Hello. Welcome to the Weekend Gene Pool, where I solicit your personal stories for use next week. Today’s question: What are you absurdly proud of?
Me, I have become the greatest tomato farmer in American agricultural history.
My farm is in my all-cement, 30-by-20 foot backyard in the middle of downtown Washington D.C. These backyards are spaces that most of my row-house neighbors reserve for parking their cars. I park in the street so I can fill the backyard with 25 large pots, each containing a luxurious tomato plant.
They are ripening now. I have 120 or so actual tomatoes on the vine, so far. Some are already the size of tennis balls.
I do not do this alone. I could not. It is a mammoth task. I have a helpmeet, Rachel, who fucks the plants with a toothbrush.
Rachel does this every couple of weeks; she goes outside with a vibrating toothbrush and stimulates the flowers until they have orgasms and spew their seed over themselves, impregnating themselves and each other. Tomatoes are disgusting organisms. But they are so delicious. Yes, we share them with friends and neighbors and various vagrants, alley cats, etc.
I cannot depart from this narrative without mentioning my friend and editor, Tom The Butcher, who also considers himself a tomato farmer. Tom lives on a vast, rolling estate in suburban Virginia, where most properties, I calculate, cost roughly 40 cents an acre. And he has planted all of … TEN tomato plants. Tom is to a tomato farmer what Toonces The Cat is to a Formula One race-car driver.
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See you next week. Or tomorrow. One can never tell.
If you convert to a paid subscription today, I will mail you a tomato when it’s ripe:
"Knowledge is knowing the tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad."
--- Miles Kington
so those of us who paid- extremely reluctantly- from the beginning get no tomato?