Jim Krusoe - The Sleep Garden

Tinkering, yes, that’s more or less the word for it, all right, and I’m with you.

The sixth episode of Mellow Valley takes a turn toward the serious as, enraged by the commune’s refusal to join in a Memorial Day parade to support this country’s pointless military incursion into an impoverished foreign country (Vietnam), the local white supremacist neo-Nazi group plans to burn down the main house of the farm where most members of the commune, except for Grandpa Stoner, sleep.

Their plans, however, are thwarted. With a large can of gasoline on the ground next to them, two of the neo-Nazis peer into the house’s small living room window, only to discover that Heather (not the Heather who lives in the Burrow, but the other Heather, the semi-successful actress who could be Heather’s double except that the TV one is prettier) is not just not asleep, but in full yoga posture, wearing only a bra and panties. Then follows a mind-bending eighteen minutes for both the Nazis and the television audience who witness this ancient Hindu discipline aimed at perfect spiritual insight and tranquility. At its conclusion, the bewitched neo-Nazi duo decides to allow the commune to exist, if only to allow the two of them — and possibly a few friends as well — to sneak back to the window at some future date and learn more about the threefold path of action, knowledge, and devotion that lies at the heart of this increasingly popular and health-oriented practice.

But the surprise revelation of this episode comes at the very end, when it turns out that Heather knew the whole time that the two fascists were there. So it was Heather, and not the intruders, who was in control of this situation, and her nonchalance translated into the words (which the characters of Mellow Valley will come to use in later episodes whenever they wish to indicate that something isn’t as bad as it seems): “It’s only the Nazis at the window.” Which is exactly the sort of line that one can tell its creators hoped would become a national catchphrase, something similar to Make my day , or You talking to me? But, sadly, it became nothing of the sort.

Never sin tocarse : not touching.

His lecture concluded, the limo at last stopped in the driveway of his house, the Captain is relieved to see that his gardener has filled the hole and that the sod he chose to lay across the top is an almost perfect blend with the grass already there. If a person didn’t know what he was looking for, that person wouldn’t notice anything at all.

It’s been a long day, but it’s over, and he can feel his Death Quotient slide back down to about twelve.

Fresh stalks, pushing their way up through the grasses and the dirt, into the light and the air.

The final episode of Mellow Valley , called “People, Let’s Come Together,” is still described by those few who remember the show as something of a Hail Mary pass at an attempt for relevance, and also to entice its ever-shrinking television audience to follow the show’s creators in a bold experiment that was meant to herald a whole new sensibility, one whose strategy was to combine gentle humor with an analysis of some of the most profound questions of life in order to make a better world for all of us.

This legendary twenty-six-minute sequence (with time taken out for commercials) contains virtually no action at all, or at least “action” as it is usually spoken of. Instead, it features the entire cast, including neo-Nazis, townsfolk, and fellow farmers, sitting in a large circle, all puffing away on the reefers handed out by members of the commune, as they describe to each other (and to the television audience) what insights about their hitherto unexamined lives — thanks to their mildly psychoactive condition — they have arrived at.

Now considered a precursor to “Reality Television,” and rumored to have been filmed using actual drugs, the show has the distinction of being the only network television production ever to have been cut off after the first four minutes and replaced by twenty-two minutes of public service announcements.

Anyway, it was only when the Captain was returning from his successful presentation and was just minutes from his house, seated in the limo, that the Myrmidon thing came back into his head. Weren’t Myrmidons in the story of the Argonauts? When Jason threw the boar’s teeth onto the ground, they popped up, fully armed, each one — God knows why — just looking around for somebody to slay. Oh, oh, here comes trouble , he remembers Jason thinking, but then the future husband of Medea took a stone and threw it, hitting one of them. And the Myrmidon he struck, without even stopping to reason where the stone had come from, attacked the Myrmidon standing next to him, and then another Myrmidon rushed in to help the second one, and somebody else rushed to help the first Myrmidon until there was a general free-for-all, which lasted about ten minutes, max, by which time they were all dead. Then after that Jason went on to get the Golden Fleece and marry Medea. The Captain knows how that turned out.

Or so he remembered it. But just before bed that night, when he is back inside his house, he looks up “Myrmidon” on his computer and realizes he was totally wrong. All those dead warriors in the Jason story didn’t have a name. They weren’t Myrmidons at all. The Myrmidons were from a whole different story. Myrmidons were the fighters who came along with Achilles to help him out in Troy. Myrmidons had nothing at all to do with holes in the ground, though plenty of them died at Troy as well. The ones who sprang from the earth and then died thanks to Jason were nameless.

“ Mellow Valley reruns,” the no-longer-young executive leaving for a promotion will tell the younger one who is to take his place. “I wouldn’t open that can of worms if I were you.”

“So when do you think we’ll know if Louis is going to come back?” Viktor asks Jeffery. “I was thinking maybe I could take over his room.”

DECOYS

DUCKS

Look like ducks

Look like ducks

Don’t eat

Eat

Don’t fly

Fly

Float

Float

Can be worth a lot of money

Inexpensive

Silent

Very noisy

Take hours to make

Relatively easy to make

Painted feathers

Actual feathers

No feet

Feet

Wood

Flesh

No hands

No hands

What Madeline said to Viktor the first time she saw him was, “I really like your hands,” even though she was secretly thinking that his hands were kind of grotesque and much much too large for an average human being, so maybe the only reason she said it was to make Viktor feel comfortable, him being a newcomer to the Burrow, or to diffuse her own discomfort, like saying, “That’s a really great boil on your neck that you’ve got going.” At any rate, she had been dating Raymond back when Viktor arrived and she was starting to get bored again, being long finished with that pretentious ass, Jeffery, and even though Raymond was — still is — sweet, decoys aside, he was a little lacking in — what? — hotness.