Either join us or grow other potatoes
I don’t remember much about that day but I know we danced to that song
Hello it’s my birthday this weekend please give me some money. I love you.
We’re fascinated by dystopian stories and apocalypse movies because we like to imagine when the time comes that we would be the one to survive. We picture ourselves sneaking around empty Duane Reades scavenging pop tarts for our sad new lady friend whose hair is always clean and throwing molotov cocktails at the cyborg mayor’s lawyer or whatever but we wouldn’t do any of that we would be dead. Whenever I watch a zombie movie I see the people trying so so hard to stay alive a little while longer than everyone else and I always think why? I also think that a lot on regular occasions but that’s just me.
It’s nice to fantasize sometimes though. You are the hero and your life is uniquely worth continuing amidst the ocean of death due to you work harder at it.
The best part of any of those movies in any case is the parts we don’t see. Maybe they have an epilogue of sorts running under the opening credits or maybe there’s a scene where they find old news videos of the lead up to the diarrhea tornado that wipes out Vancouver and you get a little glimpse of specifically how things went to all hell and that is always more interesting to me than the actual plot that follows because that just ends up being a mere survival story and every human being’s life ever has been a mere survival story. Things are very bad and you try to live nonetheless.
I think maybe the reason they usually skip over the rising calamity a lot of times is because that sort of thing is hard to pull off believably. It’s easier to start in media res film term and establish that zombies or aliens overran humanity very quickly or that the cyborg mayor’s lawyer rules the remains of Akron with an iron fist now because detailing how things fell apart leaves us too many chances to withhold our disbelief. That wouldn’t happen come on we say it wouldn’t go like that. Someone would have stopped that we think.
The other day I saw a big ass tree branch that broke off and fell onto some power lines near my house and I thought I should probably call someone about that and there was a cop sitting in his cop car just a block or so away and I thought I should go tell the cop about the tree branch and I imagined how little he would give a shit so it didn’t seem worth it and I didn’t do anything and I presume it all worked out fine because I stopped thinking about it.
Think about a dystopia or an apocalypse story. What comes to mind The Handmaiden’s Tale or 1984 or On the Beach or the 2011 TNT original series Falling Skies starring ER’s Noah Wyle? Wrong it’s dumber than any of that. The truth about the decline of humanity unless it’s through war which is still possible is that the prologue will just be a series of increasingly weirder and more selfish decisions made by the dumbest richest people alive and the rest of us will be carrying on as usual thinking we should call someone and have them look into it but we won’t because we don’t realize we’re in the beginning of a disaster we think we’re just in a survival story about ourselves.
PepsiCo the billion dollar global corp announced last month that they were suing a handful of small Indian farmers for using the proprietary species of potato that they use in Lays potato chips. They wanted 10 million rupees which is $143,000 from each of the farmers who own a couple of acres because they didn’t have a license to grow the fancy Pepsi potato.
"The company was compelled to take the judicial recourse as a last resort to safeguard the larger interest of thousands of farmers that are engaged with its collaborative potato farming program," the corporation’s spokesperson said. They contract out with farmers there to grow the famous potato we all enjoy.
Farmers and activists there were red assed about the lawsuit and rightfully so saying it was harassment. They sent a letter to the government asking for help saying the farmers who only own a couple of acres each didn’t even realize they were growing the special cola potato.
"We believe that the intimidation and legal harassment of farmers is happening because farmers are not fully aware of [their] rights," it said and it also said PepsiCo hired potato detectives to go undercover and try to buy the magic potato beans from the farmers and videotape them like they were selling pounds of heroin.
And then something weird happened though which is the massive corporation actually seems to have been shamed into relenting. First they offered to settle with the farmers. “We told them, why don't you join our program and we will provide seeds ... Either join us or grow other potatoes. That way, we are willing to let go of the case,” they said according to CNN.
Either join us or grow other potatoes.
Yesterday they finally said fuck it. Someone probably made the case of how bad it was making them look and they dropped the case out of respect for farmers just kidding it looks like Prime Minister Narendra Modi who is up for reelection soon had his Bharatiya Janata Party who control the Gujarat region where the farmers grow the cheating potatoes step in and say cut the shit.
George Saunders ass world. I forget which story of his in particular this reminds me of. If this were a movie I’d be smarter and remember things better and I’m sorry about that.
