Happiness

Happiness bubbles up in Ephemerata Gardens in fleeting things that happen.

The season's first tomato or strawberry drop of blood on the vine. Gathering food grown here, cooking and eating and sharing it, sometimes doing the dishes humming an uncomposed song. Prickly pear cacti bloom yellow bursts echoed by the sunflower patch. 

Chickens catch a purple plastic snake and chase each other around. Monk squawks fly over, the birds rarely landing on the alley power lines. Gangly juvenile Yellow-Crowned Night Heron come down to the baby pool of water. Also, cardinals, blue jays, and butterflies eat the figs. Dragonflies and toads in the greywater pond.

Sunsets hit the top of the pecan in a golden glow while the rest of the yard's already shadowed. Sitting in the shade.

Happiness is not an object or pursuit here but a relational event of light, color, sounds, foods, life forms pulsing in the landscape--qualia of life held together in a harmonious sensory expression. A collective curling up of a smile or jiggling of laughter. Also, happiness is shot through with an all consuming love between lives, a kind of clinging that veers into sadness and loss. It is a way of being for the world that plays on becoming part of a living machine, where you are not liberated but attached and made responsible, eaten alive. Happiness becomes a collaborative sculpture planed down by multiple artists with different aesthetic visions.

There are surprises like fat green caterpillars eating the sprawling tomato vines that I should kill, but don't. Vince's neighbor next to the Cathedral of Junk kills butterflies since he doesn't want caterpillars eating up his yard. Longlasting bumpy brown clusters of fungi on the composting diapers. Snow on the bottle wall raised beds. Happiness is not a state of being but little melting crystals, totally uncontrollable. I can't say if the other entities involved are happy about being in Ephemerata Gardens, or even other people who visit. The elderly woman with her granddaughter aprovingly called it a "bushy garden" with everything overgrown. She held my arm as we maneuvered the perilous gravel walkway. Her light touch also made me happy, and her exclamations: "Oh! A cactus flower!"

Tinkering and wasting time here makes me happy, finding a use for salvaged things nobody else wanted. Telling jokes and stories to visitors, performing for and teaching them. I'm happy when visitors leave a cash donation, like a tithe. Last weekend we earned about a hundred bucks from twenty visitors to our micro-tourist roadside attraction (realizing Disneyland expects this from each visitor). We "sold 'em a look" of the "House" exhibition.* Money is a clotted form of sharing gifts with each other. More to the point, making something out of nothing makes me happy. 

Happiness over nothing, just a nice breeze or watching my son dance to the alley neighbor's Mariachi music. He claps when the song is over. "Yaaaay!" Happiness happens when things like minds, bodies, objects, and events all line up in a brief refrain that suddenly glows while its fading.** This coinciding is hemmed in and even intensified by blanketing unhappiness, suffering and hardship, lurking malevolant forces, or the tenderness of knowing mortality. So happiness is not necessarily about innocence, purity, or naivety. 

There is even melancholy happiness, like poppies on the pet graves every spring. Cold winter moonlight.

In Bhutan, happiness is a metric opposed to the bland measure of Gross National Product. Bhutan surveys citizen happiness by sex, age, region, occupation, education, and other factors to quantify Gross National Happiness. The Center for Bhutan Studies developed the sociological survey tool to measure habitual subjective states as a national development aid. Money ("sustainable economic growth") is just one of four elements that are supposed to guide national development (alongside cultural values, the environment, and good governance). International conferences help to transmit the concept of this alternative development mode and measure of national growth. Over half of the people in Bhutan are farmers, and in 2010, their mean happiness--5.8 on a 10 point scale--was just slightly above the least happy people in Bhutan employed by the National Work Force, while Civil Servants were the happiest.*** Women experienced anger more than men, and in general were less happy.

