The long lost metaphors of the farming life, what does it mean to say that something has gone to seed, that something is seedy? Does it mean that for the current harvest nothing is useful, but there are seeds there for a future harvest if properly tended? If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time you may be aware of a general tension between high and low culture, the somewhat educated & removed perspective in dialogue with seedier sides of life. This is never more true than when I get together with Liz. I actually try to avoid her a bit for reasons that will be readily apparent; I’ve never known her life to not be how it is at the present, except when were children perhaps. No, even then it was like this on a smaller scale. This next bit is a train wreck so brace your self. The best way to tell train wreck stories is head on, no jumping off the tracks. Liz calls me on Sunday, our friend Mark was coming into town for his thirty third birthday, which is Wednesday. I met Mark when I was twelve. Mark broke up Liz’s first marriage and is still in love with her, well he was a primary factor at least. Liz’s husband had been in training to be a pastor, but his brother was struck and killed by a semi when he was on the side of the highway fixing a flat. Her husband sank into a deep depression and stopped believing in God. This rift in faith undermined their marriage. Truth is of course stranger than fiction and the details I’m about to give are going to sound fictive past the point of credulity. Mark is staying with Liz, he wants to move back from North Dakota, Liz also has two people staying with her who are trying to kick heroin. One is a striper at Roxy’s and the other is her boyfriend. The boyfriend was on a hard jonze over the weekend and Liz fixed him with a midol and vodka cocktail, “which seemed to work, or at least it got him through the night”. Liz is on food stamps, having just got out of the hospital for a suicide attempt herself, that was prompted by the end of her last relationship, which involved her lover spending several thousand dollars of her money and leaving her when she was broke. I got a strong bad vibe from him and whenever Liz would call to invite me to a BBQ or something, I was always too tired. I actually never met him, as the vibe was strong enough to be carried by the phone. I could hear him in the background when she first moved in with him and I remember thinking, “I don’t want this guy to know where I live.” Liz is a nurse. She knew what to say to get them to properly admit her, “I need to be on suicide watch”. As soon as she was admitted, the hospital she was working at fired her. Last week she was bit in the face by a dog. She saved fifty bucks by removing the stitches herself. She’s been talking care of the dog that bit her. She and Mark came and met me bowling, we shot pool, and came here to the house after to catch up. Liz actually laughs a great deal in that, “well, what are you going to do” way. Liz has a lot of potential, but consistently makes pretty poor choices (as at times do we all). The silver lining is that one must recognize in her courage, her humor and her compassion, that as seedy as this all might seem, there is clearly the potential for a harvest in her future.