Welcome to Reality Farm.
Lost? Confused? Excellent, me too. Here’s a map.
SUGAR CUBES 📷
Edward Gorey, from LES ÉCHANGES MALANDREUX (1985)
Edward Gorey, from VERSE ADVICE (1993)
Edward Gorey, from LES ÉCHANGES MALANDREUX (1985)
WEATHER REPORT 🖼
It is almost time for my second planting. Not because my first planting has yielded a great harvest but because almost everything I planted is dead. While grim isn’t the word I would use to describe the state of my garden, it is certainly one of the words that might apply, alongside barren, demanding, and resistant to authority. Authority being myself, yelling.
Did God intend for man to plant a garden on the 12th floor of an apartment complex? Perhaps not. Consider the evidence: winds blow constantly, carrying away my topsoil, carving deep canyons and high hillsides in my little plot. Small rocks litter the surface. While my neighbors’ plots feature black, loamy soil, with thriving tomato bushes towering above canopies of lettuce, mine is a dusty, howling wasteland. My green onions were buried under an embankment that piled up on the lee side of the garden. When I water my plants, the water runs into a depression at the center of the plot, where a grimy pool stretches from the shores of my parsley to the scallion tomb — a hellish swamp not seen by young American men since the Vietnam War. I consider the possibility that I inherited a martian patch of dirt inhospitable to plant life. My cilantro is unexpectedly thriving and I have passed this information on to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for use in terraforming and deep space missions.
My ancestors on the windblown islands off the coast of Scotland used a method of cultivation called lazy beds to grow potatoes. Lazy beds are made by digging soil out of the rocky ground, heaping it into raised beds of dirt, and fertilizing it all over with seaweed. It was backbreaking work. While gazing upon my garden, I reflect on the similarities between myself and these hardy islanders — that we both labor over raised beds of poor soil, me on top of an apartment building and them on top of the world. Sadly, the similarities end there. I no longer possess the knack for growing potatoes or much of anything, at this rate.
While I’m on the topic of lost ancestral knowledge, why is it that the ride-hailing apps no longer seem to work? It’s impossible to get a car half of the time and even when cars are available they’re exorbitantly expensive. On Saturday night, I was trying to get to a friend’s house across town for a birthday party but found it extremely difficult to find a car — eventually I decided to call a cab but quickly realized that I didn’t actually know how to call a cab. Whoops.
Cicada update: I have yet to see one, but there are reports of their early emergence in the D.C. area. The bulk of Brood X is expected to claw their way to the surface later this weekend once the weather warms up a bit. As you can see from the video below, cicadas do a sickening backflip while molting, which is one more reason to hate them if you didn’t already.
POSTCARDS FROM OUTER SPACE 🎴
WALKING THE FENCELINE 🕸
I occasionally quit social media platforms for reasons that boil down to general hand-waving about technology and inaudible mutterings about my mental health. Facebook was the first to go. I keep going back to Instagram like a beaten dog. I never deleted Snapchat because it largely fell out of use with my generation and deleting it seemed like more trouble than it was worth. Thank God, because now I love Snapchat. The Snap Map — which combines Find-My-Friends functionality with a heat-map of public Snap stories — is the single greatest invention in social media.
Some days, when I’m bored, I look at a big weather radar and try to find the worst weather in America: hurricanes, blizzards, and run-of-the-mill thunderstorms are all good candidates. Then, I cross reference those areas with the Snap Map and watch total strangers react to bad weather in deranged ways.
There is something beautiful and delightfully omniscient about exploring these first-person perspectives in real time. Americans are terrible at cooking, often drunk, distracted while driving, and a wonderful, wonderful people.
UFOs IN THE COW FIELD 🛸
Last week, I mentioned that a Chinese rocket was uncontrollably tumbling back to Earth and had the potential to land pretty much anywhere, including, distressingly, on top of you or your loved ones. Happily for everyone except the people who live in the Maldives, the Chinese rocket reentered the Earth’s atmosphere on Sunday morning and tore itself to bits above the Maldives. This made me consider our historically poor treatment of islands and specifically brought to mind a phase our nation went through in the mid-1950s where we detonated 67 nuclear and thermonuclear bombs on the Marshall Islands just to see what would happen.
From the perspective of the Marshall Islands, this must seem particularly unfair. They weren’t even at war with us. Over the past two centuries they were more or less sequentially invaded by Spain, Germany, Japan, and finally the United States. Five days after the United States secured permission from the United Nations to govern the Marshall Islands we established the Pacific Proving Grounds — “proving grounds” being the official government designation for wide swatches of dirt we intend to blow to smithereens. Five days later! Can you imagine? The poor Marshall Islanders didn’t even have time to catch their breath before this new government started dropping weapons of mass destruction on their nice coral reefs. What a lousy deal. They must have thought we were out of our minds. One of the explosions (Castle Bravo) was so unexpectedly large that it showered the residents of the Marshall Islands with radioactive fallout, for which the United States profusely apologized before promptly lighting off another thermonuclear device on a neighboring reef ten days later.
I can’t help being fascinated and alarmed by the tests in the Pacific, which produced some of the most improbable and alien visuals of the 20th century. If an extraterrestrial civilization was watching, I can only assume it would look like we declared total war on a very specific breed of puffer fish.
THE BOOK BARN 📖
Sword of Honor by Evelyn Waugh
(Fiction, 1952-1961. Thirty dollars.)
The obscure figure behind the grile leant nearer. ‘What was it you wished to do?’
‘To die.’
‘Yes. You have attempted suicide?’
‘No.’
‘Of what, then, are you accusing yourself? To wish to die is quite usual today. It may even be a very good disposition. You do not accuse yourself of despair?’
‘No, father; presumption. I am not fit to die.’
‘There is no sin there. This is a mere scruple. Make an act of contrition for all the unrepented sins of your past life.’
After the Absolution he said: ‘Are you a foreigner?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you spare a few cigarettes?’
note: Evelyn Waugh combined three of his WWII novels into this 800+ page tome, but it really hits the spot if you value dry British wit and can tolerate a fair bit of moaning about the decline of Catholicism in England. I tore through it pretty quickly but, then again, I am unemployed.
THE RIGHT’S WING 🦇
Trickle-down news of the week: Matthew McConaughey is either running for governor of Texas or people are working themselves into a lather about Matthew McConaughey potentially running for governor of Texas. I don’t know which.
I like Matthew McConaughey a lot. I like his movies. I like his characters. I like how much he loves Texas. I like when he throws up the UT horns 🤘 because I, too, like throwing up the UT horns. All of that changed when I read his memoir, “Greenlights.” It is a mess of a book and practically unreadable. In fact, I would prefer to unread it, so as not to hold it against him. I consider it a magnificent accomplishment to write a memoir so bad that I finished it with a significantly dimmer view of the author than I had going into it. The shtick goes too far and it pains me. It is almost — almost — salvaged by his account of a months-long bender at Chateau Marmont:
“I wore the leathers. I rode the Thunderbird. I took a lot of showers in the daylight hours, rarely alone. I partook.”
But it isn’t. Trust me, the less you know about Matthew McConaughey, the better. Do not read the book. If he runs for governor, do not read anything about him. Let him shine in your mind in beautiful ignorance and always look away.