My tomatoes have been out of control this year. Five were planted while I was quarantining away from home. By the time I returned they were too big to cage. That was the exact opposite of my hopes last year, when we somehow ended up with soil that had an entire army of volunteer tomato plants seeded into it. I endured many days of back pain trying to wrangle those plants into submission but ended up with rotten tomatoes and powdery mildew all over the place. Rotting tomatoes are gross. I understand why they’ve become a metaphor for bad shit. I promised myself after that mess that I was going to have the BEST tomato plants this year.

Remind me not to do that again.

I spent a large portion of the past 2 days chopping my 6 ft+ tomato hedge into something that might produce some more fruit before I remove the plants entirely. A lot of that was while cussing up a storm under my breath. It seems I lost a third of it to mildew, a third to broken vines, leaving the final third to redeem the summer.

Grow, you bastards. Grow.

Is this what’s happening to society right now? On a much larger scale, of course. Politics is causing cultural mildew, the medical system is overburdened, branches of our society are broken by unequal treatment by both medical and political systems. Maybe it isn’t equal thirds, but you get what I mean.

The rest of us, who have stayed healthy & managed to survive the political shit show might be able to produce some good fruit in the final quarter of the year. Maybe?

I could write an entire essay on personal care based on the metaphor of gardening tomatoes. I started to, actually, but I began to develop a narrative that almost convinced me that I had real answers. HA!

I have no clue. On a good day, I get through it because it’s the same as yesterday, so I know I can just repeat that and get the same results. Sure, it’s boring, but it’s getting the practice of surviving in. I, for one, have made great strides in making my coffee before the dogs can’t wait any longer to go out to potty. Sometimes we barely make it, or I spill coffee on myself. Sometimes I get out there & barely settled with my coffee before I have to run in the opposite direction so that I can go potty. It’s a complicated dance with many nuances I couldn’t possibly impart here. But I’m getting pretty good at it.

Today, once I got settled, a couple of the younger neighborhood children started to have extended loud, high pitched melt downs. The other kids were bickering loudly. Eventually I could hear an adult trying to calm the chaos, which just made it more crazy. That was when the same house decided to turn up the music. So then it was crying children, yelling children, yelling adults & bad pop music. I was about to lose my mind entirely, but through some blessed act of a merciful god, it stopped.

Those parents must have good whiskey stashed somewhere to sip after a long day with the kids. Or maybe I should gift them with some. Would it be weird to receive an anonymous whiskey gift basket? Would I drink it? If it were sealed, I mean.

What could possibly go wrong?

That’s our ironic tag line for 2020.