no picture monday

You are spared a gratuitous dog picture today, Gentle Reader, because my attempt at emailing an action shot of The Dog to myself failed.  Technology and I are not on good terms of late it seems.  While I am somewhat proud of myself for (at last) figuring out the reason my camera and laptop no longer speak to each other? (Which is that because I FINALLY upgraded my antediluvian OS , now the photo application is Lost In Space….) at the same time the complexity of constantly having to “upgrade” something that’s working fine as it is reminds me of just how close to going over the edge we are as a species, in general.

Writing yet another letter about not drilling in the Arctic.  Yet another letter about immigration reform.  YET ANOTHER LETTER ABOUT SAVING BEES.  This all takes time, and when you add to that the irresistible impulse I have every time I even see the word Trump to obliterate my consciousness, it adds up to quite the endeavor to maintain equanimity.  And?  All these things are generated by this same impulse to “upgrade”, make more and ever more stuff for God knows Who to consume.  All the while repulsing individuals, generically labelled “refugees”, who are simply trying to stay alive and escape from the miasma created to some large extent by this very Upgrade Machine called world politics and economy.  We all want, at bottom, the same things.  To be happy, as Buddha said, but also to simply be acknowledged and treated like human beings.  Not consumers and receptacles.

Which equanimity endeavor failed rather miserably yesterday.  The Arrival of The Dog has made me think about things differently, as such things tend to do.  As in.  When I “think” about The Dog, I think, oh jesus god it is too much work, too much expense, too much blahblahblah.  When I “experience” The Dog, it’s more along the lines of YIPPEE! Life is good, all kinds of things happen and we really don’t have to take any of it personally.  Just simply do the best we can at each step.  Remembering that love is the glue of the universe.  We are here to BE, not to DO or let our egoic thinking run the show.  HOWEVER.  As I was driving home yesterday a truck which did not have the right of way unexpectedly attempted to take it while I was, innocently minding my own business, getting on the freeway.  No collision, thank heavens, but massive horn honking and then?  The people in the truck flipped me off, big time.  Before I knew it, I’d returned the gesture.

I really was not happy with myself about that and was surprised to find a bit of nervousness as to whether or not the individuals in the truck were a) drugged, b) heavily armed white supremacists,  c) neighbors I haven’t met yet, or worst of all d) all of the above.  As it happened they whizzed on past me, probably not thinking much about any of it.  But I thought about it, because I do try to…well, BEHAVE.  And if someone like me goes tilt at the drop of a hat, what can we expect from anyone else?  Like, say, Trump.  Or FIFA officials.  Or any member of Congress or government in general.

I found it oddly upsetting, the whole incident, and couldn’t really put my finger on why.  Was it because someone, essentially, harshed my buzz? (ahem) Was it just the intrusion of three dimensional PTSD in the form of a bit of pickup driven thoughtless nastiness? One might also ask why I thought it was “bad” to be irritated with those fine folks who narrowly missed splattering me all over I-5.  So, net net?  I still haven’t figured a damn thing out.  Oh, well.

On the other hand, the Dog got his first bath yesterday, went for his first shots this week, and continues taking walks on a leash.  All of which are going swimmingly.  He is also, at least, peeing AT the door now when he doesn’t get through to us in time to go outside.  I’ve never seen anything grow as fast as this dog, who the Vet said will probably end up weighing EIGHTY TO NINETY POUNDS.  Talk about something landing in your lap.

The other sign of potential progress is tortillas.  Finally, I got back on the bike and made both corn and flour tortillas.  The problem with flour tortillas, of course, is that you have to use lard and also a bit of vegetable shortening.  Both of which are now close to weapons grade substances, being multiply-hydrogenated and chemicalized.   The quest for organic lard starts now.  But the tortillas were great and, as the Partner noted when he drifted by my pressing and rolling efforts, I had in fact “done this before”.  I was also seized by an unfightable urge to make prickly pear creme brulee.  Since we had some melons from the garden that were over ripe, I pureed them as well and plan a rainbow assortment of chair vert, cantaloupe, and aforementioned prickly pear custards set atop caramel.  (No propane in blow torch for top caramel at present, is why.) There is a cactus across the road from the yurt from whence came the pricklies.  At this point, between The Dog and The Cactus, I look as though I’ve gone several, losing, rounds with the inhabitants of a pincushion.  I plan to have pictures of BOTH The Dog and the panoply of cremes in the not too distant future.  Barring, of course, any more exploded equanimity or contretemps to the contrary.

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bees, temporarily

And yes, it is VERY exciting indeed, because now we’ve got cucumbers and squashes and several melons happening.  Even a few tomatoes!  Some unknown fruit pits have sprouted in the compost- I think they’re peaches but only time will tell- and lots of last year’s Anana Amerique melon seeds sprouted in there too.  Despite the often high levels of demoralization we experience around here, this stuff never fails to thrill me and put a smile on my face.

There was, also, an epic dessert disaster.  A friend who is gluten intolerant is coming to visit and I naturally thought, oh for sure there must be something sweet to eat.  I made an experimental fig gallette with coconut flour and cashew flour instead of wheat flour, using both coconut oil and butter.  Somehow, something got lost in the translation and although the taste was fine the appearance was gnarly.  In a way it was calming to realize that, actually, I don’t have to do that, don’t have to stretch into a rhomboid shape to have things be workable.  We’ll have fruit.  Simple and nothing wrong with it.  Especially since it’ll be from the garden.

