the yearnings of an addict
January 3, 2022
Welcome to Reality Farm.
Lost? Confused? Excellent, me too. Here’s a map.
SUGAR CUBES 📷
Mark Maggiori — “Living With The Mountains”
Mark Maggiori — “Hold On To What Is Good”
Mark Maggiori — “The Missing Horse”
WEATHER REPORT 🖼
HWÆT. I moved to San Francisco. Three days before my lease expired, a tech company offered me a job and asked me to relocate to the Bay Area. When I arrived, they canceled our return-to-office plans indefinitely, and I simply try not to think about how much of a hassle it was to ship my life across the country for the privilege of working out of yet another bedroom. God loves me and has a sense of humor.
San Francisco is far more beautiful than I’d been led to believe. The city is a mess of hills. Streets turn vertical, not in any discernible fashion or direction, but at random, like one of Escher’s palaces — walk in any direction and you’re face-to-face with the sidewalk, practically licking it, until you reach the top of a rise and are clubbed over the head by some astounding view of water, bridges, coastlines. I live in a big house that is falling apart, across the street from a park full of venture capital offices and homeless encampments. I’m rich with friends. The transition was easy and life is good. Please visit.
The weather here is always the same, so there’s no need for a Weather Report. I’ll rethink this section and retool a few others. I’m open to suggestions.
R.I.P. My garden, abandoned and gone to seed in Washington, D.C.
CONTENT CROP 🌾
Worn Out || Real Life Mag
In other words, fashion conveys not just specific trends or an individual’s personal style but a sense of the public itself, of shared space. Fashion implies a desire to see and be seen while affirming the need for public spaces and occasions where that seeing can occur. The manner in which fashion circulates and evolves speaks to the kind of shared reality that we are constituting for one another.
To the tech world, however, those positive externalities look suspiciously inefficient. These unpaid-for pleasures are externalities that could, with the right technological fixes, be reinternalized and made into someone’s property again.
note: instagram hammers me with targeted ads for corduroy shirts. I spend an hour a day looking at corduroy shirts for sale on the worst websites you’ve ever seen in your life
The Pink Diamond || Tablet Mag
I recently met a Jew at a hotel bar in Brussels to talk about a pink diamond, which had been taken from him several years earlier by the Belgian police. The courts had just decided that the stone is definitely his, which means that it will be returned to him soon, very soon, or maybe it will be returned to his grandchildren. Hotel bars are great places to talk about things like stolen diamonds. The music is just loud enough to encourage conversation while discouraging eavesdroppers—and to make that preference plain, there is usually an extra foot or two between tables, to ensure that everyone minds their own business.
note: David Samuels could write about the most humiliating experience of my life in excruciating detail and I’d still read every word and share it with my friends
The Myth of Panic || Palladium Mag
Victims and bystanders of disaster tend to rush towards disaster zones, not flee mindlessly away from them; the greatest challenge facing many disaster response teams is not terrorized crowds, but an overload of volunteers who arrive to aid the response.
If any aspect of an unfolding disaster is marked by panic, disaster sociologists Caron Chess and Lee Clarke observe, it is the behavior of elites. Catastrophe presents a leadership class with a terrible contradiction. On the one hand, the perception that leadership is not equal to the unfolding calamity erodes the legitimacy of any ruling class. Leaders understand that Heaven’s Mandate rests on their effective prevention of and response to crisis. On the other hand, the chaos inherent to disaster inevitably reduces leadership’s ability to control—or even stay aware of—the events by which they will be judged.
note: crowdthought (Canetti, Girard, Murray) continues to delight
POSTCARDS FROM OUTER SPACE 🎴
I’m holed up in the mountains for the next few weeks and left my cache of postcards at home — if you have a scanner, please send me a scan of a postcard. any postcard will do. God knows this is everyone’s favorite section.
UFOs IN THE COW FIELD 🛸
Photos from the Ukrainian-Russian front are stupidly bleak.
THE BOOK BARN 📖
A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
(Fiction, 1967. $14.)
Great lovers lie in hell, the poet says. Even now, long afterwards, I cannot destroy the images. They remain within me like the yearnings of an addict. I need only hear certain words, see certain gestures, and my thoughts begin to tumble. I despise myself for thinking of her. Even if she were dead, I would feel the same. Her existence blackens my life.
Solitude. One knows instinctively it has benefits that must be more deeply satisfying than those of other conditions, but still it is difficult. And besides, how is one to distinguish between conditions which are valuable, which despite their hatefulness give us strength or impel us to great things and others we would be far better free of? Which are precious and which are not? Why is it so hard to be happy alone? Why is it impossible? Why, whenever I am idle, sometimes even before, in the midst of doing something, do I slowly but inevitably become subject to the power of their acts.
Silence. I listen to it, the silence of that room which leaves me faint. Those calm phrases to which she knows so well how to respond as barefoot now, unhurried, she crosses to him in the dark.
I have not gone deep enough, that’s the thing. In solitude one must penetrate, one must endure. The icy beginning is where it is worst. One must pass all that. One must go forward all the way, through bitterness, through righteous feelings, advancing upon it like a holy city, sensing the true joy. I try to summon it to me, to make it appear. I am certain it is there, but it does not come easily. Of course not. One must waver. One must struggle. Beliefs are meant to cleave us to the bone.
“There was a lot,” she says.
She glistens with it. The inside of her thighs is wet.
note: my favorite book of the year and possibly the only erotic novel I’ll ever recommend. avail yourself of it
THE RIGHT’S WING 🦇
Strange things are afoot. I’ll assemble some relevant reading for the next edition.