Life Harvester 32: Actual Freaks, Munchin On Crunchy Cukes, Delta Variant, A Picture Of A Poster

Life Harvester is written by Colin Hagendorf. This is the email version of a print publication available for low-cost individual subscription via Paypal or on Patreon. Life Harvester subscriptions are free to prisoners. If you know an incarcerated person who would like to receive a newsletter every month, get in touch with me directly and I’ll take care of it.

THERE IS DANGER IN THE SUMMER MOON ABOVE
I’m so late on this issue that last night I dreamt I had started writing it. I was recounting my relationship with a former lover–someone I dated briefly, over a decade ago–in great detail. I was concerned that I might be sharing secrets that weren’t mine, but confident that my words served some greater good.

Luckily for that person (and frankly, all of you), I’m a woman of this earth, not the woman of my dreams, and so my secrets will remain locked between my luscious lips and muscular thighs. As for what I been doing instead of writing, that’s mostly between me and Hashem, but to paraphrase something Holiday Styles said during the performative beefing leading up to the LOX vs. Dipset Verzuz battle, “I’m out here doing good, living my best life, enjoying middle-aged splendor, buying up-to-date household appliances.”

I don’t have much of an attention span this month. That’s why I haven’t been writing, though I have been talking a lot! I recently met fellow high-anxiety print bitch Izzy Jarvis (of the fabulous F.I.N.E. Editions) at a friend’s birthday. It was one of those perfect moments where you start talking to a person and within a few minutes you’re both laser focused and the friendship seems like it had been established in the primordial ooze. It’s a feeling that used to happen a lot when I was younger, but has grown rarer as I’ve gotten older and more discerning, and so it was especially refreshing to have it happen unexpectedly.

So I was talking to Izzy about the fact that I don’t feel like writing. I was like “I’m too lazy to work and too horny to live.” And she was all, “you should just make half the issue a poster that says that!”* And so that’s what I did. Please send me pictures if you hang it up.

Happy birthday to Alice Coltrane, Rancid Dave, and Shock G (rest in peace playboy). 

* In fact, this conversation happened on the phone with low anxiety print bitch Ari of BRZD and I misremembered it when I was writing this issue. A formal apology will be issued next month but it seems irresponsible not to mention here.

ACTUAL FREAKS
I purchased Lila Tublin’s Actual Freaks 2021 Comeback Special on the recommendation of factually actual freak (and friend to the Harv) Beck Levy, and it does not disappoint! According to the introduction, this is the second issue of a zine that began in 2012. “Since then,” writes Tublin, “I’ve been hard at work depriving the world of my art.” !!!

This zine is penned in a very legible handwriting, and it’s really short, which I like. I read the whole thing in maybe 15 minutes. With Actual Freaks, Tublin evokes all the effortless teen girl excellence of my favorite 90s perzines, with none of the mediocrity. Writing that sentence I could hear TI’s voice in my head rapping “the spirit of a hustler and the swagger of a college kid,” which maybe approximates what I’m trying to say or maybe I just always think in rap lyrics.

AF is divided into three parts: an intentionally mundane (but ultimately very funny) “HERSTORY LESSON,” a vocab list of “WORDS I THINK ARE FUNNY LOL,” and a “BUDGET BOOK REVIEW.” The last section is where Tublin really shines, her criticisms and observations of the book are both funny and insightful, and the whole thing is written with a kind of casual grace that is so rarely achieved.

$2 ppd. Email lilarosetublin@gmail.com for ordering info.

CRUNCHY CUKES
I used to live with this singer-songwriter named Noah Britton. Noah is extremely weird, but his affect can be totally disarming. While this certainly results in very occasional interpersonal awkwardness, it’s pure magic when he’s performing. Try and find the video of his old band Best Thing Ever playing the Jackson Frank song “Blues Run The Game” in a strip mall haircut place.

ANYWAY, he had this one short lived performance project called AWARENESS where he would play these short songs with a kind of barked, monotone vocal. When he would play shows he’d where this baby mask that I’d found in the trash and hung on our wall, and like, a grim reaper robe. It was a mesmerizing experience. The songs were mostly about appreciating life’s tiny joys, something it felt good to be reminded of. There was one song called “Exactly What I Wanted” that’s intermittently gotten stuck in my head in the decade plus since Noah and I lived together. The lyrics were something like, “it was exactly what I wanted. A cucumber from the refrigerator. It was cold, it was delicious, it was exactly what I wanted.”

Recently I was goofing off in my kitchen trying to entertain my friend Melissa, and I just grabbed a whole English cucumber from the crisper, said “everyone loves to munch a crunchy cuke,” and chomped right into it. Readers, it felt great. The slight resistance of the rubbery skin under my canines giving way to the tender flesh and moist seed pocket was an absolute whirlwind of a sensory experience. We ate the whole cucumber in bites, just passing it back and forth. It felt like we were animals, a good feeling for those of use who live in a society.

I’m reminded of the fact that there was a time in my life, maybe 15 years ago, when I mostly went around wearing a denim vest with a $4 half pint of rum in the inside pocket and no shirt. This wasn’t yout typical denim vest, but a frankenstein job made of mixed black and blue denim. It didn’t have a collar, but also wasn’t your conventional waistcoat shape. Perhaps it was closest to a denim fishing vest. During that time I was always dehydrated from snorting speed and not sleeping and only drinking shitty malt liquor, and so I’d often snack on vegetables that I felt had a high quantity of water, in an effort to moisten the arid landscape of my insides. 

I was particularly fond of eating a cucumber, though I never held it like a Ren Faire turkey leg and chomped in. Instead I would sit on the subway, all vest no shirt, slicing off chunks of cuke with this knife I had stolen from a Dick’s Sporting Goods in Nashville when I was hitchhiking, and popping them in my mouth. It didn’t occur to me how strange that must’ve looked–the dissonance between my being dressed like an extra from The Warriors, with a knife out on the subway, eating something as unthreatening as a cucumber–until late one evening when a very elegant older gay man made lengthy eye contact before remarking “honey, you’re a savage,” in a velvety baritone I can still hear ringing in my head.

Prices vary. Available at most grocery stores.

DELTA VARIANT
Not to end on a fucking downer, but this feels important to mention. I’ve had so many conversations in the past months about the pandemic year, what it meant, what it felt like, and the chaos it wrought in so many of our lives. And one theme that keeps popping up is that no one I know really has any peers who died from COVID, but we all know like half a dozen people who died by choice or from accidental overdose. And I’m not trying to say COVID is a hoax. All of us know people who contracted it or have coworkers or family members who died from it. 

But for the people in our social circles, 2020 was devastating for entirely different reasons, both side effects of the social isolation of quarantine. Our people, the fucked up freaks, faggots, trannies, and dykes, are so incredibly vulnerable. And so on the eve of another possible lockdown, I just want to suggest that we think about this. Start having conversations. How do we make sure the most vulnerable among us aren’t languishing in undeserved and undesired solitude, while also being mindful of our people who are immunocompromised, for whom COVID poses a much greater threat even while vaccinated?

I don’t have the answer, I don’t know if there is one. Frankly I’m hoping they develop a viable booster shot before winter. But in case they don’t we need to be thinking about how we can do a second lockdown differently so we don’t keep burying our friends.

A POSTER
Print issues of this zine came with the poster alluded to in the intro, but you, my digital readership, will have to make do with a picture of the poster:

If I printed a slightly amended version of this illustration on t-shirts would you want one?