Oil Changes: the anti food blog food blog

Sprouts continued

2012-01-29T12:25:00.000-06:00

I checked on my sprouts this morning, and I found that some piddly, but nevertheless annoying, fuzzy white mold had started growing on a couple of my sprouts. A couple root hairs looked like they had gone home for Christmas and come back to town with white ermine boas. I'm not the sort of person who loses sleep over mold—well, actually, I have lost sleep over mold. I used to have really bad asthma, and mold made me wheeze like none other. Riveting.

I think it's about time that I stop considering myself a good bowler. I went bowling last night and I bowled atrociously. Rather than publish one article in a food magazine, my New Year's resolution should have been, stop lying to yourself about your bowling prowess. I threw one strike and four gutter balls. I'm a terrible bowler.

There isn't too much more to say this morning. Still, though, I should leave you with something: You know those gambling machines that you pump quarters into in hopes that your quarter will be the one that causes all those other quarters to teeter over the edge of the shelf and dump into the metal cup below where you can scoop them up by the handful? One time I robbed one of those machines.

sprouts, le Bonheur

2012-01-27T14:09:00.002-06:00

Just got back from Greenfield, Massachusetts, home to Wilson's department store, which hasn't changed one lick in thirty years, and Mohawk Office Equipment Co., where you can find Dick, who is very likely the only remaining master typewriter repairman in all of New England. Dick tells good stories about his honesty and his 48 years repairing "machines." I picked Emily up at Potpourri Plaza at noon in Northampton, and we drove through the unusually warm January rain while eating a Domino's pizza in the car. If you are into typewriters and cluttered old shops, you should take a ride to Greenfield. If you do go, be sure you get there early because Dick is semi-retired, and he goes home at one. Here are some sprouts I started the other day.

Fuck. Sorry. Those are not the sprouts. That is a screen shot I took the other night while watching Agnes Varda's film about adultery, le Bonheur. A happily married man falls in love with a woman who works at a telegraph office, and then he proceeds to have a blissful and consequence-free affair with her until the very last moment of the film—spoiler alert—when the wife's empurpled body is dragged out of an otherwise bucolic little stream. All of this, naturally, has nothing to do with sprouts. Sprouts neither have affairs nor enjoy cinema, though they do enjoy sitting in the dark, if sprouts can be said to enjoy anything.

You must pamper sprouts, but the pampering is worth it. Twice a day you must carefully rinse them in room temperature water, taking care not to snap their delicate radicles in the process. A snapped radicle can be an entryway for rot, though nothing is really so dire in the world of home sprouting. The truth is the other way around: it's really nice to have such tender and springy little creatures—and in such abundance—growing inside of a jar within your home in January, especially when the world outside of your home is brown and dingy. These particular sprouts are only about two days old. They sleep in the dark, in a mock underground setting, for about seven days, at which time, if they are fully leafed out, the sprouter exposes them to an afternoon of sun so that their tiny, embryonic leaves can transform the sun's photons into chlorophyll. Here is the cheating husband, watching his friend—not his mistress—nurse her youngest child while her other children watch greedily. Note the very nice Dahlias and the bottle of lemon soda in the foreground.

It was completely by accident that sprouts and le Bonheur found their way into one unified post, though it was not by accident that I took fifty billion screenshots of le Bonheur. I take screenshots while I watch compelling cinema. In any case, one could argue that an infant is A LOT LIKE A SPROUT. One could argue that, but I wouldn't want to hang out with that guy at a party. At parties, it's much more interesting to gossip. You know...who's fucking whom; who's been acting CRAZY lately; who's weird and getting weirder; and the ultra popular, who was seen drinking alone at the dark end of an even darker street. Now that's entertainment. Talk about sprouts and French movies, and someone is bound to hurl a basketball at you. Here's a close-up of the little sprout suckers.

I suppose there isn't too much more to say. Check back in another couple days to see the progress. The people in le Bonheur will still be repeating their perpetual ritual, but the sprouts will have developed.

mild weather, melt, compost, Stevens

2012-01-25T09:00:00.000-06:00

I don't know what the winter has been like around you, but presumably it's been a lot like it's been around me: mild. Then again, some of you are in Europe, and some of you are even further afield AND in the opposite hemisphere, so I suppose it doesn't make too much sense to conjecture about your weather. Weather. Men love to talk about the weather. I get letters from Stan (and send him letters too), and nary a one of his closes without a mention of the weather in New Mexico. The same is true for my letters. Another great day here in Massachusetts. Very blue skies. And so forth. We had some snow recently—"finally" is probably the more appropriate word—but the temperatures rose and the sun came out, and now most of that snow is gone. My backyard was a swamp yesterday because the low-lying ground was frozen and the water from the melted snow had no place to run. A drive through some farmland in nearby Hadley proved more of the same: pools of melted snow and dingy green fields. And the gulls have come inland early this year—or do they just live here year round? Whatever the case, you can find them in the fields in the early spring, especially after a tractor has come through and tilled.

I woke up this morning and started crying over lost love. What? Come again? But it's true. Eight-thirty A.M. found me quietly sobbing, just a couple repressed sobs and then I sucked in a deep breath and sat down to write about compost. I went out into the backyard yesterday to check on my compost piles—I have three different piles—and I was pleased to see that they'd shrunk, though "shrunk" is the wrong word. Time and rain and gravity and snow have compacted them, have aided the process of their decomposition. Compost matures as it shrinks. It was late January, and as I stood there inspecting my piles, I was thinking about the future, how we really don't know what our futures hold, but even so we can be sure that our compost will ripen. When nothing appears to be happening, something is still happening. I went around front to have a look at my garden. In August it looked like this...

but now it looks like this...

But "this" isn't such a terrible thing. There is some beauty and hope in this. And I do not mean that the weather has been mild and beautiful—that is actually somewhat disturbing—I mean that beauty is always happening, even when the opposite appears to be true. All winter I have been thinking about this Wallace Stevens poem, The Snow Man.

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

And that seems like a suitable place to end this post about the winter.

the pizza industry and paper waste

2012-01-10T20:34:00.000-06:00

When a good day ends with a bonus slice of pizza that would have otherwise been pitched into the trash along with crushed foam products, plastic forks, and disposable paper napkins, you enter into a kind of bonus land of consciousness, and the world stops, and pizza assumes total sovereignty. Pizza by the slice is a good idea, but its practice comes with an unfortunate consequence. The business produces a ton of waste paper. How many single slices of pizza make short, five minute journeys inside of little, custom slice boxes each day? I hate to estimate that quantity—it's a big number—but this is not an exhortation to slice shops everywhere. I am complicit in the paper waste, too. I have been house sitting in Amherst, and eating two pizza slice meals each day. Tonight, when the cashier offered me a second free slice (a generous business practice), I dropped my plans to take out my slice on a paper plate and opted for the box. One paper plate is a little small for two big slices. But still...

I don't know a ton about recycling, but I do know that the recycling program in my city has started accepting modestly greasy old pizza boxes. This is a good change. It used to be that you got one pepperoni grease stain on your pizza box and that was it for that box. It was headed to the trash can for sure. Now at least the cautious consumer can mind how greasy the box is and attempt a recycle. I am serious about this. I hate the fact that something as beautiful as pizza is tied up with something as problematic as unnecessary waste. If I was an enterprising businessman, I would come up with the solution and make bank. I hope someone is hard at work on it. There is a ton of fairly honest money to be made from solving the excess paper waste problem of the pizza industry. This problem has been on my mind for eight years. How many paper boxes have I chucked in the interim?

This pet rant of mine started at Penny's Pizza on the corner of Ashland and Jackson in Chicago, when, one night I showed up to work and found a several cases of low-quality promotional pizza boxes, shrink-wrapped in plastic, waiting for me on the prep table in the back room. I think they were Comcast pizza boxes. Someone at Comcast had the bold and bright idea that Comcast could get more customers by paying some pizza box printer to spangle the Comcast logo upon God knows how many cases of flimsy pizza boxes and then ship the "free boxes" at random to pizza shops everywhere; the assumption being that the pizza shop owners would jump for joy upon receiving free paper products and would happily send out their pizzas in boxes with the Comcast logo on them instead of in boxes with their own logo. But at Penny's, we had our own boxes—they said "Penny's" on them—and so all of the Comcast boxes went into the trash—or the recycling—it makes little difference. This, unfortunately, is how business often works. This is the dominant paradigm. Waste is factored into profit. Comcast paid someone to carry out that misguided pizza box scheme, and the beauty of pizza had been besmirched. But there is hope. How could pizza not inspire hope?

I don't put my faith in product-based solutions—systemic solutions are the solutions we most need—otherwise it's Band-Aids on broken bones—but still I think that a product-based solution to the pizza industry paper waste problem is a solution worth pursuing. If you know any enterprising young businessmen or businesswomen, please send them in my direction. I will only charge them a modest consultancy fee of ten million dollars or enough money to pay off my student loans and put a down payment on a small farm somewhere, whichever sum is less.

Linguine with Garlic Oil, Corporate Greed

2012-01-06T19:08:00.004-06:00

If you don't want garlic breath to blow at you through the internet, you should close this tab now and move onto another, safer website. Don't choose porn. Overexposure to internet porn will turn your genitals into apricots, old popcorn, and wet celebrity rags. You would be better off choosing something with cats. Overexposure to internet cats has only been shown to make test subjects unbearably adorable and, in some rare cases, socially inept. On the other hand, if you are stimulated by self-absorbed a-holes who take pictures of themselves stuffing their faces with linguine in garlic oil, perhaps you have found the right place after all. If you detect that my attitude is jacked up right now, don't run and pin a medal onto yourself for being an astute reader. This is a giant front. What I write on here bears only the skimpiest relationship to reality. Did I stuff my face with the most perfect pasta dinner on the planet? Oh, yeah, I did. And did it look just like this? You bet it did. But remember—I was hamming it up for the camera. Non-fiction is a fiction too.

I teach freshman composition on the internet, and I also attract cops to my house once in a blue moon. To make matters worse, I publicly write about it. A concerned reader wrote me the other day and mentioned that I might exercise some professional decorum, re: writing about cops on my porch. I appreciated her concern and replied like so: I don't get paid enough to bother about censoring myself on this blog. I am not complaining about my pay, folks. I am merely suggesting that one would need to pay me a hell of a lot of money before I would compromise my public self. Furthermore, I am not even slightly interested in working for any employer who would turn down—or fire—a potential candidate for blogging with too much spunk. It requires a small-minded person to say, Oh, I don't know about him. He takes pictures of himself slurping spaghetti and publishes them on the internet! Sounds far-fetched but there are people out there who think like that. One time a co-worker scolded me because I tied a satchel of pizza to my belt—i.e. my lunch—while moving the company from one office to another. He said it was not professional to have pizza hanging from my belt. I said, Oh, come on, Russ! But I digress. Somewhat.

I have been worried about money and jobs lately. Not so worried that I can't still enjoy myself on a Friday night—it's Friday night right now—but worried enough to stop and think about how I present myself publicly. Do I like like a lunatic? A mad person? Is my hairstyle unbecoming? Would you want me to baby sit your kid? Would you want this mug to do your books? I would probably cook your books and pocket the difference. I condone crime, and I think war is commendable. I love bloodshed. I am dishonest and I push old people onto the street. If I had my way, I would completely re-design the entire world and force feed linguine with garlic oil to everyone. If someone uttered a peep through a mouthful of food about the garlic being too strong, I would say, Shut up—there were starving people in Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Europe, Australia, and the sub-continent of India before I took power. Then, if they continued to moan about the pasta, I would lash them with a wet noodle the size of Tennessee. I would do this because I am a ruthless person with no respect for anyone. If you hired me to work in your office, I would probably vandalize the bathroom the first time I needed to take a sh**. Don't I look like I would?

OK, rant done. Let's talk some pasta! I love linguine with garlic oil. Love it more than casual sexual encounters and recreational drug use in dark alleys, both of which I do at every opportunity, and often times while main-lining cheap rum. What this amounts to is a total and passionate love for linguine with garlic oil. If I could have children by it, I would. I would bang it for a fortnight straight and bury it deep. If linguine had a condo with wall-to-wall carpet, I would vacuum its carpet with my nose. Linguine with garlic oil is the world's greatest noodle dish. It cooks up in a snap. You want to cook it up in a snap? Did you just say you wanted to cook it up in a snap? You're in luck! You can read how below the photograph of the degenerate, hate-ball.

LINGUINE WITH GARLIC OIL

1) Peel about four, five, six cloves of garlic and give them a good whack with your knife; then dump them into some olive oil (about 3/4ths cup per pound of pasta) and heat the oil on a low flame for ten or twenty minutes. DO NOT LET THE GARLIC BURN. IF IT STARTS BURNING, TAKE IT OFF THE HEAT. BURNED GARLIC IS BITTER.

2) Cook your pasta al dente. Don't f**k that up. And put A LOT OF SALT INTO THE WATER. Your pasta will not be overly salty.

3) Drain your pasta and give it a quick rinse in cold water, then return it to the pot. Rinsing it gets some of the starch off.

4) Finally, toss the pasta with all of the oil. If it seems like a ton of oil, it is. That's how it should be. If you want to sprinkle some extra salt onto your noodles as you go, do it, but be careful.

5) Finally finally, hit your pasta with some Parmesan cheese and some parsley. I also like to hit it with some "cock sauce"—a.k.a "rooster sauce"—a.k.a. Sriracha. I do this because FUCK CORPORATE GREED.