This may be the tiny nugget finally and at long last retrieved from recent challenging brain excavations: In fact, things are fine.  No high falsetto handsprings need be done in an attempt to prove worthiness, or anything else for that matter.  We are enough as we are.

The ongoing question of what to do about the state of the world remains, of course.  But we had an interesting discussion about the shape and consistency of evil this morning, and the Partner’s opinion is that we are getting closer, through all current space exploration and photography, to seeing the origins not just of our world but of good and evil as well.  Imagine if evil and its attendant beleaguering effects on us all was essentially an old blast of cosmic bad breath?  We might all see that finally and our minds might change and then….well.  Then we’d start to enjoy ourselves once again, and things might be a whole lot clearer.  It’s kind of like we might realize that we don’t have to run around trying to impress anyone with anything- we just have to BE.  Or, bee, actually.  I’m going to stick with that for now.

adrift

Once again I probably did something dumb like think, oh, OK!  I can handle this!  Hope truly does spring eternal, Gentle Reader.

Yet and still.  The Partner came up with a couple of good quotidian solutions, I thought.  One, to alleviate the cigarette smoke pollution in China? Vaping.  Seems like a no brainer, really.  And why not grow medicinal marijuana for Europe in Greece?  That could solve a lot of problems.  This is all over and above our ongoing discussions about what the holy ghost really is, how long did it take to clean up Guayaquil post-Pope, how weird is it that Mr. FIFA Blatter cited “travel dangers” as his reason for not coming to the Women’s World Cup ceremonies, how much longer we can really stand all this, and realizing the human body is really not meant for temperatures over 105 degrees F on a daily basis.

It turns out that bees aren’t made for it, either.  It has been so hot here that there have been NO bees at all.  We had tons in “spring”, but after the end of April it just kept getting hotter and hotter and even the bee keepers have been out of sight.  You can imagine how overjoyed we were, then, yesterday, when it was only in the low 80’s here and we heard…..buzzing.  They’re still out there today and I am allowing myself some cautious optimism about the tomatoes and squashes, along with fervently hoping it stays under 100 for at least a few more days.  My eyeballs feel like something that just came off a hibachi, for one thing, and if we don’t get any pollinating done we aren’t going to have any tomatoes.  Which for me is unthinkable disaster.

Otherwise we are still pondering just how it is that things seem so challenging even when we know it’s all kind of an illusion.  A very difficult illusion, and one that cannot be understood on its own terms- just try figuring out the exact dimensions of the Greek debt debacle, for example.  I also saw that the Canadian PM remarked the other day that using too much solar energy would, in essence, extinguish the sun.  If these things are jokes? They’re not funny.  If they’re serious? What are we waiting for? It is time to get people in positions of importance who can actually think their way out of a paper bag.  The seeming impossibility of that occurring is not something, I tell myself, we should let disturb us.   So.  The ongoing practice is picking oneself up after every fall, and continuing to visualize whirled peas.

First, We Kill All the Bees

I’ve long suspected that the carving up of the world economy post world war two laid the foundation for a huge amount of the effery we experience today.  Think, for example, about all the chemical and pharmaceutical  companies who to a greater or lesser extent played both ends against the middle during that conflict- and came out winners.  Nice people, as Harry Shearer says, doing nice things.

Bayer, for example.  Bayer who makes aspirin, and Bayer who makes pesticides.  Bayer, whose stout denial that their products were KILLING bees has proven to be on the same level of truth as Dupont’s protestations about dioxin and everything else they make.   Well, actually: the stuff Bayer makes doesn’t actually kill the bees, Gentle Reader.  No, it just CONFUSES them so they can’t find their way home.  Totally different thing, altogether…. isn’t it?

So, I’ve been wondering.  Just, exactly, how stupid do you have to be to do  this?  Kill something that is absolutely essential to  survival, know you are doing it, lie about doing it, and just carry on in umbrage when anyone points out you’re essentially destroying life on the planet.  I mean, seriously.  Bees are not optional, negotiable, or insignificant.  And we now get another round of petition signing and congress-person contacting and all the rest of it.  Just to try and stop these miserable lying sacks of excuses for human beings from continuing to, essentially, kill all of us.   With all this stuff that’s perfectly safe and poses no danger to health.  Which, may be true actually.  After all the pesticides have been sprayed and the nuclear waste from Fukushima et al has floated around the entire globe, there won’t BE any health to worry about.  Or food, of course, because- no bees.  Then these masterminds can go in pursuit of some other planet to screw up.  What a plan!

None for me, thanks.  Now, attitude adjustment time…..back, at least for today, to learning how to live in an ever expanding field of opposites, all of which are composed of myriad opposites within opposites themselves, vast fields of energy and life in motion.  Learning, essentially, how to look past duality and move with the whole thing, wherever it’s going.  There will, as usual, be cooking involved since that’s the only thing that seems to work for me these days in terms of finding some kind of center- really, why can’t that center be caramel?  Or chocolate ganache.  Or tacos?  Seriously.   I can get behind THAT.