I saw a fully-grown man in the park today,
running frantically trying to catch the last few remaining
leaves
as they fell from the
trees.

The wind took most of them,
but he caught one and stared at it in amazement for a moment
as I walked by,
before dropping it and running to catch
another.

My dad worked on a farm when he was my age. My grandpa grew up on a farm, and worked hard. Twelve hours a day during the summer, and six hours a day the rest of the year. Now I work on a farm, and I work hard, but only for a dying legacy. More and more farmland is chopped up and sold into suburbia.

Farmer Jones just sold five hundred acres of prime farmland for a few million dollars, but only because there’s no other way to stay afloat in this business. Can’t afford to live on the farm anymore, because no one can compete with corporate farms half or a quarter the size, with twice the output.

Us workers can’t afford to compete with robots, who will work only for electricity and oil. Someone is paid fifteen dollars an hour to maintain the machines, but one man could watch a hundred of those things.

Us workers can’t compete with cheaper human labor found elsewhere, because now we can’t afford to pay for our own houses, and we can’t afford to have families. Either can the other workers, but it’s out of our hands.

Our farms can’t survive and are dying, but it’s out of our hands. Farmland will make way for mini-malls, homes, and more roads. We can’t afford to shop at these malls, live in these homes, and we can’t afford to drive on these roads, because capitalism has paved them in gold.

One man wants to run the whole show, own all the farms, and his name is Greed.

A few days ago a water main burst near our street. There was essentially a flood of water running down the street all night and most of the morning. This was the result; our vehicles frozen to the ground in hard-packed ice.

<-- Part 1

“It’s just a husk.”

Holden woke with a start at the sound of a deep voice. His vision cleared and he could make out the figure crouched next to him on the damp stone floor. It was Gary King, the groundskeeper.

“You see, when you walked through that arch, you–this isn’t easy for me to explain. No one ever woke up again afterward. Not that there been many people down here. You’re lucky.”

Holden felt the tension rising. “Wh–what are you saying? What happened? What do you mean they didn’t wake up?”

“They saw what you saw and they did what you did, but that’s right, they never woke up. Listen, I am trying to be calm and rational and explain all this to you. But I know it’s hard to understand right now. People aren’t supposed to come down here… you remember when I told you that? I should have been watching the elevator tonight.”

Holden struggled to make sense of what was happening and what was being said to him. He needed to know what it was he saw and why it happened. Husk? No, it was him, like the reflection in a mirror except he could touch it. It had felt cold and lifeless, but it was certainly something real.

“How did you do that? What did I see? Why would–”

Gary interrupted Holden before he could finish his question. After all, Gary felt the more Holden said, the more panicked he would become. His mind would travel in circles. Gary was willing to explain as much as he could because he knew he owed that much to the weary explorer, but he could plainly see Holden wasn’t in a very receptive state of mind–especially for this sort of information. No, it would be better to show Holden. Force him into the reality of his new situation whether or not he was ready to handle it.

* * *

“Keep moving. We’re almost there.”

Holden gave no protest. After spending a few minutes trying to collect himself, he had made the realization that he wanted to continue exploring. If things were getting this strange, that was exciting, and now he had a tour guide to explain where he was going.

Their footsteps echoed as they walked down the narrow corridor.

(oops, I can’t believe I accidentially published this as a page rather than a post. Hurr.)

Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (re-read)
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse (re-read)
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin
Accidental Empires by Robert X. Cringely (currently reading)

Next up: More K. Le Guin!

previous post

There’s a pretty good amount of downtime where I work (at least a lot of the time). Since as of tomorrow I will have been working there for three months, this seems like a good time to list what I’ve read since I started. This is seriously more than I’ve read altogether in the past few years prior to my new job, sadly enough.

A Separate Peace by John Knowles (re-read)
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (re-read)
Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest by Stephen Ambrose
Beyond Band of Brothers: The War Memoirs of Major Dick Winters by Dick Winters and Cole C. Kingseed
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
The Corner by David Simon and Edward Burns
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy
Coraline by Neil Gaiman
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (re-read)
Currahee!: A Screaming Eagle at Normandy by Donald R. Burgett (halfway complete)

Next up: Life of Pi by Yann Martel