New Year

2012-01-01T12:55:00.000-06:00

It's a new year. Probably fewer than two hours into it I scolded the police officer who thought he had some business on my front porch. I'd ducked into my bedroom to take a quiet moment when a knock came on my door, Hey Jono, there are some cops on your porch. Cops? On my porch? I immediately thought of my brother and my dad. What would they do? I went out in my suit and gold watch and asked the officer what business he had being on my front porch. My friend was standing beside me in a dapper, all-white suit. The cop pointed down at the spent fireworks he had gathered from the street and piled on my front steps. He told me they were illegal. He told me he would search my house for the rest of them. I told him he had no business on my porch or searching my house. A friend peeked out the window. He said it looked like we had some underage drinking going on. Everyone here is thirty, I said. Please stop yelling at me, I said. He was disrespecting me on my own front porch, only two hours into the new year, and I did not appreciate being yelled at. Then four more squad cars rolled up with their lights flashing. The cop I was dealing with was much younger than me. He had something to prove. Did he think he would get somewhere in the force by busting someone for fireworks? I said, Just take them and leave. There was a fair amount of unspent fireworks in a bag. He wanted to know who had brought them. No way, buster. Not at my tamale party. Oh right, the tamales. We ate sixty-five of the seventy total tamales. The red chili sauce came out beautifully, too. The house was really rocking when the police showed up. Mayhem on the dance floor. The old floorboards took the beating beautifully. I love this house. It can get through anything unscathed.

Grapefruit vs. Pomegranate, Generous Fruits, Grapefruit Juice

2011-12-29T09:28:00.000-06:00

I was a party recently, hanging out with some old friends from home, when the pomegranate came up. We were munching on tacos, passing around the circa 1980s taco sauce, when I said something like, "The avocado is a totally asinine food." Statements like that often come out of my mouth. Last year I spent the better part of six months insisting that the avocado did not warrant its popularity, that it was flavorless and that the droves who adored it adored it for no other reason than its mysterious color, much as some birds are transfixed by shiny objects. "What do you think about the pomegranate?" my friend asked. "The pomegranate is a completely ridiculous food," another friend said. "It basically just shoots red wine everywhere." If I hadn't been clutching my taco, I would have applauded him. I don't mean to turn the pomegranate into my new whipping boy, but I do think that there are other fruits out there who reward your effort to get at them a lot more handsomely than the pomegranate does. The pomegranate is basically just a cluster of stones with a tiny sack of fruit around each stone. The grapefruit is a much more generous fruit.

I like this idea of a generous fruit—what's a generous fruit and what's not? Some of the things we eat avail themselves to us so reluctantly. Have you ever purchased a whole artichoke? The artichoke is basically a giant thistle, and the ratio of edible food to the amount of labor required to get that food is not one you would take to Vegas if you didn't want to loose all of your money. But still, we eat them. They are completely stingy with their flesh, but we persist. And perhaps this is why we persist. The over-difficult effort to get the choke makes the choke more delicious. It's like courtship. You fan out all of your most exciting feathers and when the fruit finally yields it yields in gleeful spades. I am terribly mixing metaphors here, but I think the same can be said about the pomegranate, not that it mixes metaphors, but that the glee of its fruit comes in part from our effort to get at that fruit. Its little fruit-encased stones are like rubies beneath the rubble of a demolished airport. What does this say about the grapefruit? That the grapefruit is promiscuous? That it's easy? That the grapefruit gives up its succulent abundance for little more than a squeeze? Perhaps it does, but I love the grapefruit. The grapefruit gives so much so easily.

I don't need to point out how glistening and perfect a grapefruit can be in the morning sun. Instead I want to encourage you to seize the day. Seize the season, I should say, because it's grapefruit season, and it's only during grapefruit season that it makes economic sense to squeeze a bagful of fresh grapefruits in your kitchen. I'm talking about grapefruit juice. The holidays come with their holiday parties, and holiday parties sometimes come with their holiday hangovers, but a hard morning can be softened by a sweet and bitter glass of grapefruit juice. If you don't have a juicer, don't run out and buy one. It's just as easy (and almost as effective) to squeeze them by hand over a pot. Both methods work, but one, I think, is sexier than the other. Get your hands on those grapefruits and give them a good squeeze. Wring them out good and get some of the juice on your hands. Lick the juice off your hands etc. Just as before, at least half the pleasure is the quest for the pleasure. Your glass of grapefruit juice will be more delicious for your labor. Make two glasses, and share one with someone you love.

The House Where I Was Born

2011-12-25T12:03:00.000-06:00

This is the house where I was born. I walked to it this morning to do some navel gazing. There isn't much to say about this house. Its back yard abuts the tracks. I lived there for a year, two years tops. I don't know for sure. I'd have to ask my mother.

The navel gazing didn't go well. I called my sister to confirm the address. I said, hey sis, what's the address of the Ellenwood house? I'd found the right house, but it's not like some mystical force pulled me to it—my parents probably drove me by it more than once during my childhood—and to be honest, I was hoping that the white house with the black shutters, decked out with a tacky nativity scene and red bows on the shrubs would be my house—but we don't choose the house of our birth. Jesus was born in a manger. There was no room at the inn.

I don't have much to do with this house either. My parents moved here—finally—many years after all of their children left the nest. I left the nest 16 years ago, though even sixteen years later there are still some leaves and little bits of string and maybe some torn up bits of plastic grocery bag still clinging to me. How far away must I move to get this piece of used Band Aid off my head? I'm not sure it will ever come off, my mother offered. And it's true: our homes are not bits of debris that are stuck to us. They're bits of debris that are stuck in us. Is that good?, I asked my dad—he'd been going about with a yellow pole that has a suction cup on one end, changing recessed light bulbs in the ceiling—yeah, maybe, he said, as he disappeared down the basement stairs.

This is Sperm and Eggs, a "painting" I made, I don't know—damn!—five years ago when I lived on Logan Blvd in Chicago. It now resides among the masses of other family heirlooms (and junk) my parents inherited and acquired through the years, stuff from both sides of the family that once could expand nicely into our home on Merton Ave. (not pictured) but which now must be crammed into the basement of this house. I was down there last night, poking around, mentally putting my name on things that one day will expand into my home, wherever that will be and with whomever.

19th Century Wrapping Papers, Christmas

2011-12-23T11:40:00.001-06:00

Normally I'm a pretty sh***y gift giver. My family never expects anything from me. Not presents, anyhow—though they do expect me to come home for Christmas and immediately start complaining about how vacuous mid-western suburbia is, about how ostentatious and phony the display of holiday cheer can be in a well-heeled town like ours, about how our government has been completely purchased by huge corporate interests, and so forth. Last year I made my dad some eggs for breakfast. I cracked one egg into the pan and the white spread out everywhere. I almost lost my shit. The albumen had no integrity. It was completely loose. The standard, white supermarket eggs that come packed in Styrofoam are beyond fresh before they even reach the supermarket. I watched the white spread out into a flabby pool and complained bitterly. Get some fresh eggs for Christ's sake! Damn suburbia with its crummy eggs. I'm not sure if I actually said all of that, but I thought it, which was a completely bratty thing to think with my parents standing around, wanting only to spend some quality time with their boy. This year I will behave differently. Someone gifted me with a Christmas ham (and three smoked hocks) earlier this week, and her gift spurred me into a Santa mood. The actual monetary value of the gifts I purchased is quite low—but what notion of value can't antique wrapping papers cut from 19th century Harper's magazines undercut? Normally Christmas depresses me.

There is something about all the $$$ that depresses me. We throw money around during the holidays and many of us whinge about it later when our credit card statements come and force us to buckle down. In the north, the winter months are the most financially demanding months, and this is exactly when the culture dictates additional expenditures in the form of presents, sometimes lavish, sometimes simple. I am sure that some people give gifts purely and joyfully, which is how it ought to be, but I am also sure that that there is an enormous cultural pressure that surrounds gift-giving. There is pressure to choose the right gift, pressure to wrap the gifts on time, pressure on the wallet, pressure to love the gift you receive, and the stress and pressure of holiday travel. When all these pressures collide with what is supposed to be a cheerful and joyous time, we have Christmas, we have the holidays. I think, more than anything, it is how our base financial concerns compromise our spiritual joy that depresses me and makes me rant. Perhaps I am too idealistic. Perhaps this is why I always feel so sad when unwrapping a present. I have no idea; I've never really thought about this at length before. But making these presents, I turned a corner, a gift-giving corner.

Throw all of the gift onto the outside—make the gift the lavish exterior. Put the joy into the unwrapping (and the wrapping), not into the nugget beneath. Circumnavigate the unfortunate financial whirlpool of the holidays by falling back onto the old adage: it's the thought that counts. Make a beautiful thought. Take the focus off the money and put it back onto the love where it belongs. I know that many people can express their love through purchases, which is an alien concept to me, but one that I understand to the extent that I can. I mean, you can't say I love you by shoving a dollar into someone's ear, but you can work hard for that dollar, with someone you love in mind, and then give that someone your hard work; you can give that someone that which you sacrificed in order to get that dollar. It may be that you sacrificed time—years of time—that you would have been happier spending doing something else. For someone who would prefer to be broke than work a job he doesn't love just to pay bills, etc, the idea of sacrificing time and love to worldly demands is a depressing idea. It makes me feel that life is hugely compromised. It makes me feel that I am compromised beyond my will and that my happiness must be balanced against drudgery. Perhaps this is immature and romantic. I could work on my attitude. Let's get back to the presents.

I had a ball making these presents. I put on the Velvet Underground and got into the Christmas spirit. I am much happier making than purchasing. I don't know why the two concepts are opposed in my mind—I daresay even in my heart—but there it is: I didn't know how to (and often could not) express my love through money, through purchasing, and so Christmas would upset me. I couldn't exist comfortably with Christmas. Christmas always rubbed me the wrong way.

Anyhow, I fly home tomorrow, fly home with a jar of raw Massachusetts honey packed into my checked luggage.

The Longest Time

2011-12-18T21:06:00.000-06:00

Well, this isn't food, not exactly—and if you'd been present in the "editing room" while I made this, you'd know how unimportant food can be sometimes—but even if this isn't exactly food, I do still think that it bears some relationship to human appetite. The motivation behind art and cooking are sometimes the same thing: we want something more than the world currently offers us. We look in our pantry and it seems scant. We mill around the house, hungry. There is something we want, but we don't know what, so we take another look in the pantry out of sheer boredom. Would you look at that, we say. There are some provisions in our pantry after all. It was only that we could not see them. If this seems too poetic for you, let me return to the ground. Sometimes you merely feed yourself because you are hungry; but other times you spend some time making yourself a meal that does more than fill your belly. This, I think, is the bridge between art and food. Food and cooking lend themselves so easily to all our human metaphors. How often have you heard someone say, "This pie is made with love"? "This cube steak is made with love." "These mashed potatoes, hon, are made with love." Of course, they're made with fire, spatulas, and rolling pins, but we cannot help ourselves. If eating were only calories, we could all go happily onto liquid diets. But there is something more to eating. I spent the whole afternoon eating marker caps, eating my vinyl record as it turned around and around. Bon appetite.

Eating in Bed, Quadrophenia

2011-12-16T15:10:00.001-06:00

My mom called me the other day to make sure everything was OK. She'd noticed that Oilchanges had been somewhat quiet and, like many a mother would do, she called to make sure that the quietness of my public persona didn't point at some other, more disturbing quiet within me. I assured her that I was quite happy; I simply hadn't made any noteworthy dinners lately. Contented that her boy was ok, she proceeded to caution me against getting too "preachy." "Preachy?" I said. "Too political," she said. Perhaps I have been on some political high horse lately, bad-mouthing the Food Network and bashing the Barefoot Contessa with just a little too much glee. Anyhow, that was last week, and I have since come down with the common cold. I wonder what Rachael Ray would prescribe? What 30 Minute Meal would she have up her sleeve for me? Chicken soup? I heard she doesn't drive, so even if she did whip me up some chicken soup, one of her minions would have to deliver it. I can hear her barking at her errand boy, Hey Bruce! Deliver Oilchanges some soup! Anyway, here is my computer, all comfy in bed. I doubt I shall watch Quadrophenia after all. I'm not particularly interested in The Who, and I need to do some grocery shopping anyhow. It's another, Friday night spaghetti night on old Orchard street. Buena fortuna! means good fish. Treat yourself before you eat yourself alive!

cold, fresh kraut

2011-12-01T18:53:00.001-06:00

I'd been on Planet Spazz for about ten days, carpet bombing in-boxes at night with obnoxious email after obnoxious email, drinking twice the amount of coffee I normally do, and pushing breakfast further and further into the afternoon until this morning, when I returned to Earth and found Earth to be a nice place with blue skies and big problems. I looked into my bank account: twenty dollars. I looked into the sky: not a cloud. I checked my inbox: a letter from Stan. I'd written him (again) and told him that I now believe what some others around me believe: it's time I take this blog pro. But how? Stan replied: "The connection between money and writing seems particularly feeble these days. Keep with the blog." This was at the end of a letter whose main focus was the federal regulations that make it nearly impossible for small time animal farmers to cooperate with small time slaughterhouses to supply Americans with affordable and humanely-raised meat. The demand for locally raised meat is enormous, and the market would take off if the laws that regulate the slaughtering of animals favored smaller players, which is exactly what they don't do. Anyhow, that issue is for the future. For now, here are a couple hot dogs with some homemade sauerkraut. I started the kraut two weeks ago while teaching a kraut workshop in Ashfield, MA.


kraut on dogs, homemade fries

Home fermentation and fermentation workshops are two more ways to challenge the food system status quo, to wrest some power back from whomever clutches it now. This post, however, is not really about fermentation or sauerkraut. It is more of an announcement: You should expect this blog to become increasingly political and increasingly assignment- and travel-oriented. American food culture is not only changing on Food Network. Quite the other way around. The Food Network probably does not advance our food culture in any meaningful way. The Barefoot Contessa might teach us how to make some nice bouillabaisse, making us feel more French and more sophisticated, but she teaches us, if she teaches us at all, while we sit on the couch, still munching on 1980s vintage Ruffles. I don't mean to turn my nose up at Ina, aka the Barefoot Contessa; I only mean to suggest that the significant changes being wrought upon American food culture are not happening on television. They are happening in books like Wild Fermentation and Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal. They are also happening on the ground, on farms and in kitchens everywhere, and Oilchanges wants to go wherever they are happening. Our way forward to better health for our soil and our bodies is my way forward as a writer. For now, here's a close-up of the kraut on dogs.

