quantum horse and buggy
June 22, 2021
Welcome to Reality Farm.
Lost? Confused? Excellent, me too. Here’s a map.
SUGAR CUBES 📷
Tom Killion — Kelham Beach (Double Point, Pt. Reyes) (2021)
Tom Killion — Angels Landing, Zion Nat'l Park (2019)
Tom Killion — Giant Sequoias (2020)
WEATHER REPORT 🖼
I spent the weekend at a bachelor party somewhere in Kentucky and hours away from anywhere else. I was the youngest attendee by some years — a few of the guys had newborn babies at home and used the weekend as an opportunity to catch up on sleep, clocking 12 or 13 hours a night while the party raged on downstairs. A glimpse into the future, I suppose, or an effective form of birth control for those who love sleep.
As I started my drive back to Nashville, every car on the highway crashed into one another and clogged up the interstates, so Google Maps diverted me as far away from other drivers as possible, through a series of back roads and hamlets with names like Sunfish, Pig, and Bee Spring. The houses were uniformly ugly but the churches were so pretty that I nearly drove into a ditch several times just trying to catch a second glimpse of them.
I was deep in Old Order Mennonite country. The first clue: a pile of horse shit in the road. The second clue: a woman in a floral dress and bonnet, plus two men in black hats and suspenders, cruising down a hill on bicycles, leaning over their handlebars like young Lance Armstrongs, vests flapping in the wind. I was delighted. I waved. I joined a queue of cars stuck behind a horse and buggy. I waited patiently, crawling along at 10 mph until the buggy pulled off the road, at which point I drove past, respectfully, waving again and admiring the horse, wondering if I should stop to ask for tips on growing green onions, while a group of boys on bikes lazed by the side of the road, watching the outsiders go zooming by on our way to Walmart or whatever, and laughing, and I laughed with them — what a life, what a country.
By the fourth horse and buggy I was fucking sick of tradition and wondering how my brother’s Honda Civic would fare if I took it off-road. You can’t pass the buggies because of the hills. There are virtually no passing zones. You also can’t really see if a buggy is on the other side of a hill, though that hasn’t stopped the local government form setting the speed limit at 60 mph and the local inhabitants from driving at 85 mph.
Simply to avoid being rear-ended, one must go flying up a hill, only to stand on one’s brakes at the top of the hill, assuming but not knowing that there’s a horse and buggy directly on the other side of the rise — the reality of the horse and buggy being beyond the point, they are both there and not until observed: Schrödinger's horse and the quantum buggy — only to repeat this process every 200 yards ad nauseam until you reach Nashville. Every car behind you will drive like they’re on their way to the hospital and their pregnant wife is giving birth in the back.
The land itself is kaleidoscopic and hot. I drove past farms selling funeral caskets, hand-painted signs for strip clubs, and bales of hay, saggy with rain and rotting in the fields. I had time to consider the Mennonites, their insularity, community, and confessions of faith, but, given the attentional demands of the drive, I lacked the bandwidth to come up with anything clever or insightful.
Garden update:
My cilantro grew three feet in a week while I was gone and is currently flowering. This is a process known as bolting, and while the cilantro leaves lose their flavor after bolting, the flower seeds can be harvested and dried. These dried seeds become the spice known as coriander.
My cucumber plants are thriving in the heat and rampaging through my garden. Far beneath the cucumber leaves, my poor and much-maligned green onions aren’t getting any sun. Maybe I should have asked the Mennonites for help after all.
This period of heat and intense growth reminds me of something my grandmother told me: later in the summer, zucchinis produce so profusely that you have to lock your car doors at night, lest your neighbors leave piles of zucchini on your seats.
POSTCARDS FROM OUTER SPACE 🎴
WALKING THE FENCELINE 🕸
For whatever reason, I find discussing my favorite live albums a really corny activity, but here are two of the best:
The Buddy Rich Big Band live at the Chez Club
I couldn’t possibly even begin to make a case for the single best live song, but I do love Pete Seeger playing Summertime at Bowdoin College:
UFOs IN THE COW FIELD 🛸
The government’s UFO report should drop later this week. In the meantime, a quick story about India’s early space program:
India launched its first communications satellite, APPLE, into space from French Guiana in 1981. The project director, RM Vasagam recalls how, shortly before launch, APPLE’s antenna started acting up. While the Indian team scrambled to fix the problem, they lacked a non-magnetic environment at the launch site necessary to perform the antenna tests and considered shipping the satellite back to a lab in France. Instead, they hired an ox cart and paid someone 150 rupees — about $20 at the time — to drag the satellite out to an open field, where they completed the tests and fixed the antenna. The satellite went up shortly after.
THE BOOK BARN 📖
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Fiction, 1879. $15.)
In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we.
note: I hate not finishing books. In 2017, I spent the summer at my grandmother’s farm — sleeping, reading, and drinking gin and tonics. It was lovely, a sort of platonic ideal for how to live in the heat. I read a lot of books in those four months, in part because my grandmother is the most voracious reader I’ve ever met and plied me with novels and essay collections the way an Italian grandmother plies her grandson with spaghetti and meatballs.
Of all the books I read that summer, The Brothers Karamazov was the only one I never finished. Not because of any fault or lack on the book’s part, but simply because I ran out of time, moved to Washington, and picked up newer, sexier books. Dostoevsky’s masterpiece — and make no mistake, even ten pages in it is a masterpiece — sat on my bedside table, gathering dust at the bottom of my to-read pile, until I finally transferred the volume to the bookcase where it has sat ever since, its cream-and-red spine staring at me balefully, accusing me.
Last week, I picked Karamazov back up. I don’t know if I’ve simply matured, or if this is just a better stage of life for me to appreciate the novel, but I’m roughly 50 pages in and enjoying it immensely, much more than I did five years ago. This time, I intend to finish what I started. So. This is not so much a recommendation as an invitation for you to join me on this small-print, 800-page journey.
THE RIGHT’S WING 🦇
I spent the past week drinking in Nashville and Kentucky and very little politics trickled down to me, so forgive the low effort but here’s a video of George W. Bush:
