Thursday, June 29, 2023

It’s Thursday afternoon. I’m sitting outside, on an otherwise-deserted stone patio, under an umbrella, drinking my second lager of the afternoon. Motorized tourist traffic pulses through the 25mph zone at a steady 30 or 40mph, with an occasional outlier in a Tesla or a lifted truck or a very clean late model Jeep pushing it closer to 50 just to drive home the impression that its occupants feel very important and would not really mind killing a pedestrian all that much.

Some guy just went past hauling a no-shit speedboat all decked out in giant chrome exhaust pipes, which confuses me on a couple of levels. Where are you going? What are you possibly going to do with that thing when you get there? I’m sure there’s a place for it somewhere around here, albeit one that hinges on a great deal of engineering and the expressed whims of a wealthy population who should never have moved so far from naturally occurring bodies of navigable water. It’s just a striking discongruity in this arid expanse of grass, small cactus, prairie dogs, tiny rivers, looming mountains.

It’s been warm for a week now, but there are storms in the forecast and the hills are still an unlikely green. Elsewhere in the States, a record-shattering heat wave is going into weeks of duration, at least.

p1k3 / 2023 / 6 / 29

Tuesday, June 27, 2023

a thing, falling apart

(Context: American west, Great Plains, midwest.)

Here’s something I notice: Buying a fast food hamburger is borderline impossible a lot of places.

You walk into let’s say a McDonalds situated at an interstate exit. There are giant touch-screen kiosks you’re supposed to order from, but even if they’re turned on they don’t really work. No one is at the counter, although if you wait long enough a teenager who doesn’t know how to work the register may appear. Don’t try to spend cash; it will snarl the transaction. (Unless the card reader is down, in which case you will have no choice, but the transaction will still be snarled.) Wait longer and you may get food, if not exactly the food you ordered. Odds are it will be grimly inedible: Appalling even by the standards of early 21st century American franchise burger joints and quite possibly unsafe to eat.

I hold no brief for the American chain fast food restaurant, but there’s something unsettling about this experience. Like a kind of implicit contract has come unraveled.

You expected that these institutions were, at root, evil. You knew that they abused animal life, the environment, the labor pool, and the economy as a whole to deliver a product which was harmful to its consumers. On the other hand, you had a feeling that they were functional. Whatever the externalities, they worked in a sense that would be recognized both by a person in a minivan at a drive-thru window and a stockholder in an evil megacorporation.

You would be somewhere that might well be a food desert and you would need calories. A local outcropping of an efficient corporate machine organized — ruthlessly and immorally — by competent people would take some of your money and give you a paper bag full of food-shaped objects in exchange.

I’m a pragmatist about roadtrip utility, and I have spent a substantial part of my life on highways, subsisting on trash from chains and truck stops. Still, I didn’t quite realize how fundamental this system seemed until I found it in tatters with a carload of sobbing toddlers and exhausted, sleep-deprived 30-somethings in tow.

tags: food, systems, travel

p1k3 / 2023 / 6 / 27

Wednesday, June 14, 2023

It’s midway through a rainy, stormy, cool and clouded June. The river’s up, frothing in a usually-sedate channel. I just pulled a load of laundry off the line outside, wetter than when I hung it up three days ago, and scattered it over surfaces inside the house before it could get rained on again.

My garden is yellowing in the moisture and filtered light, battered by hail. We left town for a few days and the grass tripled in height. Our negligence in mowing has tiny bees zipping around wildflowers we didn’t know were growing. Green-white flower spiders hide atop the chives. Two days in a row: A double handful of strawberries, vivid standouts in a bed half consumed by grass, bindweed, and runaway oregano.

There were grim levels of smoke, for a while, and then it drifted east. A round of those “[city] has among worst air quality in the world” headlines. I expect there to be smoke again before long. Canada is still burning, after all, and it’s only June. There’s allergy-generating pollen now. Not as bad as some years, worse than others. I can breathe, a lot of the time. My eyes itch but they aren’t streaming yet, or burning so much that I just have to close them and lay down.

I feel like I’m suspended for a moment between things that will force me to hide indoors, only half-able to think, my whole self just rendered useless by one irritant or another. Part of this I’m sure is just the faltering strength of being 40-something rather than 30-something. The shift in my relative position with respect to infirmity, the limits of the self and the system it inhabits, mortality. But then part of it feels like something that’s changed about the world. I suppose because it is.

p1k3 / 2023 / 6 / 14