October 2017 – The Surly Farmer

Facebook is the Internet

October 28, 2017

I haven’t beaten on Facebook for a while, so let me remedy that.

Virginia Heffernan writes in Wired magazine, comparing Zuckerberg’s shrugging, “Aw gosh, we’re just an apolitical platform” with the gut wrenching reckoning Leslie E. Robertson put himself through after the collapse of the Twin Towers in 2001. Robertson was the chief engineer in the Twin Towers project and wondered after their collapse what he might have done differently, whereas Zuck . . . well, after the election, he said it was “crazy” to say that Facebook could have influenced the vote, and then he went on walkabout trying to get to know American hoomans.

Facebook is indeed a new world order. It determines our digital and real-world behavior in incalculable ways. It does all this without any kind of Magna Carta except a vague hypothesis that connectivity is a given good. And yes, it’s largely unregulated, having styled itself as nothing more than a platform—a Switzerland pose that lets it seem as benign as its bank-blue guardrails, which stand as a kind of cordon sanitaire between Facebook and the rest of the unwashed internet.

In 2006, a college kid talked me off Myspace and onto Facebook by insisting that Facebook was orderly while Myspace was emo and messy. That kid was right. Facebook is not passionate; it’s blandly sentimental. It runs on Mister Rogers stuff: shares and friends and likes. Grandparents and fortysomethings are not spooked by it. Like the animated confetti that speckles Facebook’s anodyne interface, our lives on Facebook—the bios and posts—seem to belong to us and not to the company’s massive statehouse, which looks on indifferently as we coo over pups and newborns. (Or is it a penal colony? In any case, it keeps order.) Facebook just is the internet to huge numbers of people. Voters, in other words.

Further into her piece, Heffernan quotes Siva Vaidhyanathan, who has written a book about Zuckerberg and Facebook. Vaidhyanathan says that Zuckerberg may well have been better off had he finished college, as it may have addressed his lack of “appreciation for nuance, complexity, contingency, or even difficulty.” Adding that “He lacks an historical sense of the horrible things that humans are capable of doing to each other and the planet.” Sound like anyone else we know?

And . . . We’re Back

October 25, 2017

Now with a new computer (thanks, Dr. Evil), so expect some high speed, low drag kinda contextualizing from here out, brothers and sisters. Or more likely, more of the same, but with fewer cries of frustration from this side of the conversation.

While fixing dinner last night, I heard this line: “But since you’re accusing me I might as well be guilty.” It struck me a such an odd bit of passive/aggressive nonsense, or victim blaming that it stuck with me. Then this morning I came across a report about a 33 year-old man who stabbed his father to death while ranting about some secret pedophile ring run out of a DC pizza joint. This was but one of many conspiracy theories he bought into.The 911 call from his frazzled parents on the day of the stabbing has been released and it is unsettling to say the least. At the beginning of the call, the mother sounds almost bored, as in “here we go again,” but by the end of the call, her husband is dead. At one point during the call (calls, actually), the man can be heard saying, “OK well, so here’s the deal. If I am going to go to prison for threatening to kill somebody, I mean…” before fatally stabbing his father with a kitchen knife, stabbing him in the chest and back.

There are plenty of questions to be asked here: why is a grown man living with his parents? was he unemployed because he was unemployable? would he have been such a conspiracy nut if he did not spend hours upon hours chumming up to—and arguing with, I’m sure—other conspiracy nuts? But one question that plagues me concerns the responsibility of website owners and managers in instances like this. Legally, I think they are on firm footing, as long as they make the minimum effort to discourage and report unlawful behavior, but what about ethically? This man frequented Reddit, which I have a slight familiarity with, but was also a long-time contributor to the Ralph Retort, a far right fringe group deeply mired in GamerGate, and was a collaborator with Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart infamy. What does a society with a deep belief in the principal of freedom of speech and association do when the hubs of these associations are frequently destructive to that very society? The easy answer is a better educated populace, but I am not convinced that’s likely or even possible. The dummies and simps have alway been amongst us, it’s just that they were previously unable to make their voices heard beyond the local tavern or fraternal lodge, you know places that had rules of conduct and social norms.

It’s Not Hoarding If It’s Books, Right? Right?

October 15, 2017

We are slowly prepping for the big move across the Ohio, umm, to Ohio. [awk. be sure to come back and rework this] As I write this, I am sitting in my favorite room in the house: an office I share with Dr. Evil. All but about four feet of wall space in here is taken up by books, and by Jove, it just smells good when come in here. This is me, breathing in Tolkien and Melville, Dostoyevsky and Hiaasen (hey, a man needs his fun). When I moved myself here ten years ago, I only had my books, of course, and still I nearly killed myself after overpacking boxes to the point that they seemed to have their own gravitational pull. [everything has its own gravitational pull, please revise] Now, our books are happily co-mingled and even somewhat organized, but there are so many of them, with more arriving all the time. Add to this that Dr. Evil has been bringing even more books home from the office, as she will be a distance worker once we move. So. Many. Books. One positive is that the bougie Blue Apron boxes I was fretting about earlier are the perfect size for packing books—large enough to fit a few, but not so large that they should come with a coupon for a discount truss.

