Welcome to Reality Farm.
Lost? Confused? Excellent, me too. Here’s a map.
SUGAR CUBES 📷
Illustration of John Milton’s Paradise Lost by Gustave Doré (1866) — Book III — Satan falls to Earth
Illustration of John Milton’s Paradise Lost by Gustave Doré (1866) — Book X — Sin and Death plot the corruption of men
Illustration of John Milton’s Paradise Lost by Gustave Doré (1866) — Book IX — Satan watches Adam and Eve
WEATHER REPORT 🖼
My grandfather died several years ago, long before coronavirus, and thank God because he would have found the pandemic intolerable. He was the family patriarch — when you arrived at his house after a long flight or drive, no matter how late the hour, he’d sit up at the kitchen table waiting with two glasses of an undrinkable liqueur and much wisdom on a man’s responsibilities. He was part of the Silent Generation but enjoyed loudly declaring to his many grandchildren that it was high time they start having kids and quit adopting dogs. He loved babies and lived long enough to hold his first great-grandchild. He was a great man and I miss him.
A cousin recently reminded me that my grandfather took to gardening relatively late in life. He was a geologist and spent his working years in the mountains, looking for molybdenum — a key element in rocket engines and an essential micronutrient for life. His first season of gardening was a war, not unlike my own. Nothing would grow the way he wanted. His community garden lay in a dry riverbed and all non-organic pesticides and fertilizers were banned. My cousin remembered how she was once visiting my grandparents and caught my grandfather stuffing his pockets with Miracle-Gro pellets, before moseying over to his plot to happily and unlawfully fertilize his plants.
My grandfather eventually found not only success but renown for his garden, with special place of pride given to the diva cucumbers that he grew, pickled, and served at his table. I planted my own cucumbers this year with those pickles in mind. To the extent that this first season of gardening has been a war, well, it was my grandfather’s war first. The battle is in my blood. Pickles are in my future. I ask no other inheritance, though I was given a machete when he died — an omen, perhaps, of abundant gardens to come.
I invited another cousin’s husband (and what do you call those people, anyway, step-cousins?) over to my apartment on Sunday morning to watch the Monaco Formula 1 race. He brought his three-year-old child (technically my first cousin once removed) and his golden retriever (no relation to me whatsoever). The race was boring enough on it’s own merits, let alone for a three year old who doesn’t understand pit-stop strategy, so we struck out in search of better entertainment. From what I understand about small children, the most effective way to entertain them is by letting them participate in the most inane chores possible, which in my case meant watering my garden.
Watering plants, like nothing else that morning, delighted this child, so we spent 20 minutes blasting the shit out of my rosemary with a hose. Two rooftop pools sit perpendicular to my plot, across some 200 feet of open air, and a crowd of revelers watched on with interest as I stood, hands-on-hips, supervising the destruction of my garden. For all that, my garden probably needed watering, because yesterday it was in great shape.
I have three healthy cucumber sprouts and am drowning in parsley. For my first planting, I poked a perfect grid of holes across my garden and filled them with precisely three minuscule green onion seeds each. It was work for a watchmaker. Also completely ineffective vis-a-vis the survival of my scallions. For my second planting I upended the packet of seeds over the plot and scattered a few handfuls of dirt where I may, which has proven to be much more effective.
It will rain several days this week, which is the good Lord’s way of giving my cilantro a few days off from being poked by me. I hope the good Lord also uses the rain to wash the Earth clean of cicadas, because Jiminy Cricket, those motherfuckers are everywhere. I theorized last week that the cicadas were a hoax, because I hadn’t seen a single one. That was a huge mistake. The bugs litter the pavement. Some are dead. The alive ones crawl toward your ankles, just slowly enough to give you the creeps as you hop-skip over them and inevitably squash a few.
Friends who enjoy causing me significant mental distress have sent me the same article about cicadas doing meth and having sex until their butts fall off. They have also sent me a video of a woman in the D.C. area collecting, frying, and eating cicadas, but that I will not link the video here because I love you all and care about your peace of mind.
POSTCARDS FROM OUTER SPACE 🎴
WALKING THE FENCELINE 🕸
Everyone has a collection of images, songs, clips that play in their mind at random, like a haywire jukebox. One of mine, which has featured heavily over the past few months, is The Italian Home That’s Beyond Perfect for Outdoor Living and Hosting. Say it with me: The Italian Home That’s Beyond Perfect for Outdoor Living and Hosting.
The Italian Home That’s Beyond Perfect for Outdoor Living and Hosting is, of course, from the Wall Street Journal real estate page — a delightful corner of the internet which you can read about in one of my previous posts here.
Now, feast your eyes on The Italian Home That’s Beyond Perfect for Outdoor Living and Hosting:
UFOs IN THE COW FIELD 🛸
I was thinking recently about how I don’t like birds. It all started two years ago, when this video of a shoe-billed stork was making the rounds on the internet. Please watch the video because I had to look through hundreds of clips of shoe-billed storks this morning to find it.
The bird is extremely disturbing and sets off all sorts of alarms deep within my brain, a presumably vestigial reaction to my ancient ancestors being hunted by large flying dinosaurs. That is the most important thing to know about birds: they are not only dinosaurs, they are the only living dinosaurs. They survived the big meteor that killed the other dinosaurs and are not to be trusted. It’s not outside of the realm of possibility that birds conspired to bring the meteor to Earth to take out the other dinosaurs and establish their dreadful dominance. Birds’ closest living relatives are crocodiles. I suppose everyone else learned about this in kindergarten but it took me some Googling about “birds” and triple-checking the wikipedia page to confirm that it’s all horrifyingly true.
+ bonus new UFO video, but not a particularly good one: NBC — Leaked Navy video appears to show UFO off California
THE BOOK BARN 📖
Paradise Lost by John Milton
(Epic Poetry, 1667. Nine dollars.)
Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;
And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.
note: Paradise Lost is unbelievably rich, dark, and gothic. It’s the most metal book I’ve ever read and easily in my top five most metal poems. Satan invents guns. Angels respond by throwing hills at him, “So hills amid the air encountered hills / Hurled to and fro with jaculation dire.”
It is an ur-text of Western culture and modern-day references from the poem jump out on every page. I cannot recommend it enough. A friend likened the experience of reading the book to eating ice cream, “Too much of it makes my head hurt.” It’s easy to get lost in the thees and thous and thys, but if you just plow on for a couple lines things usually clear up. There’s a very handy 150 pages of notes in the back for reference and guidance.
THE RIGHT’S WING 🦇
2024 vibe-check: Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, is hot real estate. I see more articles about bills that he signed than any other governor combined. I don’t totally get it — he looks a little bit stoned or sad in every photo and suits don’t entirely seem to fit him right, but everyone knows that beauty is no prerequisite for the presidency.
I haven’t read a single think-piece about him, but going entirely off ambient social media vibes, I get the feeling that he has been willing to implement a lot of the right-populist agenda in Florida to generally positive reaction from his Republican constituents and the right wing at large. I think he’s going for a policy-heavy-actually-effective-Donald-Trump thing. It’s all very anti-critical-race-theory and anti-big-tech and he obviously made a name for himself on the anti-mask-and-lockdown front. Again, I haven’t actually read anything about him and I’ve been wrong before, but momentum online certainly seems to be moving in his direction. Worth keeping an eye on.