Having no particular ambition for the afternoon, I decided to bike out to the beach. I figured that even without a map, I could find the ocean, what with its being so large and all. After a few kilometers, I was hopefully adrift in a sea of rice paddies.
So I instead indulged a long-time desire. I parked my bike and hiked out along the levees that spider through the farmland. The paddies are a land of planes and vectors; muddy channels and grassy dikes; concrete footbridges linking tiny fiefdoms of rice.
At each juncture, I zagged in a new direction, until the road became indistinct. I paused along the path. Rice shoots shook and hissed with the breeze. At a distance, the farmers rolling along the dykes on ancient bicycles and the cows grazing the fields looked embroidered against the green.
And suddenly I was reminded of a scene from The Cruise. In it, Timothy “Speed” Levitch is describing an encounter at a Manhattan party. He is attempting to pick up “a Jewess in sexual slacks,” and for whatever reason, they are discussing Manhattan’s layout of streets.
“Everyone loves the grid plan,” the alluringly attired Ashkenazi says.
Speed, as you will know if you have seen the movie, does not love the grid plan, and the woman’s offhand remark serves as fodder for an amusing rant on the totalitarianism of the DPW and the general negation of Speed’s personhood.
If you’re wondering what the point of this anecdote is, you probably haven’t spent enough time lately wanderingly aimlessly through rice paddies.
