092709

Obama's climate-change speech to the UN was spot on. As always, his main point was: none of us can do this alone. We will only be able to meet the climate-change challenge by working together, rich and poor, developed and developing, skeptics and ecologists. The speech on nuclear de-proliferation was really top notch as well. (And as Letterman quipped, "Isn't it great to have a president who knows how to pronounce nuclear?") Having seen Obama speak on a variety of grave topics now, I can say that I believe in him and his administration even more than I did before the election--and that's saying a hell of a lot.

____

I posted a video this week on Facebook about "a day in the life" of MS kind of thing, meant for the lay person and MS'er alike. The response was very positive, so much so that this will become a new, regular outlet for me.

*Perfume*

Last week my assistant and I made a second try of the solid perfume I made for Pop, revamped, now called Helios. This is the first time I've made a solid perfume with 16 essences. The most I'd used before in a solid (which I will, for business purposes, call concretes de parfum) was 12 (I commonly use 18 or more essences in alcohol perfumes). Really the recipe was working all right; I wanted there to be more of an orange character, so I beefed up the top, adding orange essence oil (distilled from orange juice instead of pressed from the skins) and plenty of bergamot. The results are promising. I'll know more clearly in another week or so.

Also, this week we made a new perfume, Chronos. I happened to pick up an old bottle of something I made when I first got immortelle diluted and ready to use in perfume. The top section of this old one was all wrong, too sharp. But I noticed it had incredible longevity--it lasted more than 24 hours, and even made it through a shower and was still redolent! That's really impressive for a natural perfume. I looked at the recipe and realized it was likely that the combination of orris and benzoin gave it unbelievable tenacity. So I kept the base the same, added to the heart, and changed the top completely. I have high hopes for this brew. I will let you know how it turns out.

We also made a revamped version of Anthea, my tribute to jasmine. It is already adored by a number of people but it still seems too sharp to me. Jasmine can be sharp when not tamed. I attempted to rein in the jasmine with clary sage and rose. Time will tell whether or not it worked, but my initial sense is that it did. Maybe just a bit more tweaking, but then again maybe not. In all arts I often have trouble getting myself to say enough is enough. In perfume, I find I'm growing more astute, knowing with precision what needs to change, how much, or if it just plain ain't broke. This art is all about patience, and trial and error.

Also, I've been thinking a lot about packaging. I've found the right bottles (one 5ml, one 10ml) with black screw caps. Spray caps cost twice as much as the bottles themselves! So I will do several things, partly inspired by Serge Lutens: I will include an embroidered handkerchief for each customer (so they can apply perfume, from the screw-cap bottle, as in days of old; one cool thing about this is after you've rubbed in perfume where you want it, you can put the scented kerchief in you purse, suit pocket, or briefcase, or even a drawer; natural perfume lasts much longer on fabric or paper than on skin). I will also include in each box (found 100%-PC-recycled-fiber boxes): a printed description of the perfume(s), a tiny, glass spray bottle and a small, glass roll-on bottle, for additional options in application.

*Words*

The Global-Village Idiot

Hi. I'm a moron.

I mean to say I'm an oxymoron.

What I mean to point out

is that I'm a bright progressive person

who delights in the possibility

that the federal government will in fact

fall to pieces one happy day.

I'm a jazz lover who feels that 99.9% of jazz

is worse than obsolete--

it's 2010, people; there's no reason

to continue being stuck in the past.

You should do yourself a favor and listen

to some of the miraculously hip jazz

made in the last 20 years.

Think about it: even just considering

population growth, there _must_ be

more great jazz players on the planet now

than ever before.

But what do I know? I'm a fool.

I'm a blues singer who doesn't sing the blues.

I'm a health-food nut who eats mostly frozen food.

Sometimes I can love only as much

as I can be angry. Sometimes I can be angry

only as much as I can cry.

I cry with no one to hear

and I sing the blues without uttering a sound.

I happen to believe that the very idea

of an omnipotent designer/creator is

worse than ludicrous.

But I still believe in God's love,

and I want to know where exactly, succinctly,

is the contradiction in that?

God knows I know there are at least

two or three in there somewhere.

I feel blessed and wickedly wronged

at the same time. I might feel blessed

exactly because I feel so wronged,

as if there's some entitlement program

which awaits me in hell, a program

just for those, like me, who are

eternally confused by the ways

of our race, who double over with sorrow

as they feel the weight of the world,

and who can't stop asking, "Why?"

seldom with the wisdom of a prayer

or the grace of any angel.

Look at me now, sitting here in front of you

whining about eternal confusion

and the weight of the world,

about prayers and angels.

Best stand clear: any second I'll be talking

about souls. I mean really.

What would I know from a soul?

I must be some kind of a moron.

*Disability*

Recently I've been thinking a lot about my life with an able body. First and foremost is traveling around the world with a backpack; I could never do that now. (I might be able to travel, with lots of planning and pre-organization, but certainly not with a backpack, and not with the impetuousness I did before.) Also, I've been watching sports again. It's exhilarating to watch world-class athletes doing things I can't even dream of anymore. A brief history of my life in sports:

1. I was never much of an athlete but in my early days I excelled at one thing: playing second base in baseball. Unfortunately, my little-league coach's son (in Florida) also played second base, so even though I was better than him, I rarely got to start. It felt great to hear parents screaming when I was taken out of a game for no good reason. I moved back to New York; I was so busy trying to fit in, and nervous, that I failed to make the St Bernard's baseball team. I remember at try-outs, the coach, Mr Warnock, said, "Well, you stand up there like a batter [my father had taught me well] but nothing happens." To this day I'm bitter about that: maybe if Warnock had believed in me a little and given me a chance, I would have succeeded. That's pretty much the story of my life.