One part bad buns (made with more ingredients than you can shake a stick at), one part industrially produced hotdog (same), one part Hellman's mayo, one part homemade french fries, and one part home-fermented sauerkraut: this meal speaks volumes about how complicated our food world can be. An "ordinary dinner" is never so ordinary. The kraut points the way forward. The Hellman's is stuck in the mud.

turkey manhattan, leftover manhattan

2011-11-27T10:40:00.001-06:00

Once a year leftover turkey, mashed potatoes and stuffing hog up precious fridge real estate and combined throw an enormous and deep shadow onto every kind of sandwich but one, the turkey Manhattan. What? You don't know what a turkey Manhattan is? You've been living under a panini? It's been raining around your meatball sub? You've had your ear buds in for the last ten years, listening to the Dixie Chicks ad nauseum? Manhattan is only another word for open-faced sandwich, and the turkey Manhattan is the king of Manhattans. No sandwich compares to the heavily buttered slice of cheap white bread crowned by a pile of Thanksgiving leftovers that is the turkey Manhattan. I'm dead serious about this. The king of sandwiches lies flat upon its back. Here's one, glorious turkey Manhattan—yesterday's—the soft, mid-day light gleaming upon a little chunk of celery.

A lot of people would probably try to tell you that this sandwich could be bested by swapping out the cheap white bread for some fancy-pants slice of 59-grain this or that, but I disagree. I am rigidly traditional, and tradition demands the worst bread on the planet. The bread is the foundation of the sandwich. One doesn't go about swapping out foundations if one wants his house to stand. The turkey Manhattan is not a house, but I am firm in my conviction, especially when there is an entire loaf of this junk to be plowed through.

Once a year this bread comes home, the Prodigal Son of White Bread. What a dream! It's unsliced and of the lowest quality. I buy it for pure comedy value. It cracks me up. You could stuff a couch with it. In this rich country, this poor bread barely qualifies as food anymore, and for 360 days each year it hides itself. This, of course, is giving agency to a loaf of foam, but how boring would it be to say that the white bread manufacturers make this seasonal product? This bread pops onto the supermarket shelves, enters a million turkeys that have been raised in a manner that will make your stomach turn, and then it disappears again, gone for another year, just like me. I go home once a year to see my family—for Christmas—and then I leave again. I don't go home for Thanksgiving—I miss home on Thanksgiving. To respect my own nostalgia, I do not mess with the white bread tradition. Cheap white bread gives me comfort. I could use it for a pillow.

Friday Morning, After Thanksgiving

2011-11-25T10:31:00.001-06:00

I lost my glasses at some point last night. Late. And I'm thankful for that. (You have no idea.) And I found them without too much trouble this morning. I'm thankful for that, too. Ray Charles? What is he thankful for? I don't mean to joke about glasses. Ray is on the turntable now, spinning deliciously. The record is called—lemme go find it—The Early Ray Charles. It was beat up when I bought it, probably ten years ago in Indiana. I paid $4.99 for it, which was a lot back then, and I probably balked at the price. I still balk at $4.99. I don't, however, balk at hosting Thanksgiving dinner for my friends. I feel remarkable this morning—and the house is not dirty either. To think I started yesterday on a melancholy foot! The sadness of the holidays, etc—but how can you be sad around a rutabaga?

The thing about rutabagas is that they're always covered in heinous wax. Why? Do they need to keep for so long? This waxing of rutabagas is not cool. If I was a root vegetable, I would not want to be waxed. I would have my own skin, and it would be good skin. It's like shrink-wrapped potatoes! Have you ever seen those? Have you ever understood the motivation to encase a thing in plastic? A living, breathing thing? I'm not making a total joke here. A root vegetable is its own storage organ. It is a food supply. I think the plant knows how to look after its own food source—but we think we know better, and so we wax them, but I've never enjoyed the wax on a rutabaga, and I've always wanted a naked one. Sometimes you don't know how much you love an un-waxed rutabaga until you peel it. I planted three of them last summer, a personal first, so that I could eat them on Thanksgiving. My own rutabagas, sans wax. What a delight. It doesn't matter that I screwed up the rutabaga mash. How could it matter with so much butter around?

Butter, naturally, means friends, but part of the pleasure of hosting is dipping away from the hubbub to do some dishes. Hosting, of course, is not as relaxing as being hosted; but if you stack the rewards side by side, there is no comparison. I love to hear my friends enjoying themselves in the adjoining room while I clear plates and towel dry pots, and if a couple friends remain for late night conversation after I've thrown off my host badge and relaxed, then that, my friends, is glory. That's bonus. This world is full of bonuses if you are open to them. Last night I was feeling so good, I threw a leaf of spinach onto the floor, knowing it would dry up and find its way into the dust pan one day. It was a triumph, one of the world's small but many triumphs, and small triumphs are what I grope for nowadays. Small triumphs and my black t-shirt on bright mornings when I've forgotten to ratchet down the mini blinds. I am up far earlier than I should be, and I feel ecstatic about that.

This blog has really turned into a diary! (Ah, bless.) But I have little else to write about. I could mention that I stand with the 99%, and not half-heartedly either, but you already know that. Instead I'm going to write about these bowls. They're great. I wish they were mine. I am borrowing them indefinitely. They can go in the oven. There is no home oven that is too hot for these pots. They're rugged pots and you don't have to walk on eggshells around them. They can take a tumble and be no worse for wear. I don't look down on people who have cheap, Chinese plates from CB2 or whatever—I have some myself. In fact, I knocked a small saucer off a table last night and it could not withstand the 18 inch drop. Busted into about twenty-five pieces. Not so with a sturdy pot. You can handle a sturdy pot with care and confidence. The world would definitely be a stronger place if there were more strong bowls around. I am totally convicted about that. I'm not hating on our world. I'm only saying. I'm also shying away from showing my friends that were seated around this table last night. Instead, here's me with the pumpkin lantern I made to spruce the place up and to match how I felt about my guests. I am particularly thankful for the friend who took this picture. What a guy. Which isn't to say I'm not thankful for everyone else who came...

How could I be thankless when a turkey like this one got plunked down on my stove? I have never seen such an art of turkey.

This turkey got its bones removed, got reshaped into a coil, stuffed, tied and roasted. The amount of food on the Thanksgiving table is often all the words we need. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and what pudding it can be sometimes. Thanks all. Thanks.

puttin my feet up, upholstery done

2011-11-22T21:36:00.001-06:00

I'm putting my feet up, forgetting all about the chairs. The chairs are behind me now. They're done and recovered. Recovered is the word I've been looking for. I've been obsessed by these chairs and coming up with one-hundred-and-one reasons why. But it's totally obvious now: the chairs are recovered. They're cured. They're not lonely anymore. They're not sick anymore. They've been saved. They would have gone into the dump, but now they are beautiful again. They are about moving on in this life. Moving on is the most beautiful sorrow, but a good chair can see you through it. These chairs are really good. Here's me, sitting in my grandmother's old wooden chair, my feet up on the desk, looking at a picture of a chair I refurbished that I have not found the nerve to sit on yet. I have too many chairs on the mind. A chair is a thing you can think about forever.

But the chairs really did come out nicely. I have mixed feelings about a couple of them—one has already become the official ugly duckling—and the other one I just can't understand. It's the other one that I'm talking about here. My mind boggles over this chair. Do I like this chair? Do I dislike this chair? Do I even want to sit on this chair? It's a hideous chair. Still, though, it charms me. Here it is, the charmer.

This chair is the way this chair is for a good reason. In the end there was not quite enough of the blue paisley fabric to cover the seat. We'd prioritized covering the backs first. (Good advice.) The backs were in terrible shape, had been totally destroyed by a cat, foam bulging out of them like Samuel Taylor Coleridge's opium smoke blowing out of the crater hole in Mt. Vesuvius. These chairs were wasted. But getting back on track, it's the fact that this chair was the last one in the soup line that endears it so much to me. When this chair got to the pot, there were no more beans. So it had rice. With butter. Which was not too shabby, the chair's attitude was good. But here is the chair that the chair judges would choose:

There are actually two of these—in the sense that identical twins are two. It's hard to tell them apart unless you really know them, which you don't. So here's just one of them. I think the reason the judges would choose this model is obvious enough. This model just feels better. It feels more right than the others. But this is all so totally subjective, which is why these chairs beguile me. The fabric and the frame are a better match here. Everywhere I turn with these damn chairs, I find another convenient metaphor for togetherness and separation. I'm throwing all my questions onto these chairs—blah blah blah. Here's the perplexing chair.

I just took a piss, and I thought to myself, "break-up chairs." It was just some words that flashed through my head while I peed. "That'd be a good status update," I said to myself, peeing, but then I sat I back down at my desk and realized that it would not be a good status update, that I wanted to think about it more. "Would people like 'break-up chairs,'" I thought, poking around in the refrigerator. "Would people understand what I mean," I thought, thinking about sweeping the floor again. "People, Jono, are probably watching Youtube." I told myself this and decided against updating my status. But I have gone astray here. My point was that I cannot understand this chair. I look at this chair and I cannot understand it. I don't really like it this chair. This chair seems so alien and so cool to me. There are cheerful spots and question marks on it. And those are nice. "You can look forward to cheerful spots and questions marks." I tell myself this every morning. Most of them anyway.

Reupholstering Project, part 2.5

2011-11-21T18:08:00.001-06:00

It's been a day of staples, pliers, and blood blisters. A day of pocket knives, small mishaps, and irritating little screw-ups. It's also been a day of intentionally setting fabric on fire. Who doesn't love a day of intentional fabric burning?

I spent about an hour this morning, removing all the old seat covers. Then I went about my business, handing out grades to on-line students, sending text messages, and surfing the internet for images of the red-bearded cop who is now infamous for pepper spraying students and who has been photo-shopped into a dozen famous paintings, pepper spraying beauty. Spray your heart out, man. Your family is forever shamed. Anyway, eventually I got back around to finishing these chairs. If you are wondering about the burn holes, here's the scoop: on the bottom of the back of each chair there are three bolt holes into which go three big bolts. To affix the seats to the backs, the bolts must pass through the fabric. Here's a finished chair.

But about that cop who pepper sprayed those college students: I have mixed feelings about him. That photograph will be a mar on his soul forever. About that I feel badly. I mean, I wouldn't want a permanent mar on my soul. And what about his children? Does he have children? I hope he doesn't. No one wants an infamous asshole for a dad. Naturally, I dislike the man; I dislike him without even knowing him. The tide of public unrest swept me up and there you have it: negative feelings toward a man I don't even know. What I do know is that that man did not spend his Sunday reupholstering a chair. Poor confused man. Poor hate-filled man. You can never sit in my chair. You are unwanted here.

Reupholstering Project, part two

2011-11-20T18:21:00.001-06:00

We reached the summit of the mountain around 6 P.M. In the valley below, four completely reupholstered, completely reassembled chairs stood among the wildflowers and caught the dying light. I pulled out my field glasses and trained them on the chairs. They were better than we'd imagined, crisp and alluring, and unlike any chairs on the planet. Lonely Planet had sold us on this lonely valley with its diminishing inhabitants and the towering, bizarre furniture that festoons its central green, but you never know with travel books. Sometimes the destination is not all it's cracked up to be. Sometimes imagination is sweeter than its result. We hiked for days with our gear in tow, but plunking our asses down on those chairs would not be a pleasure we'd know today. We eyed our rations: would the carnitas hold out for another week? And what about our anti-Giardia tablets and our powdered Gatorade? Would they hold out? They will hold out. It must be that way.

But enough of the hiker metaphor! This is one of the "bags" as we called them. Hannah sewed four bags today and batted four foam slips. Last week, when I was selecting the fabrics with Ehu, I told her that it would be a shame to spend the money on the fabrics if the workmanship was not up to par. Ehu grinned and rolled her eyes to remind me whom I'd recruited to do the brunt of the sewing. And what sewing! And what teamwork! The chairs are truly remarkable. That Hannah can sew with the best of them. If you have ever deconstructed a designer Italian chair and then reconstructed it, you will know that there is a ton of story in a chair. You will also know that there is a ton of foam. I got hosed on the foam. Foam, my friends, is more costly than fabric! Foam! Who'd have thunk it? Foam is just grocery bags in another form, and the world is littered with grocery bags. Sadly, the world is not littered with craftsmanship and teamwork. It is also not littered with stellar chairs. It's lightly dusted with awesome chairs, but most of them are sequestered among the homes of the ultra rich. The 1% if you will. But not here. As Hannah said when I misheard her, early in the day, and accidentally brought her a second glass of water: "That's okay; I am now rich with water." And so I am now rich with chairs. Here's Hannah doing her handiwork.

The sewing machine was manufactured by a company that manufactures chainsaws. The model is called the Viking. I don't know what kind of chairs Vikings sat their brutal asses upon, and I don't care. What astounds me is that for the price of an email, a pork taco lunch, and a box of dilly beans, shallots, rutabagas and tomato sauce, my vision and my need got fulfilled. I badly needed these chairs to happen, but they could not have happened without Hannah's skill—and her chainsaw sewing machine. But I should give myself some credit here: these chairs could not have happened without me either. I exist in this world, and it wasn't like I sat around on my duff all day doing jack shit. Reassembling the chairs proved trickier than one would have thought, and so Hannah sewed while I trouble shot. I sewed, too, but I sewed interior stuff, stuff that could be crude and hidden. It took two people—no, it took a lot people to make these chairs happen. It also took a brutal cat (now de-clawed) and some Italian women who burned holes into the original upholstery through which hidden bolts could be driven to affix the backs to the seats. Just like you and me, hidden bolts affix our spines to our asses. Here are the finished backs waiting for their seats.

I will recover the seats alone and alone reassemble the chairs. But will I be alone when the chairs are complete? Hell no. I will gather my closest friends around this table, and we will sit in this splendid valley, upon these radical chairs, and we will eat and drink our fill, and no bankers will be richer than us.

carnitas

2011-11-19T19:48:00.001-06:00

It has been reported to me, dear readers, that I'm a bona fide curmudgeon. I am thereby bound to spend my life alone, a cantankerous, bad-tempered man braising his curmudgeonly pork. A licensed therapist perused what I thought were the stately and often hilarious accounts of lentil soup and hot dogs, McDonald's Farm, A Conversation with Obama and his kids, basically all the sundry posts here at Oilchanges, and declared me a big fat curmudgeon. How did that make me feel? Defensive. To the messenger of the news I retorted: "I will accept curmudgeonly but not curmudgeon." I stand by that statement. Have you ever been around me? I can definitely be curmudgeonly. Make no bones about it, this anti-food blog food blogger can demonstrate sweeping arias of curmudgeonliness at the drop of a Fruit Loop or a hat. He can also braise the hell out of pork butt.

