Eclipse Follow-Up

I was going through past blog posts to find the coral video that Geologist did the music for in celebration of Animal Collective's new album when I came across an old, offhand post about seeing the eclipse.

Well, (most of) we fucking did it, people. And I recently got around to finally uploading the footage, so without further ado:

Facebook

early christmas post

where i'm at

The Radish Dilemma and Rrrock Facts

Bainbridge Island is pretty much full of old hippies who also have buttloads of money. They care a lot about their trees and don't give a shit about paying $5 a bunch for tiny carrots.

Staying dry by planting lettuce under greenhouse tunnels we built.

By my estimate, we have something like 1200ft of radishes in the ground, which is a bit insane considering that's just one crop out of the 50+ that we grow here. A common radish task is to thin them once they start showing their first true leaves (about an inch tall). In practice, this involves going down rows of plants and murdering them. Tiny ones are plucked out of the soil in favor of the bigger stronger radishes that must be spaced 1-2" apart. Simple. Except sometimes you have a big radish that's just too close to the other guys and now it must join your pile of corpses. It lived better than any other radish and certainly is superior to the scraggly radish left behind several feet ago, but it was born in the wrong place. It was born in the wrong place. Something that it couldn't control and now it must die.

My boss chillin'

In the past couple weeks, I've come to peace with the radishes and cozied into my home for the season. Today, instead of changing into sweats and researching plants in the comfort of my room, I decided to enjoy a bit of the rare evening sun, tidy up our overflowing compost, and map out an outdoor mushroom bed for one of my experiments. A pile of rocks by our fire pit was prime pickings for the border of the bed, but I was worried it was a small pet cemetery or someone's sacred collection of rocks. It turned out to be a communal rock pile. My coworker mentioned that the fire pit always tends to get stacked and re-stacked by its many visitors - something I found terrific and ceremonious.

Anyways, the stones weren't claimed and the pit already had plenty of them, so I started placing the excess in a bucket until I got swept up in mixture of sadness and guilt. These aren't my rocks. These are everyone's rocks. Did I really not just get my own rocks because I'm a lazy piece of shit? Yes. Definitely yes. I decided to replace the rocks after finishing up the border because it felt like the right thing to do. We had joked about harvesting rocks in the field since Washington has such rocky soil, so it felt silly-in-a-good-way to actually be doing that now. I walked down the edge of the garden beds as the sun was setting, putting rocks in my bucket. And as I was adding rocks into the communal pile, I thought, "Oh shit this is what it's all about." Using collected rocks that came from other people to build something new and then adding your own rocks back.

I'm sure there are much more straightforward, less rock-centric and radish-y ways of coming to terms with the good and bad aspects of life, but that's all I got. Toodles.

Dream

Walking through the night in Allston trying to get back home, talked to a shadowy homeless dude along my path, kept walking and ran into cico, talked to him and then the homeless dude caught up. Cico knew him from the greasy-hipster-underbelly of emerson. I'd offered to let John stay the night at my Westland apartment, and he in turn invited this guy to stay. I was apprehensive but knew that if John wanted it to happen then it would probably be fine. We got back and later in my room I found out this dude actually used to be in the hipster cliques at emerson before becoming homeless the year before our last year. I realized I had peripherally known him at some point. What I had not known before was that he was also a long lost member of neutral milk hotel. He had then had an underground-cult-famous solo project with a neutral-milk-hotel-ish name, which I was always unable to remember. There had been a documentary on him. Something had happened to him that had changed everything, and now he'd been living on the cold streets for four years. I was happier to help then, as I was fascinated by his story, but he was still a dirty homeless man and I worried about getting sick from having him sleep in my room.

The next night I was trudging across the crunchy-snow-covered backwoods of Boston with rob and Brandon when we heard a car coming. I thought it might be the dude from last night, or another homeless guy I'd come across, and didn't want to have to deal with him another night, so as the car came into view of us we, or I at least, pretended to be sleeping on the snow.

Then it was raining. We reached the part where we had to scamper down the hill to the city streets. I fretted that I had left my shoes outside in the rain overnight. We approached the bright colorful city lights of Downtown. I went into a convenience store and knew where everything was because I'd worked there a long time ago. But I might've knocked something over, leading to an unwanted conversation with the current stock-boy.

Then I was in the subway, asking someone–was it the neutral milk hotel guy? Or an Asian proxy?–what hard thing had happened in his life. I asked him two easy questions, then I asked him if he'd lost someone close to him. He told me that I had asked a question that he could not answer, and started zooming ahead of me. I could not catch up to tell him that I had too.

Obligartory Golden Moon Post