Francis Thicke for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture

So, since my last post was so long, I guess I decided it counted for two or three weeks. But I suppose I should write again.

-To explain the title, I'll say that maybe my favorite thing that happened in the last few weeks was that EcoHouse got Francis Thicke (pronounced "Tickey") to come to the college and give a talk about agriculture. He's a former Washington bureaucrat turned farmer, and he's won a slew of awards, none of which I remember, but they sounded impressive. At the talk, he confessed that the old political urge is pulling at him again and he'll be running this year for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture; the election is in November. He gave maybe the most coherent and informative PowerPoint presentation I've yet seen at this college. Here's what I take to be the upshot of his political stance (with the caveat given to anyone who stumbles across this while searching for his name that I'm in no way associated with him and if I misrepresent him it's only my fault). He believes that Iowa's current system of agriculture is flawed because it's based so heavily on consuming oil, which is a nonrenewable resource, which is another way of saying it's a finite resource and it's going to run out sometime. To give an example of how it now depends on oil so much, look at how feedlots are operated. The feed comes in from corn farms around the state, which each of course use lots of oil and chemicals to make their crop productive. Then when it gets to the feedlot it's hauled to the troughs by truck. Contrast Francis's personal farm, which he told about in his presentation: his cows graze pastures that require little maintenance, and they're rotated so that they don't graze the same place every day and the pasture has a little time to recover. All that needs to be moved is the cows themselves, which he accomplishes by opening the gate: they're smart enough that they know to walk through it to the taller grass. The ground is fertilized by their manure, whereas in feedlots it's collected into enormous pools, which contain way more manure than can naturally biodegrade, so instead it gives off toxic chemicals. Also, Francis's pasture has plants on it year-round, so that when the spring thaw or a big rain comes, the topsoil doesn't all flow into the nearest river. This could be done on corn farms too by the use of a cheap cover crop that starts growing just before winter, then gets frozen, then grips the soil so the thaw can't take it away. And what about when you need to plant? Plow it down; it dies, and rots, and turns into nutritious compost! You can plant corn in the same pass when you're flattening the cover crop. The flattener goes on the front of the tractor, and the seed spreader goes on the back.

-This seems like such common sense, but the current system is to grow as intensively as possible using as high technology as possible, and that's screwing up our water and our corn and our beef and, come to think of it, everything. I was already excited for Francis to get into office after the presentation was over. Then he came for his planned visit to EcoHouse, and I asked him what the incumbent's policies are like. He told me that the current secretary, Bill Northey, thinks the best example of what Iowa's farms should emulate is a chicken farm somewhere in, I think, the northeast part of the state, that has 2 million chickens in it. These chickens, I'm sure, are being kept in the most inhumane of conditions, and the factory—that's all I can think to call it—must be terrible for everything downstream or downwind of it, not to mention the places where it gets its chicken feed. The conflict here is the present against the future. Northey's definition of good agriculture is whatever is the very most productive today; Francis's definition is farming that results in a good product and keeps the land usable for long after the current day, without having to rely on chemicals that damage the environment and oil that not only does that but also will start getting expensive and scarce.

-Francis and most of the EcoHouse people and some visitors talked about agriculture for a while, and then he gave us some delicious cheese from his farm, and then he left.

-At some point after I got back, I totaled up how many pages I need to write for my final papers. They added up to about fifty. I'm done with ten of those now, but I still have to write 7–10 for Philosophy of Language, my half of a ten-page collaborative project for English Historical Linguistics, my half of probably fifteen for Archaeological Field Methods, and twenty all on my own for Sustainable Development in Costa Rica. I should probably start making a dent into that as soon as possible, like, say, tomorrow. I wonder how far I can get this weekend.

