none of this, including your life, is actually my problem
December 1, 2020
Welcome to Reality Farm.
Lost? Confused? Me too. Here’s a map.
s/o to the fans
SUGAR CUBES 📷
Karolis Strautniekas | @strautniekas
Karolis Strautniekas | @strautniekas
Karolis Strautniekas | @strautniekas
PESTILENCE & PESTICIDES 🦟
There’s a light at the end of the tunnel: the vaccines are effective, the spring is coming, the sun is shining, the tank is clean. When we emerge from our holes and start socializing again I expect we’ll be in for a bit of a shock. Most of us will be suffering from some form of COVID-awkward in which we’ve forgotten how to interact in groups outside a limited bubble. The slapdash psychology behind this lies in the fact that, in normal times, we’re constantly using social feedback to reinvent and tweak our personalities and without that feedback mechanism we’ve all gotten pretty weird. Plus… what’s there to talk about? How was your 2020? Sheesh, what a minefield.
Alcohol will help. Expect 2021 to be a messy year.
I’ve entered the join-a-Dungeons-&-Dragons-group phase of quarantine. My tryout starts later tonight. Wish my half-orc monk, Mordak Lord of Unholy Fury, luck!
Someone recently told me that the section titles in my newsletter don’t actually help them understand what content goes in which section. I sympathize but will change nothing.
“Vision and Breathing May Be the Secrets to Surviving 2020” the longer you look at it the funnier this headline gets
CONTENT CROP 🌾
An Adventurer Retires || Esquire Classic
Sure, it’s been a great show, going to bed in one capital and waking up in another. When Generals sent for me I never knew whether it was to give me a decoration or have me shot.
In less than two years I was under fire in three wars, in three countries, on three continents. There were soldiers marching and planes falling and guns pounding away at little white towns, but there was only one short space of happiness and contentment.
note: this is a reprint of an article from 1938, and one element that immediately jumps out at me is the primacy of port towns. I wonder if we’re missing something there — of course, ports still exist mostly as a plot of water to park container ships between the mammoth tetris game of commerce, and, of course, people like to snap up real estate with a view of the ocean and a nearby gelato store on the boardwalk but bUt BUT… are we missing out on port towns as provinces for the wayward, a hub for travelers and adventurers, however piss-poor that life may be? one wonders. (hat tip PC)
Year Zero || Tablet
What I know, as a devoted reader of 20th-century literature, is that none of this, including your life, is actually my problem. My problem is how to escape from it all in order to continue being me. The aim of any sane person in an age like this one is to be free to love the people you love and secure the freedom of one’s own thoughts, the same way you step out of the way of an oncoming truck. If you want to argue about the wisdom of this approach, go argue with Emily Dickinson, Ralph Ellison, Elizabeth Bishop, Joan Didion, Robert Stone, Herman Melville, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It’s only the machines that think that I owe you an answer. My answer is fuck off, and take your political garbage with you.
note: My God, David Samuels can write. Push through the musings on Milan Kundera in the beginning (I never could finish The Unbrearable Lightness of Being, not even during the loneliest and least eventful summer of my life) to be richly rewarded further on
The Last Children of Down Syndrome || The Atlantic
The decisions parents make after prenatal testing are private and individual ones. But when the decisions so overwhelmingly swing one way—to abort—it does seem to reflect something more: an entire society’s judgment about the lives of people with Down syndrome. That’s what I saw reflected in Karl Emil’s face.
Denmark is unusual for the universality of its screening program and the comprehensiveness of its data, but the pattern of high abortion rates after a Down syndrome diagnosis holds true across Western Europe and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in the United States. In wealthy countries, it seems to be at once the best and the worst time for Down syndrome. Better health care has more than doubled life expectancy. Better access to education means most children with Down syndrome will learn to read and write. Few people speak publicly about wanting to “eliminate” Down syndrome. Yet individual choices are adding up to something very close to that.
note: a deeply upsetting read that comes out and says what usually goes unsaid
WALKING THE FENCELINE 🕸
Formula 1 is a dangerous sport. That’s the fun of watching it — there is real, tangible risk involved in racing wheel-to-wheel at 200+ miles per hour. Someone crashes nearly every weekend and it’s always interesting to see who crashed, why, and how it shakes up the rest of the race.