After about two hours of braising, the carnitas are coming along splendidly. One of the most absolutely annoying things about being a cantankerous blogger is the poor quality of indoor lighting. I often do not publish posts about dinner because I live in dastardly New England where half of the year we are denied sun on more than half of the days. I take one photograph of my soup under a 60 watt G.E. bulb and become monstrously grumpy, pounding my fist onto the table and stomping around the dining room. I am only happy when there is natural sunlight on my face, and when there is no sun, watch out! I become the Mount Everest of surliness and bad temper. I once threw a taco at someone for winking at me. Had it been a sunny day, however, I would have been most genial, probably offering up extensive, full-body massages and undying loyalty. Oh well. Being a curmudgeon sucks. I am planning on socializing in public this evening, and I expect to jab my sharp elbow unnecessarily into many kidneys. I'm a real shit head. Look at this beautiful meat!

That, my dears, is going to become pork tacos tomorrow afternoon. The genius of reupholstering is coming down to help me out with those chairs (from the previous post), and so I ran errands all afternoon, hunting down foam padding, upholstery thread, cinnamon sticks, and 4 lbs. of pork shoulder (AKA butt) with which I plan to say "thank you." Carnitas will make your kitchen smell like Christmas, which to me, of course, smells like Hell.

This is how you make carnitas:

1) Get yourself a big hunk of pork shoulder (about four or five pounds of it). Cut that pork shoulder into big chunks, about 5" chunks. Don't worry about perfection, just cut the pork into big chunks. They will not all be the same size. It doesn't really matter.

2) In a big oven-safe pot (iron pots are the best), pour in about 2 TBS of oil, and crank up the heat. If you cannot brown all the chunks at once, brown them in stages. You want to really caramelize the heck out of the pork, getting good crispy color on it.

3) Once all the pork chunks are browned, remove them and deglaze the pot by pouring about half a cup (or more) of water in it. Scrape up all the good brown bits, then return the pork to the pot along with enough water to almost cover the pork.

4) Add two bay leaves, three cloves of garlic (sliced thinly), one cinnamon stick, one teaspoon of chili powder, another teaspoon of a different kind of chili powder*, some cracked black pepper, and about a quarter teaspoon of ground cumin.

5) Pop this baby into a three hundred and fifty (350) degree oven, no lid, and braise for 3.5 hours, turning the chunks of pork periodically (about every half hour), and adding more water as needed.

Finally) shred the pork and cook it in another pan until it gets a bit crispy. Then, stuff tacos.

Reupholstery Project, part one

2011-11-12T15:53:00.001-06:00

I have become obsessed with a reupholstering project. Long story short: I acquired four expensive ($250 each) Italian dining room chairs—more or less through a break-up. They are sturdy, excellent chairs with chromium-plated metal frames. They're structurally brilliant with elegant lines—and they're cat wasted. Cat's don't know a five dollar scratch pad from a two hundred and fifty dollar designer chair. Such is what happens when scratching posts don't match your decor. There is more to this.

Today the svelte Ehu accompanied me on a fabric hunting trip. "Hunting" is the right AND the wrong word to use here: right because it's so right, and wrong because we didn't do any hunting. We had one destination and we went there in a roundabout way. It's not like we waited in a tree-stand all night for a six-point buck. It was more like, "Six-point buck on a shelf in Turner's Falls! Go there with your rifle and shoot it down." And so I aimed my wallet at the bottom two sheets of fabric pictured above. I'd had my wallet pointed at some other fabrics, but Ehu rolled her eyes way back into her head and I conceded rapidly. (Who wants to shoot down a garden gnome?) Ah, but the trophy game is still amiss: Why has this become a do-or-die reupholstering project? The fabrics, again, from a slightly different angle.

The answer is that I have allowed this reupholstering project to assume tantamount symbolic gravity. I cannot replace these chairs with a credit card. I simply cannot bank-roll new furniture—sorry—but I can call upon my own resources (my friends), and for the price of one teardrop my vision can produce four stunningly original dining room chairs such as cannot be purchased in any catalog in our solar system ever. These chairs are cast-offs from the same place I am cast off from. We are kindred space travelers. My future is on a fucking chair.

My Own Social Fabric

2011-11-08T12:15:00.000-06:00

I received my own social fabric! Two social fabrics now flap around in the Pioneer valley. There could be hundreds more of them. I have no idea. The words I need to talk about the social fabric are just beyond the little black keys through which I attempt to convert my electro-chemical brain impulses into meaning, but meaning is something that is not made alone in your bedroom, but rather is made when two or more more people congregate around a thing and say, "I agree, that is a social fabric." But it could be anything. It doesn't need to be a gorgeous sheet of Finnish fabric. It could be a Waring blender. A book of poetry that has come in and out of fashion for two-hundred and fifty years could be a social fabric. Meaning is something that changes as the circumstances that surround an object change. What does a piece of fabric mean to the rain or the rain to a piece of fabric? Here's mine, spread out in the sun.

"Mine" somehow seems wrong, though. The social fabric is not mine or yours, not when properly displayed and shared. When it's folded up and tucked into a drawer, it's only a piece of fabric, a piece of fabric that's about as social as the Mad Honeymooner in Marriage, who lives under the falls, "a scourge of bigamy, a saint of divorce." But when that fabric unfurls before the public eye, a beautiful curio for the weather to have its way with, then that fabric becomes something for men and women to reflect upon, to invest with ideas and meanings. It's like a national flag that represents no nation but the nation of community. There is no president standing behind it, thumping on a huge pork-barreled bill. On the contrary: when I set this social fabric out in the garden this morning, its first respondent was not even human!

Show me the congress that represents this grasshopper. Show me the congress that represents the racoons who forage around the skirt of a land-fill. Show me the congress that represents the fish who swim in the rivers that receive the run-off from the massive, chemical-input heavy farms where mountains of inedible corn are grown to be turned into the million-and-one unhealthy foods that dominate our supermarkets. RANT OVER. To refresh your memory, here's the social fabric that I wrote about on October 20th. Cheers. Peace. Etc.

Lentil Soup with Hot Dogs

2011-11-03T14:04:00.000-05:00

People are abusing the word "occupy" these days, posting ridiculous pictures on facebook with captions that say things like, "Occupy the Gingerbread Man," or "Occupy My Empty Coffee Mug." Those people should stop doing that. Moving on now: lentil soup. My grandmother put chopped up hot dogs in hers. My mother did the same. Hot dogs and a splash of vinegar. When I learned how to make lentil soup I was a pretentious, budding chef, a purist of sorts, a food snob, and I was also responsible for feeding a small household of vegetarians, so it was goodbye hot dogs, hello straight-up lentil soup sans dogs. Well, times have changed since then, in my life and in our national life, and hot dogs have returned to my soup pot. I love the way they bloat when you cook them. I also love the way they augment the color scheme.

This is an interesting photograph to me because not every photograph shows you what cooked lentils look like in shadow and in full sun. Sometimes half the pleasure of eating really is in the eye. There is mystery in a good, chunky soup. Look at the way that one little lentil clings to that central piece of wiener! And those potatoes! Do you not absolutely love the way their rounded corners emerge from below the murky surface of the soup? And what about those bias-cut hot dogs? There may still be a thin slice of pretension in me after all. It's absolutely unnecessary to cut your dogs on the bias, unnecessary but also no more difficult than cutting them straight. It's one of those win-win situations: you get a more visually stunning chunk of hot dog without any extra effort. I would never julienne a hot dog—well, actually, I think that would be hilarious, and if the appropriate situation ever presents itself, I just may do that. It would be a scream to quarter a hot dog lengthwise.

As always, if you want to know how to make this lentil soup, you should email me. Or you can leave a comment with your email, requesting the recipe. Cheers. Happy souping.

tiny wood note

2011-11-02T19:35:00.002-05:00

Being broke and underemployed is good for two things: slow braised meat and ingenuity. You have plenty of time on your hands, but not much dough in your wallet. You also want beef stew because it's beef stew season. You want to make beef stew but you don't want to run out to purchase an oven-safe lid knob. What do you do? You run outside and grab a small hunk of wood. Then you run inside and drill a hole into the wood. Make sure you remove the bark from the hunk of wood. You can do it with a pocket knife. Then you want to oil the wood. If you have wood oil, great. If you don't, use canola oil or something. Once your wood is all oily, fashion the wood to the pot lid. Voilà. You now have an oven-safe pot lid knob. The lid knob doesn't have to look pretty at all. You only need to be able to hold it. Pretty is for when you have more time.

End of "Tiny Wood Note."

Downed Trees

2011-11-01T09:33:00.000-05:00

It turns out that I do have some pictures of downed trees. I had them all along. There are hundreds of downed trees in my phone. When the power is down and the cell service is down too, phones become little, portable light sources, and cameras. I confess that I was among those people who looked upon the wreckage from the storm with an enterprising eye. The day after the power went down was a beautiful day—the sky was blue, the air was warm—and it was difficult not to see opportunity in all the downed trees, an opportunity for work and an opportunity for garden stakes. New England is abundantly littered with garden stakes. You merely need to see them among all the piles of downed branches.

Yesterday I put my hand-saw into my car and headed into Hadley, Massachusetts, to forage for garden stakes. Like many New England towns, Hadley has enormous swaths of commons, town commons. Unlike some other towns, however, Hadley will haul off your downed branches for nothing. The result is that the commons are covered in branches and limbs that the residents who live near the commons have dragged there. I could hear chainsaws running everywhere as I picked through the piles for garden stakes. Perhaps I should have been thinking about the people who suffered real damages as I foraged for stakes. I am sure that many basements flooded when sump pumps everywhere went down with the power, and I'm sure that more than one roof took a severe beating, but these things were not on my mind. I had cast my mind into the future. I was picturing the spring that will follow this winter into which we've barely dipped a toe. I had garden stakes on the brain...

and on the roof of my car. If you know me well, you know that there are few things I love more than lashing items down to the roof of my car. I never go anywhere without rope.

Candles

2011-10-31T19:22:00.000-05:00

If you live in New England, you already know that the recent snowstorm knocked our power out. Power is still out in some places. This is what happened: an early snow storm dropped a bunch of heavy, wet snow onto the trees, and the trees, which have yet to shed their leaves, were able to catch an abundance of that heavy snow. All night long you could hear branches cracking near and far. A crack followed by a whoosh and a thud. Then darkness and candles.

Two nights without power, but I learned that when there is no power, there is still power. Only the humans and the trees felt the impact of the storm. But back to power and powerlessness. The Stop n Shop in Northampton became an oasis of light and community. Shoppers milled around the dim grocery store purchasing cans of soup and boxes of crackers. You could not purchase any meat or any dairy. All of that had been shuttled into an emergency cooler somewhere; but if you couldn't purchase some perishable items when the power lines were down—an estimated 10,000 power lines came down in New England—you could feel the communal warmth of your fellow shoppers, a warmth that is rare in New England where the people are known to be cool. I refused to pay $20 for a scented candle, but one knock on my neighbor's door produced two stick candles and one pillar.

My mother emailed me from Hilton Head about an hour ago, demanding pictures of the downed trees. Sorry, ma, but I only have pictures of candles. Your relationship to candles changes immensely when the rumor mill swirls around and you hear predictions that you will be without power or light for four, possibly five days. You don't burn all your candles simultaneously. You look at your stock of candles and burn only as many as you need in order to see the faces of your friends and neighbors as they sit across from you in the relative dark, sipping their whiskey.

Rainy Day Pocket Fix

2011-10-27T17:26:00.001-05:00

In 2006 my then-favorite pair of brown trousers developed serious holes in both front pockets with the frequent result of my wallet sliding down the interior of the left pant leg and onto the ground. This happened so many times I decided to mend the hole, which worked for a time, but eventually my crude stitches came undone. Even so, I never threw the trousers away. Once or twice a year I'd put them on, and plunk to the pavement would go my car keys. I'd think, "I really should get around to mending these pockets. For real."

This is my "for real" repair job. The trouble was that the original fabric had become too threadbare for a patch job to hold. The pocket had to be entirely rebuilt. This is the left-hand pocket, the wallet pocket; the right-hand, car-key pocket remains holey. Perhaps in 2016 I will mend it, or perhaps I will ride this wave of mending and repair it tomorrow. I kind of want to repair it because I made one aesthetic error tonight: I should have reversed the fabric so that I could turn my pocket inside-out and, as my roommate said, show the world that I have no money but a really cool pocket.

The Social Fabric

2011-10-20T12:00:00.000-05:00

During the Bush 2 administration I would fly home for the holidays and rant about how f'd up our country had become. I'd rant about the second Gulf War, which the Bush administration had tentatively named Operation Iraqi Liberation or OIL, until they decided that the country was not ready for that level of smugness. I'd rant about the fact that we had no democracy, only the illusion of democracy, that our politicians were in the back pockets of huge corporate interests, even as Bush II spouted B.S. about bringing democracy to the middle east. Our politicians love to talk about democracy because by talking about it they maintain the facade that we actually have a democracy, at least as democracy is popularly defined and understood by most Americans: a political system in which you can express your choice by voting. You can express your choice: you can decide which puppet is more handsome, which one more intelligent, which one rides horses, which one ropes bulls, but it's sort of like choosing one brand of cheese puff over another: there isn't any real difference between them and neither of them are healthy options. The point I'm trying to make here is that I would encounter a lot of resistance from my family back then—they were all Republicans—not that that makes a huge difference here—and they were mostly unwilling to accept the bleak torrents that poured out of my mouth, over the Christmas ham, and into their ears. Fast forward ten years: half the country (it seems) is now willing to accept that maybe this is true, that maybe we waged war on Iraq, not because Iraq posed any actual threat to our security, but because there was a lot of money to be made in the transaction, the war, by contractors, arms builders, and oil companies. I forget how many billions the major contractors made off the reconstruction efforts, but it was tons. I don't think it's cynical at all to think that there are officials out there who are willing to shed blood to put money in a few pockets. Anyhow, I am house sitting and the day has become quite lovely.

