The Rhubarb Lady

So I was planning to spend this week discussing the nature of literary deconstruction and why we torment ourselves by becoming invested in characters who we know will meet tragic fates. Then, as I was sitting in on a relatively slow English class at the high school for my teaching license program yesterday, a student mentioned that she knew the cop who tasered the rhubarb lady. I had no idea what she was talking about, so she showed me the five-minute viral video of two women arguing over rhubarb-patch rights that apparently captivated the nation back in 2013, so much so that Conan O’Brien even did a re-enactment. 

None of this would have mattered all that much were it not for the street where the action went down, which seemed strangely familiar to me. I asked around the class (who all seemed deeply invested in the rhubarb drama) and found that, yes, the rhubarb lady was definitely a Grinnellian.

Watching the video again with that in mind, the whole thing seemed so perfectly Grinnell. In case you don’t have time to watch it, it’s mostly a confrontation between a screaming, swearing, potentially violent rhubarb thief (the eponymous rhubarb lady) and the owner of the rhubarb patch, who stands behind a fence and gently tries to assert her rhubarb ownership. 

Here’s a list of all the distinctly Grinnellian elements of the video:

1. The wonderful Midwestern niceness of it all. Yeah, the rhubarb lady wasn’t particularly cheery, someone off-scene used the R-word, and the cameraman sort of egged her on in a mean-spirited way. But the hero of this drama, the kindly woman behind the fence who owned the rhubarb patch, took the it all with good patience of a distinctly Midwestern variety. Her response has a sort of helpfulness that borders on delusion: she always seems to think that the rhubarb lady is simply mistaken, and will pack up and leave once she realizes that the rhubarb isn’t hers.
2. The quaintly archaic homophobia.
3. The way that a crowd of disapproving bystanders forms, but no one is bold enough to actually stop her from stealing the rhubarb.
4. The centrality of rhubarb to this whole sordid tale.

Given that someone who only knows America through popular media would think that the only thing between the coasts is one small town Ohio where every child has to go on a journey of self-discovery and/or face an eldritch abomination before graduating high school, I’ve always been sort of starved for media set in places that I recognize as home. Aside from the movie Grosse Pointe Blank, in which the final scene is shot a block from my grandparents’ house, I’ve never really found it. As I’ve explored before, people tend to think of places they’ve never been as archetypes. People who know Waco know it as the town with the cult fiasco, the fertilizer plant explosion, the biker shootout, and the economic revitalization driven by homophobic fundamentalists who fix up old houses. Edina doesn’t even get distinct events in the cultural memory, just a vague aura of entitlement and pretension. Neither of those are wrong, but neither are the full story either. In-between our periodic town-wide disasters, Waco had a lot going on, and I knew plenty of people in Edina who broke the mold of vapid wealth. 

I can’t really complain, of course. If I demand that people know the real Edina or Waco or Grosse Pointe or Grinnell, then for things to be fair, I’d have to get to know the real Cleveland, Honolulu, Saskatoon, and so on, and I really don’t have time for that. But it’s still nice when some place that I know and love breaks out of its Midwestern anonymity and gets real recognition across the world. Not many people knew that Grinnell was the home of the infamous rhubarb lady, but still, a random Grinnell street appeared on screens across the nation, and I’m happy for that.
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Sidenote: My brother Micah and I borrow/steal from each other's writing so often that it's hard to pinpoint when I'm copying him or copying something he copied from me, but this post seems especially indebted to his blog. Click here to read my personal favorite post of his, in which he reveals the horror that Luigi's Mansion visited on his subconcious.

Bad High School Poetry

For my educational psychology class this semester, I’ve been sitting in on an English class at Grinnell High School once a week. The students have been in a poetry unit for the past couple weeks and, as part of my observation, I’ve written poems alongside the teacher and students. I’m posting a couple that I’ve written so far, even though they tend to be on-the-nose and poorly constructed, in part to show off the fascinating poetic structures that the English teacher is using, and partly because I’m trying to get back into the habit of doing these Monday posts.

Fibonacci Poems: This structure uses the fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8) to determine the number of syllables or words in each line. Since the fibonacci sequence has a deep and confusing relationship to biology, I tried to use motifs of life and existence in my poems, which mostly ended up making them melodramatic and overblown.

Prompt: Pickles (Version 1)

Old

Girl.

Our sick

Caretaker.

Drank a glass of green.

We stood to the side and we winced.

Prompt: Pickles (Version 2)

Lab.

Strange.

Unclear

Why we need

Humans grown in brine.

Pickled people, puckered from birth.

