posted 2018-09-16 00:18:13

I need to write some jokes.

like develop a tight ten, as they say.

DEM and other people used to tell me to do stuff like that, become an essayist, or a standup comic, and essay wise, the only people I could think of were Spalding Grey (big when I was in high school) and David Foster Wallace, and um, they have some commonalities I'd like to avoid.

So Grey's body identified via dental records after being found in the east river two months after he killed himself by jumping off a ferry. fun wiki fact of the night. Wallace hung himself with an extension cord, which seems more straightforward.

I like being charming. It's not easy when you can't engage people directly.

or you can, but you look like an asshole.


So the station fired one of the on air personalities this past week, he probably showed up drunk. hard to say, I'm not in the loop. Got a scary terse email saying xxxx is no longer employed by yyyy and is not permitted in yyyy buildings or properties.

I don't want to be that guy.


so. minor league baseball. ranks for me a little above horse dressage and way below midget wrestling when it comes to stuff I want to watch.

dressage, for those of us who are normal, is basically horse dancing. You get on a horse and make it walk in cute, funny ways. It's really dumb and costs a boatload of money.

you ever have that experience where you're completely, totally out of place?

(save the going stag to slutwalk story for another time)

so I was working a contract at a museum in Florida, in Palm Beach, which is a fantastically wealthy resort island, and they have this little tea room set up looking out over Lake Worth and the yachts and the Donald Trump properties, and basically I had a comped tea time pass. So I go down there by myself, and give them the card, and I get this table for four, by myself, and they bring me this giant tower of canapés and petit fours and so forth, and my tea, because of course you get motherfucking tea in the tea room, and this entire busload of women in lily pulitzer comes sweeping in, like orange magenta mauve sunglasses, giant hats, thousands of them, and fills up the rest of the room, with me in the middle of it.

I'm not sure who my people are, but those were not my people.

So I went to my county extension agency grain contest and pesticide recertification training two weeks back. This one rich guy plants all these different varieties of corn and soybeans next to each other, and then the reps from each of the seed companies comes up and tells you what you're looking at. It's an interesting intersection of language and science, because instead of "genetics" or "genes" they say "technology", as in this vanity contains the Bt technology against corn cutworm" or whatever. And they talk about a bunch of different technologies and glide right over whether it's a selected breeder variety type technology, or wither they spliced in some random salmon genes. One of the ag reps, who is about 30, leans over to this kid who is a county extension agent- they both went to Virginia Tech- and says "do you know what they're doing on campus tours these days? When you give a campus tour at tech today you have to tell everybody your orientation, like Hi I'm Steve and I'm a cis pan hetero whatever". The ag agent looks vaguely confused.

We went back to a former School building for a fried chicken dinner, my county ag agent, young woman who has gotten much better at public speaking, asked the buttoned down old man who grew all the test plots to lead us in prayer, which he does.

We have a talk on dicambria drift. This is kind of a big deal. Potent herbicide that likes to evaporate back off the field you put it on and move someplace else. Kills oak trees really good.

Then there was a talk about giant hogweed. Giant Hogweed is very phytotoxic, you get it on you in direct sunlight and your skin falls off. it's killed people. Its also giant. like 14 feet tall. So that helps with the ID.

Then we played toxicology bingo, with m&ms, many of which were consumed in the process of playing. This got them like 3 credits or whatever towards maintaining their permits to spray various chemically hazardous types of nasty all over the landscape.

Most of the guys in the room were vegetable people. You can tell the corn/soybean guys because they're well dressed and well educated and well connected and like button down shirts. they're also running half million dollar pieces of ag equipment over thousands of acres of land.

the vegetable people look like the slept in a ditch. because they farm the fuck out of like 8 acres.