This is a piece of fabric that hangs along the driveway. It has no real purpose other than to look nice and spur conversation. My host calls it "the social fabric." Today the social fabric fulfilled its purpose very well indeed. I needed a nice snapshot to inspire a post. I had no idea that the social fabric would evoke old family dinners and the heated conversations that would inevitably erupt over the rolls. My family is not a bunch of gun-toting die hard right-wingers. They used to be "fiscal conservatives," but after eight years of Bush II, they too became fed up, disappointed, and disillusioned, at least to some extent. Disillusionment might not feel good, but it is a good thing. To the fully disillusioned person, lies look like lies; they don't look like a hot fudge sundae.

Rotting Flowers, Decomposition, Bacteria 101

2011-10-19T11:07:00.000-05:00

I went outside to take a picture of my compost pile because I thought I would write about compost this morning, but the compost pile looked pretty blah on this typical, fall, overcast New England day, so I turned around and went back inside without a single photograph. Compost piles aren't the most photogenic things on the planet, but when the sun lights up their slick, rotting lines and protrusions they can look good. But it's not so much what the compost pile looks like that counts: it's what it smells like and what you find on the inside that count. You should find earth worms any maybe a cricket or two, and as it ages it should start to smell like rich earth. What you won't see are the millions of bacteria who are working feverishly in there to break down the organic matter, i.e. your yard waste. Decay is a very complicated process, as old as life on Earth; and though I am not a microbiologist, I can tell you that this life, the one we know, would not be possible without bacteria. Bacteria are the main agents in the decomposition of plant matter. They transform a heap of dead flowers into compost. They take that which was once beautiful and turn it into nutrients for that which can be beautiful again, not to mention the thousands upon thousands of other vital functions that bacteria perform in our world.

This zinnia has already started to rot. No doubt there are some microorganisms already at work on it. If they are not at work on it, they will be shortly. There isn't much left to do in the garden. We're pushing into late October, and all my transplanting is done. I threw the tomato vines into the compost pile a couple weeks ago. I left the zinnias because here and there they are still showing some nice color, color which is very welcome at this time of the year. It can be difficult for the novice gardener to let go of the summer, to rip out the plants and toss them onto the compost heap, because this signals the onset of what is ultimately winter, and winter, for many people, means death. Death for one thing but life for another. Life for many others, in fact: there are hordes of bacteria who are itching to munch on all your yard waste. They're not as pretty to look at as a flower, but they are just as pretty to think about. Again, I'm not a microbiologist, but I promise you that all those things you find beautiful in this life would not be possible without bacteria. Compost is solace for the gardener at the end of a season. I now relish the end of the season, relish putting my garden to bed, relish tossing all the scraps onto the compost pile because I know that next year's garden will be so much richer for it.

Not to gross you out or anything, but the process of turning yard waste into compost is very much like the process of turning a cucumber into a fermented cucumber pickle or some shredded cabbage into saur kraut. Fermentation is just controlled decomposition. The black tea you drink has been fermented. In China, tea leaves are traditionally fermented in piles. Bacteria colonize those piles and turn them from green to brown, curing the tea leaves and adding flavor in the process. Essentially, black tea is compost, but in the culinary world we swap out the word "compost" for the word "fermented." If the idea of eating something that has been subjected to controlled bacterial decomposition disgusts you, I encourage you to think again about bacteria. You are not possible without them. It is unfortunate that our war on pathogenic bacteria has spilled onto bacteria in general. It is unfortunate because bacteria are vital to our life processes, both inside and outside our bodies. For every cell in our bodies, there are ten single-celled bacteria, which is to say that there are trillions of live bacteria in us right now. Our intimate relationship with them is something that our scientists do not fully understand, but if you believe that we indeed descended from bacteria—and you should believe this—you might stop to think before you purchase that next bottle of antibacterial cream. What are you really trying to kill? Most likely, it's only fear and a lack of knowledge that drive you into the health and beauty section of the grocery store to get that anti-bacterial soap. Fear and the lack of knowledge are the tools they use to sell product.

Private Property, Laws, Cabbage Moth Caterpillar, Liberty Plaza

2011-10-17T09:36:00.001-05:00

When I was twenty-one I rented a studio apartment on Cottage Grove, in Bloomington, IN. It was kind of a dump. One night I came home and found my apartment door completely covered by a swarm of beetles. I'd left the light on, and they'd come from all around to do who-knows-what on my door. Probably nothing. Just normal beetle behavior. Whatever the case, it struck me that I was the one who paid the rent there, and that I therefore had some authority over the door, and that I was thus free to evict the beetles in any manner I deemed appropriate. I went to find a bath towel. But how, really, do you evict a beetle? What do you do when something wild impinges upon your private property? It's not like you can take a raccoon to court. I say all of this because we all know (or we should all know) that private property is an arbitrary concept that man fabricated and which he enforces by all the standard means: complicated laws, institutions, intimidation, deadly fences, weapons. You only own that which you can retain by means of power. If some larger power comes along and vanquishes your claim and supplants it with new institutions and laws, you will find yourself in the position of the dispossessed. I was about to dispossess this cabbage moth caterpillar yesterday, as I would have done in my youth, but instead I petted it.

Late this summer, I planted a small number of tatsoi for a fall harvest, but the cabbage moths came around, laid their eggs, and this is the result: no tatsoi for me, a bunch of nice tatsoi for the caterpillars. Instead of pinching this caterpillar between my thumb and forefinger, I let it occupy my plant. Eat is probably a better word, but today I prefer occupy. I thus renamed my tatsoi patch, Liberty Plaza, to show my solidarity with the protestors in Manhattan and around the world. My garden is big enough for the both of us. We exist together, as equals. There is food enough for me and for the various insects who come to my garden to claim their share. But there's that word again: claim. It is their share—I do believe that—but they can only enjoy it when I allow the claim, when I do not do everything in my power to block their claim. Insects are beyond the reach of human law, but they are not beyond the reach of a thumb and forefinger (of an organic gardener) or the insecticide of what we have come to call "conventional farming." Perhaps it's too bad that we now consider the assertion of power through chemicals to be conventional. Perhaps "perhaps" is not a strong enough word.

The truth is that gardening is a lot like governing, where the gardener is the governor and the constituents are the native insects, fungi, and bacteria that inhabit the garden. It is possible to eliminate them in great numbers, to control their populations, to even devastate them, but it is also possible to take a somewhat more generous view of life and allow them to flourish, though it's not only generous: it's smart and sensible, too. Healthy ecosystems are very complex. The garden should be a place where life is various and healthy, where the various forms of life are encouraged, not discouraged. Naturally, some conflict will arise when two animals lay claim to the same plant, but the twin knee jerk reactions of suppression and elimination are probably not the soundest courses of action. We exist in a very complicated kind of union on this planet, a union that is not without competition—it never could be—but the abundance of this planet can be divided more equitably. I believe that 100%. There is room in the garden for more than the gardener.

P.S. peaceful protestors are not insects; I don't mean to insinuate that

Gone To Seed

2011-10-15T11:21:00.000-05:00

I used to think that plants make provisions for their young, that the mother plant takes every measure to ensure that her offspring will take root and live as robustly as she has. And in some senses this is true. What's changed is the extent to which I am willing to anthropomorphize plants, to compare in earnest an aster laden with seeds to a human mother pregnant with triplets. The biological comparison is an apt one: both are pregnant; both are fulfilling their role in the continuation of the species. The difference is that humans generally produce one offspring at a time, whereas most plants, as we all know, attempt to make hundreds, hundreds of thousands, even millions of offspring each season. Behind this fact there is a dreadful conclusion: the infant mortality rate for plants is very high. This formula holds true across the kingdoms of life: the more direct care a parent can provide to its offspring, to ensure its survival, the fewer offspring it needs to create. There is nothing sad, however, about an aster laden with hundreds of thousands of seeds that will not become adults. It's a numbers game, and it looks pretty.

Last night my friend and I were sitting at the bar at the Dirty Truth. We'd asked a couple to shift over one seat to their right, thus freeing up two stools to the left of them. In return, the male half of the couple asked us if we'd pick up their check, which was lying face down on the bar, a position that I have known once or twice. The man then put a ten dollar bill down on the check and asked me if I'd pick it up now. I told him that it was still not a good gamble. Beers at the Dirty Truth average about 6.5 dollars a pint. I told him that I'd be willing to pick it up if he'd put down a twenty. He didn't put down a twenty. The point of this diversion into bar etiquette is amiss, but I think it has something to do with numbers. Humans tend to choose their mates with the same calculating minds with which they decide if an investment is a good one. I don't mean to take all the romance out of it, but merely to suggest that our minds, even subconsciously, are constantly evaluating situations, constantly computing outcomes. Plants don't exactly have this capacity, though the abundance of seeds they create testifies to the fact their odds are very low. Eons upon eons ago, there may have been plants who showed up at the table without a big enough purse. Those plants are gone. I am terribly mixing metaphors here, but there is one thread: those creatures that exist today, i.e. all creatures, can be said to have equally effective strategies for the continuation of their kind. If I do not father a child, some other human will. Same with the aster.

This zinnia is a member of the aster family, Asteraceae. There are currently 22,750 accepted species of aster. It's a huge family, and clearly a very successful family. This pink zinnia, however, is a very civilized member of the family. Much like a domesticated dog, this zinnia exists because humans involved themselves and continue to involve themselves in its livelihood. It's a cultivated plant whose enormous pink blooms probably would not have occurred in the wild. And unlike its wild cousin (top photo), this zinnia does not produce seeds that can be carried off by the wind and dropped around the world. This zinnia requires me to choose, each year, the most handsome flowers and save their seeds. Furthermore, I must then manually extract the biggest and strongest seeds from the flower head and plant them in the late spring. If a seed head is left out all winter, it will produce some seedlings in the spring, but it may produce them too early, encouraged by a warm spell, and because the seed head will not break apart and disperse the seeds, all of the seedlings will grow up in very close quarters, choking one another, much like the children of large families who fight over the last scoop of tuna casserole.

Old Friends, Freezers, Memory

2011-10-13T23:00:00.000-05:00

In New Mexico there was too much to write about. Work hard as I could, I could still only get about a tenth of it down on paper, and a tenth is a generous estimate, and the paper wasn't paper, but this computer, this blog. There's something I should tell you about blogs—at least about this one: they're a performance, they're theater, but you shouldn't distrust them because they sometimes transform a little sadness into a mammoth sobbing fest. This morning I received a letter from a concerned reader. This reader happened to be a friend of mine from pre-school. Our mothers and a couple other mothers got together in the late 70s and formed a child sitting cooperative called "Play group." On the appointed day of the week, one mother would take all the kids so that the other mothers could go about town and do whatever they couldn't do the rest of the week, including stay home and relax. My mother, of course, is the industrious sort, so I am sure that she never used her days off to watch soaps. I take that back; I know she watched "Days." Anyway, my point is that this old friend wrote to me to cheer me up, said she'd noticed how sad the blog had become since I'd come home from New Mexico, and told me I should keep my chin up, my star will shine one day, I'm great. I felt a little bad for having laid it on so thickly. I've been sad and lonely, it's true, but I've also been having a ball turning that sadness and loneliness into blog content, and sometimes, apparently, I've been having too much of a ball. I think I lost a sneaker last night.

In New Mexico there was also a lot to photograph. It was a pretty photogenic place. I didn't take photographs constantly—there was too much work to do—nor did I constantly want to take them to jail perfection, but I did have the sense, that had I wanted to turn my trip into a photo safari, I would have been surrounded by an abundance of wildlife. Like Eric, the plumber, and his lethargic dog. Like the bear scat outside the front door. The point is that abundance is relative. What seems abundant to one person, seems shabby to another. If the trip had been reversed, and I'd left my life in New Mexico to work on a small farm in Massachusetts, Massachusetts would have seemed amazing and New Mexico would have seemed shabby and boring. The real truth is that for all the faith we put in imagination and possible realities, fact has one course, and in my case that course brought me back home to Massachusetts, not New Mexico or some other place, and Massachusetts looks, for having traveled, somewhat lovely and somewhat sad. I'm down to taking pictures of my freezer. I am writing as much as I can.

"My freezer is not such a bad freezer. It's a very red white and blue freezer. It's a freezer good for a patriot." I say this to myself, and I feel a little bit stupid. I am writing about my freezer, saying, "check out those frozen peas, they're 100% organic!" But I know that a freezer can only hold so much interest, and that's the point of a freezer. A freezer shuts down whatever life there is; it stuns all the biological processes and renders them inert. A freezer is a kind of arrested development. The tomato sauce in those freezer bags may indeed be super sweet, but until someone removes one of those icy freezer bags, the sauce within will remain solid and cold. Frozen sauce is somewhat like an old memory. It stays the same until you change it. My old friend is married now with children, and I know that, but I mostly remember her on her birthday, wearing a spotted party hat and blowing out the candles atop a brown cake, about thirty years ago now, and this, really, from a photograph.

Apple Butter, Distractions, Time

2011-10-13T00:02:00.000-05:00

Apple butter is a wonderful distraction. If you're sad about something, make some apple butter. If you have debts that you are worried about, make some apple butter. If you don't know if you will ever find true love again, apple butter will help allay those worries. If you're worried that you won't pass your driver's test, you'd be better off practicing your driving, not making apple butter. Study up on the rules of the road, and leave the apple butter for another day. Apple butter is best made when you have too much time on your hands, when the grey of Massachusetts greets you in the morning and then stays around all afternoon. It's best made when your bank account is low and your income is low, too. If you've just been promoted at the bank, I recommend a round of golf and neat bourbon at the nineteenth hole. Apple butter should not be made after you have putted. Apple butter should be made at the end of an outstanding apple season, and this season has been outstanding.