Ephemerata Gardens and Bhutan are trying to engineer affective atmospheres where happy patterns can happen. We're serious about happiness. Characters in these landscapes are potential parts of circuits of happiness. Feelings are quantified or listed as artifacts, becoming self-reflexive to enhance or preserve harmonious relational patterns between selves/societies/ecosystems. Like in Disneyland, there is almost a coercive element here: you should feel happy, you will feel happy in this magic kingdom. 

2012

*In the 1950's, Ray Bivens of the Black Hills Animal Farm roadside attraction taught Tinkertown's Ross Ward to "sell 'em a look!" "They'll pay everyday to see the same old bear and you won't need to buy a new bear every day either." Ross J. Ward, "I did all this while you were watching TV," published by the Tinkertown Museum, p. 2.
**Sara Ahmed, "Happy Objects," in The Affect Theory Reader, 29-51, ed. by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, Durham: Duke University Press (2010), pp. 36-7.
***2010 survey http://www.grossnationalhappiness.com/docs/2010_Results/PDF/National.pdf, p.19, women's anger p.65.

Catmospheres

Visitors to Ephemerata Gardens inevitably ask, “So just how many cats do you have?” For years, Delphi was our official greeter and Mia did her hoop jump at the end of the Museum of Ephemerata tour. Cats lounge everywhere, throwing together temporary forts and bedding out of whatever's handy. Laps and bathroom sinks serve as improvised hammocks. The shed roof provides the perfect patio lookout. In the winter they seek warmth, discovering accidental passive solar junkitecture like Perlita’s greenhouse, a broken window leaned against a wall. There are also cats you don’t see who sneek away from the clutter of other felines to enjoy solitary catnaps, like PT’s burrow under the kitchen sink where we used to save plastic grocery bags.

The yard came with strays  – a tatter-eared tom, a soon pregnant golden tabby kitten, and six or seven other felines who depended on scraps from the butcher two doors down. Every day an employee fed them in the alley, calling out “Here babies!” to summon the clutter. The colony was growing fast thanks to steady food and no sterilization. Over the years we “fixed” more than two-dozen (as if their reproductive capacity was something broken).

Our second winter at the house, the tomcat lost his left eye. As the cold came on he stopped roaming the yard and just lay there, missing eye suppurating a clotted yellow flow. We were letting him waste away. My stepmom, also an animal person, asked, “Shouldn’t you just put him to sleep?” Instead we used holiday gift money to take him to the vet. Tricked into a cat carrier with wet food, he was neutered, vaccinated, eye sewn up, body purged of parasites, gently “interpellated into the modern biopolitical state” under the aegis of love and care.* For three days he healed in our bathroom, saturating it with litter box smells and a polecat stench of spray from his oily coat.

The missing eye healed well, stitched skin dimpling into a little bowl of fur. We called him One-Eye. He became the guardian of our TNR (Trap-Neuter-Release) colony. He even began to purr. His territorial aggression to male cat strangers dwindled, but he still sprayed everything and fought off dogs by leaping on their backs despite his partial blindness. Then one cold November night we heard a dog growling in the yard and One-Eye went missing. He just vanished from our vulnerable cat preserve.

Cat characters like One-Eye saturate spaces with their presence. Cat fur finds its way everywhere. Purrs resonate bodies with healing frequencies.** Hints of spray or urine linger in the air for months, marking objects with pheromone messages about an animal’s sex, age, and health that humans, lacking vomeronasal sensory organs, can’t comprehend. It is an affective writing that is smelt and felt, not seen and read. Becoming a part of these atmospheres by caring for cats involves daily feeding rituals, close contact with wounds, suffering, and feces, and crime scenes: dead roaches, anoles, bird feathers, the occasional baby possum or squirrel. Sadly, caring for mortals inevitably involves burying dead cats or wondering if missing ones will ever return. Worrying about cats, slowing down and enjoying their company on your lap, stressing out over vet bills, being annoyed by nagging midnight meows or stepping in puke – a welter of feelings spins out of our self-imposed responsibilities to the felines. And you can’t care for an animal without caring for its life-support habitat. Like any form of life, cats need a certain kind of atmosphere in order to survive, but also emanate an atmosphere of their own. We cohabit that territory, a catmosphere crossed by little weather patterns of feline love, need, and aggression.