2. At boarding school (Milton Academy) I played lacrosse and football (before I was kicked out). I was an offensive and defensive lineman in football. Man, did I have fun. My best moments were on offense: often my sole job was to swing out and deck a defender on the wing. Poor guys saw me coming but didn't expect that I would be able to lay them flat with one blow. Few things in life I have found to be as satisfying.

3. For some reason, one high-school moment sticks out in my mind: after returning to New York from Milton, I started going out with a girl who was _the_ major love of my young life (more than a few months). Her family had a house in the Hamptons. It's a very small memory but it means the world to me: one day I was playing a game of soccer and we had to leave; there was a large hedge between the soccer field and the car, a hedge taller than I was. I was full of adrenaline from the soccer game; I ran and leapt over the hedge, perfectly, cleanly. Even my girlfriend's mother was impressed. It makes me smile to remember that once I was able to leap over tall hedges in a single bound.

*Health*

Please watch this important and sardonic humorous piece about health insurance, featuring Jon Hamm, Will Ferrell, and others:

http://tinyurl.com/nb82h2

*Taiwan*

[The next day was unbearably hot and we came to terms with the wreckage: the whole center of town was flooded and wouldn't be cleared for days if not weeks; the damage was incalculable. I went to look at my apartment and what I saw was life changing: the river had risen to above the first floor--in other words every single one of my possessions on this earth had been soaked and forever sullied by river mud; an entire wardrobe gone, my most dear photos turned into a pile of undecipherable sludge, all of the little trinkets I'd collected in Taiwan ruined. My motorcycle, fully flooded like everything else, was the only thing I was able to salvage The apartment was a stinking mess so there was no way I could sleep there--I hadn't even gotten to enjoy it for a single day! Back to the top of the hill I returned....]

And the final nail in the coffin of my time in Taiwan was this: on that tremendously hot day, as I sat around in my shorts, chit-chatting with the Australian/Dutch woman, she took it all the wrong way, a way which would prove to be dangerous for me. Her husband had been out all day, attending to some business or other, and our host was gone somewhere too, so it was just the girl and I, alone together, in the wake of a storm, in someone else's house. We talked about all manner of things, where we each grew up, what sort of schools we'd been to (I was barely a high-school graduate at the time)...and our love lives. I thought nothing of it at the time, but it turns out this woman was delusional and imagined things into our day together which weren't possibly true.

One of the things we'd discussed, in what I thought was our perfectly innocent conversation, was the fact that she'd only ever been with one man, her husband. Looking back now I realize I couldn't possibly, as a teenager, have understood just how stultifying that fact was for her. Craving her life as a young woman back, I see now. I found out later that when she got home the next morning, she "confessed" to her husband that we had had a romantic day and were planning to run away together! Pure and total delusion. This was the first time I learned that another person's delusions can really screw up your life (I've learned the same lesson over and over again). I wasn't even attracted to this girl, let alone ready to elope with her.

I too decided I had to face the music the next morning, and went back to my flooded apartment to see if there was something, anything, I could salvage. I had no luck, except as mentioned with the motorcycle. As I was standing there wondering how I would ever rid myself of this catastrophe, the phone rang; phone lines were working again by then. It was my friend Adam, one of the eight white folks in this little town of Hualien. We all knew each other of course. Adam sounded very worried about something.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"You tell me," he said.

"Well, my apartment's a bust. The only thing I could salvage was the bike--"

"No, I mean about yesterday."

"What about yesterday?"

"You and what's-her-name?"

"Me and who?"

"That Australian girl, dammit! Don't pretend you don't know."

"I have no idea what the fuck you're going on about!"

"None?"

"None!"

"Well, she seems to think you two had quite the magical day together yesterday."

"Quite the magic--what?!"

"Look, I don't care to know the details. Just, I think it's important you leave town right away."

"Leave town? My life's a wreck. Why should I go now?"

"Like I said, I don't even _want_ to know what happened. But you have to know that crazy Kiwi told me he would shoot you on sight. And I don't think they really have the rule of law down there, where he comes from."

"This is crazy. Leave or die?"

"I'd say you better catch the next train for Taipei."

"This is nuts."

"It is what it is, man. You gotta look out for number one."

I did catch the train that night, bound for Hong Kong (and finally Tokyo) via Taipei. I didn't have a single swatch of clothing to my name, but for the shirt on my back. The one thing I did have plenty of was money. So I faced: a verifiable threat from a mafia-backed school, the messy aftermath of the typhoon, and yet another threat on my life from an unforeseen, unforeseeable source. With absolutely nothing to keep me, my only choice was to catch the next outbound train, never again to return to the beautiful little town of Hualien, on the east coast of Taiwan, majestically nestled between mountains and the open Pacific ocean. I saw Adam not long after, who had gotten the real deal by then, in Hong Kong. He told me I had saved that couple's marriage by leaving. Ever the fall guy/sucker I will be.

*Peace*

"I think in many ways it is the most important campaign since 1933, mostly because of the problems which press upon the United States, and the opportunities which will be presented to us in the 1960s. The opportunity must be seized, through the judgment of the President, and the vigor of the executive, and the cooperation of the Congress. Through these I think we can make the greatest possible difference.

"How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world? On your willingness to do that, not merely to serve one year or two years in the service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer whether a free society can compete."

