To The “About Us” Section of My Fantasy Business

I’m grateful for this small but standard link that gives me the chance to tell you about who we are and what we do.

We run a small farm in upstate Wisconsin, just outside of Rhinelander. It is a light farm; we cultivate natural, or as we call it, “wild” light. We harvest it and age it under a variety of conditions: a nineteenth century barn with several gaps that allow the light to breathe, the lower 23 acres that we have filled with imported Greek dandelions which bloom one day a year and which color the light so perfectly. We collect light in sea glass bottles and store them in the attic where we have a loop of Mozart’s Jupiter symphony playing. It mellows the light, but it’s a process that takes years. The Jupiter light is our most expensive.

We believe in the importance of tension, the truth of contradiction. We encourage our employees to work on their day off and sleep when they work. We serve them salted sweets at the annual company picnic, which we hold in February. No one attends. We encourage a lot of input from our customers and we do the opposite of what they say. Most are repeat buyers because they know they are not always right and they appreciate our honesty, say it’s refreshing. We do not like irony.

I am the president of this company.I eat cinnamon toast for breakfast and also for dessert. I long to remember my dreams but every time I do, they seem like someone else’s. I remember eating olives in a hostel in Spain. We crowded around the refrigerator and ate them out of jar. We washed them down with fresh memories of the day and a red wine with no label.

The Olive Trees by Van Gogh

I started this light farm after my bag was stolen off an Italian train while I was sleeping. Perhaps the thieves thought they would find something valuable, but inside my bag was a toothbrush, soap, clothes and my annotated copy of Pablo Neruda’s Collected Works. I found the conductors to report it. They were sitting in one car up front drinking espresso from tiny cups and smoking cigarettes. The light in the car was blue. I tried to explain and they tried to listen. They nodded. One ushered me to sit next to next to the window and when I finished speaking, he kept pointing outside. Olive trees bend at weird angles and the light wraps around the branches before spilling into the field. Neruda may be gone, but who wants to read? No, no. Read the letters the trees write. Read the scripture in the grass. Read the light on the coast as it breaks your heart. Survive this and go home.