Prompt: Light

Light,

Heat,

And all

Energy

Spread thin and even.

Cold, democratic, and lifeless.

Prompt: Hands

Underneath

Skin

Knuckles, joints,

Assembled from birth

But hidden, save for x-rays.

You’ll never see your own structure in life.

Collage Poem: This one was more straightforward: just mine a copy of National Geographic for its most poetic terms, cut them out, and organize them into a poem. The issue I used was focused on environmental issues relating to water, and it had a car advertisement on the first page, so most of my writing came from playing those two off each other. It came off as heavy-handed and preachy, but I still like some of the turns of phrase.

Can Ford Help a Family?

Chromed exhaust tips construct a religion.

We speak innovation: The creative life force of the universe.

We speak car. No one should have to.

Mother Earth was impregnated by direct fuel injection.

Small family, foraging for human existence on a mouth-wateringly flat plateau.

Water-stressed flower.

Insecticide is scribbled with light.

Do We Need Conservatives?

My first semester at Grinnell, in the first floor bathroom of Burling library*, I found some graffiti on the wall that pretty well summed up what I was in for. The school administration made the idiotic choice to paint over it last year (somehow assuming that the walls wouldn’t fill up just as quickly), so I can’t quote it directly, but it started with some general message about how we need to fight Trump and his supporters. It was a common enough sentiment at the time, it being the sad month after the 2016 election when everyone was looking for some route toward progress. Right next to it, someone else argued that we shouldn’t fight Trump supporters, but try to win them over to our side. Then another person said something about how Trump supporters are beyond redemption and we shouldn’t tolerate bigots, and some wise-ass summarized the whole thing up by saying something like, “So you’re tolerant by being intolerant of intolerants? That’s a position that I just can’t tolerate!”

It’s probably a mark of how far to the left Grinnell is that the conversations usually aren’t liberal versus conservative, but liberals who can stand conservatives versus full-on revolutionaries. At first the debate seemed kind of stupid to me, having spent my formative years in Waco, Texas, where I grew up thinking that my family’s liberal tendencies were some sort of shameful secret that we shouldn’t go around spouting. Probably as a way of dealing with the cognitive dissonance between my family and my community, both of which I loved, I became a strong believer that a multiplicity of opinions are necessary in any conversation, and that strong friendships across party lines are the soul of democracy. My time in Edina did little to challenge that assumption (the asshole conservative wing of my high school hadn’t sprung up quite yet). 

Looking back on it, that position was optimistic to say the least. It was hard to hold onto it in the early 2000s when Republicans were waging senseless wars that still haven’t entirely ended, and hard in the late 2000s-early 2010s when Republicans obstructed a centrist president from making mild progress. But it nearly collapsed for me when millionsof Americans (though, importantly, not a majority) voted for a man who promised to do evil things to the most vulnerable among us, and delivered on that promise perfectly.  How can you argue with someone who thinks that migrant children should be separated from their parents and kept in cages, and still think that it’s a good thing that they have that opinion? How can you stay friends with someone who believes in something you find abhorrent?  The idea of amiable rivalries between opposing parties really only works in the best possible scenario, in which the opposing parties hardly even oppose each other at all.

That’s not to say that liberals are always in the right. Obama’s use of drone warfare deeply troubled me, and keeps me from being too nostalgic about his term. And conservative ideas do appeal to me from time to time. The deficit is a real issue that we should be more concerned about (though if you asked me how I’d go about fixing it, I’d say to tax the wealthy and reduce military spending, neither of which would thrill conservatives). Still, I often feel stuck between the reality of politics and how I wish things were. It seems intuitively right to respect everyone’s opinion and see worth even in those who disagree with you. But I believe what I believe for a reason, and if I give too much ground, it feels like I’m selling myself out for some grand view of democracy I can barely define.

Luckily, the hardest part of this issue is the kind of philosophical abstraction that we never really have to face. Violent insurrection aside, we’re not getting rid of conservatives any time soon, so the question of whether or not we’d be better off without them is purely hypothetical. A dangerous hypothetical too, because it tempts us to retreat into feedback loops of agreement with fellow liberals about how messed up everything is and how easy it would be to fix it if only we had the chance. There are two real questions I can draw from this conundrum, though: How should we treat conservatives as people? And should we compromise with them?

The first question is a tricky one, especially after the election. We can’t deny that everyone who walked into the ballot box in November of 2016 and voted for Trump made a choice, a moral choice, with full knowledge of the extreme prejudice, inequality, and hate they were letting into office. We can’t deny that many, of them, though not all, faced legitimate problems, and may have just made a poor choice, manipulated by biased media. We can’t deny that they are human beings either, and that they have the capacity to change. And no one changes alone.