The apple butter is the ketchup-colored stuff, but it doesn't start out ketchup-colored. It starts out pale. You have to cook the apples down, stirring them regularly, before they turn that color. You also have to put them through a food mill to remove any of the seeds and chunks of core. I actually put this apple butter through the food mill twice, from medium to ultra fine, because I wanted a fine result and because I am lonely and I have a ton of time on my hands. Loneliness and time are good for many things. When you're not alone, your identity gets mixed up with the identities of the people you love around you. You become partly them and they become partly you. It's not necessarily a bad thing—it can be a good thing—but when you're alone, you're really alone, and you often return to yourself. I'm apparently someone who obsessively makes tamales and apple butter. This is how the apple butter looked about seven hours ago...

After I'd quartered, cored, and cooked down the apples in some apple cider, water, and cider vinegar (a pretty standard recipe), I put them through the medium disc of my food mill. Next I chucked in some sugar (half of what the Joy of cooking recipe called for) and some spice mix (cinnamon, crushed cloves, allspice, lemon zest), and then I cooked it down on low heat for about five hours, stirring about every 10 or 15 minutes, until it turned dark and viscous. If you haven't understood my point yet, this took a lot of time, time that many people don't have, either because they're in a relationship or married with children, or because they're hustling their way up a demanding company ladder, or because of this, or because of that. We're busy Americans. It all boils down to time. Apple butter is no different. It boils down slowly. It takes your time.

Man Land

2011-10-12T12:33:00.000-05:00

My previousgirlfriend and I used to call my personal space, "Man Land." When I wanted my personal space at the end of the day, I'd tell her, "I'mgoing into Man Land now." Sometimes I said this over the phone;sometimes I said it face-to-face. "Good night," I'd say, I'mgoing into Man Land now." I must have said it two hundredtimes. Man Land: the place I'd go to drink beer, watch movies and makethem. I'm in Man Land now, but now I am only taking personal space frommyself. I have been alone all day. I went to New Mexico in arelationship and came home single. This is not a personal ad, thoughdriving across this country I did hear that song about the personal ad—ifyou like piña coladas and getting caught in the rain, if you're not into healthfoods, if you're into champagne—many times on the radio; and each time Iheard it, I thought it told a touching story. Rain, sun, mountains andflatland, that song made me think that sometimes love renews and sometimes itdoesn't. The big point that I'm laboring to make, though, is not aboutlove, it's about Oilchanges. Oilchanges turned a corner in New Mexico. Inow reserve the right to write about whatever I want and to do so atunprecedented length. If I wrote about the thrill of crossing a border, Ididn't write about how I felt when I approached Santa Fe from the south, duringmy last couple of hours on the road the day I reached the farm. I almostwept at seeing those mountains to the north. I had no idea that I was crossing into Man Land for good this time.

Shallots, Facebook Rant, Compost

2011-10-11T19:55:00.002-05:00

I've been off the road for about a week, and the road is almost out of my system. This is no doubt thanks, at least in part, to the hourly pictures of the interstate out west that pop up in my facebook feed and remind me of where I've been. I should hide that person from my facebook feed. I should hide everyone from my feed. Facebook is an entirely unnatural mode of socialization, which is something that anyone born before 1990 should know, and I find it terribly boring. I don't care which couch your puppy jumped onto nor which television show you are currently watching to the point of guilt. I do not mean to suggest that your life is as tedious as your status updates, only that, once the charm of facebook wears off, it really wears off. And yet, I have not cancelled my account. I habitually log into facebook between tasks. If I learned one thing in New Mexico, I learned that I am personally much happier without the overload of stimulation that comes with our daily, 21st century, industrialized lives. There are studies out there, too, that suggest our brains are healthier when we don't multi-task ad nauseum, i.e. act as ordinary middle-class Americans with internet connections and smart phones. "Smart Phones." Now there's a manipulative piece of corporate language. It's smart to have a smart phone, dumb, apparently, to have anything else. With a smart phone you can take a picture of Mt. Rushmore and immediately share it to your favorite social network with one push of a "button," but even buttons are no longer buttons on smart phones, only button icons. These shallots, however, are shallots, not shallot icons. I need to go check on my rice.

My rice is perfect. There are people out there who cannot cook rice without a rice cooker. And yet, cooking rice is probably one of the easiest things you can do in the kitchen. Now, let's say I am one of those people who cannot cook rice in a pot. I attempt and fail repeatedly. Then one day I do something right, though I don't know what, and my rice comes out perfectly. Instead of fluffing my rice with a fork, I hop onto my smart phone and immediately announce to the world that I made, oh my god, the most perfect rice. Rice, however, is not status update worthy, and the crummy camera phone pictures you take of your half-eaten meal are not worthy of an entire album. Who am I to make these rules? I am nobody. I am only talking about my preferences. I prefer not to see ten million pictures of eggs and toast in bad, yellow light. I suppose I should stop ranting before I alienate all of facebook. Please forgive me; I am only taking the piss.

Plant your shallots in the fall, anytime before the ground freezes. Plant them as you would tulip bulbs. When you finish planting them, it's not a bad idea to spread some compost. Compost, my friends, is one of those words that the cyber-brain corporate powers have not yet found a way to turn into a cute, marketable catch-phrase. It's one of many things in the garden that has not one bell or whistle, not one application or snazzy feature. Actually, compost is all application. I take that back. Grow it and apply it liberally to your garden, and do so with your smart phone inside your house, tucked into your sock drawer or left behind the toilet.

October 9th, Some Facts About Soft Drinks, a Butterfly

2011-10-09T12:06:00.001-05:00

It's twelve-twelve in the P.M. The year is two thousand and eleven. Blue skies. I've been an occupant of this, my thirty-fifth year on the planet, for about twenty-four hours now, and the planet, if you don't know, is Earth. Somewhere in an ancient Chinese document it may well say, "He who wakes up well on the morning of his birthday may wake up unwell the following morning." Such may be the case, but I ask you: what is wellness? Is wellness an arc or a moment? Is life a condition or a movement through conditions? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? What I'm trying to say is that you shouldn't extrapolate on rough mornings. The weather man is often wrong. Today is grand.

I have just officially opened my blinds and indeed the sky is blue. I had a hunch it would be. The rutabagas pictured above are no doubt cool this morning. The air is warming, but the ground is still cold, and in the shade of the nearby cemetery the grass is still dewy. I wonder what the Chinese say about the dew. Here, in this country, we now have the unfortunate connotation of Mountain Dew, a yellow-green soft drink manufactured by Pepsi Co. Nothing spells POWER more than turning a natural phenomenon into a soft drink. Sierra Mist my ass. Strange things happen when the profit motive gets its hands on the language. But it's more than the language, really, and the soft drinks are more than soft drinks. Language is only the instrument by which total mind control is attempted and, alas, sometimes achieved. One time, many years ago, while attempting to purchase some deli meats in Indiana, I overheard an entire conversation between a man and a woman in which neither of them uttered a single thought of their own, but rather regurgitated streams of babble that sounded, to my young and angry ears, like the whir of excited cash registers on a big shopping day. The language of pure commerce. It depressed me. I spent the next six years calling all commercial radio, "cash register music." I am sure my co-workers at the pizza place were not with me.

I just stepped outside to snatch a photograph of some kale (to compliment the rutabaga), but instead I was treated to this Monarch butterfly. What, Mr. Monarch, are you doing in my garden so late in the year? Shouldn't you be in Mexico? Perhaps you are a birthday present. Would you care for a Mountain Dew? How about a Sprite? Well, too bad, because I don't have those beverages in my house. Try next door. A lot of young people live in the apartment across the street. There's bound to be some soft drinks in there.

There Is More Green

2011-10-05T23:31:00.003-05:00

I am home and I am celebrating. I drove 13 plus hours today. I drove from New England to New Mexico, and then from New Mexico to New England, and I didn't hit one spot of stopped traffic until today, precisely one hour from Northampton. A 20 minute bottle-neck just north of Hartford ("road work") was the only stopped traffic I saw across 56450 miles of road, or approximately 90 hours of driving work. That's a fortnight of driving. Anyway...I am home. There is more green in my front garden than there is in the entirety of Northern New Mexico.

Naturally, you can't see the green here, in this photo, because it is dark, and green, in the dark, looks black. What doesn't look black is my front door. It looks how I remember it, but sweeter. All summer long that door lead to pleasure and stress. One small garden is simply not enough work for me. Days go by and there's nothing really to do in the garden but fidget. And then there's the strings of rain that last for days. The garden is a charm and a snake, and my front door leads to it. Hence the stress. But today there is no stress. The door has taken a chill pill.

But it's not gonna be that chill tomorrow. Tomorrow I am going to rip out the tomatoes and plant a lot of shallots and a good amount of garlic. To celebrate. I did just come home from a garlic farm. And on my last day on the farm, the farmer did tell me that I would get back to Massachusetts and see the climate and the land differently. We were resetting a fence post. It was cold, still pretty early in the morning and in the shade. About a week later, I did make it back to Massachusetts, around 11:00 P.M., and I was stunned by how big my zinnias had become. I should leave more often. I love driving fast.

X-Country

2011-10-05T01:28:00.001-05:00

Driving X-country should probably be a core curriculum requirement, mandatory for all students, compulsory, something from which only the blind, deaf, and paraplegic are exempt, but these days even those without control of their lower extremities can be fitted into special cars, and the deaf, well, all they'd miss out on is the endless stream of classic rock and country stations, not to mention the ubiquitous radio preachers who dominate the airwaves throughout the vast interior of this country, and so really, only the completely blind should be excused from driving across this country, because the blind, as we all know, are probably unfit to operate a motor vehicle that can travel in excess of 80 m.p.h. It's just too difficult to know which way to turn, too difficult to see the Golden Arches in the distance, impossible to know if there's a Motel 6 at this exit or the next one. Tonight I had to settle for a Super 8. Not my first choice based entirely on price, but good enough considering the fact that it was 1 A.M. when my body, my good sense, and my fear that my mother would receive devastating news of my fiery dismemberment if I did not stop driving told me to stop. So here I am, my last night on the road, in a Super 8 in Springfield, Ohio. How many Springfields are there in this country? Drive across country and find out for yourself.

I want to take this opportunity to offer you some pointers on driving while tired. Not over-tired, mother, just tired. If your travel itinerary is intense like mine has been, you are sure to encounter some stretches of road upon which all of your faculties will have vanished, as if they'd decided to set up permanent residence at the Shell station, 200 miles behind your tail lights. Worse: sometimes you will be an interstate zombie after dark, when the sun is not streaming into your eyes, stimulating your brain stem, and this is when you need a battery of techniques to keep you safe. The point of a X-country journey is not to perish in a ball of flames, but to improve your life and to deepen your understanding of your country and its people. I have found that it helps to be incredibly cold. Roll down the window and let the night air slap you. When you become too cold, roll up the window and crank the heat until you become unbearably toasty. Meanwhile, you should be scanning the radio dial for the most repulsive song or radio program your ears can stand. To make it from Bloomington, Indiana to Springfield, Ohio tonight, I endured an hour of Christian propaganda about a criminal drug addict who found Jesus in prison, who learned to read (the Bible) in prison, who was subsequently paroled, then fell back upon the heroin needle, who returned to prison, repented again, and then finally, after he'd gotten clean and truly devoted himself to God, quickly died of esophageal cancer and was delivered unto his lord. Listening to that compelling tale, I began to worry that in another minute I would be transformed into a born-again Christian, like Randy, and return to Massachusetts an alien to my friends. The up-shot: I was wide awake and ready to start passing semis.

What you will learn from driving X-Country will be tailored to your own personal fears, aspirations, hang-ups, dreams, libido, educational arc, intellect, passion for country, politics, religion, culinary-bent, and desire. It's a huge country and there seems to be more than enough room to do whatever the hell you want. Mostly, you will have so much time to yourself. It's impossible to sit behind the wheel for so many long hours, in control of your direction and speed, to not have something happen in your brain, to not have some shred of personal growth, even revelation. You might be able to travel across this country without gaining a smidgeon of empathy for your fellow countrymen and countrywomen, for their stations, their politics, their dress, manner, accents, education, beliefs, etc. It might be possible, but after having spent the better part of five weeks on the road, I doubt it. Get on the road and find out that you are only one important person among many. Even the cranks at the midnight gas station who begrudge you your .99 cent water become real people if you wink at them just so or speculate upon their lives for one minute or less. You don't have to devote your whole life to them, only know that they're there, selling water at 2 A.M. on a Tuesday night, in some gas station, a quarter mile off the interstate anywhere.

P.S., this is the last post of this X-Country Road and Farm Blog Adventure. Many thanks to everyone who made this possible.

Jono

X-ing Borders: Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana

2011-10-03T22:37:00.001-05:00

The full title of this post should be: "Crossing Borders: Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and the Spirit" because some thrill or high tone on the emotional register always accompanies a border crossing. You pass out of Kansas and into Missouri, and your spirit lifts. You might hate Missouri and love Kansas, or love Missouri and hate Kansas—it doesn't matter which way around it goes; some dip or elevation of the spirit always comes with a border crossing. Borders are both imperceptible and perceptible lines; sometimes the terrain on one side of the line varies so little from the terrain on the other side, and yet there it is, that tiny lift or alteration of spirit. When you're traveling X-country on the interstate, bound for a distant point, crossing a state line may only lift your spirit because you know you're that much closer to home. So borders become these real and simultaneously artificial phenomena at once. There isn't space enough in one blog post to delve into state politics and the and the funky old ways in which this country was divided, mostly, into neat rectangles (we're not cartographers here), but there is time for one quick observation: if you're passing from a conservative state to a, well, less conservative state, you can be sure that all the vice that new state has to offer will be piled up along the interstate within the first twenty miles of the border. XXX superstores, discount cigarette outlets, and fireworks are what you find on I-70 when you cross from Kansas into Missouri.

