Imagination Without Taste

My partner and I have a running joke with a friend. Every time he goes on holiday we increase the quantity of beans in his flat.

The first time we bought ~30 cans of kidney beans and hid them around the house like some Easter egg hunt thing but with beans.

The Second time we bought ~6kg dried white beans and hid those in various places. Nearly every receptacle that could safely hold beans became the home of beans. My personal favourite was emptying an oat milk carton, very carefully washing and drying it, filling it with beans and then just putting it back among several other cartons.

He went on holiday again a couple of weeks ago. Obviously there is an expectation of bean-based shenanigans. And obviously we have to beat our previous efforts.

Our friend has (had) a mosaic on his wall of the famous Marilyn Monroe Pop-Art by Andy Warhol. He made the mosaic himself. Over the last couple of weeks we have spent hours and hours assembling a frame, drawing up a pattern and gridding out a 70 x 70 frame and gluing an untold amount of beans to it. I have spent over 21 hours gluing beans to a frames.

For the last couple of days I ended up going to bed at 5:00 am because I lost track of time whilst experimenting with which types of glue works best with different beans (I now have *opinions* on this, y’all). The day of our friend’s return we spent the morning and afternoon grouting the piece and wiping it down and wiping it down again and wiping it down again because grout is just like that. In the evening we went to install the mosaic, just a few hours before his return. Here’s a comparison between the original and our clearly superior replication, and the new piece installed in its rightful place.

if you think for one second this technology was made to "help artists" you're sadly mistaken

it's money

remember back in 2019, when Notre Dame burned? All of these millionaires and billionaires pledged eye-popping sums for the rebuilding... but when it came time to actually give funds, they all dug in their heels and refused. Why? Because they wanted control over how the rebuilding would be done. They wanted their names on the most ostentatious and important pieces, that they personally were responsible for rebuilding...

And most damning of all, they didn't want any of their funds to go towards paying for labor. They were, every single one of them, adamant that if they donated, the money would go to things--showy, impressive things--and not the people who made them or built them.

I’m planting lettuce today and I’m using terracotta pots because they’re better for my salad and my environment than plastic ones!

Yes. Do not, repeat not, do what I did, after having had a wisdom tooth out, and decide upon getting home in a very stoned-on-anesthetics kind of way that it would make an immense amount of sense for you to take an enormous knife and try to cut open a green coconut with it, with one mighty swipe.

Hope life is treating you well, say hi to Terry when you next talk to him, since we all know you have powers and I miss his words.

Of course!

A business woman in the line turns around. She introduces herself, frowning a little because this is so against whatever code she lives her life by. She explains she’s a pharmaceutical exec from New Jersey and that she is visiting some distant relative in North Dakota, and was on the same (now cancelled) flight as me. She hands me an apple and protein bar and says something like ‘I have no maternal instinct. I do not have children and I do not want them. But you are so clearly out of your depth here I feel compelled to help you in some way.’ She helps me book a room in the airport hotel and trusts I will pay her back when I get home (which I do). She pays for a meal we have together, in which she mostly talks about how she climbed the ladder at her corporate job.

The whole incident now seems like a fever dream because I truly was sleep deprived and loony. This woman emphasized many times how she was not a caretaker, she was not a warm person. Indeed she was not gregarious or solicitous. But she also very very much was deeply kind to me, much to her own surprise I think. 0 percent maternal, but my extreme patheticness really drew out something she didn’t know was in her.

“The black purral”