300 clementines each and glues the skins to their skin. Unfortunately, the jubilant people could not find enough women named Clementine. Many many miles away a woman named Clementine rode through the ocean in a small boat filled with marshmallows. Clemetine was omnilingual, she spoke all languages, including the language of the ocean and the trees and the wind. But when deprived of marhsmallows, alas, she was deaf and dumb. BAAAOOOAAAOWWWOWW. She ate all her marshamallows, called the apocalypse, but didn't hear it, so she survived. Vegan marshmallows will not save you on a boat. Don't eat marshallows because the apocalypse will get you.