As for compromise, there’s a certain disdain for that word on the Grinnell campus. But, in a lot of ways, this college is a square mile cut out from the rest of the universe, where choices between capitalism and socialism or oppression and freedom seem simple, when really they are so complex, so compromised, that any absolute position sinks fast. Case in point: my dad has made so many meetings with the Trump administration these past couple years that I’ve stopped reacting beyond, “Yeah, okay, dad’s off to talk to Jared again. Maybe he’ll have an awkward run-in with Mike Pence or something**.” After every trip to Washington, he comes back with bizarre souvenirs and good news that the Trump administration seems just a few steps away from taking the clemency system away from the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice is run by prosecutors, who have a vested interest in keeping prisoners in prison, so it makes sense that they would be opposed to releasing non-violent drug offenders serving ridiculously long sentences. Even Obama’s widely-lauded pardons could only go so far because each application had to go through a convoluted system to reach the president’s desk. But Trump could change all that, maybe out of some sort of conscience, but more than anything as a stroke of vengeance on the Department of Justice for the Muller investigation. 

This is the kind of complexity that you don’t see in bathroom wall philosophy: an incompetent and evil man is angry about an investigation into treason that he probably committed, and in his revenge he creates a system that could free thousands, maybe even millions, of unjustly imprisoned people. It’s a compromise, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the right thing to do.

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* This was before I chose my favorite cubicle on Burling third floor, right by the contemporary fiction section, where I spend a little over half my waking hours.

** And, by the way, he did.

Two Things I Did This Weekend

No new content this today, exactly, (though I hope to start up Monday posts again soon!), but I just wanted to write quick plugs for two pieces of media I helped out with this weekend.

First, Inklette Magazine published a collection of interviews with and writing by various Cow Tipping Press students and staff, which I've been working on for almost a year now. Cow Tipping Press is a really great publishing house, which offers classes and publication to adults with disabilities. I had a great time working for them last summer and curating this article over the past couple months, so I'd really appreciate it if you checked it out!

On a markedly different note, I also appeared for about a second and a half in a video about air fresheners. Being stuck at a track meet for twelve hours does weird stuff to your head, I guess.

And, as long as I've got your attention, submissions are open for Inklette Magazine's next issue, so if you have poetry, prose, or visual art lying around, send it in!

Personality Tests

I discovered the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator the same way that I discovered my mom’s old word processor, the key tenants of Marxism, and the first story I ever wrote: by digging through family crap in the basement. Flipping over a few pages of the slim, yellowing volume about the personality test convinced me that I wouldn’t understand it; it used advanced words like “cognitive” and “psychological” and had some esoteric lettering system that I could only assume was derived from complex math. Still, it gave me a vague idea what we were doing one day years later in high school, when the counselors announced we’d be taking the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. (Aside from the familiarity, I was relieved that at least it wasn’t another job predictor: the last one had given me the supremely useless result “philanthropist”). 

The MBTI text ended up being a lot simpler than I’d thought: a couple questions on your work habits and friend groups, and then it spat out an indecipherable four-letter code (INFP) and a summary explaining how each letter corresponded to an aspect of my identity and what they all meant put together. I’ve read some descriptions of people getting their MBTI scores that treat it with transcendent awe, like something on par with finding God or finally meeting a lost identical twin. I’ve always scoffed at those, but more than anything out of latent humiliation, because that’s what it felt like for me. It described parts of me that I’d always felt but had never articulated: deeply caring for people while feeling most natural on my own and getting high on blasts of creative energy that seem to ignite spontaneously. There was something a little unsettling about a computer program knowing more about me than I knew about myself, but that was to be expected, of course. We INFPs are inherently suspicious of institutions and authority of all sorts.

For about a year after that, I was hooked. Every time I finished a book or movie, I’d look up internet speculations about the characters’ types, always noticing that I found a unique empathy with anyone who had an INFP label. After cycling through just about every piece of fiction I’d ever consumed, I moved onto more niche MBTI communities: animals sorted by MBTI, nations sorted by MBTI, mythical creatures, deities, foods, and so on and so on. I think I bottomed out what I looked up tyrants sorted by MBTI (apparently I’m a Chairman Mao-type). Though the test was meant to be social and focused on human diversity, my perseveration on it isolated me more than anything, since I never talked to anyone about it, and I wasn’t interested in any type but my own. 

