 Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday. As you can possibly tell, just from looking at the camera lens, it is a very humid day in Indianapolis, but unfortunately, the beans must be harvested. The first thing you need to do is move these bricks you've set up to foil your nemesis, the groundhog. There she is in all her beauty, your number one stop for beans, beans, and more beans. You've been feeling a little exhausted lately, so the garden is overgrown and wild, but you mustn't let that discourage you too much. You are, after all, just a creature trying to live with a very strange chronic condition called consciousness. Today, you're harvesting cranberry beans, so-called not because they taste like cranberries, but because they look like them, and the pods make it easy for you by turning a rich, variegated red and white when they're ready to harvest. This is straightforward work, despite the heat, but you can't help but think about the absurd inefficiency of it. A can of beans costs $0.79 at the grocery store, and your beans cost triple that, even before accounting for your labor, but maybe your whole life shouldn't worship at the altar of efficiency anyway. There's a paradox of work like this, which is that it takes energy and time when you feel like you don't have a surplus of either, and yet doing it leaves you feeling less tired and less overwhelmed, although also quite sweaty. Once you've picked the beans, you'll want to shell them with someone you love, and while doing so, talk about your recent travels and travails. You've felt lately like there's a distance between your mind and your body, like they are two old friends who've drifted apart but are still required by circumstance to spend all their time together, but idly chatting while shelling beans makes you feel like your mind is back inside of your body, at least for a little while, and plus the beans are pretty. Sometimes cranberry beans are mostly red, other times they're speckled. Opening each pod is a bit like an extremely low-stakes slot machine or something, and you're surprised by how beautiful you find the beans. So much so that after you finish shelling, you may want to take up close video of them. Alright, time for that mise en place. If this was your first bean harvest, you'd make some warm bean salad, or something that really celebrates the bean-ness of the beans, but no, you're just gonna make some chili. You start by chopping up two onions. How will you prevent people on the internet from making fun of your knife skills? A jump cut. While in the garden, you also picked a bunch of peppers, and so you cut those up as well, along with four cloves of garlic, all of which goes into the big pot. Now over in the little pot, you'll want to boil some water and toss the beans in there, making sure your video shot is out of focus. You boil those beans for 30 minutes or until they taste good, while in the big pot, once your onions are suitably translucent, you'll add two pounds of plant-based fake hamburger. You've got a little time now, so while you watch the beans boil, think about how really you're just sort of a fleshy worm with limbs. How there's a tube that goes through the middle of you, just like there is for many other animals. Perhaps you should be a bit more forgiving of yourself, you know, given that you're literally a mammal. Like, of course you get scared and don't know which way to turn in your life. You're basically an advanced squirrel. Anyway, then you add three cans of diced tomatoes, a tablespoon of vinegar, two heaping tablespoons of chili powder, some oregano, and two beers. If you ruminated long enough about being an organism, and you did, the beans will be cooked now, so you can put them in the chili as well. You let it simmer for an hour or two hours, seasoned to taste, and then serve. You eat the chili with your family, including some cousins in from out of town, and it tastes good. The beans really are better than the ones from the store, or at least you're able to tell yourself as much. And as you eat it, it occurs to you that maybe this is the point. Like, yeah, you're just a fleshy worm with consciousness, which can feel like a lot sometimes. But that's also what allows you to share food you worked hard on with people you love and who love you. Hank, I'll see you on Friday.