Suicides among farmers in India have been a huge problem for many years now. A study from the University of California, Berkeley from 2017 tracked suicides over the past thirty years and measured them against climate change and it found a correlation between rising temperatures and the deaths. As reported by the Guardian “an increase of just 1C on an average day during the growing season was associated with 67 more suicides” and “an increase of 5C on any one day was associated with an additional 335 deaths, the study published in the journal PNAS on Monday found. In total, it estimates that 59,300 agricultural sector suicides over the past 30 years could be attributed to warming.”
“One drought-hit state, Maharashtra, reported 852 farmer suicides in the first four months of [2017[, while in 2015, one of the worst years on record, about 12,602 farmers killed themselves across India. Overall, more than 300,000 farmers and farm workers have killed themselves in the country since 1995.”
Worse than the rising temperatures and droughts perhaps is that the farmers were facing an even scarier threat in the form of the fucking bank. Rani Radhakrishnan whose husband had taken his own life out of financial despair explained what happened to him.
In February, owing 80,000 rupees (£945), her husband stood outside his bank branch in the city of Trichy, and consumed a toxic concoction. He died on the spot.
“He had talked about things like this [suicide] happening with others, but never about doing it himself,” she said.
The next week, Radhakrishnan and her daughter-in-law stood outside the bank brandishing wads of rupees. “We told them, we have repaid your money, now will you give us back my husband’s life?” she said.
Speaking of The Guardian I wrote a thing the other day commemorating the occasion of Donald Trump’s 10,000th lie as president. Does that seem like a lot or a little to you because it seems like a lot of lying to me even grading on the Trump curve.
Donald Trump likes to boast about his achievements, imagined and otherwise, that is no secret. The president regularly trumpets the success of the greatest economy ever, and the strongest military, and the most decisive electoral victory and all manner of other superlatives he’s supposed to have delivered. But one that is undeniable is that he has just become one of the most prolific liars in the history of American governance, passing the 10,000th lie of his administration this week – meaning an average of almost 17 lies a day over 604 days.
Not all of his lies were created equally. Some have been harmless, almost goofy claims about his physical stamina or business acumen, or obviously exaggerated anecdotes about the types of things supporters say to him. Others are downright horrifying and dangerous, about serious issues such as immigration and abortion.
I’m not gonna drop the whole thing in here but here’s a couple that stood out for me.
‘The doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby’
This past weekend, Trump repeated what has become one of the more frighteningly dishonest claims from the right lately regarding abortion.
“The baby is born. The mother meets with the doctor. They take care of the baby. They wrap the baby beautifully. And then the doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby.”
The fearmongering comments echo previous lies about state laws on abortion that Trump has made, such as a State of the Union address claim that a New York law would allow for “a baby to be ripped from the mother’s womb moments before birth”.
“Late-term abortions,” the subject of both of these incorrect claims, are very rare and only occur when the pregnancy poses a threat to a mother’s health or there are dire fetal medical conditions.
Fred Trump was born in Germany
It’s not just the big things Trump is compelled to lie about, it’s also the minor details that seem to serve no conceivable benefit, such as in April of this year, when he asserted for the fourth time that his father had been born in Germany.
“My father is German, right? Was German, and born in a very wonderful place in Germany.”
The president’s father, Fred Trump, was born in New York City.
For some reason this piece has drawn the particular ire of a reader who has left a series of messages for me on every conceivable social media channel. Getting weird comments and messages from the worst people you can imagine is nothing new to me but this one is funny to me in a very specific way.
Wake up and retain counsel! sounds like a cursed CSPAN morning show that would be on so loud at the airport when you’re leaving like…fucking… Dallas Fort Worth International on a Sunday at 5 am and you’d have all sorts of violent fantasies about what you wanted to do to the TV with a hammer but you wouldn’t do it because you aren’t ever going to do shit are you you’re going to take it you little worm.
Here is my other airport thought of the week.
Here’s one of the best songs I can think of.
No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one's laughing at God when they're starving or freezing or so very poor
No one laughs at God when the doctor calls after some routine tests
No one's laughing at God
When it's gotten real late and their kid's not back from the party yet
No one laughs at God when their airplane start to uncontrollably shake
No one's laughing at God
When they see the one they love, hand in hand with someone else
And they hope that they're mistaken
No one laughs at God
When the cops knock on their door and they say we got some bad news, sir
No one's laughing at God when there's a famine or fire or flood
I had occasion to remember this song the other day due to someone I have cause to want to see stay alive had some routine tests come back in a scary fashion and well I am just not going to think about it and then it won’t ever turn out bad.
