Welcome to Reality Farm.
Lost? Confused? Excellent, me too. Here’s a map.
SUGAR CUBES 📷
Silent Figure With Landscape {Full Moon At Sea} — @oejerum
Silent Figure With Landscape {The Wilderness} — @oejerum
Silent Figure With Landscape {Facing The World With Downcast Eyes} — @oejerum
WEATHER REPORT 🖼
Last week, after I mentioned that ride-hailing services were expensive, buggy, and felt broken, a friend — another farmer of sorts — texted me: “I know why Ubers are so expensive! There’s a massive driver shortage. They’re refusing to return to work because the amount they get paid doesn’t outweigh the health risks — they make more on unemployment. But everyone else is returning to normal behavior, so it’s a classic low supply high demand situation.”
What to do in a classic low-supply-high-demand situation? The obvious answer is to turn to cheaper alternatives (economists: do not correct me). Namely, bicycles. Yes, on Saturday, while walking across the city, I saw a ton of people on bikes, memorably packs of friends balancing cases of hard seltzer on the handlebars and pedaling from one party to another. It was gorgeous. On several occasions, faced with exorbitantly-priced Ubers and half-hour waits, I rented a $2 Capital Bike to get around town. The Capital Bikes are great: they’re cheap, viciously unsexy, and scream “this wasn’t my first choice or even second choice for transportation but I have places to go and $2 to get there.” The bikes have three gears — one that works and two that let you twirl your feet at different speeds.
I just watched Call Me by Your Name. It’s a great movie, very engrossing. People in that movie ride bikes everywhere because they’re young and beautiful and live in a villa in northern Italy where the principles of good urbanism and artistic necessity ensure that everything you could possibly want is within biking distance. Not all of us are so lucky. I, for example, don’t live in an Italian villa. There is one scene where Timothée Chalamet, in the process of clarifying his sexuality, tells a girl to meet him by the river at midnight. He is late for the appointment and when he arrives, he flings himself off the bike with a great sense of nonchalance, a sense of abandon that feels both romantic and liberating. I thought that was a fitting image for this coming summer — the act of ditching a bicycle in search of sex.
A fitting image, but not necessarily the right one. The internet touts this summer as the horniest summer ever and pushes this vaxxed and waxed meme, because we’re all assumably craving human touch and attention after the past year. But to the extent that the pandemic left a crowd-shaped hole within us, I think it’s a cultural mistake to try to fill it with sex. We’re confusing our desires. We think we want intimacy, when what we really want is sociability. Loneliness and intimacy go hand-in-hand — this past year was lonelier and more intimate than most anyone was capable of handling. In a pandemic we fear each other’s touch and now we want to rid ourselves of that fear, which Elias Canetti says can only happen in crowds:
The man pressed against him is the same as himself. He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body. This is perhaps one of the reasons why a crowd seeks to close in on itself: it wants to rid each individual as completely as possible of the fear of being touched. The more fiercely people press together, the more certain they feel that they do not fear each other. This reversal of the fear of being touched belongs to the nature of crowds. The feeling of relief is most striking where the density of the crowd is the greatest.
We want to feel the crush of bodies in concert. Why switch one dark bedroom for another? Modern sex was the act of leaving a party together — an exercise in attempted intimacy and a break from the social whirl of life in a city. That intimacy and separation from social life is now the norm. I think we’re fooling ourselves with the summer of love thing, finally seeing our friends only to flee on a bike toward something we’re only telling ourselves we want. After the past year, why would we ever leave a party in the first place?
In important horticultural news, I have new neighbors. Less neighbors, really, and more unwanted houseguests. First, understand that my garden is a square and I only control half of it — we’re supposed to share the plot with another randomly-assigned resident, but my plot-partner never showed up. That is, until this weekend, when some lunatic placed three massive tomato plants just opposite my half of the plot. Please see below for a before-and-after schematic.
