Love at a Reasonable Price

This is the beginning of “Pure Love Factory Farm Pt 1”, appearing in “First Loves” (see “Buy the Books” [you don’t have to; this was our first attempt at a book.]

So this is our factory farm. Up here you can see pretty much the whole operation, from the giant glass aquariums filled to the brim with rich black dirt where we hold our earthworms before milking, to the stainless steel milking stations where our workers, dressed nattily — “lumberjack-chic”, we like to say — in heavy workboots and denim overalls with soft flannel shirts bursting brightly out the sides, pull Pure Love from the worms, worm by worm, using our patented Pure Love extraction equipment.

See how a little square of super-soft — cuddly, really — gray cloth is flung over an earthworm resting on the smooth wooden surface of one of those small square work tables? The blue wire attached to the back of the cloth sends a wake-up signal to the earthworm’s nervous system, exciting the earthworm and invigorating its thoughts and feelings — such as they are — and thus propelling Pure Love up to the forefront of its conscious or perhaps pseudo-conscious — as the case may be — experience (basic rule of thumb: awareness is most fundamentally Pure Love, so more awareness equals more Pure Love), and the red wire attached to the front of the cloth carries any Pure Love rubbed off the writhing worm into that little glass cylinder where the Pure Love catches Its breath and becomes more present in Its infinite expanse.

Behind the milking stations you can see the large wooden barrels where we store core upon core of everywhere- and forever-explosions of Pure Love. Each bottle in that conveyored line of bottles flowing under the barrel taps is filled with all the Pure Love it can hold—which, rigorously stated, is both an infinite and a non-existent amount. Over there on the far end towards the back door you can see another set of dirt-filled aquariums. That’s where we hold the earthworms once they’ve been milked. They recuperate in those tanks a minimum of 24 hours — notice how both sets of aquariums are on a long elliptical conveyor belt; the belts move one position to the left every three hours to ensure we process the earthworms in the correct order — , and then we drive them out and release them in the wild.

Beautiful, huh?! Our investors wanted cement floors because they’re cheaper than hardwood and a big windowless concoction of steel beams and vinyl siding instead of this comparatively pricey giant brick barn whose magnificent skylights and windows fill the space with not only natural light, but the whole of the outside world. But we explained that you simply cannot cut corners when dealing with Pure Love. The right mood is important for both harvesters and donors.

Let’s go to our dining area. I’ll buy you something to eat and drink and tell you a little about the details of the operation.
Here’s your coffee. You’re sure you’re not hungry? The food is quite good. Healthy too. None of that processed nonsense. Everything’s made right here with fresh, organic ingredients. And the animal products — no meat is served here, but we do offer eggs and dairy — all come from carefully raised, grass-fed, free-range critters. I really like the avocado omelet. With sweet and white home fries. And the most amazing aji verde!

Don’t be like that! It’ll only take a second — you can see that there’s no line. None of the workers are on a break or lunch at the moment. Here, watch my iced tea — I want a good approximation of how much volume each ice cube loses while I’m away.
That bit about the ice cubes was a joke! Just sit back and relax! Make yourself at home! Help yourself to some ice cubes from my glass!

That bit about taking the ice cubes from my glass was a joke!
You don’t want any ice cubes yourself do you? In a cup?
OK.

…

Here you go. Smells good, right? Follow me to the patio — it’d be a shame to miss out on such a clear bright day!
Incredible! Incredible! And free! That’s nature for you! Wow! Great outdoors: can’t get enough of the stuff myself. Let’s stop a second and breathe it in. You only live once! Well, I mean, who knows?, but surely there’s a sense in which you only live once.
So, is this the first Pure Love factory you’ve ever seen? They’re not as expensive to operate as you might think. The equipment doesn’t use that much electricity — on a sunny spring day the solar panels on the roof of the cafeteria/rec-room usually cover all our energy needs. Also, as you know, earthworms are basically free — and they are quite hardy. Though we do keep the place fairly cool all year round because that seems to keep them as full of life as they can be and thus as productive as possible.

Before we go on, let me first tell you how much I love iced tea with about a cup of ice and one-fourth lemon per pint. It isn’t just that it is cool and gentle yet sharply refreshing. There’s something more to it than that, or something within that crisp tang that is somehow more than the sum of its parts, something that connects me to deeper things, to the soft yet clear-edged, sometimes blue-, sometimes-gray-skied world of my youth and to the creek winding its way through those days. I like to watch moving water, especially on a bright day when its constantly shifting peaks and valleys reflect the sunlight in infinitely wondrous and unpredictable ways. It always gives me the feeling that there is something more to this play of atoms and voids in my watching mind than atoms and voids or even my own watching. But I suppose all that goes without saying. Philosophers debate whether or not, or in what way, and/or to what degree that sense of a deeper core to this life is accurate. But we’ve all seen creeks in the sunlight; and that experience is the bulk of what we really know about the matter. Many of us revel in a glass of freshly brewed, unsweetened iced tea with ice cubes floating enmass in the upper portion of the glass and a lemon wedge — still somewhat folded-over from the twisting-squeeze — in the mix somewhere or other. But who can say what lies at the core of this joy?

Did you have any questions about the factory or the product?
No: As far as we can tell, the worms don’t suffer or get damaged in any way by being milked. And we don’t think they lose any Pure Love. According to everything we’ve observed, you can no more remove or lessen the infinite dollop of Pure Love shining at the core of a creature than you can keep The One Light — aka: Pure Love — from creating, sustaining, and shining through all things. But even if the milking doesn’t damage the worms, they should still spend the bulk of their days writhing eagerly through the earth’s immense, and — from the earthworm’s perspective, which we of course need to be sensitive to — immensely invigorating and inexhaustibly fascinating crust.

You’re right: moral concerns are even more important to a Pure Love factory farm than to more conventional factory farms. As an aside I will note that torturing chickens to death to save a few cents on eggs and poultry, and cramping livestock together, plumping them up with hormones, and keeping the stressed-out brutes alive with antibiotics instead of more traditional methods like allowing them space to move is probably neither practically wise nor morally acceptable. However, that’s not really my industry and it’s not really what you’ve come to learn about today.

I won’t spend too long on our metaphysical and ethical positions. If you’re interested, you can read about them more fully on our website. There you’ll also find a good synopsis of our philosophical positions and how we try to connect them to our real-world operations in our business statement.

{It goes on like that.
Buy “First Loves” if you want to keep hearing this kind of pitter-patter. We understand if you’d just as soon let it pass. But we thought we’d let everybody know what all we’d published in “Buy the Books”

— B. Willard / A. Whistletown
copyright holder is AM Watson
}