--JFK in 1961 talking to students about his plans for the Peace Corps

*Music*

One diva everyone should hear is Angie Stone. She's an English hip-hop artist that's got style, a memorable voice, and a deep, funky sensibility. My favorite records are Mahogany Soul and Stone Love. Dig it!

Also, for the record, Prince's best album is Dirty Mind from 1980. Let Stephen Thomas Erlewine (AMG) tell it:

"Neither For You nor Prince was adequate preparation for the full-blown masterpiece of Prince's third album, Dirty Mind. Recorded in his home studio, with Prince playing nearly every instrument, Dirty Mind is a stunning, audacious amalgam of funk, new wave, R&B, and pop, fueled by grinningly salacious sex and the desire to shock. Where other pop musicians suggested sex in lewd double-entendres, Prince left nothing to hide--before its release, no other rock or funk record was ever quite as explicit as Dirty Mind, with its gleeful tales of oral sex, threesomes, and even incest. Certainly, it opened the doors for countless sexually explicit albums, but to reduce its impact to mere profanity is too reductive--the music of Dirty Mind is as shocking as its graphic language, bending styles and breaking rules with little regard for fixed genres. Basing the album on a harder, rock-oriented beat more than before, Prince tries everything--there's pure new wave pop ("When You Were Mine"), soulful crooning ("Gotta Broken Heart Again"), robotic funk ("Dirty Mind"), rock & roll ("Sister"), sultry funk ("Head," "Do It All Night"), and relentless dance jams ("Uptown," "Partyup"), all in the space of half an hour. It's a breathtaking, visionary album, and its fusion of synthesizers, rock rhythms, and funk set the style for much of the urban soul and funk of the early '80s."

*Quotations*

I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems. To desire to write poems that endure--we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and that if we succeed we will never know it.

--Donald Hall

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

--F SCott Fitzgerald

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one.

--William Faulkener

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.

--HG Wells

Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

--Emerson

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

--Samuel Johnson

He who cannot lie does not know what the truth is.

--Nietzsche

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

--Churchill

A man's private thought can never be a lie; what he thinks, is to him the truth, always.

--Mark Twain

A man who will not lie to a woman has very little consideration for her feelings.

--Olin Miller

Peace love and ATOM jazz

092009

I started taking a new drug called 4AP (fampridine) a couple of weeks ago. It is not yet approved (in its current form) by the FDA for treatment of MS so, while it's legal, there's only one compounding pharmacy that makes it. My first visit to my physical therapist after I'd started on it (having been on it for a week), his wig was flipped. I went from having balance equivalent to that of a typical 90-year-old to having the balance of someone about 50. Moreover, I went from being able to walk less than 4000 feet in half an hour (extrapolated from six minutes of walking) to being able to walk almost 6000 feet in that amount of time. All in one week! This bodes very well for the future--I'm not even up to the full dose yet. I will keep you all apprised.

_____

Last week I went to the birthday party for an old high school friend I haven't seen in at least 18 years. At the party were other high-school acquaintances I haven't seen in more than 20 years. What a life-affirming experience. We all look different (in most cases exactly as I would've pictured 20 years down the line would look like), but we're all so essentially the same inside as to be instantly recognizable. Some of us have fallen in a couple of decades, most of us have seen some shit, and all of us have fundamentally altered perceptions of what this breath is all about.

*EVs*

About the time that I moved to Bellingham WA to finish college, my father sold that beautiful piece of land in Maine, on which my girlfriend and I had built a cabin. I had just been realizing I had to give up on the homestead idea so the news came at a good time. I had also decided I no longer wanted to drive a gasoline-powered car, and had spent some time with the Seattle EV (electric vehicle) group. I knew of a nice Fiat that had been converted to electric by a father-son navy electrical-engineer duo. The owner had tried it for a few years and was ready to move on. I had money from the cabin and so was ready to take it off his hands. Sweet ride! It had LEDs on the dash which showed you the relative strength of each battery.

The one thing it didn't have was a heater--really not a good thing in northern-most Washington state. Whereas heat in an ICE (internal combustion engine) car comes from the engine itself, in an electric car heat must be produced by taxing the batteries, which cuts heavily down on the distance you can drive (the heater took more power than driving). Additionally, lead-acid batteries do not hold a charge very well in cold weather. This combined to make for a very tough year. I had resolved to retire my gas burner and use the EV exclusively. When I first started I knew next to nothing about motors, engines, or cars in general. After taking a course of study (five engineering classes) at the Vehicle Research Institute (one of the premier schools of its kind in the country)) I was a veritable wiz with cars.

I wish I'd foreseen the "year with" trend which is so hot right now (year with Julia Child, year with minimum-wage jobs, etc.) because my year driving an EV exclusively would have made a hell of a story. There was a very steep learning curve. First off, at the Seattle EV club, we had changed the car from eight 12-volt batteries to 10. No one had told me that this meant the car now had to be charged on a 220-volt circuit instead of a regular household 110; I guess they assumed I knew. At the beginning I didn't even know the difference between an engine (ICE) and a motor (electric). With the help of a friendly Seattle EV buff, I finally hooked a charge cable to my 220-volt stove socket (with a splitter), and ran it out the window to the car.

There were numerous other problems, some of which I was able to fix, some I never did. As winter came on I realized I needed a heater that would work with my new 120-volt battery stack (instead of the old 96 volts). That was small hurdle. Then I discovered that the motor mounts were coming loose; actually, a Seattle EV-club member who lived on Camano Island, the closest member to Bellingham, figured it out, and we devised a simple but sturdy brace that held the motor in place. Then one night as I was driving through town, the simple piece which connected the transmission with the drivetrain broke. Because the car was a Fiat, parts were not easy to come by. I finally got my hands on the replacement part, but the car never did work right again. I could never again get it in reverse; I always had to park on an incline or hill so that I'd be able to get out.