I was a fairly early adopter of the Kindle, so there are a number of books living in the ether and lightening our physical load, but even after several years with the Kindle, we still buy a good number of hard copy books. It’s difficult not to sometimes, when the prices are so similar. [yeah, keep rationalizing, pack rat] We have not done the smart thing like our friend Marie the Mad Librarian and made use of our local municipal library, but we aim to do more of that at the farm. You know, tomorrow.

Fac me bonum, o deus, sed nondum.

With the move growing closer by the day (we are told that a December handover of the new house to Dr. Evil’s folks is not out of the question), I keep returning to our little library to see what might be culled without too much pain. Friends, there is not much. Will I really be re-reading Francine Prose’s “A Changed Man” or Faulkner’s “The Reivers”? Probably not. But what if, man? What if? Add to this that there is no way to reasonably dispose of these books. Sadly, they have little value to anyone but me. I might be able to sell them to a used book store for pennies, or donate them to a charity that will probably cart them straight to the dumpster, and that just doesn’t sit well. I admire my in-laws, who set about replacing their most valued books with solid early editions and ditching the rest, but I’m just not there yet, ya know? Maybe after this move. Yeah, sed nondum.

I’m a Monster

October 13, 2017

When a recipe calls for only the green parts of green onions, you can place the root stems in a glass of water and new greens will grow from them. But whenever I do this, I experience a certain discomfort. I blame it on Cormac McCarthy.

He started down the rough wooden steps. He ducked his head and then flicked the lighter and swung the flame out over the darkness like an offering. Coldness and damp. An ungodly stench. He could see part of a stone wall. Clay floor. An old mattress darkly stained. He crouched and stepped down again and held out the light.

Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous.

Jesus, he whispered.

Then one by one they turned and blinked in the pitiful light. Help us, they whispered. Please help us.

On Roots

October 11, 2017

Over the past few years I’ve dabbled in researching my family history, going hard at it until no more clues are available, then coming back a year or so later to see if any new information is out there. It satisfies a certain itch I have for solving puzzles, but it also makes me wonder about rootless existence.

I got fantastically lucky in my last go around with genealogy, learning that my mother’s side of the family goes back to Jamestown. I got 17th century bona fides, yo! On the other hand, I think there’s nothing here to be bragging about; I had nothing to do with any of this, I was just born into it. Somehow, though, it justifies my sense of home in Virginia. I’ve mentioned before my inner confusion about ending up in Ohio. I don’t object to it, it’s just that it’s not what I anticipated, how ever subconsciously. Looking back at my family tree, I see generations living within the same few counties, and often because they predated the establishment of said counties, with larger counties subdividing into new ones while the families went about their business. Me, I was an Air Force brat, born on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic, then lived several years in Florida before, at the whims of Uncle Sam, ending up in Virginia, where my great, great, great (etc . . .) grandfather John Combs (Coombs) had landed some 350 years earlier. It was a good circle, I think.

Although I wasn’t born in Virginia, it’s always felt like my place, especially because I grew up in Northern Virginia, which is an incredibly transient kind of place. In NoVa, you could be considered old school if you remembered when I66 just came to an abrupt end in Prince William County, or if you saw Billy Kilmer under center at RFK. Even when I left NoVa to be with Dr. Evil in West Virginia, it was a sort of homecoming, because my mother’s family was from southern West Virginia. But when it comes to Ohio, I’ve got nothing, no connections, save for Dr. Evil’s parents. Ohio will most likely be the last place I live, and I won’t have any progeny (I mean, at least I don’t think I will; thoughts, Dr. Evil?) begotten in Ohio, so when some future researcher follows my path via census information (assuming the census survives Trump), my move to Ohio will be a weird outlier in a tale beginning with the landing of the Marigold in the Virginia Colony in May 1619. Will either of the girls want to take over the farm when Dr. Evil and I get old? Maybe. Maybe not. And even if they do, it will mean only three partial generations worth of roots in Vinton County, Ohio.

Maybe we Americans are just past putting long roots down. We don’t work lifetime jobs any longer, so why should our addresses not change too?

It Came From Below

October 8, 2017

I just spent an hour and a half combing through files on my computer, trying to force some kind of order onto the chaos that is my current (okay, pertpetual) state. I haven’t changed much since I was kid, it appears, because just like back then when I was sent to clean my room, I ended up getting distracted by the items I was supposed to be organizing. Anyway, I came across Mark Vonnegut’s 2010 piece on mushrooms and remembered why—tempted as I may be—there’s no way in hell I’d ever eat mushrooms I foraged.

Fifteen minutes or so after eating the new mushroom, which I did not serve to my wife, thank God, my heart started racing, painful spasms seized the back of my throat and sweat started pouring off me. I remembered seeing a picture of a mushroom, one with a skull and bones under it, that was called the sweating mushroom. Funny name, I thought.
“I think I might have made a mistake with the mushrooms,” I said softly.

“What’s that, dear?”

