I had been thinking about how out of touch with nature I am. I drive to work in my metal car. I watch computer-generated films on my DVD player at night. When I sleep, it is on a bed of circuits and lies.
I suppose that’s the reason that I first started to eat handfuls of dirt - to feel more at one with nature. It was only one or two a week to start with. After a long day, I’d nip out to the back garden, before my wife got home, and help myself to a lovely mound of moist soil.
At first you think it’s not all that nice, but, let me tell you, it grows and grows and grows on you. Soon you’re appreciating the nutty, bitter nuances of it’s flavour, and comparing different sections of your garden, to find which has the best bite to it. And the way it makes you feel - wow. I can’t really get it across here. It’s as if, your whole life, you’ve been living in orange packaging, but now the packaging is green, and it’s good for the environment. It as no artificial colours or flavours.
It didn’t take long for me to work up to a good two handfuls a day - one first thing in the morning with my coffee, and then another after my working day was done. Those were some of the best days of my life, really they were.
Of course, I couldn’t stop at two handfuls a day. Not with soil so good. I got so I would sneak it to work worth me, in my coat pocket so that I could chew on it as I typed. It attracted many stares. My colleagues started to ask questions, and were never satisfied with my answers.
Eventually my wife caught me hunched over her pansies, stuffing fistful after fistful of rich earthy goodness into my gaping, salivating mouth. For a long time, she said nothing at all. We just sort of stared at each other. Me, with the brown wrong of soil all down my chin and shirt, looking up like a child caught in the clandestine act of onanism, and her, with her woman’s face and ways, looking back on me like a disgusted, disappointed parent.
After what seemed like forever, it was me who broke the silence. “Oh Daddy,” I said through teeth caked in mud and worm-halves, “Oh I’m so sorry”. As I started to sob, and reach up to those hands, those hands that had caressed me in happier times, she moved away from me, her face sour and twisted beyond recognition. “You fucker…” she said “…you fucker”. And she walked away.
More fool her, I say. Now I have my pick of the soil, and I can eat it whenever I like. I don’t even go to work any more - who needs work when you have all the food and love you need in the fields and in the grass verges of any town in England?
And that’s where you’ll find me - the grass verges - digging up handfuls of wonderful, wonderful soil and scoffing it away, pausing only to vomit or sing a little song now and then. That’s where you’ll find me - the fields - pressing my body against the earth, licking at the bounty it has laid before me and sobbing great big, blissful sobs. Living as nature intended. That’s where you’ll find me. Yeah…
It was a cold, bright day in 2005 when our home was christened Fort Awesome, and a website was made in its honour. Since then, Fort Awesome has moved to a new physical house with a nicer kitchen, and even swapped out one of its members for a new, younger and more attractive one; although the old guy will still get alumni benefits (if you donate now!). But now the world of the big and adult is upon us, and we must move into separate houses with washing lines and small herb gardens. The spirit of Fort Awesome will live on over wires, sent in digital packets. Digitial packets of love.
