Hippy Roundup

Image courtesy of www.foodfirst.org

I've always assumed the lady next door was a hippy. She wears billowing Indian print skirts & tie-dye shirts, has pendulous breasts that flop about unimpeded, is overweight, under washed, and has excessive facial hair. Sort of like how I imagine Patricia Krenwinkle would have turned out if she hadn't joined the Manson family.

The hippy lady next door and her husband are in charge of yard work and handy-man stuff at my place.

This morning I noticed a couple of garish jugs of something sitting outside my landlady's laundry room. I thought it was some sort of Nascar brand anti-freeze, which seemed odd, so I took a closer look. Round-Up. Extra strength, long lasting.

Faced with these two garish jugs full of Monsanto chemistry I had to reconsider the whole hippy business.

The signs were always there. The husband has been repairing our fence, replacing the wood with this weird toxic putty that gets the entire neighborhood feeling a bit like we are huffing paint. He's always at his most redfaced, sweaty and happy when he's slapping around this toxic paste. Our fence now weighs several tons, is held together and mostly upright by a convoluted set of metal cables, springs, & braces, and I hope no one is standing near it when it inevitably collapses.

They probably think organic is that thing the dude in Emerson Lake and Palmer plays. I can imagine them singing their favorite tunes from Brain Salad Surgery to each other: "You see it really doesn't matter when you're buried in disguise, by the dark glass on your eyes, though your flesh has crystallized... Still...you turn me on."

Meanwhile, while they sit there all fat and sweaty and high on solvent fumes in their toxic wasteland cabin next door, I have these two jugs of Monsanto poison sitting outside my apartment. In my more paranoid moments I'm positive I can feel myself mutating.