Major lesson learned: all cars are bad. Even electric cars need their electricity from somewhere, and invariably, in this day and age, most of that electricity comes from coal power plants. A net advantage of zero. The most important thing to consider as far as cars go is emissions. With all-electric, you've got the emissions from the power plant (it is not possible to generate enough electricity for motive power from a single solar-panel array). Nowadays you can get Ultra Low Emissions Vehicles (ULEVs) and even Partial Zero Emissions Vehicles; in all cases those are hybrids, and hybrids are without doubt the best bet for everyone between now and the 100% electric-vehicle world (with no coal plants!) all of us EV idealists are banking on. Maybe not in my lifetime, but some day.

*Cities*

When I fled New York in 1992 or '93, I had the very foolish notion that living in a city was in some way less eco friendly than living in the country--it took me nearly 20 years to realize just how wrong I was! One of my idols, David Korten, reformed World-Bank economist and author of the scathing When Corporations Rule the World (among others), took note of this "red herring" in his aforementioned book. Just as with the idea that plastic is bad and paper is good, the idea that city living has more of an environmental footprint than country living is patent hogwash: Paper is what fills up more than 75% of landfills and does not biodegrade under normal circumstances; if you consider the gas you have to burn in your single-occupancy vehicle just to get anywhere in the country the eco cards are stacked against you. Cities have mass transit in which many people occupy a single vehicle.

Add to that the fact that in the country, people all live in separate single-family homes (whereas in cities people live together generally, all under one roof, with one boiler for a whole building), and you're quickly into "no doubt about it" territory. One of the salient features of contemporary city planning is that the goal in general is to work against sprawl by building _up_ instead of out. Here again cities are way ahead of the game from the get-go: big cities are all about building upwards not outwards, with New York City being the premier example; we _can't_ build outwards. Those places where strip-mall sprawl is the norm, and where there is poor mass transit, are not in fact true cities. Therefore, for example, Tampa Florida doesn't count, nor does Seattle Washington. In both places, and similar ones, a car is absolutely essential, and there alone you've got one big environmental boondoggle.

*Peace*

Please watch the following video:

Nonviolence

Nonviolent peacekeeping is the way of the future.

*Quirky*

Also look at this kooky video by a guy named Hawksley Workman (crazy name, I assume it's a pseudonym). I'd say this is understated and sublime:

Hey Hey Hey

*Rights*

From The Writer's Almanac:

"Margaret Sanger was born into a working-class Irish family. Her mother died when she was 50, after 18 pregnancies. Margaret went to New York City, became a nurse, got married, and gave birth to three kids. As a nurse, she worked in the maternity ward on the Lower East Side, and many of her patients were poor, some of them living on the streets. They seemed old to her by the time they were 35, and many of them ended up in the hospital from self-induced abortions, which often killed them. Margaret nursed one mother back to health after she gave herself an abortion, and heard the woman beg the doctor for some protection against another pregnancy; the doctor told the woman to make her husband sleep outside. That woman died six months later, after a botched abortion, and Margaret Sanger gave up nursing, convinced that she needed to work for a more systematic change.

"At the time, contraceptives were illegal in the United States, and it was illegal even to send information about contraception through the U.S. Postal Service. The information and products were out there, but a privilege only of the wealthy, who knew how to work the system. Margaret Sanger wrote a series of articles called "What Every Girl Should Know," and published a radical newspaper, Woman Rebel, with information about contraception. In 1914, she was indicted for sending information about birth control through the mail. She fled to Europe, where she observed birth control clinics, and eventually came back to face charges. But after her five-year-old daughter died of pneumonia, the sympathetic public was on her side, and the charges were dropped.

"But Sanger kept going. In 1916, she and her sister, who was also a nurse, opened a birth control clinic in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, modeled after the clinics that Sanger had seen in Holland. Neighborhood residents, mostly Italian and Jewish immigrants, flocked to the clinic for information. Nine days later, the police closed it down and arrested Sanger, her sister, and the clinic's interpreter. Sanger went to prison and her sister went on a hunger strike. The publicity worked: Soon birth control became a matter of public discourse. In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which in 1946 became Planned Parenthood Federation of America. And she funded research to create a contraceptive pill. She died at age 87, a few months after the landmark Supreme Court decision Griswold vs. Connecticut finally made birth control legal for married couples."

It's astonishing to think that in this nation, where there is _supposed_ to be no mixing of church and state, there was a time when even birth control--family planning!--was illegal. Horrifying. And incredibly short sighted.

*Quotations*

Human misery is explosive, and you better not forget that.

--Norman Borlaug

If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not bring it forth, what you do not have within you will kill you.

--Jodi Picoult

What people forget is that Shakespeare was a restless entertainer. When he played the Elizabethan stage, he was basically dealing with an audience of 3,000 drunken punters who were selling pigs and geese in the stalls. He played to everyone from the street sweeper to the Queen of England. And his style was to have stand-up comedy one moment, a song, and then the highest tragedy right next to it. He was a rambunctious, sexy, violent, entertaining storyteller.

--Baz Luhrmann

I am only a public entertainer who understands his time.

--Picasso

The worst thing a writer can do is to think. The best thing to do is to react, which includes thinking but doesn't let it act as an impediment or a censor. When you read something, you think something--write that down. That's what I'm always trying to do.

