There’s a Machine in my garden, and it is definitely not the one that Leo Marx wrote about. It’s been silently rusting & weathering in the right back corner by the fence for decades, never thinking but always knowing.
All its delicate pieces are gone now, what’s left is the rough evidence of its strength clad in a seductively rich, dark, flaky red cloak. It can stare down any invader; its self -assured gaze never wavers. Why from its front gate it can even see the red cows in the pasture across the pond.
Years ago, The Machine would gobble acres of wild grass and spit out neat cubes of dried hay, identical in every way.
Conformance, after all, was the key to survival back then. Also, the grass stretched to the horizon giving it an endless task to complete. There were no limits and there were no consequences until, one day, it stopped in this small god-forsaken corner of my conciousness. It grew comfortable and didn’t move; it just waited for something to happen. 
The Machine waits for a chance to rise again and conquer new unruly fields. It has an analog memory that stores its processes in thick coils of corroded steel.
And those coils know that the simple life is the happy life and that only the weak snivel about seasons and the future. The Machine exists for the NOW and always has, never moving quickly but always moving deliberately, building momentum by the mile and becoming increasingly difficult to stop until a total breakdown steals its power. It never ever changes (except for those annoying tiny parts falling off damn it!).
However, as The Machine sits and waits, the fields change. Now they are fewer, richer, more rational and disciplined. The fields work with the newer digital methods of exponentially increasing complexity and elegance to achieve a tenuous balance between machine and nature. The field is now infinitely responsive and no longer needs the brute discipline of The Machine. Sadly, The Machine can no longer move.
It seems that the tiny missing parts were critical to its purpose. The coils tight with potential have no vehicle for release. Even sadder, The Machine doesn’t know it cannot move. Reality is no longer a part of its existence. But rust is.
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