For cats, love, aggression, territory, and smells are not linguistic or symbolic statements, but relational atmospheres expressed through layered sensory patterns of purrs, meows and hisses, touches, bites, scratching, and phermones. As Gregory Bateson puts it, “the cat does not say ‘milk’; she simply acts out (or is) her end of an interchange, the pattern of which we in language would call ‘dependency.’ But to act or be one end of a pattern of interaction is to propose the other end. A context is set for a certain class of response.”*** Developing his cyber-ecological model of identities, Bateson argues that relationships between self/other or self/environment

are, in fact, the subject matter of what are called “feelings” – love, hate, fear, confidence, anxiety, hostility, etc. It is unfortunate that these abstractions referring to patterns of relationship have received names, which are usually handled in ways that assume that the “feelings” are mainly characterized by quantity rather than by precise pattern.****

Feelings are not strictly internal events, but waver somewhere in between individuals, saturating a common atmosphere through repeated relational experiences. Each kitten's features, mewls, and purrs tug at something in us that wants to care for them, to become responsible for their lives.

Catmospheres are inflated with feeling responsible for other life forms, but it is unclear where catmospheres and feeling responsible begin and end. The intimate little catmosphere balloons out to problematic landscapes of open pit bentonite and clay mines that become kitty litter, and landfills where bagged animal feces and litter make up around 4% of municipal waste. At the urban scale, ornithologists are concerned that feral and pet cat populations turn cities into “sinks” that suck bird species diversity out of the atmosphere.***** The American Bird Conservancy blames cats for 500 million bird deaths a year, arguing against TNR colonies as bottomless bellies.****** Cats are atmospherically judged as far surpassing wind turbines in their deadly impact on bird populations, while still falling significantly behind windows.******* Feeling responsible floats out of control. We want to do something for all the strays, but they can’t all live inside with us, and that makes us accomplices in the ecological crimes of our “subsidized predators.”********

We became crazy cat people. One winter freeze we had over a dozen cats inside, with temporary barricades to keep the eight indoor cats separated from the outdoor ones, each with their own food, water, and litter boxes. Every year we weatherize the back porch with sheet metal and plastic bags and set up a heat lamp bulb to warm them. Catering to the cats and their litters can become overwhelming and take over our lives, like the eight kittens one spring that all needed sterilization. Or chores back up, dried poop on the litter box room floor with empty 10 pound food bags (saved for some reason) falling over on top. Scenes that tire me with the recognition that I have hours of work to do.

A special voyeuristic fascination is reserved for people whose atmospheres become glutted with life forms, who can’t say “no” to animals or objects in need. Building on the morbid popularity of A&E’s Hoarders, Animal Planet’s Confessions: Animal Hoarding adopts the soundtracks and gritty aesthetics of horror movies. Shaky cameras maneuver houses swarming with cats or dogs or both, stacked floor to ceiling with animal cages and aquaria of captive life forms. We see catmospheres layered with scratch marks, walls browned knee-high with wreaking phermone graffiti. Cats give up on the moldy, overflowing litter boxes and use beds, couches, and piles of clothes. Feelings of nurturing, saving, and rescuing animals in need have tipped over into scenes of excess, transforming houses and people into overwhelmed life support systems. Watching these scenes, a sense of disbelief and the humor of excess mingle with pity and disgust. Something familiar and ordinary has taken an extreme trajectory, without the atmosphere’s inhabitants quite noticing.

Once we had two kids, the patterns of our relationship with the cats quickly changed. All the indoor cats now stay outside in the front yard. Our oldest cat Mia and three-legged Lacy get to come in for rainstorms and extreme temperatures. It wasn’t the occasional scratch, but the constant sweeping up of fur, one too many meows that woke the baby. Our son likes to eat the cat food and tip the moat that keeps out ants. He thinks the litter box is a sandbox. Maybe we were unfairly treating the cats as surrogate babies. Now we are a little hardened to the cats' neediness. Why change the litter box when they have the whole yard?

