six beverages betrays me
April 15, 2022
Welcome to Reality Farm.
Lost? Confused? Excellent, me too. Here’s a map.
SUGAR CUBES 📷
Self Reflection, 2018 — Eric Fischl
A Moment of Tenderness, 2020 — Eric Fischl
Cleansed by the Flames of Water, 2020 — Eric Fischl
LETTERS HOME FROM THE WAR ON REALITY 🪖
Dear Lucille1,
I made my first enemies at work.
They are software engineers and I hate them.
Our office doesn’t have assigned seating, you can sit anywhere in a sea of hot desks. On my first day of work, I picked the most anonymous desk possible, a desk without a single positive characteristic to recommend it: mediocre views, mediocre lighting, unreliable HDMI cables. It’s not close to the cafeteria or the bathrooms. It is, in every way, the no man’s land equivalent of a desk.
Some twenty minutes later, a pack of software engineers appeared and sat in the eight desks immediately surrounding me. Our office is mostly empty, so this is roughly equivalent to someone stepping onto an empty train car and sitting next to you.
I know they’re software engineers because they spend their days grimacing at multicolored lines of text, like children learning to read. I have no idea what they talk about. They might as well be speaking another language and their mating rituals are opaque to me.
When I showed up to work the next morning, the software engineers were already there, sitting in the same desks, with their jackets and backpacks piled on the desk in the center, where I wanted to sit. Amused by their refusal to confront or acknowledge me, I resolved to arrive 15 minutes earlier the next day. I arrived at 8:45 AM and claimed the desk. The morning after, the engineers arrived at 8:40 AM. Then I arrived at 8:35 AM. So on and so forth.
Eventually the skirmish cut into my sleep. I’d win the desk for the day, then sit haggard and bleary-eyed, incapable of doing anything. The engineers look equally bad. Nobody is sleeping well and given the disruption to at least eight developers, I’m costing the company some millions of dollars.
The engineers snapped. In an all-hands meeting attended by well over a thousand people, Six Beverages stood up and outright asked the cofounder for an assigned-seating policy, complaining bitterly about “people who unknowingly sit in our area.” I felt betrayed. Of all the engineers, I liked Six Beverages best. Peace is despaired. For who can think submission? War then, war open or understood must be resolved.2
The company built a desk reservation system. The engineers got what they wanted and I have long since stopped sitting at that desk. But every night, I stay up until 12:01 AM and reserve the one desk in the middle of their pod for the following day. I arrive early in the morning and leave a cup of coffee steaming in front of the monitors. I make myself the sun of their solar system, the nucleus around which they batter themselves in a sick frenzy. I hear them sing out in grief, unburdening themselves of their worst fears, a wild litany of nightmare and lament: their nation invaded, enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles, slavery and abasement. Heaven swallows the smoke.3
Until next time. Eat the sweet grass, drink deeply of the sun, defend reality.
Heart’s best,
Murdo
CONTENT CROP 🌾
The Myth of the Chemical Imbalance || Return
Which of the following two statements would you say most accurately reflects the current view of psychiatrists and other mental health professionals?
A. Depression and other mood disorders are caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and are best treated with antidepressants that restore the brain’s normal chemical balance.
B. Depression and other mood disorders are probably caused by a complex interaction of genetic, neurochemical, and psychosocial factors, and are best treated using a holistic, “biopsychosocial” approach.
note: the best biopsychosocial advice I ever got was: 1) change your habits 2) change your environment 3) find God
The Eros Monster || Harper’s Magazine
Lovers outsource the meaning of their lives to each other; instead of asking themselves, “How should I live?” they ask, “How should we live?” When it works, that kind of mutual devotion can be transcendent, allowing the two to aspire to heights of virtue and happiness impossible for either to achieve on their own. When it doesn’t, it’s like having your mind hijacked by a master of evasion. “Love” becomes a quest to win back control.
note: very acute observation here that the opposite of eros is civility and politeness
Tomorrow Sex Will Be Safe Again || Damage Mag
Sex toy manufacturers of the 80s and 90s were preoccupied with creating siliconized reproductions of the male member, from trying to approximate the hand-feel to trying to capture the quality of vein networks. Dildos today no longer seek to approximate the physiognomy of the penis because to do so would be to run the risk of reminding the PMC girl-boss of the tragedy of its felt absence. Instead, sex toys are trending towards looking more and more like alien life forms. Their shapes are blob-like, and their reflections are metallic. The vibrator has become helveticized.
My LBDO, for example, “creates sexual wellness products that elevate your bedroom essentials.” Their typography and brand packaging is equal parts Glossier and Aesop, tapping into an anxiety about always needing to “elevate.” Their “essensual vibe” encases its battery in a biomorphic silicon raindrop so that it’s possible to have sex with the disembodied spirit of technology.
. . .
For the professional managerial class (PMC), the apotheosis of female freedom is one wherein every problem related to pleasure has found its technocratic solution. The ideal environment for sex has stone-tumbled, french linen sheets, a hand-poured Le Labo candle, an Akari table lamp, and a bottle of high-end lube on a bauhaus-era side table.
note: jaw is on the floor
POSTCARDS FROM OUTER SPACE 🎴
UFOs IN THE COW FIELD 🛸
Spy Satellites Confirmed Our Discovery of the First Meteor from beyond the Solar System | Scientific American
Three years after our original discovery, the first object originating from outside of the solar system observed to strike the Earth—the first known interstellar meteor—has officially been recognized. The 2014 meteor is also the first recorded interstellar object to be detected in the solar system, predating ‘Oumuamua by over three years, and is one of three interstellar objects confirmed to date, alongside ‘Oumuamua and the interstellar comet Borisov.
note: an instant classic from my boy Avi Loeb — staggering that the first known interstellar object (predating ‘Omuamua, for those following that saga) hit us!
THE BOOK BARN 📖
The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov
(Fiction, 1925. $13.)
The cadets of the First Infantry Detachment knew nothing about any of this. And this was a pity! Had they known, their desire to fight would have been diminished and, instead of stumbling about under a shrapnel-torn sky at Post-Volynsky, they would have made their way to that cosy little apartment in Lipki, seized Colonel Shchetkin, dragged him outside and hanged him from the nearest lamp-post right opposite the golden-haired woman's apartment.
Had they done this, it would have been really good. But they didn't do it, because they didn't know or understand anything that was going on.
And, indeed, nobody quite understood anything that was happening in the City, and it was quite likely that it would be a long time before anyone did understand.
note: Set in 1918, The White Guard is about Russians and Ukrainians fighting over Kyiv. Sound familiar? Also, I want to cry every time I read Bulgakov, I love him that much
Lucille is a heifer.
John Milton, Paradise Lost (1.660-662).
Beowulf (trans. Seamus Heaney) (3150-3155).