This development distressed me greatly. Whereas before, I was clearly the worst gardener among the rooftop garden plots, at least I had my plot to myself and existed at a kind of ascetic remove, trying to grow my crops from seed while others transplant from nurseries and similar grotesque modern institutions. The vibrance of my new plot-partner’s tomatoes challenges me. My tortured hot pepper — almost entirely shorn of leaves, really just a stalk, at this point — twists in the shadows.
So I gave up on my first planting and re-planted yesterday. While turning over my dirt, I unearthed an ant colony living in one of the rotten wooden posts that encloses my garden. I wondered if the ants hadn’t subterraneously carried off all the seeds from my first planting. The ants were extremely pissed off and I poked at them for a little before googling “ant colony in garden help?” The internet tells me that ants naturally “aerate the soil — digging tunnels that carry water, oxygen, and nutrients to plant roots.” That rocks. The internet also tells me that aphids — vampiric little bugs that suck the precious bodily fluids from garden plants — secrete a sugary, sticky liquid called “honeydew” and that ants farm these aphids like cows, protecting them from predators so the ants can continue to milk honeydew, “then carry the honeydew back to the nest to share with the queen and other workers. And sometimes ants move aphids to their nest or better plants.” That’s highly alarming, possibly even fucked up.
Happily, I don’t have any plants healthy enough to support an aphid population. If anything, the ants will move the aphids over to my neighbor’s tomatoes. So, weighing the positives of natural aeration against the negatives of ant cows, I’ve struck an uneasy alliance with the ants and am happy that they are quite literally in my corner.
Cicada update: the whole thing was a hoax, I haven’t seen a single one
POSTCARDS FROM OUTER SPACE 🎴
WALKING THE FENCELINE 🕸
For several years in college, I used a watercolor of a tulip as my phone background. The tulip, named Semper Augustus, was the most expensive ever sold at the height of Dutch tulip mania in the 1600s — legend has it that a single bulb cost as much as a townhouse in Amsterdam, though a quick whip around the Wikipedia page muddies the waters on how much the tulips really cost.
The distinctive stripes of the Semper Augustus come from a plant virus called tulip breaking virus. Tulip breaking virus weakens the tulips through successive generations, until one bulb no longer has the strength to flower, and the genetic line ends. As a result, Semper Augustus doesn’t exist in the modern world — the only evidence that it ever existed at all is in paintings and myth.
It always bothered me a little that this specific photo of the Semper Augustus watercolor has a large moiré pattern stretching between the stem and the bottom-left leaf like a spiderweb — it is the most widely-propagated picture of Semper Augustus across the internet and the moiré pattern goes everywhere the picture goes. The wikimedia file states that the image was stitched together from several tiles on the website of the Norton Simon Art Foundation, which owns the watercolor. It is fitting, somehow, that the digital imperfection of the moiré pattern infected a photo of a tulip famous for — and doomed by — its own viral imperfection.
UFOs IN THE COW FIELD 🛸
Six months ago, Congress gave the U.S. intelligence community 180 days to produce an unclassified report on “unidentified aerial phenomena.” As we approach the June deadline, media speculation on what the government knows about UFOs has reached a fever pitch. While there has been some serious reporting for years on the military’s change in stance toward UFOs, this past month feels like the first time the story has achieved full-court press in the big outlets. Here are some recent, notable ones:
New Yorker: How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously (4/30/2021)
NYT: They Are Not Alone: U.F.O Reports Surged in the Pandemic (4/12/2021)
NYT Opinion: Even if You Think Discussing Aliens Is Ridiculous, Just Hear Me Out (Ezra Klein) (5/13/2021)
CBS - 60 Minutes: UFOs regularly spotted in restricted U.S. airspace, report on the phenomena due next month (5/16/2021)
WaPo: For some Navy pilots, UFO sightings were an ordinary event: ‘Every day for at least a couple years’ (5/17/2021)
WaPo Opinion: We need to talk about UFOs again (4/1/2021)
WSJ: UFO Spotting Has Replaced Bird Watching as Pandemic Obsession (9/1/2021)
On one hand, this feels like a sea change in the media’s willingness to take UFOs seriously. On the other hand it’s… it’s probably nothing, right?
