On Persistence

Have you ever encountered the persistent?

I mean, the really persistent?


Persistent as in asking multiple questions about the same thing, bombarding you like some aerial assault over the course of a day or a few days, with the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back that is your patience coming in the form of a most annoying question: "Are you sure?"

That question proves the last drop in the water torture that is persistent nagging. It compels you to dispose of niceties and diplomatic coverings and launch into an assault of your own that is a counterattack of pure, unadulterated, naked, vile truth; nay, it is the nuclear strike that annihilates the persistent.

The counterattack is not delivered in any gratuitously mean way, but as a litany of statements of fact that were otherwise couched in a language of gentility that the persistent clearly does not and cannot grasp. The truly persistent only think and speak in  languages and logics of excess and excuse, of fantasy and blindness. 

Thus, you begin, firmly and somewhat flatly, as if distancing yourself from your self: "Yes, I am sure. Let me tell you the real reasons why I am and why we are sure. First, your X was abysmal, not even competitive. I had to fight for recognition of something so base. Second, your Y was hardly appropriate. Third, your Z made us question..."
 
All the while your mouth emits a barrage of truths, you mind perhaps rhetorically frames the experience: "this is not me," "this is not my style," "I can't believe I am saying such things," but, ultimately, "you asked for it; you pushed me to to the brink." And then you realize: gosh, this feels so good.

You are not met with counter-resistance, because nothing can really survive your nuclear attack. You encounter an uncharacteristic silence or a meek, now seriously intoned, "I see. I thought that might be a problem."

Well, you just want to say but cannot because gentility once again possesses you, "you should have thought about that before you (a) applied, or (b) you began to assault me with your fantasies and your persistence. YOU made ME speak in terrible truths. YOU made ME be what I think to be rude in a way I am normally not.

Ah, yes, the joys of work this week. There were 4 such persistent encounters. Four.

But it did not stop there.

Gramsci has proven a most pathetic sight: my little garden buddy, surveying the bleak winter-scape, a garden helper without a garden.

We've not been treated to copious snow, or even lasting bits of snow this season, but subjected to a persistent brown (I am not complaining). Thankfully, we've had occasional rains to provide the moisture our hibernating flora needs, but those rains and those browns do not compensate for or assuage the pangs of gardening loss we feel in the way the presence and persistence of snow seems to do.

Snow buries the garden, removes it from our consciousness by covering it from our sight, forcing us to focus on other things. This season's temperance, unfortunately, urges forth the presence of spring flowers (the daffodils, Ornithogalum, Petasites) or the recently hibernated Toad Lilies, coaxes out a sexy green in slowly burgeoning buds: the gardening urge becomes more persistent, more, well, urgent. It is, after all, unfulfilled desire.

That desire is not, of course, helped by the arrival of garden porn: an orgiastic array of volcanic coloration, suggestive petal shots and the leave-nothing-to-the-imagination full frontals.

"Hi, sweety, wouldn't you just  like to run your fingers through my lace-like foliage?!"

or,

"Yeah? You like those stamens, don't you?"

I'm blushing with all of this beauty before me.

Even Gramsci is not immune. He desires, he wants, he needs to garden.

And so he does.

He fertilizes and waters in the only way Gramsci can.

Piles of displaced mulch and topsoil everywhere testify to his persistence.

Several Hellebores did not seem to make it, buried under Gramsci....er, remains, but this one (barely) did. And the odor surrounding it is, well, not pleasant.

This poor Big Blue Angel hosta had its roots exposed by a persistent Gramsci intent on watering it--a nakedness unbecoming (and improperly immodest) for an upstanding hosta.

Now: if only I can figure out a nuclear-type counteroffensive to ward off Gramsci fertilization.