Ceci n'est pas un chapeau that looks like one that belonged to my 1st ex-wife 20 (twenty? LMAO) years ago sitting on a middle school gymnasium floor where I was a night janitor. There's a sentence I wouldn't have imagined stating as objective fact and not some chimeric fiction in an unpublishable story before the start of COVID insanity. You can see the phone's shadow under the overhead fluorescents, proof of my witness. I have (had?) a photo of her wearing it somewhere, where if memory serves, she's smiling, but there's no chance I'm going looking for that.
This is four hundred feet of rhubarb and it does not give a fuck about your lower back and will continually sprout flowering bodies that the farm owner demands you to rip out as they are an energy suck to the parts of the rhubarb he does want to grow. The bushes are three feet high and six feet across. The flower stalks shoot up over the bush like some kind of xenomorphic antennae. The pruning must be done every four or five days or else the biology gets away from the farmer's ability to curtail it with his own. So, yeah, I started work as a hand seasonally at a local, mostly potato, family farm. This is also a sentence that is grand in its absurdity while simultaneously capital t "True". It's pretty wild, the farm, and I feel like I'm in a Wes Anderson movie as I'm moving around, being transported to a field in the back of a 1970's-ish diesel fueled Isuzu, or walking behind a tractor drawn planting implement that is depositing squash starts into a plastic sheet. I know the camera crew is out there and if I try only a little I can dream up an appropriate emo soundtrack to accompany the footage.
Here's a picture of where the squash would eventually find their summer homes. This is where we sealed the desired portion of earth with a plastic sheet. My job was to anchor the plastic and the irrigation tape as the tractor unspooled the roll down 400 feet of powdery soil. After the tractor would descend the row, another hand severed the tape and plastic and then served as anchor as the tractor returned to me. I sat, waiting, in the shade of portoshitter and watched the tractor crawl back like some kind of live action Andrew Wyeth painting. Later, I would watch a wolf spider hop about and later still a beetle would try to employ me as a rock. Later still, on some other day back at the same field, a flock of sandhill cranes flew over, croaking, about thirty feet off of the ground. I took a video and considered that I was an "intelligent" ape using a highly specialized rock to access updates from people all across the globe. Haha. Man, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
The River. One thing I've really grooved to, working at the farm, is how much time I spend outside, tuning into the animal nature that's carrying these dumb thoughts around. It's hot, labor intensive, and often miserable, yet at day's end when I peel off my filthy socks and clap on my flip flops and wash my face and hands and head for the bar I feel a great satisfaction with nothing, almost as if the physicality of it drains one of existential dread. Just the other day, I felt I knew a little more intimately what Cain felt when his brother's offering curried more favor with Yahweh than his own had. I'd kill a motherfucker with a rock too. Then again, wouldn't we all?