--Alberto Álvaro Ríos

Whatever you do, do it with all your might. Work at it, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now.

--PT Barnum

Find something you're passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it.

--Julia Child

Media, the plural of mediocrity.

--Jimmy Breslin

Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint you can on it.

--Danny Kaye

If I can go from burglar for the government to talk show host, you can go from entertainer to congressman.

--G Gordon Liddy

Peace love and ATOM jazz

091309

My mother is spitting mad about something and I'm sure she'd appreciate my taking note of it here: the (lowbrow) debate (which isn't a debate) we've all been embroiled in the past few months is _not_ about health care! Unfortunate but true. What we've been arguing about is health-_insurance_ reform and nothing else.

*Enlightenment*

A couple of weeks ago I posted a status update on Facebook in which I noted: if enlightenment must come by way of shedding all attachments in this world then it must follow that those with children can never attain enlightenment. I know for certain that if I ever had kids I would never be able to shed attachment to them. I got many varied responses; one woman who lives, works, and studies in China sent me a private message. She said that indeed in all her studies of Buddhism and meditation, her teachers had constantly remarked about this insurmountable obstacle for adults with children. I realized that this is one reason that in many (if not most/all?) traditions, holy men are celibate.

*Mini-farming*

I've been an avid gardener in my time. When I left New York in 1992, I was already a radical back-to-the-lander; John Jeavons' book How to Grow More Vegetables than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land than You Can Imagine was at the forefront of my schemes, as were the various writings of a man who is my foremost idol, Scott Nearing, grandfather of the Back-to-the-Land movement which took hold across the country in the 1960s. I'd been studying Home Power magazine for months and was determined to live "off the grid." I had become a radical on many levels. I was working at a health-food store in the East Village and one day I was spewing my new local-independence, anti-city, neo-Luddite convictions when a co-worker said, "If you hate it so much why don't you leave?" I left for Maine within a week.

Somehow I convinced a girl I'd met only a couple of weeks before to join me. My plan was for us to set up a self-sufficient homestead on family land, a beautiful spot right on Blue Hill Bay, mid-coast Maine. The furthest we got was to build a cabin (we lived in the old barn while we were there) and to plant a garden, using Jeavons' Biointensive methods. Jeavons calls his method "mini farming" and it is indeed that, focused on growing complete diets (including grains, legumes, tubers, etc.) for all people, on this increasingly crowded planet, with less and less arable land each and every year--Jeavons is spot on to point to the contrary curves of increasing population on the one hand and decreasing amounts of land from which to feed the people on the other as an alarming fact of 21st-century life. Here follows a partial list of my gardening/mini-farming experiences:

1. Through my first adult-life garden in Maine I learned a great deal about the difference between books, theories, and their application to the real world, to seeds, and actual garden beds, and crop yields.

2. My girlfriend and I drove to Seattle at the end of 1993. My plan was to continue on for a return trip to Taiwan, to earn money for the homestead, for solar panels, and a water pump, and a wood-burning stove. I instantly became enchanted with Seattle, broke up with my girl (again, that one was the very last good relationship I ever had with a woman), and decided to stay. My homestead plans met their demise, but not my passion for gardening. I had one great garden in Seattle, at a large community garden on the north side of town. I'm usually a quick study, and gardening was no different.

Other gardeners were genuinely amazed at what I was able to produce on my one small plot, a dozen types of vegetables, lots of potatoes, and the gem of the lot, a large stand of sweet corn. All of it planted unconventionally closely together, all of it growing healthy and strong. Subsequently, I got a job at Puget Consumer's Co-op (a real prize for a newcomer) and no longer had time for the garden; then I started college at Seattle Central Community College, and was preoccupied with school for most of the following five years.

3. Luckily, in my upper division studies at Western Washington University, I was easily able to incorporate agricultural studies into my (complicated!) self-designed major, which was actually like minors in five or six different areas, microeconomics, physics, moral philosophy, engineering, agriculture, etc. To accomplish this feat I had to convince three PhDs in my fields (a doctor of economics, one of resource assessment and analysis, one of physics) that my chosen classes were all on target (in the name of Sustainable Development) and that my (10-page) reasoning for my courses of study was sound. In nearly killing me, that massive undertaking made me stronger and more resilient.

At the beginning, after I first moved to Bellingham (with which I had a terrible relationship from the day I arrived to the day I left), I lived about six miles outside of town, in a beautiful apartment overlooking Bellingham Bay. There I was able to have a very large garden, and to continue my own experiments with mini-farming. Increasingly I became dedicated to growing all of my own food. One winter, I survived solely on potatoes I had grown myself the summer before (if you eat enough of them, you can get plenty of calories and nutrients from potatoes, assuming they're _grown on healthy soil_).

4. After a couple of seasons, a small group of us got a grant from Fairhaven College to go to Willits California for a weekend workshop with John Jeavons himself. At the workshop, folks were very impressed with my detailed knowledge of the subject, especially Jeavons and his staff. Jeavons and I continued correspondence for several years afterwards (he even published an article I wrote for Whatcom Watch in his own newsletter). [On that trip, I also met a Franciscan monk who veritably changed my life, and who is the subject of the fifth poem I ever had published, Monks Follow Me.]