I don’t know about you but I don’t believe that there’s any God or afterlife or any of that horse shit or anything beyond all of this but when it’s dark and quiet at night and I can’t sleep or someone I love is in pain or even when I am in a lot of pain I do. I talk right to that imaginary bitch and say please. I have a little prayer I say sometimes and I share everything about my life but I’m not going to ever share that with anyone.
I like Regina Spektor a lot and another of her songs I love is Us and even though it’s about the crumbling Soviet empire and shit of that nature Michelle and I danced to it at our wedding. Not “wedding dance” danced to it because we didn’t have that type of wedding we had a restaurant we like make some food and open the bar and did it right in there and had no dancing. I love dancing but I despise wedding dancing so that was one of my rules right up front. There is nothing sadder to me than a corny wedding DJ hectoring your cousins and your dad’s work friends into dancing to Bust A Move. Then one guy starts funny dancing and everyone gets in a circle and the guy just goes for it. I don’t have many hard and fast rules in life but one of them is do not funny dance. Either dance or don’t.
I don’t remember much about that day but I know we danced to that song and Michelle looked beautiful I remember that.
Four thousand people a night sleep on the streets of San Francisco and a family earning “$117,400 a year is considered low income” there according to the Sacramento Bee. Why is that? Hard to say but the CEO of a tech company based in the city is donating $30 million to study the problem.
To be fair to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff he does seem to be somewhat better than his peers in that he supported an initiative to make tech companies pay higher taxes to support homelessness programs in San Francisco. No other prominent CEO was on his side including of course Twitter’s Jack Dorsey who whined about how unfair it would be.
The UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative will be part of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations, led by Dr. Margot Kushel.
The $30 million contribution is the largest-ever private donation to fund homelessness research, according to Salesforce.
"The world needs a North Star for truth on homelessness," Benioff said in a statement. The initiative "will be that North Star, providing the latest research, data and evidence-based solutions to ensure we're investing in programs that will help solve the homelessness crisis."
Sometimes people are confused about what neoliberalism means.
That’s it. That’s all the commentary on that I have on that one.
I saw a story titled Abuse By Boy Scout Leaders More Widespread Than Earlier Thought the other day. How widespread did you think it was? I admit I never really thought about it and I was a Boy Scout until I was about sixteen. I was a Life Scout which is one step before Eagle but I quit because they wouldn’t let me wear an earring. I was never abused as a Boy Scout or as an altar boy in Massachusetts which are two of the main groups people love to sexually abuse. Not sure how I dodged that.
The Boy Scouts of America's own records show that more than 12,000 children have been sexually assaulted while participating in the organization's programs. The documents came to light through court testimony given by a researcher whom the Scouts had hired to do an internal review. The records reveal allegations against thousands of Scout leaders — allegations that date from the 1940s.
The abuse stretches back nearly one hundred years and one of the fancy tricks the organization is thinking about doing to get away with it is declaring bankruptcy reports WBUR.
The Scouts have extensive land holdings across the United States where members hike, camp and play. The prospect that the Boy Scouts may declare bankruptcy has victims and their lawyers crying foul, arguing that this would end up shortchanging sexual abuse victims.
A bankruptcy filing could allow the 109-year-old organization to continue operating by shielding assets and information.
I’m not sure if one of those properties they own is Camp Squanto in Plymouth, Massachusetts but that is where I went for summer camp when I was a boy. Can you figure out which one is me in that photo up there? Here’s a hint I’m the one who went on to suffer from a lifetime of body image-based self loathing.
I have vague memories of camping out under the stars and it feeling magical and digging holes of various sizes with no particular purpose and rowing boats and shooting arrows and shit like that but the one memory that has stuck with me the most from my entire time as a Boy Scout was my first night ever away at camp. I would have been about twelve or thirteen I guess and I was getting set up in my tent and I was nervous and scared to be away from home and I had to go to the bathroom and so I went out behind my tent and pulled down my dark green cargo shorts and squatted next to a tree and emptied fifteen pounds of turds directly back into my shorts. A marksman archer couldn’t have hit a more direct bullseye. I didn’t even know how to shit in the woods which is literally the first thing our ancient ancestors learned how to do and then once I cleaned up someone told me there was an actual bathroom we could use right over there.
