Standards of deviation

There is a house on the corner in Chapel Hill, on the twisty hill up to my mom's house, which is egregiously overgrown. It's a dinky little brick ranch, a tear-down-to-be, and the people haven't so much as trimmed a blade of grass there for god knows how many years, so now it'd be like original growth forest there if it weren't for the dear who surely come by and sup on the tender shoots. How ironic is that: nature imposing the appearance of culture. In any case, you can barely see the house from the street and it does look kind of sinister, like what the hell are they doing back there? Oxycontin? Video games? Tabbouleh?

I never thought I'd care about this kind of thing. I remember years back my sister telling me about picking dandelions because otherwise they'd spread to neighbor's yards and thinking "that's absurd," but the fact is that every community concocts and imposes standards around the subjugation of nature, the bracketing of contingency. And these standards, to paraphrase Foucault, are determined by the derelict and marginalized properties that everybody talks about in whispers and louder.

On our block it's the green abandoned house owned by the shifty old Chinese dude. Rumors abound of mysterious late night sightings of day laborers and junkies and the fact that they're gonna condemn the joint and so on and s on.