Around the same time I got to be a Teacher's Assistant for the Agroecology class at Huxley College of Environmental Science. The teacher, one of my three main mentors, the PhD in resource assessment, really believed in me and what I knew. She left me in charge of marking up and commenting on student papers and exams, even the graduate students; she did not mind it one bit when I was stern (some would say harsh) in my assessments. Lord, did I ever have fun calling graduate students on their bullshit. I ended up dropping out for a year, so immense was my workload, and never had a garden again in Washington state.

5. After I'd moved to Portland and lived through my marriage fiasco, I eventually found an assistant who agreed to have a garden with me, across the road from my last abode in Portland (another community garden). Really, I called all the shots and watched as she did all the work. Ours was the shining star of the whole garden. By this time, I had become quite adept, not even needing to consult books anymore for tips on planting methods, plant spacing, or companion planting. Every crop we grew flourished beyond all reason (I'm convinced we had angels like they have at Findhorn); people were particularly amazed by our robust broccoli, interplanted with companion flowers. It did make a nice show.

And that was the last garden I will likely ever have.

*Poem*

This is from 1996, though it seems like yesterday:

Monks Follow Me

regularly, give me plain looks that insist across

the silent distance between us, "You know what

you need to do. You know." Especially on

those days when I find it particularly difficult

to be nice and when I feel particularly bad for

not being nice very much of the time--those

are the sort of days that signing up at the local

abbey hangs over my head like a devoted

cloud, fully realized, unrelenting. Recently I met

a Brother Timothy in Willits. Brother Timothy

had a constant frog in his throat, and when he

spoke I knew some of the things he had seen

in his day without having to ask. He talked

about the other monks with an extremely

judgmental tone. The ones he liked he said

were "hot" monks. To a Franciscan, that meant

they must have damn near lived on air. To be

hot you had to have been eating out of

dumpsters since '64, had to have been wearing

and washing the same one set of clothes since

two weeks after the day you lost your last job,

had to stand up fast after eight hours straight

of praying and prostrating in front of the altar

and cry, "More, more! Give me more! I want

more burdens to shed. Give me another

chance!" Brother Timothy told me in one of his

heated asides that They (with a capital 'T')

had given it to Judi Bari, had finally forced on her

a slow and painful death, not just because

she loved the trees so much and was willing

to fight for them, but because she was a woman

who loved the trees. This was a terribly rich

and dangerous combination. "Don't be too rich,"

he warned, "And above all, don't think They

don't know what riches really are. In the end,

They have no choice but to lash out and grab

hold of whatever They can in Their final, frantic

efforts to fill in the massive holes Their money

carved out of Their hearts."

*DJ*

One of the best years I had out west was the year I was an on-air programer (DJ) for KMHD, the main jazz station serving Portland OR. I had taken a class earlier taught by the head of the station; I had to drop out, but I guess he liked what he heard. Out of the blue I was called in by the personnel manager to do an audition tape; actually it turned out to be three tapes (for one try). He explained that if I didn't pass muster, I would have to wait and try again later. The whole KMHD crew listened to my tapes and I was accepted to be on-air. The first couple of months, I was filling in for people with regular shows who couldn't make it on a particular day; I was on call. Finally I was offered my own spot, prime time, 2-6pm Mondays. What followed was a fairly magical time; I got to call all the shots and play anything I wanted.

Now being a DJ I must tell you is anything but glamorous. Ninety-nine percent of your time is spent alone in a detached, insulated room and you never get a chance to meet your listeners. On top of which, KMHD is a public-radio station so the gig was volunteer. I had a great time while I was there; I called my show "Post '69" and I featured "the best jazz from the last 35 years" (this was 2005 obviously). It was my conviction then as it still is that the best jazz ever made has been made recently; I aimed to prove that fact on my show. Mostly, those few brave souls who called in raved about how good the show was, saying they'd never heard such great jazz on KMHD (there was the occasional little old lady calling in to wonder what happened to Ella Fitzgerald).

The very vitality which made the show excellent was also my undoing for various reasons: after about ten months, the disparity between the amount of time I spent preparing for each show (a _lot_) and my lack of pay became more than I could handle. By that time, there was at least one old-time DJ gunning for me. I had heard that he objected to a track I played once by Dave "Fuze" Fiuczynski; looking back now, I have to admit that was a pretty outrageous track to play during business hours on a Monday (Fuze is a guitarist and he's all about rock-jazz with an emphasis on the hard-core rock). Still my listeners expected me to push the boundaries, and I most certainly did.

One day I played Cassandra Wilson singing Crazy, a really stand-out track in her inimitable folk-jazz style. As always, when I introduced it I mentioned who wrote the song: Willie Nelson. Within 20 seconds the phone rang; it was that same old-time DJ out to get me. He clearly didn't get it that my understanding and immersion in jazz was much more complete than his own; maybe he did and that's what made him feel threatened. He was just dying to find anything he could to find fault with. He said, "Adam, really. That's Patsy Cline," as if _I_ were the idiot. I said, "I don't know what you do on your show but on mine I mention who _wrote_ a song, not who made it famous." Never mind that Ms Wilson's rendition is so good I know there were countless people who were nothing less than thankful I was playing it.

This fellow was, among volunteer programmers, a heavy weight. The fact that he would have seen the death of my show, and been happy, eventually became more than I could bear. I had my last show not long after his call. When I announced my retirement on air, the phone was ringing off the hook; that felt great. Folks called to say things like: "You _can't_ stop. You only just started," and, "Oh crap! I guess I'll have to get used to Mondays with Ella and Louis again," and, "What does that mean, you're stopping? Will the show go on?" It was not a happy parting but it was one that had to happen. I'm happy I did it while I still could; it would be next to impossible for me to do anything like that now.

