Fall Farm Party 2018

~ johnbrandall

I.

Dateline Farm.  First tea of the season.  October 11—kind of late for first tea, methinks.  B agrees.  It's Thursday.  She took a sicker.

It's sunny and breezy.  The blue jays make ratchety calls.  All in all the place was in good shape upon our arrival.  The freezer was running strong.  The four trays of ice were cold and full.  I cracked them and filled the owl, part-way.  It amazes me that old freezer works so well.  Even the fridge compartment had a chill to it, which isn't always true.  I was here three weeks ago; left it running in anticipation...



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Andersonville, August 2018

~ johnbrandall

I.  Prologue:  Illinois Itinerants.

Itinerant.  Now there's a good word I don't use, have never used, to my recollection.  It means "passing about a country".  That's the adjective, as in "itinerant laborer" or "itinerant preacher".  But there's also a noun version: "one who travels from place to place".

And I'm thinking this might be fitting for us as we head to Chicago tomorrow, knowing the route I'm looking at taking, off-highway, through all those random little Illinois farm towns, Raymond and Stonington; Blue Mound and Boody; Pontiac and Ransom...



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Tijuana Mission Trip, July 2018

~ johnbrandall

Hotel lobby, the comings and goings of guests.  I emailed a PDF of the house building plans to the front desk with a request that they print it for me.  Information continues to trickle in, about what we will be doing.  According to the itinerary Dan sent out to all of the participants by email, "This mission trip is an intergenerational trip" where we will be "building houses in a depressed area of Tijuana." 

Last night Graham informed me he and I are in charge of Van 7.  I thought that had an eponymous ring to it.  "Van 7", like it's a movie, or at least there's a trailer for a putative thriller called "Van 7" where a couple of guys—brothers-in-law: one a pastor, the other an underachieving blogger—are part of a church group that goes into Mexico except their particular part of the group ends up getting lost, drives into a bad part of Tijuana, has to use their fledgling Spanish, a little bit of luck, and the grace of God to get out alive, et cetera.  It's actually not a bad idea...



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Tijuana Mission Trip—Pack Notes (An Appendix)

~ johnbrandall ~ Leave a comment

*  The pillowcase.  I wasn't happy with the resting place the lumpy pillowcase offered.  It's not the pillowcase's fault.  When I woke at night after I got the good air mat from Frank what woke me up was my sleeping mind's dissatisfaction with the lumpy pillowcase.  It was lumpy, it was damp, it was full of dirty wadded-up clothes or my balled-up second towel.  What ended up working the last night was to stuff just the bottom compartment of my backpack and then put the neck pillow on top of that.  So forget the pillowcase.

* Backpacking airmats.  Completely useless unless I can sleep on my back.  What just gives me an everlasting chuckle is how somewhere during the first night as I was tossing and turning on my mat—and as Graham was tossing and turning on his—I heard him completely let the air out of his mat, like a mat assassination.  I don't know if that is what he was trying to do, in some sort of "F this mat" move but as the air was going out I thought to myself, "We should probably move on from these mats..."


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Cabin Sessions

~ johnbrandall

I think about our conversation.  Our conversations.  They're like a river.  One river, different river, it doesn't matter.  What we say—it's important to say it.  I'd like to remember everything but once you say something it's in the river, the river takes it on down the stream, we can't look at the river to remember whether we said something.  Did we say it, didn't we?  If it's important enough we can say it again, and it can go into the river again, and it's not wasteful, it's not pollution if we mean what we say when we say it...



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Farm Draft

~ johnbrandall

Every car and truck that could've passed us has done so by now.  Oh wait, here's a couple more.  I will need to make a stop for gas; the tank is about a third full.  I'll stop in Vienna or maybe at that gas station along the jog at 133 and 42.  Two choppers appear, now three.  Low.  Military.  Black and grey.  A fourth.  The Cards and Nats are knotted at two after six innings.  Where are those choppers going?

Bob's Gasoline Alley.  Old filling station signs and alpacas.  Vacuum Museum, exit 195.  This semi I'm tailing is going a little slow but sitting content in its draft takes all of the decision work out of driving, a relief and a condition necessary to the drafting of this travelogue.


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Dateline Farm, Tape Measure, Missouri

~ johnbrandall

Indeed, the coffee maker was in the lazy susan.  The apple cider vinegar was also still here, all that mother settling like ore to the bottom of the bottle.  Days earlier I had bought some black pepper style pea snap snacks for my wife, who shunned them hard.  I brought them down and will stash them for some(one's) future use.

I've found over these last several years of my life that my favorite hobby concerns this Farm.  I have developed a fascination with the place.  I love bringing things down and stashing them here.  Then when I return a quarter of a year later—is it still here?  Do I even remember having stashed it?  I get a kick out of that moment, "Oh yeah, I did bring down a tube of marine caulk, awesome!"


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Black Holes and Second Lives

~ johnbrandall ~ Leave a comment

You look down at yourself from above, then you awake.  You realize you have flies buzzing about you.  Not a ton, but more than you would expect and somebody tells you,

"They'll go away after a while."

The flies are there because you have been dead.  But you have come back and your second existence has started.  You always go back to an existence that you have already had.  That's why you want to have good existences. 



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