-My first two weeks back were about as insanely busy as you've probably now come to expect my weeks to be, mainly because Press had to send this semester's books to the printers last Friday. Actually, that date turned into Monday. But now the projects are almost completely in the hands of the printers, instead of our own overfull ones. I just have to go to the post office tomorrow, and then wait. What are we publishing? you might ask. Well, we've got the sequel to last year's fantasy novel The Captives' Quest, called In Pursuit of Reason. And we've got a cookbook that'll mainly be of interest to students, because it's sort of college-oriented, but in any case it's great-looking and tasty-looking too. And lastly we have an awesome book of slam poetry. These are all going to be So Cool.

-Lately, I've had what seems to be free time, an almost completely foreign concept to me. It's been maybe the first time in a month that I've had time to work on things that I want to do. I haven't had much of it, mind you. I've spent it reading fun books and, lately, inking a font that I want to work on this summer. With the free time I'll have this summer (I'm only working four days a week at my internship, two of them from home), I think I might be able to create two now font families, and maybe even put Russian letters in one of them. Greek, if I'm feeling really crazy. I haven't released a font since my first one, and that was two Decembers ago.

-Which brings me to what I'm doing this summer. I didn't get the internship I applied for in Chicago. (A bite of the thumb to you, Sourcebooks, Inc.) That made my decision between Chicago and New York pretty simple. But there's still a decidedly not-simple problem awaiting me, that of finding a place to sleep in New York City. I haven't gotten that quite solved yet, but I have written to an acquaintance who has a friend who needs someone to fill space in her apartment this summer. The acquaintance, by the way, is the girlfriend of one of the guys who founded Press way back in 2006 and then ran off to New York themselves upon graduating. So I'll have at least a vague sort of connection. I also know a few people here who are New Yorkers. So I'll have friends around town. Also, the rent for this apartment is $910 a month, which seemed just ridiculous to me when I started looking for places, but now seems to be around the low end of what I could hope for. This is a lot more expensively than I like to live, but I justify it by saying that I'm getting experience that'll make me money in the future, and that I'll get a good amount of money from the fonts that I'll be designing. Oh, also: even if I allow a preposterous $1000 for food and miscellaneous stuff per month, living in New York will cost probably less than a quarter of what a semester here costs, and I have one less semester here to worry about paying for (or saddling Mom & Dad with). So I guess I'm okay with going to New York for the summer, although it's still a little daunting, especially since I've never been there before, and actually I've never lived inside a city, only in suburbs. But I'll be close to Central Park, so I might actually see more greenspace than I see in Cincinnati, despite being in the middle of the biggest city in the country. That'll keep me from going nuts.

-That's about all the interesting stuff I have, unless you want to hear about my lucid dream. I'll try to be brief about that. If you're not familiar with it, a lucid dream is one where you realize during the dream that you're dreaming. Once you realize this, you can control the dream, and experience what it's like to bend physics around, or meet fictional people, or other really fun stuff. I've been trying, with varying amounts of dedication, but always with practically no success, to have a lucid dream for years. There are ways to help yourself achieve them. One way is writing down your dreams to find themes that you can use to try and identify dreams. Another way is through "reality checks", which are where you look at something that would probably be off-kilter in a dream: like a digital clock (I hear they usually show nonsense, and rarely show the same thing if you look at them twice), or your hands (which will often not have the right number of fingers). The idea is that you check this stuff whenever something vaguely weird happens while you're awake, or whenever something reminds you of a dream, and then you'll be in the habit of doing that all the time, so you'll at some point do it while you're dreaming too. I use the hands one, since my watch is analog. A few mornings ago, I was with a girl from college in my car in Cincinnati, and I started it up without using a key. I thought that was odd, so I checked how many fingers I had, and it appeared to be eleven. So I looked at them and willed one hand to have four, and two of them absorbed each other, and so I decided to go flying. I did that, although I wasn't very good at it yet, so it didn't feel as real as it could have, and it was also jerky. But I did fly around, and visit an enormous slab-shaped city built into the clouds by means of long metal legs like the kinds that power pylons have. It was supposed to be Heaven, but it didn't look like a very fun Heaven. After not too long, I lost control and woke up. Hopefully I'll have another without having to wait several years, and I'll be able to control it better. I'll keep you posted if anything interesting happens.