Most crashes are (relatively) minor, but this past Sunday during the Bahrain Grand Prix I watched quite possibly the tensest moment of live television I’ve ever experienced. A driver, Romain Grosjean, slammed through a metal barrier. His car exploded into flames. TV cameras cut away from the crash almost immediately and it took a good two or three minutes before there was any word of Grosjean’s status. I thought I’d just watched someone die.
Incredibly, Grosjean escaped from the inferno with only minor burns to the backs of his hands. The footage of him climbing out of fiery wreck (~1:17 mark in the video below) is one of the most striking videos I’ve ever seen. A litany of safety measures and a great deal of luck kept him alive.
I was a bit queasy as the day went on, turning over counterfactuals in my mind. Grosjean is the butt of many, many F1 jokes because he is a Frenchman with historically terrible luck who is notorious for complaining and the occasional bout of incompetence. When his team announced they were dropping him next year and hiring another driver, there was a bit of a collective fare-thee-well feeling and Grosjean later revealed that only one of the other 19 drivers (good guy George Russell) texted him to express condolences.
What made me feel shitty is that he’s a genuinely nice guy with a wife and three kids and I watched him very nearly die for our collective entertainment. Had he died, he would have died knowing that he was widely mocked and denigrated by fans for trying to excel at the one thing he loved, and that his colleagues weren’t much bothered to see him go. And I cannot imagine the horror his family experienced in those short minutes when nobody knew if he was alive or dead.
In an interview from the hospital, he told a French network, “It was almost like a second birth. To come out of the flames that day is something that will mark my life forever.”
UFOs IN THE COW FIELD 🛸
The top Iranian nuclear scientist was killed last week in what is turning out to be a remarkable story about the future of assassinations.
Oh boy: “The shots were fired from an automatic machine gun which was mounted on the pickup truck and operated by remote control. . . Fakhrizadeh was hit by three bullets – one hit him in the spine. Seconds later the Nisan pickup truck exploded in what looks like a self destruct mechanism.”
There is also chatter of a team of gunmen being on the ground in addition to the remotely-operated machine gun truck of doom but AP News reports that Iran has confirmed the assassination was conducted remotely.
bonus: the monolith. hard to get worked up about this thing when it’s probably an elaborate advertising campaign
bonus bonus: I’m inexplicably fascinated by this video of an F-35 dropping a dummy B61 nuclear bomb
THE GOVERNMENT OBSERVATORY ON THE HILL ABOVE MY FARM 👁
It was raining in DC yesterday. I sat on my couch reading, on the sixth floor of my apartment building, when I saw a worm inching its way across my window. The worm (regular worm, no suction cups or other identifying features of note) was just scooting along this vertical pane of glass sixty feet off the ground in some bizarre surface-tension puddle of water. I don’t have any idea how he got there but so far as worms go he seemed pretty unphased. I’d post the video I took but won’t for opsec reasons so if you know who I am and want to see the worm video… text me.
THE BOOK BARN 📖
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
(Fiction, 2015. Eighteen dollars.)
When did pursuing your ambitions cross the line from brave into foolhardy? How did you know when to stop? In earlier, more rigid, less encouraging (and ultimately, more helpful) decades, things would be much clearer: you would stop when you turned forty, or when you got married, or when you had kids, or after five years, or ten years, or fifteen. And then you would go get a real job, and acting and your dreams for a career in it would recede into the thick of the evening, a melting into history as quiet as a briquette of ice sliding into a warm bath.
note: A Little Life has the dubious distinction of appearing on damn near every bookshelf of young professionals of taste living in New Gork City. The simplest explanation for this phenomenon can be attributed to the book being about a group of college friends who move to NYC and become successful childless artists / architects / lawyers (GOOD). This is unfortunately not only the simplest but the best explanation because the book is really about child molestation, human trafficking, self-harm, and suicide (BAD).
I actually tried reading this book earlier in the year and abandoned it because it was too dark. I finished it in one big push two weeks ago. It’s well written, sure, but read at the risk of being plunged into a funk for few days. There are very few set-pieces and almost the entire book is dialogue and the space between what is said and what is left unsaid.
THE RIGHT’S WING 🦇
Q: So, if the Electoral College does elect President-Elect Joe Biden, are you not going to leave this building?
President Trump: Just so you — certainly, I will. Certainly, I will. And you know that.
—
If you spent a single molecule of brainpower over the last month fretting over whether this man was going to organize a coup I’m sorry
bonus read: The Biden presidential transition logo is here