2013

* Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2008), 281.
** Elizabeth von Muggenthaler of the Fauna Communications Research Institute in North Carolina studies the healing qualities of cat purrs. She patented a therapy device based on findings that frequencies from 25 to 50 Hertz – the cat purr range – help heal torn muscles and broken bones (von Muggenthaler 2009). Her research dovetails with claims that pet owners make fewer doctor visits and have lower stress levels. In a 2008 study, researchers found that cat people’s risk of suffering fatal heart attacks are 40% lower than those without cats (BBC News 2008).
***Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 2d ed., Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, (2000), 275.
****Ibid., 140-1.
***** Anne L. Balogh, Thomas B. Ryder, and Peter P. Marra (2011), “Population demography of Gray Catbirds in the suburban matrix: sources, sinks and domestic cats,” Journal of Ornithology, 152(3):717-726.
****** http://www.abcbirds.org/newsandreports/releases/120329.html
******* http://www.sibleyguides.com/conservation/causes-of-bird-mortality/
********Balogh, Ryder, and Marra, 724.

Eggshell Violation

Our two chickens have been laying about an egg a day. We got them as pullets from the feed store Callahan's: a Barred Plymouth Rock named Sal and a golden girl--maybe an Orpington?--we call Mango. Lately Sal runs around with two roosters and a rogue black hen who appeared in the spring and has taken to laying her eggs in our coop. Sal and Mango lay brown eggs, but this hen's are a beautiful blue. Mango got broody on her nest all day. Those six eggs must be fertile. I mark them with pencil so I can harvest the newly laid ones.

We spoil the hens and ourselves with organic feed, about three times more expensive than conventional, but the eggs taste three times better, their luminous amber yolk so bright.  The hens leave craters in the gravel scratching for seeds and insects like earthworms and fleas with their microscope eyes. They help themselves to whatever garden greens they can peck through the fence, hopping up to pluck snow peas. Lamb's quarters and other seedlings that volunteer around the yard in spring become wild sprout salad. Penned chickens are lawnmowers, decimating groundcover like goats.

For years we've put our cracked eggshells in the garden by the sidewalk as an interesting pattern among the pansies, snapdragons, and bamboo shoots. People say the shells make earthworms happy. They take a year to decompose. One morning right after the first Austin Art Yard Tour I'm up front watering and a Code Enforcement truck pulls up. The officer snaps some pictures of our yard and asks about the eggshells. He is inspecting some of the art yards for potential violations, and he's very friendly and smiling. Scott Stevens, who organizes the annual tour with Robert Mace, said they got a call from Code the day before tour weekend asking if they had a permit for the event. No, it is very informal and many of the sites are just drive by. The officer asks me, "Is this all there is--just the front yard?" Yes, just hundreds of egg shells in the garden and thousands of bottle caps strung up as garlands, stars, moons, and chains on the front of the house. (Never mind the museum inside.)

City councils work with code departments to set up ordinances that regulate whether or not having chickens is permissible in your city. Austin has lax laws about urban livestock. There's even an annual Funky Chicken Coop Tour. "Are you interested in raising chickens? Do you need coop design ideas? Do you enjoy talkin' chicken w/folks? Do you want to show your kiddo's where eggs actually come from? Do you own chickens now and need a few new ideas to spruce up their coop?" Chicken coops are unpermitted structures improvised out of chicken wire and often resused wood. Some are mobile and you can mow your yard by moving them about once a week. Coops must be fortified against predators like racoons, possums, and dogs, making them one part prison, one part fortress.

The main arguments against backyard chickens are noise and poop. Neighbors driven insane by 3AM rooster crows. Allegations that chicken poop runoff is eutrophying urban creeks with phosphorous. These kinds of complaints are also leveled against dogs, but imagine if your city said "No more dogs allowed--you will be ticketed if you have one, and the dog will be euthanized." More annoying to me is when the neighbor's chicks scratch in our food patch, its fence mesh just big enough for them to squeeze through. Now a layer of expensive chicken wire keeps them out. An inch gap at ground level lets gulf coast toads slip beneath the screen when the hens try to eat them.

Backyard eggs are food security, easy high protein, sustainable food so local you step in chicken poop. Chickens are at the center of new markets in chicken stuff (prefab coops, feed, even chicken diapers for indoor fowl), and all kinds of little communities of chicken people gather around them to enjoy the birds, trade tips, or mobilize for a common cause like revising city code. Every few months the New York Times runs an article on the "backyard chicken trend [sweeping] the country," sometimes chalking it up to the 2009 recession and desires for Depression-era self-reliance.

The eggs/unborn lives are part of an omnivourous whirlwind of consumption going on in the landscape patch. Like the compost pile, the chickens eat pretty much every living thing, but prefer scraps from our plates. As vegetarians, we eat their eggs and poop (via compost pile via garden bed via vegetables), but not them. But everybody else wants to eat them. We have lost five hens to animals and only one to sickness. A little massacre--a dog or something broke into the back of the first coop I built and tore apart all three hens. Then the neighbor's dog caught Aya, a golden rogue hen we adopted and tamed, and she died on a little bed of hay from a punctured lung or broken neck. Sometimes I forget to coop the hens and one morning find just feathers around the yard and our second hen in the fig tree--probably a raccoon. She never got over the shock, caught some kind of virus, and withered away.

Our neighboors across the alley don't coop their chickens, and we're never quite sure which of the free roaming hens and roosters belong to them, and which are rogue. At dusk the birds gather in the hackberry branches clucking to each other in a rural refrain. The roosters crows day and night, with their glossy regalia of white, umber, and iridescent blue-black intensities. In Miami, free roaming and feral chicken populations become so large--"numbering in the thousands"--that Code Enforcement officers and firefighters dedicate time each month to rounding them up. "Captured chickens are sold to farms in Homestead and the proceeds go to charities in the City (including the Mayor’s Holiday Celebration)." So far they've raised over ten thousand dollars.

In February all six eggs hatch. The chicks hide under Mango's hot, fluffy body. One is blonde with two brown stripes down its back, and the others are black with white spots. Like magic our two hens trippled themselves. In a few months we'll know if the babies are hens or roosters.

Sometimes in the backyard I lapse into a naive state where I'm struck by the oddity of chicken money--buying and selling life itself. You can order chicks online for around $3 each. Then the market logic settles on me again. Of course you can buy chicks--you can buy chicken meat raw or cooked. The chicken factories chug away with their industrial egg and broiler machines all across the southern US. Seeking more flexible low-wage labor to supplement a largely African American workforce,  they now hire migrant laborers from Central and South America.* The broilers with burned off beaks are commodity life forms bred and engineered into being. So different from raising chickens yourself, the chores of provisioning them and cleaning out the coop, the responsibility for your food/pet, killing and plucking and eating the birds, or burying them when they die--the living commodity organizes parts of your life's textures and feelings in a complex relationship, adding to your qualia of life.

I crack our hens' unfertilized chicks into a bowl and whip with a fork to make breakfast tacos in the skillet. The shells go in an old plastic yoghurt container so we can later put them in the garden.

2012

*Angela C. Stuesse, "Poultry Processing, People's Politics: Industrial Restructuring and Organizing across Difference in a Transnational Mississippi," In Mexican Immigration to the U.S. Southeast: Impact and Challenges. Mary E. Odem & Elaine Cantrell Lacy, eds. Atlanta: Instituto de México, 2005. http://lasa.international.pitt.edu/members/congress-papers/lasa2004/files/StuesseAngela_xCD.pdf