THE BOOK BARN 📖
The Tale of Sunlight by Gary Soto
Listen, nephew.
When I opened the cantina
At noon
A triangle of sunlight
Was stretched out
On the floor
Like a rug
Like a tired cat.
It flared in
From the window
Through a small hole
Shaped like a yawn.
Strange I thought
And placed my hand
Before the opening,
But the sunlight
Did not vanish.
I pulled back
The shutters
And the room glowed,
But this pyramid
Of whiteness
Was simply brighter.
The sunlight around it
Appeared soiled
Like the bed sheet
Of a borracho.
Amazed, I locked the door,
Closed the windows.
Workers, in from
The fields, knocked
To be let in,
Children peeked
Through the shutters,
But I remained silent.
I poured a beer,
At a table
Shuffled a pack
Of old cards,
And watched it
Cross the floor,
Hang on the wall
Like a portrait
Like a calendar
Without numbers.
When a fly settled
In the sunlight
And disappeared
In a wreath of smoke,
I tapped it with the broom,
Spat on it.
The broom vanished.
The spit sizzled.
It is the truth, little one.
I stood eye to blank eye
And by misfortune
This finger
This pink stump
Entered the sunlight,
Snapped off
With a dry sneeze,
And fell to the floor
As a gift
To the ants
Who know me
For what I gave.
THE RIGHT’S WING 🦇
It is with a heavy heart that I must do some light reportage on raw egg nationalism. I recently saw a few videos on Twitter of some guy named Dryden Brown and his friends in SoHo consuming raw eggs and I figured the practice had achieved mainstream visibility (163 views, 11 likes) and merited a write-up. I have no idea who Dryden Brown is or what his organization does, but he looks like he’s having fun, so I wish him the best.
Slonking raw eggs — like any number of things on the right — grew out of bodybuilding culture. I’m generalizing here, but bodybuilders, who have little regard for the edicts of modern nutrition, have long thought that adding raw egg (initially just the egg white) to protein shakes is a quick and easy way to boost your protein intake. Somewhere along the line, when people started getting suspicious about the medical community’s anti-cholesterol crusade, the anonymous bodybuilding community decided that cholesterol is not only good for you, but is in fact a source of immense vitality, and that the best way to add cholesterol to your diet is by 1) consuming red meat, particularly organ meats, and 2) slonking raw eggs — yolk and all. Cooking the egg denatures the good stuff or something.
A bodybuilder on Twitter who goes by the name of RAW EGG NATIONALIST has cornered the market on raw egg discourse and even wrote a book, called Raw Egg Nationalism in Theory and Practice: Cook Good with the Raw Egg Nationalist (Amazon link). The summary reads thus:
What is raw egg nationalism? And how can the massive consumption of raw eggs save us physically and politically from the depredations of globalism? Contained within are some of the secrets of raw egg nationalism, an esoteric movement of self-realisation that has set the anon bodybuilding community ablaze. Forget what you know about nutrition -- the nostrums of a medico-political regime that has done nothing but sicken the world -- and embrace the wisdom and diets of mavericks like Vince Gironda, the Iron Guru. Discard the bland chicken-and-rice diet of the Virgin Meal Prepper and become the Chad Egg Slonker... A new world of raw-egg-based vitality awaits you, anon.
Vince Gironda, the guy mentioned above, advocated for eating 36 raw eggs per day. Jiminy Cricket, that’s all I’ll say about that. I have not read the book, nor do I slonk raw eggs. It is at least partially for this reason that nobody calls me Murdo MacDonald, the Iron Guru.
I can only assume that slonking became the preferred term for consuming raw eggs because it doesn’t feel entirely right to say either drinking raw eggs or eating raw eggs. A new word had to be requisitioned and slonk fits the bill because it verbally resembles bodybuilder culture: it’s rotund, homegrown, and tongue-in-cheek. The crossover between the bodybuilder community and the right wing more generally reminds me of a meme that made the rounds last week.
Enjoy the week and keep it real, fellow farmers.