The Master Plan
I watched the clock intently as the long arm ticked closer to the 3:00PM mark.
The bell usually rang at 3:15 but Ms. Walters, my second grade teacher would always stop class early.
One of us would get chosen to read from our favorite book for 15 precious minutes while the rest of class looked bored enough to die right then and there. I recall Sheila reading aloud from "Where the Wild Things are" and a kid named Earl brazenly reading from his older brother's "Mad magazine" until it was quickly confiscated.
The day it was my turn I brought my copy of Alice in Wonderland that was disintegrating from wear. Ms. Walters was thrilled at my choice and said that once everyone in class had their day to read, that I could continue every day after reading a little bit from that book. She confided to me it was her favorite.
After I got entirely through with Alice, Ms. Walters lent me her threadbare copy of "Through the Looking Glass" to read that aloud to a sullen crowd of seven year olds at Jim Cherry Elementary.
As I read through chapter eleven a weird little seed was planted and my obsession started as simply as that.
Every night I went to sleep dreaming of a large garden; an exotically beautiful place with a creepy undertow. It would be something mysterious that would belong entirely to me and keep me safe from precarious outside forces over which I had no control.

I would of course require a very very large chessboard, just like in the book.



After school I escaped unnoticed into the woods behind my parents house where my very own "house" stood. It was an empty Kenmore box with holes cut out for cathedral windows and plastered with glued bits of foil paper and flotsam. I had squirreled the box furtively from the garbage pile a few weeks earlier and it was beginning to wilt from the moisture of a weepy spring in Georgia. I knew I would need to "build" again soon.
Undaunted I crawled inside with my horse head writing tablet and markers, shooed away the silver fish and began to crookedly draw my future.

I can't say exactly when the other projects came to mind or were modified again and again like honing an enormous stone to its final shape. I only know when they became cooked all the way in my head. It is at once liberating and mortifying to be so in love with your own art. I would often bother my father's drunken coworkers who came to the house for the odd martini. It always turned out much odder than they anticipated. "See? The giant concrete Pegasus goes here..." I would tap on the paper containing my elementary school blueprints and stare into red rimmed eyes waiting for the recognition of my little demented genius.
I wanted so badly for somebody, anybody to understand and appreciate my madness even just a little.

Somewhere in my late teens I began to consider the real world challenges associated with being compelled to make something that everybody else will think is entirely retarded. I didn't even have a good excuse. Historically most people who built strange giant things tragically lost a family member or had God giving them directions or like the man in Mexico who built his alien landscape using ceramic bits and pieces of glass said the butterflies had whispered instructions to him. I was pea green with envy as I had no outward mental illness on which to rely as a plausible excuse, perhaps in a way that made me slightly crazier than they were.
One thing was for certain - I would need a LOT of property.

When terrible awful things would happen to me I would retire emotionally in my place that didn't exist yet. My poorly rendered drawings and half-assed engineering gave me shelter when I had not a soul to turn to. Mentally I could always float in my own lake in my personally built rowboat with the cheery fiberglass head of the lochness monster at the bow to lead me though troubled waters.

After years of being reasonably happy and yet piss poor as an artist for hire, I felt my long term garden goals were not being met. My internal voice would not be silenced. I quietly got a respectable job about ten years ago. I hated it and still do but I knew that sometimes you have to give up everything to get everything. So I socked away twenty five percent of my pay, I wore Salvation Army clothing and used shoes like I intended to in the first place. I drove a vintage car and pretended it was because I was cool instead of not wanting to dig into my cache for a down payment.
During this time I worked and reworked my ideas, sometimes bringing books of my weird sketches to inappropriate places like parties or bars.
"You see? the bats fly out of the nose here."
I would stare into red rimmed eyes and tap the pages for emphasis.

Eventually I stopped telling most people about my plans.

Fast forward to today.
Today I drive two hours to my NEW PLACE, the one I sign the papers on - my precious and bizarre garden that has been waiting so patiently for me to build it finally has a physical place for it to be born into. The import has welled up in me. The gravity of what I am doing is at once astounding and completely and mercifully ridiculous.
My place is 50.73 acres with a creek bordering on two sides. I called the county extension office to see if the creeks have a name, they don't. I get to name my two orphan creeks.

Now I have to build a house where I can go wash up after a hard day of building the weird stuff. I will likely have to sell everything I own to do it.
Here is the view from my future front door.



fucking huzzah.