Rivers and mountains are another kind of border, and sometimes those borders lie within state lines. I'm not sure which river I was crossing when I took one hand off the wheel to photograph (several times) this bridge. Needless to say, I found my way across it. Missouri was a breath of fresh air after Kansas. I didn't stop at any of the roadside, 24 hour titty bars, and I didn't pull off the interstate to purchase one single firework, but I did stop for cheap gas and contraband cigarettes. I figured I could deliver some cheap smokes to my friends back in New England and still find room to make a buck. Making a buck is what interstate commerce is all about. Yesterday I passed a semi truck laden with bags of white onions somewhere in the middle of Kansas. I stopped in Topeka and found my bed. Then, today, sure as hell, I passed the same truck. There might be a lot of oil tankers on Interstate 70, but I assure you that it's not everyday that you see a truck loaded with hundreds of 200 lb. sacks of onions strapped to the bed, barreling his way to parts Eastern unknown. Me and that trucker are on the same route, and there's no doubt about that.

Still, though, for as much as I've talked about crossing borders, crossing state lines, I haven't talked about what happens when you cross the border from a place that is nothing more than a state on the map in your head and into the place where you have lived a long life, wept, loved, drank, celebrated, felt pain and felt pain disappear. When I crossed from Illinois into Indiana, when I crossed the Wabash, the usual flicker of the heart that comes with any border crossing became something much larger and more difficult to comprehend. It became something profound, something grand. I spent the best part of my twenties in southern Indiana, and the moment I saw that "Welcome to Indiana" sign, well, I turned up the radio as loud as I could, partially to drown out the Indiana ghosts that crowd my brain, and partially to celebrate them. It didn't hurt that I was nearing the end of my travel day (a 3rd wind always accompanies that last stretch of driving, no matter what you feel about a state), but still, crossing from Illinois into Indiana was the most monumental border crossing of this X-Country Road and Farm Adventure. I wasn't merely crossing a state line. I was crossing into memory, and I didn't know how I'd feel about visiting some old haunts.

Turns out I felt f***king great about it. It did spook me to cross into Indiana, the state where my heart got kicked around, but something about the road and the momentum carried me through those borderline ghosts. I lost a lot of love in southern Indiana, had my heart and faith in the decency and goodness of life trampled there, and so upon returning I expected my speedometer to drop to 55 miles an hour and my heart to drop to ten. I was wrong. That peculiar mix of elation and sadness drove me through. I pushed hard up Indiana 37, peeing on the roadside and keeping the radio loud. It was move move move. Get there get there get there. I was crossing from a place of relative ease, of happiness and well being in life, and into a place where life was happy and joyful, but also difficult and painful. This was the big border crossing of the journey. It wasn't that I didn't know what the state on the other side of the state line would be like; it was that I didn't know how my heart would respond to my memories. I pulled off the highway and onto South Walnut, Bloomington. The same old businesses were piled up along the road. Not much had changed but me. I'd changed. I'd expected the town to be full of old ghosts, but instead I found it to be full of old friends. I'm in a hotel room now, on the north side of Bloomington, enjoying the free beers my old chef/boss/mentor gave me when I popped into his restaurant, just before close, on the way up to this hotel. He took me into the kitchen. We chatted about fermentation and french fries. I actually had a thing or two to teach him about french fries. Times change from 25 to 35. Age is another kind of border. He told me to come back tomorrow, to see if the restaurant had gotten better or worse since I'd worked there. I told him that you only get better if you don't stop caring. Clearly, by his enthusiasm, he hadn't stopped caring about food, and nor have I. We have both gotten better. He is still in the kitchen, and I have come from the farm.

Kansas, Topeka, Hooters

2011-10-02T22:08:00.000-05:00

"Met a couple dudes at Hooters. Told me Topeka sucks. They were right." Such is what Garret told me at the Topeka Hooters across the road from my hotel. Hungry and tired after a long day on the road, I tried to buy a tall boy of Budweiser at the gas station and got rejected It's Sunday in Kansas. I checked into my hotel, Motel 6, and went out for dinner. It was either Buffalo Wild Wings or Hooters. I'm not big on wings and I'm not that wild either, and I'd never been to a Hooters before, so I figured, hell, it's Hooters or bust. I placed my burger order and sat down at the bar to drink a beer while I waited. That's when I met Garret and D, good guys and forklift operators.

I'd always imagined that the waitresses at Hooters would be women, but they're not. They're girls. Fortunately for me, I was too tired to think too much about what it means to have your hamburger brought to you in a giant sack by a young woman wearing little orange butt shorts and flesh-colored tights. Whatever. I took my food back to my room. The burger was tastier than expected (Garret told me they just started forming their own patties), and the thimble-sized side of potato salad, well, it was thimble-sized. Kansas, on the other hand is huge: huge, colorful, Christian, and windy. I lunched at this McDonald's in western Kansas. (The girl who took my order was very interested in my Mighty Wallet.)

Blogging from the road is no easy task, despite the amount of content that streams through your life at eighty-five, ninety miles an hour. At noon you might think one thing, but then four o'clock rolls around and you think something else entirely. Then night falls: your eyes turn into Jello, your brain stops working normally; velocity destroys whatever slick ideas you had. Around lunch I'd thought I'd write something about how the best place to find the truth in small American towns is at the McDonald's. When a town wants to show its (constructed) public face, it doesn't show it at the McDonald's. (I doubt this town even has a constructed public face.) At McDonald's you get more than french fries with your cheeseburger. You get the most ordinary life of a particular place in the most ordinary setting. You also get a repeated icon, but each time that icon, those golden arches, appears in a new setting, or a slightly new setting, the place where the uniformity of corporate franchise culture rubs shoulders with the identity of a landscape and its people. There's truck parking at this McDonald's. Anyway. There was a lot more of Kansas to pass through before I the day was done.

As you move away from the western part of the state, away from the Rockies, and into central Kansas, the land actually starts to get hillier, not less hilly, and the reigning use of the land switches from enormous fields (of corn, wheat, hay) into smaller fields of corn, wheat, hay, until it eventually becomes too hilly for the giant irrigation machines to navigate, and then it's all pasture land and, at least along Interstate 70, huge wind farms. This particular photo doesn't show how hilly and rugged parts of central and eastern Kansas really are, so you'll just have to take my word for it.

Or you can just come out here and see for yourself. Traveling back and forth across this country, I often wanted to stop and get a real feel for the land, for the people, but high speed doesn't permit this. It's hard to transition from ninety m.p.h. to down on the farm, be it wind farm or corn farm, and when you've got a destination you want to make by night-fall, well, it's that much harder. The sum total you end up learning about a place is that which you can put together from one or two quick conversations with a cashier, ten hours of commercial radio, and the eight million consecutive snippets of landscape that pass into your retinas and then onto the part of your brain where language and ideas occur, which is to say, you only learn a fraction of what there is to know about a place. A fraction of knowledge, though, is better than none. Knowledge is power. Wind farms are power too.

This Is Just to Say

2011-10-02T09:40:00.000-05:00

I am headed back east today. It's 8:31 A.M., Mountain time. I'm in Boulder, CO. I need to make Kansas City by nightfall. Oh boy. Here comes the road. If I find a good place to work among the wheat fields, I'll do some proper road posting then. Cheers

Denver: it's basically Nebraska

2011-09-30T10:31:00.001-05:00

I'm in Denver. Rolled in last night. Drank some (three to be precise) beers in a bar with far too many men in it. Before heading out, I decided to put on my corduroy button down with the bold collar, thinking, "Hey, I'm in the rough and ready West. I better don some corduroy." Wrong. I would have done better to wear a t-shirt with a Sprite logo on it.

So, I kind of slacked off yesterday. I started taking some photos, but then my camera battery pooped out. The chunk of road before you is somewhere between Eagle's Nest, NM, and Cimarron, NM. At 8000 plus feet, Eagle's Nest claims the "Highest Point on the X-Country Road and Farm Adventure" title. Sadly, however, I don't have pictures of it. I can tell you though, that if you plan to drive through there on US 64 anytime soon, you should expect delays. Roadwork.

Anyway...it's breakfast time. I'm headed to Boulder for the weekend, and Kansas after that.

Later

Farewell

2011-09-28T23:46:00.000-05:00

I don't know how to say goodbye to this farm. I don't know how to say goodbye to Stan and Rose Mary. Perhaps I should just start with the day's work. A leisurely morning, I sat on the terrace with my coffee until nine-thirty when Stan remembered that there was a row of spinach overrun by short grasses that needed weeding. I disengaged from the internet, and headed into the fields. The thing to know about weeding a row is this: do not look up to assess how much of the row you've weeded. From a squatting or sitting position, your eyes will tell you that you've weeded far more than you've actually weeded. When you stand up you will see that the half-row you'd thought you'd weeded is, in reality, nothing close. It's best to keep your head down and weed. Go slowly and methodically. Open your ears and enjoy the sounds of the country. This is the best method. Before you know it, Stan will call you to toast break.

After toast break, your work will change, and you will have the opportunity to change into shorts. At this time of year in northern New Mexico, you will be comfortable enough in jeans and a sweatshirt, weeding spinach from eight until ten, but by ten and even before, you will throw your sweatshirt onto the ground and be dying to wear shorts and eat toast. After the toast break, if you are lucky, and luck seems to run abundantly on this farm, you will leave your partially weeded spinach row and be called to harvest acorn squash and pumpkins. If you have sensitive skin, put your gloves on. If you're a squash terrorist like me, forego the gloves and take your chances. Perhaps it's only because I am a rookie farmer, but there is some satisfaction to be had from looking upon a forearm irritated from harvesting pumpkins and winter squash. The vines can be quite aggressively spiky.

When you have finished harvesting all the ripe squashes and pumpkins, it will be time for the noon sandwich break: sandwich, cookie, apple finisher. You'll have already done a good amount of work, and you'll have earned the post-lunch, 15 minute lay-off. This is when I usually retire to the terrace to check my email and collect my camera. The morning's coffee will have cooled, and the air will have warmed. It can be very tempting to snooze, but there is too much work to be done. On a farm like this, there is always work to be done. One o'clock rolls around and it's back into the fields. The afternoon goes by quickly and then it's four o'clock and dinner must be made. I don't know what happens if dinner is not available by five-thirty. Actually, I do. We were in Santa Fe all day yesterday, running errands, and we were due at a book launch at six, to be followed by a 7:30 dinner, but around four in the afternoon, exhausted and drinking coffee in a Santa Fe strip mall Starbucks, we all decided, individually, to phone our regrets. We regret that we cannot attend the dinner party. We are farmers and we must return to Dixon ASAP to eat left-over spaghetti. If we don't eat dinner at 5:30, our crops will die. But after dinner is such a joy. That is when we stroll down the lane to view the Embudo and the clouds.

Rose Mary always sees something in the clouds, and she is never silent about it. Tonight it was a shark and an upside down crocodile. "The first thing I had to get used to after I married Rose Mary," Stan said, "was seeing things in the clouds." "Oh, there's a flat tire in a cloud," Stan said, "I came from a family that never saw anything in a cloud." Rose Mary: "I always thought Americans are so boring; I always thought Americans were so boring." I kept my ears open and my mouth shut. It is so nice to stroll down the lane with Stan and Rose Mary after dinner. It is nice to stroll anywhere with them, but strolling down the lane with them after a long day of work is a ritual pleasure, a pleasure that doesn't become boring with repetition, but rather becomes more calming and ensuring each time. This is when our banter is best, when we are all relaxed at the end of the day. We stop at the river, turn around, and head back to the farm. One some nights we continue past the gate and down to the highway. Tonight was not one of those nights. Stan and Rose Mary turned in at the gate and I did the second half of the walk alone, wanting to relish the lane by myself (though I would have relished it if they'd been there too).

The second half of the walk is less bucolic, more busted out cars. The neighbor at the far end of the road has a very impressive collection (this is only the tip of the iceberg) of beat up and dysfunctional old cars. He also has a dog who is not above attacking you for getting too close to the merchandise. Tonight, however, the dog was nowhere to be found. It was only me, my camera, my thoughts, and my last walk down to the highway-end of the lane. I kept my camera close to my eye to stave off busting a tear. It's not like I've been here forever and forever, and it's not like I cannot return again, but this trip and my time on this farm have been so sweet and so rewarding, I did get a little teary-eyed when I stopped here to photograph these busted out pick-up trucks at the end of Stan and Rose Mary's lane. Who knows when I will be gifted enough to get back here. It could be a long time, it could be a short one, but time has nothing do to with farewell. Farewell is a gush of joy, a timeless gush that renders your rational mind incapable and makes you a subject of emotion. Farewell is the small opening through which passes great torrents of feeling. Those torrents can build for two weeks, two years, two hundred millions years. It's all very relative. It's not something that a clock or a calendar can understand. But you feel it in your heart. And if you're lucky, like me, you can sit down and remember it, and write about it, and continue remembering it until your love is renewed again, until something comes along and makes your life as grand as it is at the moment of farewell. So farewell. So thank you Stan and Rose Mary, and thank you everyone else who has made this X-Country Road and Farm Adventure Gift possible.

Cheers,

Jono

The Ditch, la Acequia, Mayordomo

2011-09-27T23:42:00.003-05:00

It took me the better part of two weeks to appreciate the ditch. The ditch is unassuming and easily passes beyond notice. Without the ditch, there would be little reason to be here. Or fewer reasons. But it's fruitless to think about life without the ditch. And the ditch is only of many. To think I traveled 2300 miles for a ditch, to sit and reflect at the end of the day that a ditch is behind this X-Country Adventure, and that behind that ditch there is a river, a river sunk of its water, a diverted river, a river broken into pieces, a river with forced branches, a river whose ever finer streams course into space-age plastic tapes and finally peep into the earth through pin holes. This is how the Embudo river finds itself off course, in the fields of those who demand that it should be so. The river makes no demands. Demands are only made upon it. At the tail-end of my time on this farm, I finally found a couple afternoon hours to roam the banks of the ditch. They are man-made banks and spangled with poison ivy, and so I did not roam very far. Nonetheless, here is the ditch that runs along the bottom of the slope, the arid slope, behind this farm.