Wheelflowers

Wheelflowers, wheeldomes, wheelwalls, wheelarbors, wheelbarrow shrines, welded-wheel bike racks, wheelgardens, and wheelmachines bloom everywhere in the patchy landscapes of the City of Living Garbage. There are bicycle-powered tablesaws and foodblenders, bike rim domes at Biosquat hunkered over hand-dug clay quarries and another at the Cathedral of Junk that incorporates a cosmic satellite dish and whirling A/C turban. Rubber tire planters, sometimes cut into fanciful bird forms or spiky crowns, grace yards and sidewalks. Earthship dwellers inhabit rammed-earth car tires. You enter Ephemerata Gardens through a wheelarbor of bike rims with an arced PVC/metal pole/guardrail skeleton that hosts moonflower and heavenly blue morning glory. In the backyard, three wheelflowers sway over our fig trees. White wing doves pause on them to survey the cats hunting on the ground below.

The wheelflowers bloomed when some side-of-the-road hubcaps, junk bike rims from the Yellow Bike Project, and PVC and metal pipes abandoned in our backyard met a little bit of wire and earth. They are doubled overhead by car and bicyclist emissions, with the small hubcabs centered in the web of bike spokes having a bigger share in the atmosphere's composition. The circles make a pattern with the sun's arc, the bottles stacked as retaining walls for raised bed gardens, and an arch of bent rebar with cut metal letters spelling out our garden's name.

Wheels compose landscapes of circular repetition and movement. Cars and bikes are so different -- the moods they stir up in traffic, their repair costs, the ways they spend time and energy, their relationships to the sky or hills (not to mention soil: cars are heavy and compact earth; they have to drive on non-permeable cover; food-powered machinery runs on agricultural fields and cars run on drilled land- and seascapes; you could go on and on). Car wheels, chained to machine engines, don't have the DIY flexibility of muscle/food-powered cyborgs like the bike or shoe. People are walking or biking into livable futures past junkyards of electrified and corn-fed automobiles. They build signposts out of vehicular debris, fenders welded into a huge gateway that reads "BIKETOPIA." The Nowhere City of Velocipedopolis.

Biosquat started out as a summertime homestead for outdoor living, with wintertime dwellings somewhere south. Their living experiment was to become bike nomads following bird migrations through a seasonal city stretched out across what David Santos calls “the New World Twilight Zone” in his onscreen epic, Wheeliad. The Zone is a north-south flyway for migrating monarch and snout nose butterflies, Mexican free-tail bats, hummingbirds, and hundreds of other beings of the sky who teach nomadic survival. The Zone's hourglass shape hosts supernatural anomalies at its tapered heart – “a geographic singularity of weirdness centered loosely on Mexico." Austin, Oz-Town, “a prime node in the twilight zone,” incubates mutations for survival in the ecological catastrophes wracking the early 21st century.

Biosquat's caretaker, Ed Sapir, leads us along paths winding through this edible landscape dotted with salvage architecture. The hillside gardens can be irrigated with rainwater caught in a homemade 600 gallon cistern that runs on a solar powered pump Ed designed. We visit the little egg-shaped dugout “hobbit hole” with a dome of welded bike wheels and curvy benches made of red clay mixed with sand. Climb up into the wheelegg treehouse, with its pointy end north and its wide side south, open-ended to the sun’s arc and cooling wind. Wired with electricity, but built for open-air, A/C-free summer sleeping, the treehouse lets you slumber in the sky. The treehouse’s rough cedar plank floor comes from a factory outside town. The egg’s pointy end is half of a satellite dish with an over-arc of bike rims wired to aluminum sailboat spars bought cheap – surplus junk. Political candidate signs make up the roof, but Ed wants to replace them with metal tiles. He envisions an elegant vernacular architecture akin to Finca Exotica's "tiki modernism" where the makeshift political signs, crumbling in the sun, no longer fit in. A beautiful curvy wheelbanister is held together by strong wire running in a circle surrounding the balcony in a structural hug. Ed says you could charge at it and just bounce off, it’s so strong. It’s the tension.