*Quotations*

They financial crises are all different, but they have one fundamental source: the unquenchable capability of human beings when confronted with long periods of prosperity to presume that it will continue.

--Alan Greenspan

[BLOW HARD! Of course his deregulation had nothing to do with it.]

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece. No other task is of any consequence.

--Cyril Connolly

[Explains why I'm perennially daunted.]

Homo sapiens are a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree.

--Stephen Jay Gould

[I feel less probable even than all this, and not all that fortunate.]

Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.

--Mary Oliver

[Am i no longer young?]

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.

--DH Lawrence

["Say it hot" !!!]

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

--Oscar Wilde

Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.

--Hebbel

If there is no passion in your life, then have you really lived? Find your passion, whatever it may be. Become it, and let it become you and you will find great things happen for you, to you and because of you.

--T Alan Armstrong

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Chase down your passion like it's the last bus of the night.

--Glade Byron Addams

*Music*

In the installment before last I mentioned some of my favorite music from Me'shell Ndegéocello and I forgot to mention one of the most important of her recordings: Peace Beyond Passion. Dig it. Tracks like Leviticus: Faggot are sure to win you over.

Peace love and ATOM jazz

090609

This week I had a chance to go to a third Turkish restaurant in NYC, Ali Baba. There's another one, Dardanel, specializing in fish, right around the corner from me. And yet another, Taksim, is not far away. If I said they all have the same food, that would make it sound bland--this food is anything but! They all have the same dishes, the same high caliber of cuisine, and the same freshness factor. Every one is worthy of a splurge--or even brunch when you can get it; Dardanel has brunch on Sundays and I might just have to pop in tomorrow.

*Movies*

This week my mother and I went to see Julie and Julia. Though it presses some simple buttons, it's complex enough to redeem itself. The most interesting part of it was the part about Julia Child's actual life, shot in a period-piece style. Meryl Streep's performance, as is to be expected, is simply staggering in its authenticity, evocativeness, and sheer acting bravado; she does not ever call attention to the fact that she's playing a role, and doing a phenomenal job at it; by the end you feel as if you've just been watching the real Julia Child for a couple of hours. And you love her, and her husband. The other part of the story, about a blogger who takes Julia Child's famous cookbook to be her model and task, is only serviceable, especially compared to Streep. I highly recommend this movie just to witness another timeless classic from the muse of Meryl Streep.

*Poem*

Peace for Cal

Off into that place

from which we never return

she's surely gone by now.

She might have been

Vietnamese or

Laotian or

even Korean;

I'm sure none of us

in the apartment complex

knew or even ever

thought to ask.

But she was our saviour.

Every single person

in that complex.

For when it comes to

infants, no American

really has a clue.

It's a cultural,

and historical,

and familial failing

(like not knowing what

constitutes a good diet).

Any young parent

within miles who had

a screaming infant

that they couldn't handle

brought the child

to Cal's apartment

and within minutes came

silence and sleep.

You might think she

fed the babies laudanum

or some other narcotic

but I spent many hours

at Cal's when I was young,

watching, learning, amazed,

and she never used any medicine.

Her first trick was

to lay the baby on its back,

speak softly,

and place her hand firmly

on the baby's belly.

Sleep usually came

within a minute.

For the tougher cases

she made a gruel

of various ground grains

(oats, rice, barley, etc.),

fed it to the little one,

and away it went to

never never land.

What gets me most

when I think back on Cal

is that none of us ever

really thought much about her,

what her husband was like,

how she grew up,

where she learned her tricks,

and Cal did not care one bit.

All she wanted was to help

babies sleep, and so,

in many cases,

to save marriages,

and sanity,

and restfulness.

To this day I am convinced

she was an angel

who came from nowhere,

gave what she could,

and disappeared into the ether.

In my heart of hearts

I want to believe dear Cal

has finally found her own peace.

*Taiwan*

Three areas of my life collided toward the end of my stay in Taiwan and I was compelled to leave to save my life: I had become a very successful private English tutor; as such, all the money I was paid went directly to my pocket, and I could charge considerably less than language schools (bushibans) did because I didn't have to split the money several ways. Great for me, bad for my long-term health. All of my white friends (all 10) taught at bushibans and so earned a fraction what I did. None of them ever asked so I didn't tell. One day after I'd been doing my thing in Hualien for nine months or more, one of my ex-pat friends came over with an urgent message: he had just spoken with his boss (mafia connected as most business owners were) and he had been sent to give me an ultimatum: raise my prices to match the bushibans...or else! I wasn't about to raise my prices (I'm stubborn like that), but I wasn't much interested in finding out what the 'or else' part would mean. It became clear I would soon have to skedaddle.

Around the same time, the worst typhoon in 50 years hit Hualien. I had just moved into a two-story apartment right on the river--bad place to be in a typhoon. Novice that I was with such storms, I stayed right there; I hadn't unpacked yet and all of my belongings (my doomed belongings) were strewn about on the concrete floor. I watched as the storm grew stronger and the river began to rise. Then cockroaches, big river bugs, began storming into my abode through every crevice they could find. Numbskull that I was insistent on being, I actually sat there with a hammer smashing roaches for several minutes before it dawned on me: if the cockroaches were escaping to higher ground, I probably should too. I tried calling a friend who lived on top of a hill but the phone lines were already dead. I made a run for it. I pulled my motorcycle inside, locked up, and fled on my Vespa. I was driving through a torrential downpour, dodging flying tree branches, barely able to see where I was going.

