A Grapefruit Universe

Yesterday, my little brother called me from Texas to tell me that he was walking through a grove of grapefruit trees. I imagined the sun shining down on his broad shoulders as he carefully selected a warm, ripe grapefruit from the ground; around him, light cheerful breezes bumped gently into heads of grass, and rustled the leaves of these glorious trees...


I live in New England; we don't have grapefruit trees. We have a bit of snow, though. He sent me a picture:

When he called, I was sitting in front of my computer, working. In front of a screen. As I am doing right now. All my time is spent in front of screens. Working. Writing. Communicating.

When he hung up, I wrote a poem:

i told Dave i want to be a hermit

 a hermit in outer space

  where there are no screens

just stars and stuff

and the bits that make up the sky, the dark, grapefruit trees

   and stuff

i want to be a space hermit

As you can see, I am not good at poetry. That is why I write in sentences. But I am a little jealous of my brother, strolling through a grove of grapefruit trees and picking up the fresh fruit, peeling back the skin, biting into the tangy, bitter, juicy bits of starlight before laying down in the gently swaying grasses to nap under a canopy of blue heavens and surrounded by the sweet scent of spring...

If I were a space hermit, I'd have a houseboat floating in the giant space ocean moored to an Earth-like island with a grove of sweet, ripe moons--some crimson red with swirls of lavender blue, dilly dilly, or sparkling green and cerulean blue and antique white that dallied in the blossoming dawn. I'd have a fossil museum in my living room, with bones as large as Mount Everest glistening in a heap near the swirling asteroid zephyrs that whirl and spin a path through a wilderness of stars. 

But if you came to look for me, I'd be hard to find; I'd be too busy painting the tiny motes of dust that drift through the starlight streaming through my stained-glass curtains, or surfing on the massive and rolling gravitational waves that soar through the darkness of space and time and crash against planets and stars and the sands of time... and there would be no screens, just everything.

You Can Stomp On Monsters, But Not On Black Holes. So Don't Try.

If anyone ever tells you there's no such thing as monsters, they're lying. There are monsters all over the place. It's just that we've gotten quite good at ignoring them, banishing them to the outskirts of civilization, or remaining ignorant. Children understand this. When they are afraid of the dark, it's because they know that the biggest, meanest, most dangerous monsters are invisible; and what is the dark but a very commonplace version of invisibility?

 I suppose you want some examples of monsters. That's good, because that's what I was going to tell you next.

Category 1: Monsters We Ignore

You know that guy who cuts you off? Or the one who reads their receipt at the cash register with eight people in line behind them, finds a $1 mistake, and makes the cashier call a manager immediately? Or the lady in front of you who drives 35mph exactly in a 40mph zone, and is going exactly the direction you are? These people are not monsters. But they have little monsters inside their heads. Little monsters that whisper "who are you?" and "why?" and "RAWR" and "you're stupid". These little monsters can have devastating consequences on us. Sometimes they're even contagious. But usually we just ignore them.

The second type in this category are monsters such as The Runny Nose, The Hang Nail, and The Sneeze. These are constantly attacking, but we've developed complex defense systems that allow us to ignore the monsters most of the time.

Category 2: Monsters We Banish

These monsters usually take forms of bears, mountain lions, volcanoes, and poisonous reptiles. Typically we keep them at bay by installing electric lights everywhere, shooting at them if they come to close, or destroying their food sources and habitats. These ones are probably the least dangerous and the most feared.

On the other side of this coin is the Germ. The germ is tiny, but it invades our body and slowly takes out one of our functioning systems at a time. We have developed many defense mechanisms for this one; the main one is banishment through vaccinations.

Category 3: Monsters We Are Ignorant Of

This is a bit of a difficult category, because if we're ignorant, it means we have no knowledge. However, I at least know of one: black holes. You think your teenage brother eats a lot? My little brother would wrack up a $400 grocery bill all on his own when he was thirteen--a black hole would eat the whole planet if it could get its greedy little hands on it. And that would just be the beginning. A black hole would eat our sun as well as all of the surrounding stars. It just sucks in everything, like a giant vacuum--it eats stars, planets, moons, dust, asteroids, entire galaxies. Even you. The worst part is that they'll eat light: mixing your wildest fears into one terrible creature: a giant, ravenous monster that consumes everything, in the dark. Not only would it be consuming you, you wouldn't be able to see it.

So just watch out for little monsters and big monsters, because they're sneaking everywhere, stealing your socks and your hair, making you grumpy and scratching your car, and the only way to fight back is to stomp on them. Except black holes, you can't stomp on those.

Tin Snips and Tractors

One day, my little brother is going to be famous, but there is something about being famous that doesn't exactly leave room for tractors. Being famous is about large quantities of people seeing your face and knowing your name, and wanting to give you enough money to keep seeing your face and knowing your name. It's not about tractors.

So I would like to tell you a story about my little brother and tractors, with the hope that one day, when he is famous, there will also be something said about tractors.

Of course the story never begins with tractors, it always begins with boredom. As children, boredom was forbidden--that is to say, we were allowed to be bored, but we were required to either keep this fact a secret or be subjected to a large number of chores which we wished to avoid. Thus, our ability to self-entertain was a highly developed skill by the time we reached adolescence. Mostly, we made things.

Miniature Evan loved tractors. His favourite bedtime stories consisted of a calender of tractors with the names and numbers labeling every single picture and a catalog of farm equipment. These are not, of course, the only things he loved--his first drum set was made of laundry soap bottles and pot lids, and he had a cow outfit with cow spotted shorts, a cow spotted shirt, and a cow spotted hat. But for a long time, you could drive a tractor up the road and it would keep him occupied for, well, as least as long as it took the tractor to drive up the road.

Combine the ability to make things at a young age with a vast knowledge of farm equipment and a lot of free time and what do you get? A complete set of farm machinery made from tin cans with tin snips and pliers.

Since then Evan has made a large variety of things (homemade bass guitar, guitar pedals, musical instrument traveling boxes, a tube amp converted from a movie projector, and a variety of other unnecessary inventions), but nothing quite as interesting or endearing as his tin can tractors.