I've been sitting on this one for a while until the nerdiness/hipsterish/hoity-toityness of it all overwhelmed me today and I couldn't resist posting about it anymore, although truth be told, the other reason I didn't want to post about it was that I am always,
always overwhelmed with an overwhelming urge to participate in weird hobbies when I read about them.
This is something I first realized about myself when I read my first issue of
The New Yorker ever, something I did while sitting in the waiting room of the local hospital's ER while Sweetie was treated for a kidney stone; Sweetie gets kidney stones infrequently but always in the dead of night, and I have to then take her down to the ER to get shot up with painkillers so that she can get back to sleep, and so can I.
About 6 years ago or so, I was doing my semiannual waiting in the ER and the only things to do to pass the time (this being before Kindles and smartphones) was watch TV, which was tuned to a NASCAR-ish station and was being watched by a guy I think was infectious, or read one of the magazines they had:
Woman's Weekly or something, and
The New Yorker.Well, after I finished reading all the cartoons in the
The New Yorker, Sweetie wasn't done yet, so I had to read something else and I read an article about homing pigeon racing.
A
fascinating, bewildering article about homing pigeon racing that noted all the different breeds of pigeons including one that gets around exclusively by doing somersaults. Which is a thing people always accuse me of making up when I mention it in conversation but which I am not:
It really is a real thing, and just typing about it made me want one all over again.
Anyway, by the time Sweetie was cured or whatever, I had a hankering to raise homing pigeons and briefly contemplated using her drugged state to get her to agree to let me start doing just that. My better nature/exhaustion took over and I am, as we sit here today, still homingpigeonless, but not for lack of wanting.
Since then, every single thing I read about people doing -- almost without fail -- makes
me want to do that thing. Sea Kayaker catches an octopus?
I want to do it -- even though I don't like kayaks. Or fishing. Or octopi. Well, I kind of like octopi.
People raising chickens in their backyard? When our city discussed an ordinance to regulate how many chickens you could raise, I realized
you could raise chickens in your backyard and almost went out to buy one right then and there.
I even, briefly, wanted to learn to knit. Because
I read an article on Yarn Bombing.
So I haven't wanted to go back to the brief period of time last October when I wanted to grow heirloom plants, something that I started wanting to do
even though I can't even properly dig a garden (and hate nature) when I read an article in
The New Yorker about heirloom seeds and fancy cooker-y down south and other things I generally find kind of obnoxious but also compelling -- a secret jealousy that I harbor forcing me to outwardly scorn all those things that I actually want to do.
The article,
called "True Grits," talked about a guy trying to revive "real" Southern cooking (like the kind, maybe, that called for William Howard Taft to eat a opossum) and part of the article dealt with a guy who was getting "heirloom" seeds which are apparently seeds that have been around a long time and aren't genetically modified to be 54% Twinkie like the seeds we modern 21st century people have, resulting in plants that are way tastier and also far more likely to fall victim to some sort of crop blight and leave the world starving, but whatever -- it's
haute cuisine, right, not survival of the human race -- and as part of the story (which, in reality, did make me want to grow heirloom plants) after the writer got done talking about killing pigs and eating them, the writer got to talking about a how a guy had quit his job and gone into business buying rare, heirloom seeds and selling them to fancy restauranteurs, with a network of farmers in thirty states working for him growing things like feral chickpeas and garlic bulbs, and never mind that I can't stand vegetables and like my food so far removed from any identifiable part of the food chain that I might as well eat nothing but freeze-dried astronaut ice cream,
I wanted to grow heirloom seeds and I kind of want to
, now.Which brings me, finally, to the Star Wars Reference: Talking about that guy, one customer said:
"80 percent of what I put into the ground is from Glenn. He's the godfather of it all. He's the Obi Wan Kenobi."
Point of order: That video at the start of the post? That guy actually has the powers of the
Sith. Get it right, people.