When I got to the top of the hill, I found that several other friends had already sought shelter at this same house whose proprietor, my friend, was a kindly, mild mannered, soft spoken New Zealander (something of a rarity?). Seeking refuge as I was also were a pair who were relatively new on the scene there in Hualien, a married couple, the man a New Zealander (the more hot-tempered variety) and the woman Australian by way of Holland; I'd only known them a couple of weeks and they seemed like decent enough folks. I suppose they were in the end, but I can't say the way they ended up with me was exactly fair, or just, or reasonable. Their combined impact on my life was to change it drastically (they and the several other threads I'm discussing here). I was stagnating a bit in my comfortable life as a private English tutor in that small town; the truth is I was greatly in need of a change.

The next day was unbearably hot and we came to terms with the wreckage: the whole center of town was flooded and wouldn't be cleared for days if not weeks; the damage was incalculable. I went to look at my apartment and what I saw was life changing: the river had risen to above the first floor--in other words every single one of my possessions on this earth had been soaked and forever sullied by river mud; an entire wardrobe gone, my most dear photos turned into a pile of undecipherable sludge, all of the little trinkets I'd collected in Taiwan ruined. My motorcycle, fully flooded like everything else, was the only thing I was able to salvage The apartment was a stinking mess so there was no way I could sleep there--I hadn't even gotten to enjoy it for a single day! Back to the top of the hill I returned.

[To be continued....]

*Veselka*

This week I went to an old favorite restaurant of mine, Veselka, a Polish restaurant that's been around forever, and had bigos, which they served only in winter in the old days. My mother sent me the following description of the dish:

"A famous Polish dish, bigos, is very controversial. No two Poles agree about bigos, which is known as 'hunter's stew', and has wound up in some cookbooks as a leftover dish. Bigos was originally cooked during the great hunts on the estates of the aristocrats, kings and princes. It was always prepared in large quantities, and what wasn't eaten was reheated after the next day's hunt and added to on subsequent days. Recipes for bigos have a Rabelaisian quality: 'Take beef, bison, venison, hare, pork, kielbasa, duck, lamb, chicken [or other game from the hunt]' and that is just the beginning. Bigos is Poland's contribution to the galaxy of celebrated stews. Cabbage or sauerkraut (or both), onions, mushrooms, spices, even prunes or apples, may go into it. Strict traditionalists claim that freshly made bigos is not fit to be eaten but should be left standing and reheated over several days before it acquires the mysterious flavor that freshly made bigos does not have. Could be. It's not a culinary but a metaphysical problem, and there is no point arguing with a Pole anyway."

--Joseph Wechsberg

I can attest to the fact that in general we of Polish descent are stubborn as all hell. There is definitely no point arguing.

*Quotations*

There even are places where English completely disappears.

In America, they haven't used it for years!

--Lerner/Loewe (My Fair Lady)

[Amazing Grace] took the most out of me and was the hardest to write, because it was the hardest to live through these experiences. I felt it would initially be seen as discouraging but, ultimately, sensitive readers would see the resilient and transcendent qualities, that it would be seen as a book about the elegant theology of children.

--Jonathan Kozol

The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion.

--Molly Ivins

That's free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing--the truly democratic thing about it--is that you don't even have to be a player to lose.

--Barbara Ehrenreich

The survival of democracy depends on the renunciation of violence and the development of nonviolent means to combat evil and advance the good.

--AJ Muste

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.

--Alexis de Tocqueville

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

--Oscar Wilde

The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.

--Churchill

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.

--Thomas Jefferson

The spirit of democracy is not a mechanical thing to be adjusted by abolition of forms. It requires change of heart.

--Gandhi

*Music*

A record any jazz fan must own is New York Stories Vol 1, featuring the late Danny Gatton on guitar, Bobby Watson alto, Roy Hargrove trumpet, Joshua Redman tenor, Frank Amsallem piano, Charles Fambrough bass, and Yuron Israel drums. This is the last recorded work of Gatton, one of those phenomenal guitarists who straddled genres and inspired other guitarists to expect more of themselves. (He drove off the side of the road a few months after this album was recorded, in one of his vintage American racers). All the players on New York Stories clearly saw a master in Gatton and pretty much let him do as he saw fit. The first track, called Dolly's Ditty, was definitely called by Gatton (rooted as he was in country) and it sets the tone for the rest of the record: an aging but stratospheric guitar player leads a group of jazz's young lions through an epic set of highly memorable originals (from each member of the band). This recording is a rarity. If you like really good modern jazz and/or incredible guitar playing, you simply must dig this record.

_____

A few years ago I came across a song called The Best Deceptions by Dashboard Confessional. If I had know this song when my ex-wife deserted me, I would have made her listen to it. A few days before she walked out, I was pouring adulation over her, as I had done every day for almost five years; I was kneeling on the floor; I went to give her a kiss and grabbed the back of her head gently, the way lovers do, and she smacked my hand away. I was shocked. I stood up, stepped back, and thought about it. I suddenly realized the truth and I said it out loud, "You haven't let me give you a real kiss in at least six months." She didn't say a word and was gone within a few days. This song was written for Janna Tuck:

"Don't you see, don't you see?

The charade is over.

And all the Best Deceptions

and the Clever Cover Story awards

go to you.

So kiss me hard

'cause this will be

the last time that I let you.

You will be back some day

and this awkward kiss

that tells of other people's lips

will be of service

to giving you away,

TO GIVING YOU AWAY!"

--Dashboard Confessional

[The only difference I see is that Janna never came back.]

Peace love and ATOM jazz