I felt as if I had been hijacked

rockbottom

“I felt as if I had been hijacked” – Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis

14 thoughts on “I felt as if I had been hijacked

    1. Huhu, I just realized I showed this one on the scrap press already … but that doesn’t count, does it? ;-) German chickens gackern. And Glucken glucken. >:-)

      Thank you very much.

        1. But do you forget? That you have posted a photo before? Uhh, the age … .

          So there is a cluck in English, i.e. a Mama chicken? Let’s see …

          Old English cloccian originally echoic. Cf. Turkish culuk, one of the words for “turkey;” Greek klozein, Latin glocire, German glucken. Related: Clucked; clucking.

          1. Of course I forget when I double post, sometimes, other times on purpose because they fit both blogs. You’re just a baby. I can feel age creeping up on me like a pair of cheap shorts. I’m turning into a dumb cluck;-}

  1. Awesome photograph.

    Plus, it reminds me of an obscure quote by Oscar Wilde –

    “People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it’s impossible to count them accurately.”

    Since this chicken is (obviously) out of his (or her) egg, that means he (or she) has been hatched…. :-)

    But it has this sort of half-stunned, half-stupefied look on its face – how the **** did I wind up here, of all places?

    1. Thank you very much for your comment (btw any chance you are going to resume your blog? It’s so good – I think I have read most of your old postings. Hmm, right now I am sounding like one of my own spammers :-S).

      It’s exactly what I thought: How the f*ck did I get here?

      I often wonder how and why and where people put their garden decorations – would be a project of its own: “The absurdity and surrealism of German front yards.”

      Ha!

      1. It’s really a great photograph, Martina. I keep coming back to look at it again….and again.

        And the look on the chicken’s face is….well….is effing priceless.

        Incidentally, after a long (too long I think) period of silence, I’ve started writing in my blog again. Possibly my delays are caused by the fact that since my day job is being a writer and since so often I just write write write….that it feels quite good to just sort of walk away from it all at moments. Not abandonment per se but just getting a little distance….so that when one returns, it feels……fresher.

        Anyway, there’s a new post up…..tell me what you think :-)

        1. What do you think all these chickens and gnomes do at night? Okay, that’s a rhetorical question. Perhaps they gather for a sort of “owners’ meeting” … talking about the proper handling of back and front yards.

          Your new post is interesting – interesting how my mood changed while reading it …. from grinning about the stuffed animals to thinking about the deer head. After the deer head everything changed. Even the stuffed and plastic animals didn’t look so cute anymore.

          Ah, yes, I fully understand what you say about getting distance. Essential for survival ;-)

  2. It may be a rhetorical question, but I’ve actually thought quite a bit, on and off, about what the chickens – and gnomes – and other garden sculptures/animals – might do at night. There are a lot of possibilities….in the same way that there are a lot of smaller tributaries and little rivulets and streams which spin off from a larger river. But, yeah – I can definitely see one of the perennial popular subjects on the agenda could be the proper care and handling of back and front yards.

    Of course, the darker side of my imagination wonders if the chickens and gnomes might turn their attention to that one derelict house whose new owners never water the lawn or take care of the plants, who let everything die and who have turned their house/yard/garden into a horrible eyesore. Which stands out in a quiet lane of otherwise perfect little houses with their perfect little gardens. And so the gnomes decide that the inhabitants of the oddball house must be punished, for not fitting in. But when they head down the street on their late-night garden vigilante policing raid….they discover that within the confines of the seemingly dead/never-watered garden….is a solitary, crusty, antisocial misogynistic gnome who doesn’t share their fondess for order. And then….

    The part about the deer head in my post – I’m certain that my thinking, and the darker places it took me to, was influenced by two things. One is that in the small Oregon town that I’ve made my adopted home in for the last dozen odd years, there is always ‘road kll’ around – animals on rural lanes, streets and highways get hit and killed by cars, especially at night, when the country roads aren’t well lit. Driving my car I dread hitting an animal; seeing their bodies is sobering, but it also makes me think about a lot of things. So that’s part of it…

    The other part comes from a poem by a great Oregon poet – the former ‘poet laureate’ of the state of Oregon, a man who believed that if you were a poet, you needed to write a poem every day of your life….something he did up till the day he died. One of his more well known poems is about just this – finding the body of a deer alongside a small country road – and the philosophical and personal (and emotional) problems it causes. It’s called “Traveling through the Dark” – and worth reading, for many reasons. Here’s the link – http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171495

    1. Oh, that’s a cool “grumpy gnome” story .. I hope there is no kitschy happy end with the grumpy gnome becoming a nice good citizen. I would prefer him to convince all the other gnomes to go out for some guerilla gardening.

      After reading the part of the comment and the poem I am glad the only road kill here is rabbits and many many hedgehogs. The one ore other big bird.

      The smaller the things you encounter in the dark on your travels the more easy it is to make decisions.

      1. Definitely no kitschy ending with the grumpy gnome getting a sanitized Disneyfied ending and being redeemed and joining the ranks of complacent citizenry. In fact it would have to be the reverse: the solitary misanthropic gnome corrupts his would-be ‘normal’ and ‘orderly’ gnome tormenters from down the street, and convinces them to join him in, as you so aptly put it, guerrilla gardening!

        I’m going to have to give the story some more thought now… :-)

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