My disillusion with the test started in high school psychology class, where we tallied up everyone’s MBTI scores and found out that a quarter were INFP, and another half were the nearly-identical ENFP. Suddenly the archetype that I thought made me unique also encompassed a full seventy-five percent of the class. Then in college my psychology professors regularly used it to point out the dangers of pseudoscience while my humanities professors claimed that it was a way for the educational-industrial complex to exploit us human resources in the capitalist machine (a problem that hadn’t occurred to me at first because INFPs are by far the least employable type). A couple days ago I looked at the old MBTI message boards I used to hang out on. It was fun for a few minutes, until I stumbled upon a post by pugnacious ISTJ who referred to the personality theory as “the Truth” (always capitalized) and demeaned anyone who questioned it. This isn’t to disparage the MBTI community in general, but it was more than a little disheartening to realize that, a couple years ago, I could have heard someone reducing the entirety of human variability to sixteen personalities called Truth and nodded right along.

But, even if I’d never taken the test in high school or unearthed the book in our basement archives, I still would’ve known exactly what it felt like to get that INFP score. It’s how I felt choosing Grinnell. It’s how I felt declaring an English major. It’s how I felt at a Beto O’Rourke rally last week, when for a moment I forgot the issues and the speech and just sunned myself in the happiness of being in a room of people who all agreed with me for once. For as much as our society is supposed to be radically individualistic, we’re real suckers for certain types of conformity, and I’ve fallen into that trap more times than I can count. But it always is a trap, or at the very least a lie. Certain well-spoken Grinnell students pointed out major flaws, or at least points of doubt, in O’Rourke’s stance. Walk into any English class discussion, and you’ll see that we’re hardly an interchangeable mass. As for thinking that Grinnell is a community you can lose yourself in, a glance at the Facebook group Grinnell Thumbs Down will shatter that quick. Sorting people like that is fun, and sometimes useful. Student-teaching at Grinnell high school, I saw a teacher use the test to form student work-groups, so he wouldn’t end up with a bunch of alpha personalities all jockeying for leadership. All the same, I think that it’s always important to remember than the truth, the real truth, is much more complicated.

Cameron Park

My brother Micah and I must have gotten the wrong idea from so many books and movies about brothers fighting and assumed that it was a sort of requirement for any boys with the same parents to hurt each other. To fill our quota of brotherly harm, we scheduled a two-hour timeslot to punch and kick each other every Saturday morning. Micah had height, strength, and smarts on me, but I was much more willing to bite, scratch, and fake an injury for a cheap shot than he was, so we were more or less evenly matched. My Mom figured it was fine so long as we weren’t fighting on the stairs, but my Dad wasn’t quite so comfortable with his children having such a neatly scheduled battle, so he went on a campaign to find some other activity to replace our fights. None of them worked until he told me that he saw real-life Bionicles looking down from the cliffs above the riverside trail of Cameron Park, so I went along on a Saturday-morning bike ride with him just to see. I’m not sure if it was cleverness on his part or gullibility on mine, but when he pointed at the outlines walking by the rim of the cliff, I really believed that they were the bio-mechanical warriors I essentially worshiped back in those days. After that, I’d never pass up a trip to Cameron Park, hoping to catch a glimpse of a Nui-Rama buzzing above us, or Toa Lewa flying between the trees.

Cameron Park is the largest park in Waco, Texas, and just about the most Waco park in the world. The rocks are littered with trash, there’s an enormous and incredibly unstable limestone cliff that regularly collapses on the walking trail, the brush is mostly poison ivy, and something like 30% of the people in there at any given time are drunk. It’s a sprawling place with no clear edges: the trails weave through backyards and construction sites, so you’re never quite sure if you’re trespassing or not. A couple miles of wandering can bring you from a dry wood of dehydrated trees to a dense forest to a patch thick with bamboo. 

At least that’s how I remember it. The truth is, last time I saw it, I was at least a foot and a half shorter and a whole lot more imaginative than I am now. Maybe the way that the paths seemed to be constantly shifting, never the same way twice, was less a product of some magical quality than my terrible memory and short attention span forgetting roads as I walked them. Still, even if it wasn’t magical on its own, there was something about it that made me lose my bearing on the world. I always thought that my Dad was a little stupid for keeping track of which way it was back to the parking lot, and never surprised when we got lost. Direction didn’t seem to mean much in a place like this.

