Field Notes: We've Got No Random Junk at Fancy Lad

He puts the same cup of coffee in the microwave three times. Not a fresh cup — the same one, half drunk, warmed back up, set down again while he talks and forgotten again. The cigarettes go the same way. When he wants one we go outside, or he props the door open and the cold comes into the room with us. Coffee and cigarettes, coffee and cigarettes, and in between, the animals.

The last three miles in are dolls. They hang from the trees along the gravel road, limbs down, faces turned, and there is no cell service to tell anyone about it. It reads like the opening of a horror movie, which is exactly what it is meant to read like. He hung them there himself.

“I hope it conveys to any potential trespasser that this dude might be a little weird. And maybe it’s a better idea to go rob the next place.”

He finds this funny. He also means all of it. That is the thing about him I keep circling: the joke and the deadly earnest arrive in the same breath, and you can’t pull them apart without losing the man.

The work

Raccoons, mostly. Opossums, skunks, woodchucks, whatever native mammal comes to him. Not birds, not turtles, not snakes — he stays in his lane and hands the rest to people he trusts. During baby season he does not sleep so much as doze between feedings, because a neonatal raccoon eats every three hours, around the clock, formula measured by weight, a different one for each species.

What he wants me to notice is not the animals. It is the order. There is a broom at every station, a mop at every station, everything he needs where he will need it, so that at two in the morning nothing has to be looked for.

“I keep my shit straight. There’s a place for everything and everything in its place.”

The name

He toured the property before he bought it and there was a pile of junk out back. He assumed it would be gone by closing. The seller shrugged — it’s a farm, you have random piles of junk. He thought: not here. This is going to be Fancy Lad Farms and Wildlife Sanctuary. We’ve got no random junk at Fancy Lad.

The phrase came out of an old movie bit, a sea captain, a young man born to privilege. He liked that it sounded a little soft for a place like this. One more thing to keep people slightly off balance, same as the dolls.

Margin note

He built a career on discipline — squared-away accounts, nothing left floating, the helpers paid in cash at the end of every shift. He also stood on this land, a purchase bigger than any he would normally make without sleeping on it, and signed the contract in ten minutes.

He does not explain the contradiction. He reheats the coffee, steps outside for a cigarette, and goes back in, because it is almost feeding time.

This is a field note from Resonance: The Quiet Revolution of Compassion, out November 10, 2026 from Akiiki Press. You can join the early list here.