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

Response to Jesses Blog

Funny timing, the other night I checked the blog for the first time in months and there were no new posts. Checked again tonight because everything else out on the internet is so fast-paced and frantic and just carries an inherent stress, so this is the perfect introspective thing I wanted to read. Scott, adrian, and I also just spent the night recounting college stories.

I feel where you're coming from. One of the things we talked about was how much we used to laugh, how many just out-of-control overwhelming laughs we had. We used to just get sooo high, it was like a fucking space mission, we literally deemed it a different universe. Looking back there definitely is something garden-of-eden-ish about it. And we definitely all had winters.

But looking at it now, I don't feel so detached from my former self like you describe. Life is more rigid for sure. I haven't been able to get high or even really stay up late since I got my concussion in July, so that's an even bigger reason my life's been not as 'magical' lately. But I also feel more comfortable with myself, and stronger and independent as a person, than I did back in the day. The trifecta of working out, learning how to camp, and dealing with my dads death made me feel like I can deal with a lot of things life might throw at me. (I don't wanna say all or most because who the fuck knows what horrible shit could happen, but I'll say a lot.) So I've grown up, and maybe the rigid, structured nature of how my life is set up right now makes me feel less like I'm floating through a hilarious psychedelic dream than I used to be. But for the moment I'm ok with it.

I've always been interested with the arc of how you change as you get older. And wondered if you ever get stale. Like I look at my favorite artists over time- the Beatles soared through their early twenties, then in the mid-twenties got into their druggy crazy shit, but from then on got kinda boring. And in my mind that was when they "grew up." Like Abbey Road is still great, and the craftsmanship is brilliant, but they weren't capable of reinventing the wheel anymore, or just being on the cutting edge anymore. In my mind the early/mid-twenties Beatles have something in common with our college selves, this aspect of still-figuring-things-out, which makes everything they do a bit more exciting, because it's on the edge of chaos or something. Where as now I'm just repeating the same things over and over. Same job everyday, same house at night, same kind of jokes all the time. Am I stale? Am I boring? If I am at all I think it's mainly because that time is being funneled into a job to pay for a life.

So to get back on track, it makes sense to wonder if who you are now will feel the same let's say 20 years down the road. Like, in our teens we looked back a year and felt different. Has that slowed down at all? I was gonna say it has, but I don't know, I feel like I can still go two years back and say I was different. But is now-me less different from 2-years-ago-me than 4-years-ago-me to 2-years-ago-me? I don't think so, I think I've changed more in the last two years. So the question is, if I changed and now feel like I have shit figured out, does that make me less likely to change in the future? Maybe, but I don't have everything figured out, just more of it....

To wrap this up. Before reminiscing about college, I was at work late and literally had life conversations like this with two other people, so again this timing is weird. But anyways, this woman I work with told me how basically she was married for 24 years before her marriage fell apart in 2015, which forced her to move back here from New Zealand. And she said for a while she brooded over it and cried everyday. But since she started working with us she's been feeling like she's living up to her potential better, working with people she likes for a good cause, and then she was like, "I know this sounds crazy, but looking back at it now, I'm grateful that it happened, because it's given me a second go at life that I didn't expect to have." So, case in point, if things feel stale, and like the magic has gone out, it's not impossible to change that. This isn't totally on the mark of what you're saying, because it's true you can never go back. But you can make forward just as interesting and exciting. I think?

Looking Back

Voices from the past. Moans of pain, contemplation and endless laughter. The over-use of the word "gay":
I read the blog last night.

It had been some time since I paid it a visit. Each time I would read a couple entries, laugh a little at how silly we were and lament the fact that the years of 100+ posts were gone.

This time I felt different. This time, my heart wrenched as I scrolled through the years, past dick jokes and long drawn out sentences meant to confuse for simple friendly delight. My heart wrenched because it felt no equal here. This blog is no longer a mirror, it's a photograph. And the people in it almost unrecognizable. The authors of theses stories are ripe fruit hanging over a lifetime. Swaying joyfully, soaking in the sun with there brothers.

That fruit fell and the harsh sun above drank it's juices and the ground below ate it's soft skins. A winter fell over the bodies and covered the remains with a blanket cold and real.

And when the rains dragged away the brush and the warm wind returned, what emerged was a sapling. Still young, looking up to the same heights it once swung only now with morbid trepidation. With the deep earthly knowledge that this will be my final form. From here till forever some version of this brain, these beliefs and this heart, ever growing heavy, will be life.

I cannot long for my former self, I think I've grown too old for such cheap tricks. And I do not envy the pain I felt five years ago. But with outstretched arms towards the constant Eastern winds of time I feel the all too sober conclusion, that one me has long past and before this life is through so shall another.

Wanna call watching this whole thing the Shepard's Challenge

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9VMfdG873E

i just realized every blog post from 2017 starts with i

i carumba ;)