In a fit of nostalgia during my first year at college, I Googled Cameron Park and was surprised to learn that there was actually a rich body of folk tales surrounding the park. I was even more surprised to learn how boring they all were. There was something about unseen hands gripping lovers walking up a certain hill at night, a generic baby-sacrificing witch-ghost who haunted some graffiti covered stone archway out in the woods, and two Native American lovers who apparently jumped off the limestone cliff where the Bionicles used to congregate. But, as little as I connected with the stories surrounding those places, I could trace my memories back to the same emotions; the unease of walking through that ivy-and-spray-paint covered archway or the faintly terrifying wonder of staring up at the limestone cliffs and contemplating how far a plunge it would be. I guess folk tales are kind of like most cartoons: they don’t really work without some kind of nostalgia at work. Still, looking back at pictures of those old places, it felt like I’d built my own folktales around them through all those walks and bike rides. Folktales of senses instead of stories, of bent branches making portals into worlds of leaves and shadows and brightly colored plastic robots watching me from over the cliff, just a little too far away for me to know for sure who they were.

Chapter 87: In Which Our Intrepid Narrator Learns of the Existence of Florida

I’m writing this on the bus back from the track trip to Florida. It seemed like we traveled through time overnight on the ride south, forward to the spring or backward to last summer: the sun set over a dry, empty field somewhere in the midwest winter and rose on a blooming southern wood. As we passed into Florida, the forests became greener and denser, filled with palm trees and other tropical vegetation that I assumed had died out along with the dinosaurs. We must have crossed the border to Georgia an hour or so ago, because I can already see the hints of the early spring we’ll return to in the empty trees and brown grass. 

I’d had minimal experience with Florida before this trip. I was a fan of the Florida Man twitter account, knew that there was a 30 Rock episode about it, and was pretty pissed at the peninsula as a whole after the 2016 election. There were jungles, I knew, but my only conception of jungles came from the background art on certain Bionicle canisters. And I was pretty sure there were alligators somewhere in those jungles, but I wasn’t entirely convinced that alligators existed in the first place. Florida was, in short, a fantasy land, built on tropes and imagination; a place where houses fell into sinkholes and forests grew thick and things never got as complicated as the midwest.

I doubt this will come as much of a shock to any of you, but my main takeaway from this trip is that Florida exists. And it exists in as much detail as anywhere I’ve ever been. I don’t know why exactly I expected somewhere simpler than Iowa, somewhere hastily put together by God after making all the important parts (most of which are scattered across the upper midwest). But I must have, because the tiny details that proved its existence always jumped out at me. If I wanted to preserve my dignity, I’d say that I was just floored by the biodiversity, since that’s where most of the impressive details came from: the two thousand year old tree with overgrown limbs sinking into the ground and bouncing back up again, the lizards skittering between islands of foliage in mall parking lots, the little red strands living in sand on the beach that turned out to be an odd breed of worm. The human-made realness of the place took me by surprise too, though, particularly the distinct accents and proliferation of IHOPs. 

I guess the realness of Florida shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to me, since I’ve been on the receiving end of these strange perceptions of foreign states. When I moved from Waco to the Twin Cities in seventh grade, I milked my novelty value as a Texan for all it was worth and in turn got bombarded with a bunch of questions about my home state. Did I ride a horse to school? Did my family own a stockpile of guns? Why didn’t I speak with an accent? I wasn’t exactly put off that the stereotypes were wrong (even though it wasn’t true for my family, they did sort of hit the nail on the head with the gun thing). It’s just that there was so much more to it than that. Waco, Texas was a real place with real people, and to describe it all would mean articulating everything, down to the heat glare on the asphalt of a grocery store parking lot. 

Over the past few days I’ve been reading Ecotopia, a battered paperback science fiction novel I bought in the forgotten corner of Grinnell’s game store (which is more or less a forgotten corner itself). There’s not much to the plot or characters. It’s more of an extended world building exercise, an ethnography of a place that never existed. It never quite holds up, though. The alternative history always stands out from the real history and the Ecotopians all seem uniform in a way that people in the real world never are. As wildly imaginative or tediously detailed as it is at times, it never captures that same sort of tactile realness as I found with a week long stay in Florida.

Isn’t that sort of a dark note to end on, that our perceptions of a place can never really match the overwhelming detail of the real thing? Maybe not for most people, though as a fiction writer I can’t help but be a little depressed by this conclusion. But maybe this just reveals that I’ve been holding fiction to a very high standard. As wonderful as it is, it’s probably a stretch to say that it’s a suitable replacement for real life. At best, it’s a supplement. And the tradeoff is that there are always new places to go, bits of the map where shallow facade of our perceptions is ready to be burnt away and replaced with something real.