Everything at Biosquat is just hatching, all the time. Ed imagines the bike wheel domes
and red clay mortarwork as archaeological sites – readymade ruins or follies, overgrown with flora. While we sit and talk he plucks weeds in an ongoing shaping of the landscape. Like Santos’ online writing, Biosquat is devoid of any illusion of closure, permanently in progress, and alive. Half-born wheelforms accumulate for however long it takes for them to come together. Salvage architecture takes patience in a slow accretion of puzzle pieces. There are finished and inhabitable projects like the treehouse, and there are things in more elementary stages of coming through the pipedream bottleneck. Everything is many things at once, and nothing is what it was.

Biosquat plays out how cities might finally catch on to the ecstatic bounty of the post-industrial age – the trashed world. Beautiful houses have been built of waste. This radical tinkering revels in the surplus of decomposition, experimenting with new and unanticipated forms and landscapes out of mobility machines that are falling apart. Like a circus of scrappy novelties, it is an alternative, temporary urban zone that gets on with celebrating life in the face of ecochaos. Rolling with the cyborg bicyclist/bike body, it keeps human muscle power and feats of endurance like bicycle migrations at the center of possibilities. Carnival sustainability is “victory-in-advance,” as David Santos puts it – “victory-in-the-attempt” to bike out of peak oil collapse into the paradise of the City of Living Garbage.

Bottle Hoard

For some reason photographers love the stacks of green, brown and clear bottles we accumulated over seven years. The hoard invokes jokes like “That looks like my liver!” and concerns and critiques that “I hope you didn’t drink all those yourselves.” Those bottles are waiting for something. Maybe they’ll be mortared into luminous walls, or stacked to retain a bed of soil. Meanwhile, I’ve stopped collecting.

Recycled bottles in Austin are taken to a sorting facility with the rest of the curbside recycleables, but they are not melted down into new bottles or washed and reused. Glass is trucked to the FM 812 Resource Recovery Center (formerly called the FM 812 Landfill), joining a hoard that must make my stack look like a little shard. The City grinds up some of the glass and gives it away as “glass mulch,” free if you bag it yourself.  You can use it in landscaping instead of decomposed granite to add some color and sparkle, or pretend to be a circus performer who dances on broken glass.

I was surprised how fast our bottles accumulated. A big party could bring in over a hundred. At one point the yard had multiple stacks that got so high the bottles started rolling off the top. Now wine bottles are hidden in the storage shed, gallon jars line the chicken coop, and all the beer/soda/sparkling water bottles are in an eight foot long stack about fifteen bottles high and three deep against the shed.  The stacks are kept in place by gravity, a pattern of arrested flow. They would roll away if not buttressed by cinder blocks on one end and a wood scrap and concrete stairs on the other. The pattern has the grace of holding together without money and permanence. Bottle wall building requires a surprising amount of mortar, but stacking just takes time.

The front of our house is festooned with bottle cap snakes. Like our stacked bottles, the caps seem to index a habitual drinking habit (or at least obsessive collecting, or having too much time one your hands, or the willingness to waste it, or something not quite right). John Milkovisch’s Beer Can House in Houston is similarly armored with all that remained of what he drank over eighteen years, a shameless display of what had piled up through everyday consumption routines. The creator of the Mano Poderosa art yard, Mary Kraemer, dispels the drinking stigma by pointing out that the half-buried blue bottles that line her garden labyrinth come from the Ecology Action recycling center. The glinting bottles drink in the sunlight, concentrating its presence in the garden.  

Although our bottle stacks are so orderly they are photogenic, the bottle pile signals disorders like hoarding or alcoholism, bad attachments to forms of waste or getting wasted. As living garbage, the bottles are filled with danger and promise. They are tiny habitats that might have been filled with beer yeast and bacteria, or where mosquitoes might breed (something code enforcers scrutinize). They are at once cast-off traces and unrealized projects. The stacks reveal and embody the slow, steady piling up of routine desires and immanent possibilities. What would your bottle hoard look like, if you saved them for a few years? What would you do with them all?

2012