This piece of mine came out the other day in Boston Magazine and I’d like you to read it because you will probably find it relatable which is thing articles are supposed to be now. Sorry about reusing the bit about the low ceilings that I used on here once in the intro but how many ways are there to describe a room with a low ceiling for fucks sake? Anywhere here’s the first part:
The ceiling in my childhood bedroom is so low, it’s like I could jump and hit my head on it and knock myself out if I really wanted to. The room itself is small, too, as if the walls are closing in. Part of that might be the way that everything in the home you grew up in seems smaller when you come back to it as an adult, but it’s also probably because when the room was built a few hundred years ago, people didn’t have as many possessions to hold onto forever as we do now. The guy who built the place was a son or a grandson of the first governor of Plymouth Colony, and there’s a big rock out back with a plaque on it to commemorate the occasion. Unbothered by history, I used to climb all over it when I was young, standing on top and looking out at the farm next door. It had one horse and one cow, and it always seemed like the loneliest farm in the world to me, but maybe it was just an exceptionally efficient one.
Every year, around the start of spring, I get a call from my mother asking me to come contend with the entire history of my youth, which has been jammed into this room for almost 20 years. It’s like the persistent alerts you get on your phone saying you’re running out of photo space and it’s time to upgrade your iCloud storage, but even phones don’t (yet) have the power to guilt you into action like mothers do. And so finally, this year, I gave in. I was in the neighborhood already to celebrate the March birthdays of my niece and sister, two people at various stages of object accumulation. I trudged up the alarmingly steep and uneven staircase, the wood having warped under the pressure of centuries.
Inside, the bedroom was a mess. I discovered box after box filled with the detritus of youth: old comic books my mother insisted must be worth some money; projects dating back to elementary school; high school and college essays; and morbid poems, including some in an unrecognizable scrawl that I’d bound together into a book with a flowery wallpaper covering. I must have recently read Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” for the first time, because one verse was clearly a rip-off, and I laughed, because at least it was proof to me that I’ve remained consistent in my miserable, brooding identity. I also found a treasure trove of cassette tapes, some I’d even listen to right now—Dinosaur Jr., Liz Phair, Alice in Chains—and some I wouldn’t, such as a Hootie & the Blowfish live bootleg from 1992. I don’t know what to tell you, man, the ’90s were weird.
There were also postcards from girls I no longer remember and long, desperate letters from ones I do. Pictures of friends whose names are lost to me and pictures of friends who I still see all the time; posters of concerts I’d been to by bands that haven’t existed in decades; and posters of Keanu Reeves looking beautiful with great hair—evidence that at least some things never change. There were Boy Scout badges, and photos of me and my friends looking like we were in a ’90s boy band, and photos of my dead friend, who actually was in a ’90s boy band, and photos of people I’d thought at the time would be in my life forever and, of course, would not. I found my old shit, in other words, which feels like an appropriate term because I found it all foul.
By coincidence, I wasn’t the only person staring down a personal history. A former high school classmate came to visit me while I was going through my old things—I’d found a mixtape he’d made me in the pile—and he showed me his latest project: thousands of archived emails that our group of friends had sent, beginning in 1996. At first I was thrilled about the prospect of being able to read what we were talking about back then, and I jumped into the messages, but the excitement didn’t last long. Here was someone writing under my name in a voice that no longer exists, and what was worse, speaking at length and with no shortage of emotional conviction about things I no longer remember caring about. I felt the same way about the dusty boxes of memories, a strange dissociative feeling like none of this had ever happened, or had happened to someone else, someone who wasn’t me. Reading some of the old letters felt like eavesdropping on conversations that I wasn’t meant to hear. It all engendered a sense of revulsion.
Throw it all away, I told my mother. I don’t want any of it. It’s not mine, I said, which hurt her feelings—something I seem to be very good at doing, much as I don’t want to. Why wouldn’t I want to dig through it all for hours and pick out the things I want? she asked. The honest answer is, I don’t know. At least not yet.
The repugnance I felt for my belongings seemed off to me. Based on what I gather from Marie Kondo’s famous Netflix show about organizing, which I haven’t seen but have read roughly 10,000 posts about so therefore am an expert on, it’s supposed to be hard for people to let go of their sentimental clutter, right? I asked around…
Please go read the rest over at Boston Magazine. Ok bye.