galapagos north
Being’s how we South Enders are naturally indisposed to work — and work is pretty much non-existent down here anyway — we have a lot of neighbors who turn to alternative means of employment. Meaning, they become, in the parlance of the day, ENTREPRENEURS, a fancy French word for I’ll-be-my-own-boss-thank-you.
The artists pretty much have that trademarked. Get up before noon, putter around in their bathrobes with a cup of cappuccino, wait for the flash of inspiration to strike, then paint another watercolor sunset they can add to the wallspaces of the islands’ retailers with a handwritten FOR SALE tag, usually no more than 5 times the going rate. But the artists, with a bit of overbreeding, have pretty much saturated the area. We can’t all be artists, I suppose, although some years it sure seems that way. The creationists would have a field day with the evolutionists, since obviously Darwinian selection doesn’t seem to apply to artists here. Course, neither does intelligent design, you ask me. And I know you didn’t.
What Darwin does apply to are all our would-be animal entrepreneurs who pound a couple of corner stakes out back, fence off a piece of nettle acreage and commence to raising llamas or alpacas or show dogs or ostriches. For awhile the South End looked like a zoo for the insane. With the animals, I mean. My neighbor raised thousands of quail to sell to the Hawaiian market he imagined existed. Quail of the Nile, he called his ranch, to give it that international mystique. A year and $10,000 of bird feed later, he was broke and despondent and drunk as a goose so he let them all go. Coyote smorgasbord for awhile down here. The Mexican restaurant in Stanwoodopolis carried ostrich meat on the menu for a couple of years from O-Zi-Ya Ostrich Farms, not exactly authentic Hispanic cuisine, and anyway supply always exceeded demand, something Quail of the Nile might have revealed if we had an Ag College down these parts. Llamas ran their course a few years later —- looked like Machu Picchu for awhile. And now we got alpacas. Cute little buggers, but not much meat when you see one recently shorn.
Pygmy goats showed up in the Fog Farm fields last year. And for a time we had Vietnamese pygmy pigs. What most of these entrepreneurs figure is they’ll sell the newborns to other entrepreneurs, kind of a kennel dream, breed yourself to success. What they never figure out is the pyramid scheme it actually is, a Ponzi for pygmy pigs, until the feed bills mount and the poop filled fields look like muddy tarpits and finally they give up. And take up oil painting or driftwood sculpture.
Meanwhile we got a woods down here that’s home to every weird creature on the planet. You entrepreneurs out there might consider starting tours of Galapagos North. Easy money, but I recommend you jump on it before some damn fool brings in a breeding pair of Bengal tigers.
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