“I think I made a mistake with the mushrooms,” I said too loudly. Had I been sure I had ingested a less-than-fatal dose, I would have just gone quietly to bed.
It didn’t help that I was on the staff of the hospital where I went to get my stomach pumped. If I had been thinking more clearly, I would have gone elsewhere and maybe used another name.

“Doctor . . . , what are you doing here?”

“I was hoping maybe you could start an IV, run some saline and pump out my stomach.”
“Why are you dripping sweat?”

“Funny you should notice that.”

Needless to say, Vonnegut survived his brush with nature, but let it be a warning not to eat stuff growing on the forest floor. Unless you want to.

The Calm Before the Storm

October 6, 2017

Quiet time in 2017 seems to get interrupted by two things: sitting next to your partner reading the news of the day and one of you ejaculating¹either

“Oh my God!” Which precedes the description of yet another outrage by Trump, his family or his collection of cartoon administrators, or
“Oh no.” Which precedes the disclosure of another death or ailment of someone dear.

I suppose we should be thankful that the “Oh my Gods” are outnumbering the “Oh noes,” but it’s a hard way to live, ya know? The first thing I do upon waking each morning is check my iPad for overnight news alerts, hoping there are none. They’re bound to come through the day (like today’s alert that employers are largely off the hook for including birth control in their health insurance packages. Why? FuckifIknow. It’s certainly not because Trump is a prude or a typical sex-fearing evangelical, maybe just another case of undo-what-the-black-man-did, is my best guess), so it’s a relief when the screen is blessedly blank before my first coffee. Someone remind me why health care (via insurance) is linked to employment again, because that is some stupid shit right there. Oh, and while we’re at it, how come dental care is not health care when it comes to insurance?²

But back to the “Oh my God” that prompted me to write this. Last night, after dining with many senior members of the military (and their plus-ones, who must have had fantastic feelings of ambivalence about being invited to the White House, but this White House), Trump, in a photo op, commented that this was the calm before the storm, and when asked by the press what he meant, replied, “You’ll see.” Presidenting by reality show rules, ain’t it grand? And it makes for an awesome night’s sleep, let me tell you. Will we bomb North Korea? Invade Mali? You’ll see. Tune in tomorrow.

¹ I am trying to rehabilitate this verb to include definition number two in common conversation again.
² I know the historical reasons for this, I just want to know who thinks they still make sense in the 21st century.

October? I’m not impressed so far.

October 2, 2017

After my short post about Las Vegas this morning, I thought I’d come back later and post something a little more positive, maybe even amusing.

Then Tom Petty died, and October 2nd 2017 can go right off and fuck itself.

Louisiana rain is falling at my feet
Baby I’m noticing the change as I move down the street
Louisiana rain is soaking through my shoes
I may never be the same when I reach Baton Rouge

What Happened in Vegas . . .

October 2, 2017

. . . can’t stay in Vegas. We are very early into this story, but the established facts are enough: a human being opened fire on fellow human beings with a weapon whose only purpose is to kill or at least instill a fear of death. What are we going to do about it? Not much is my guess. And to be honest, I don’t know what’s to be done about it.

So as not to leave everyone on a down note, here’s an awesome Tweet I encountered this morning:

https://twitter.com/PeteNorth303/status/914758580749918208

The Curated Box

October 1, 2017

I’ve noticed a trend in retail lately, that of the subscription/curated model. Food is the first thing that comes to mind, with the Blue Aprons and Hello Freshes of the world delivering pre-portioned meal components to thousands of doorsteps each week, but it goes far past food and appears to be a growing trend. Just thinking about how often we buy in this manner surprised me, even though I chose to do it.

On Wednesdays, we receive a box of stuff from Blue Apron, three meals for two people. It’s convenient, the ingredients are high quality and always fresh and the recipes are reasonably imaginative. There are some downsides, of course. Mostly, it feels very bougie. What, are we going to get a cleaning service next? Beyond this, I subscribe to Third Man Records’ “Vault” program. They assemble a nice package of music from various artists which goes out every three months. Some of it is more interesting than others, but even if you don’t like a certain installment, they are easy to re-sell, because they are limited editions. You know record heads can’t stand the thought of missing out on a limited edition from a band they like. Also on a quarterly basis, I receive notebooks from Field Notes. I have a weakness for notebooks, and even though I probably already have more than I will be able to use in my lifetime, still they come. Dr. Evil used to get subscription boxes of girlie things from Birch Box. I can’t speak to their quality, but the boxes were pretty cool.

Add to this the odd must have “One Time Tools” from Woodpeckers, various premiums offered by Kickstarter and the like, signed first editions from Powell’s, Record Store Day special pressings, and on and on, and pretty soon we’re talking real money. If I were a good capitalist, I’d be looking for a way to exploit this trend. On the other hand, since I’m just beginning to detect the trend, it’s safe to say that it is probably about to bust. I’m just lucky that way.

But why? A manufactured sense of scarcity? A need for something seemingly unique, but without too much effort, thankyouverymuch? Are we all bored with the million ways that already existed to spend our limited lucre? I dunno, but I welcome your thoughts.

Month: October 2017