In this picture you can barely even see the ditch, la acequia, because its banks are entirely overgrown with water-loving plants. As I said, the ditch easily passes beyond notice, though if you were to climb the slope which lies just beyond the left-hand side of this picture, if you were to climb even 50 feet up that slope, the ditch itself would completely vanish from view, but the produce of the ditch, the abundance of lush foliage it affords would become totally apparent. For all you know, this photo could be of some stream in Vietnam. But it's not. We are still in New Mexico, still thinking about the ditch. We are facing up-ditch. Let's turn around and face down-ditch. (I am reminded of the expression: "face down in the ditch.")

Here you can see the irrigation ditch much more clearly. To the the left-hand side of this photo are the small farms that this ditch serves; to the right-hand side is, again, the arid slope. If you think that I repeat myself, I do, but I repeat myself because the ditch is the fine line between abundance and death. The lushness of the foliage around the ditch would not be so without the ditch. Without the ditch, it would look like this:

The last time I hiked up the slope behind the ditch, I thought to myself, "Life congregates around life." The more life there is, the more life there is: the more sparse the vegetation, the more sparse the animals, the more sparse the insects, the more sparse the life in general. This seemed to make sense in the hills, but I was wrong. The truth is that life congregates around water, but humans are willful animals, but plants are willful too. Up in the arid hills, plants protect their water rights by putting on wicked defenses: spikes, thorns, needles, sappy tight foliage and foliage that retreats to its roots until the water comes again. The only time the plants of the arid slope give access to their water is when they must give access in the form of fruit. (The animals of the arid slope depend upon the rare fruit.) The story is not much different down below where the water has been diverted, and the humans down there who have worked to divert it defend their captured water just as fiercely as the plants above them do.

Here is a patch of flower garden at the foot of the slope, a patch through which runs a shallow trench that is fed by the ditch. These cosmos are not native here; they have been brought by the human farmers. This, mind you, is only a garden at the back of the house. The majority of the ditch water is channeled into a tank and from there it is dispersed into the fields by a pump through a system of hoses whose diameters gradually diminish, just as the gauge of the river gradually diminishes as it moves from river, to ditch, to hoses. The overall system of water here can be understood as one of finer and finer veins. What begins large and incomprehensible is, through human endeavor, refined into smaller and smaller streams until its value has been spent and transformed. If you are interested in learning more about the ditches of New Mexico and their cultural history and importance, you can pick up Stanley Crawford's book, Mayordomo. It is 230 pages about the life of one irrigation ditch, an acequia, in northern New Mexico. It will defend the statement I made that the people who live below the ditch (and who depend upon it) defend their water rights just as tenaciously as the plants who inhabit the rocks, clay and stones of the arid slope above them. I recommend it with all my thirsty tenacity.

New Mexico State Fair, McDonald's Farm, Earl Butz

2011-09-26T01:32:00.000-05:00

Back from Albuquerque. Late. About twelve hours since I wrote about going to Albuquerque, finishing another long day, but about what? About the New Mexico State Fair? State fairs are all alike. Big food. Big people. Midways, attractions, the world's smallest this, its smallest that. Animals. Blue ribbons. Don't forget about the animals. Saw a baby lamb atop a miniature picnic table. You know, one made for children. Just standing on it. In a pen. Behind a fence. This was within the confines of McDonald's Farm. Those clever marketers. Upon entrance into McDonald's farm you were handed a basket, a mini basket such as farmers use. If you weren't in the mood to practice your skills with the lasso (on a plastic bull's head, mounted on a sled), you could fill your basket with fruits and veggies. Plastic ones. I picked one plastic red pepper. A worker woman told me and my companion (a pen pal who happened to be in Albuquerque) that the fruits and veggies look real. They didn't look real at all. Fake fruits in real, if tiny, baskets. But that doesn't take the cake. This does...

Along the farm fence rows (plant fence row to fence row; get big or get out) (Earl Butz), were these interesting signs. One for beef, one for chicken, one for pork, one for tomatoes, and definitely one for potatoes, and they all said the same thing: Proud to be U.S. Agriculture's #1 customer. No shit. Still think this country isn't an agricultural nation at its bottom? But then, can you really call the agriculture, to which these signs refer, agriculture? Is there anything agrarian about it? Seven hundred and fifty million pounds of beef annually? And what about the culture part of agriculture? What kind of culture is it? These are questions that you ask when you leave the state fair. When your wallet is empty from throwing softballs at bottles. Where is my decorative mirror with a pro wrestler on it? The organic farm where I am working is only 2 hours drive from the state fair. Not very far. But how far is the organic produce we grow here from the propaganda that grows (without water or soil) on McDonald's farm? I don't really know. My guess is that, if you tried to drive that distance, you would use all the oil in Iraq.

Terrace

2011-09-25T10:45:00.000-05:00

Sitting on the terrace, drinking coffee. About nine in the morning. Nice morning. Heading to Albuquerque in about an hour. Day trip. What to do until then? How about the terrace from which I write about this spot in northern New Mexico that I've come to love? Good enough for a short note?

My first morning here, that high peak in the distance had snow on it. For about a day. Then no more snow. Point is, this is the view I look out upon when I look up from my laptop. This morning there are only the thinnest wisps of clouds over the mountain. It's a little hazy, too, but not much. I love how the clouds rise up from the opposite side of that mountain. They seem to be pushed from a lower altitude, up and over that high range. And then they just hover there.

And there's the terrace itself. I sit on an old van seat. I sit on it in the morning. I sit on it after lunch. I sit on it at night. At night I can't see the mountain. At night I can't see much at all. Very dark. Only stars. Stars and the sounds of dogs. This has become my private spot. Where I send emails to my friends, my mom, to Stan, to Rose Mary. We talk all day long, talk, work, eat, walk. I will be sad to leave here. I should drive to Albuquerque now before I get choked up. Magpies can be very noisy.

The Van, Picking Day, Plastics

2011-09-23T22:59:00.003-05:00

I definitely did not expect to write about a large, emerald colored van during the planning and fund-raising phase of this X-Country Road and Farm Adventure, and I don't really intend to write much about it now. It's big; it's green; you can remove the back seats. I really only intend to kill the forty-five minutes between now and the moment when, at ten o'clock on the dot, I will slip under the blankets in my bed and lie there until I fall asleep to dream about nothing and then awake in the dark, at four A.M., to a pre-loaded French press and a half-way coherent Stan, munching on granola.

We pack the van around six-thirty P.M. on Friday, after eating dinner at the local restaurant. One night a week, we splurge on reasonably priced enchiladas. It's an end-of-the-week ritual, a break from the work of the kitchen after the work of the field is done. Between five and six P.M. on Fridays, we eat our food hurriedly and then return to the farm to make sandwiches, prep our coffee and clothes for the morning, and finish packing the van. From a stash buried who knows where, Stan emerges with four small plastic bottles of Tropicana orange juice, a vital component of the return trip from the Santa Fe farmers market. Wait, did I say "plastic" and "Tropicana" in a post about an organic farm in northern New Mexico? Perhaps I did.

What of it? Do you expect us to drink homemade choke-berry juice from clay jugs we fashioned and fired ourselves? This is the 21st century, and organic farmers are like everyone else: there is plastic in our world. The plastic shows up on the sides of our roads in the form of crushed Gatorade bottles and Solo party cups; it shows up in our fields in the form of torn little bits of Planter's peanuts packages; it shows up in the bags that line our blue picking boxes, and it definitely shows up in the drip lines that irrigate the fields. Plastic probably shows up in our diets, too, in microscopic little particles that, a million years from now, scientists who wish to discover the mysteries of our ways will find in our hair. Who knows...by then science will probably be the function of a swab. Scientists will wave an ultra fine sheet of paper over a ruin, and a nano-structure robot embedded in the paper will analyze, down the the most wee details, everything that happened within that square mile over the last million years. It will find that the heinous products of the industrial food system existed, side by side, with the wooden, 1950s era, apple picking boxes you see in the photo above. It may even detect a trace of my urine and be able to identify the particular batch of the New Mexico brewed, Happy Camper IPA that I drank the night before I peed around the willow tree.

The hoop house is covered in plastic. Manufactured where? I don't know. The modern organic farm avoids plastic, but only to the extent that it is practical and reasonable to avoid plastic. Plastic is useful and it has its functions. The solar water tanks on the roof of the adobe house are probably made of some kind of plastic or fiber glass. There might be one organic farmer somewhere who still plows his field with a horse and an iron-age plow. He's probably also a palace of stress. OK, eleven minutes until bed: I would be willing to hedge my bets that it's impossible to be an organic farmer in 2011 if you don't have a comfortable, if complicated relationship with plastics and all the sometimes evil, sometimes necessary trappings of the post-modern world. I'm not writing this blog on a stone tablet. I didn't take these pictures of this gorgeous farm with a charred stick. The van doesn't run on primordial semen. It runs on gasoline, and tomorrow morning, at 5 A.M., we will burn some fossil fuel to sell our organic radishes in Santa Fe, 45 miles south of our farm here in Dixon.

Good night. It is one minute before my bed time.

Sorghum

2011-09-22T22:30:00.002-05:00

Question: What do you do when you have sorghum? Answer: You go to the dentist. Scratch that. You don't go to the dentist for sorghum, though I badly need some serious dental attention right now. What you do when you have ripe sorghum is harvest it. The rhythm of agricultural work is not complete without the harvest. There is so much satisfaction from the wholesale destruction of a crop that you spent so much time planting and nurturing. There is pleasure in removing it, in clearing it from your field, a retrospective pleasure that can be twinged with sadness for the soft hearted, or that can be downright ecstasy for the hard hearted. It depends on what type of person you are. Many of us are in the middle. If you are like me, there's satisfaction in cutting down rows of gorgeous plants. The harvest marks the end of something, but a cleared field can also be refreshing. Especially if you rotate your crops. True misery is when you hack down acre upon acre of corn, knowing that you will only plant more of the same corn in the spring. Good organic farmers, however, know that where this year sorghum grew, next year squash will grow. Squash may not be better than sorghum, it may only be different. You could read this text as a reflection upon love and love lost. It's better, however, to read it as life and more life. Life goes up and life plummets: the sorghum rises and the sorghum gets whacked down. If you don't believe me, you can watch this X-Country Road and Farm mini Feature Film: "Sorghum."

Water, Updated

2011-09-21T09:40:00.002-05:00

I woke up this morning around seven-thirty, still thinking about water. Last night I got hot under the collar, writing about unnamed corporations who bid and vie to control water throughout this world. There is some truth to that, but there is another truth: I have not done my research. In New Mexico, it isn't one corporation or another that is the problem. The situation is much more complicated than that. New real estate developments are putting pressure on a limited water supply. Is it that this area can only support so much life? And what do I mean by "this area"?

If "this area" means "New Mexico," I am not educated enough to properly talk about water. But the overall equation is simple: if there is a fixed area with 500 units of water, and each person requires 1 unit of water, then the area can only support 500 people. But even this is grossly simplified. It leaves out the fact that humans do not exist in a vacuum. Other species and natural systems require water, too. In my previous post, I only wanted to point out that water, especially in parts of the world where water is less than abundant, can be, will be, and is the location of huge conflicts of interest. I also wanted to remind you that the struggle to control water is evidence that water does indeed belong to everyone, but in many cases belongs to those with the most power.

Water

2011-09-20T23:31:00.000-05:00

I took Stan to Santa Fe today to get his eyes dilated. He had me come along so that I could drive us back. I was really looking forward to seeing Stan in those ridiculous, dark black, cover-all shades. I was reading an article about water rights in New Mexico when Stan rolled out of the examination room, shades free. Water is a big deal around here. Real estate developments especially are putting pressure on a limited water supply. In other places of the world, corporations manage to buy up the rights to a natural resource that should belong to everyone, and then they manage it (or mismanage it) in whatever manner they deem the most immediately profitable, even if that manner goes against good sense, the consensus of the scientific community, and human decency. "What happened? Where are your shades, Stan?" No dilation today. But back to water...

This is the pump that Stan uses to irrigate his fields. Behind the house there is an irrigation trench. Basically, it's a man-made ditch that diverts water from the river Embudo to the small farms in this valley. Water from the Embudo flows into the ditch and downhill toward the farms. For those of you who are not into plumbing, I will cut to the chase: some farmers around here use flood irrigation, i.e. to irrigate their fields they flood them. Stan uses a system of hoses and drip lines. Thanks to the high-tech drip lines that run along his rows, Stan can irrigate his fields with the least possible amount of water. I asked him the other day how many farms the river Embudo could really support in this valley, and he told me that it could support more if everyone switched from flood irrigation to drip lines. Like I said, water is big in New Mexico.

I did not intend for this post to be about water; I intended it to be a photo dump of this farm that I am coming to love and which I will miss when I leave in seven short days. I drove home from Santa Fe with Stan's un-dilated eyes, unpacked the groceries and realized that for all my posting, I hadn't really even begun to write about this farm. Straight-away went out to take some pictures. Perhaps it was the article about water that drew me to the water pump; perhaps it was the sound of the water pump running (the first time since I've been here) that drew me to it. Or perhaps it was the film crew that pulled into this driveway yesterday in their enormous black pick-up truck to interview Stan for a film project about acequias: waterways. I didn't hover around for the interview, so I don't know what got said, but I do know what I think about natural resources in general.

The world can be a beautiful place, but if you think that there aren't massive corporate powers out there who care nothing for the livelihood of you, me, and our well being, you are completely naive. Too often, the people who fight and work for that which is just and good get labeled as political whackos. It is the case that we do get labeled, but it's not that case that we're whackos. The real truth is that there are a finite number of resources on this planet, and those resources belong to all of us. It is only through a complicated snafu of laws, power structures, and cultural indoctrination that rights to resources belong to those of us with the greatest ability to pay. That manipulation of mind is the greatest triumph of power there is. The wealth of the natural world actually belongs to all of us, but our laws, unfortunately, do not reflect this truth. Our laws reflect waste and greed. The only reason Dasani owns the water in that plastic bottle is because they put it in there. By buying that water, we confirm the law.

The Road to Taos, My Snake

2011-09-20T00:07:00.000-05:00

This morning me and Stan spread quite a lot of compost on the fields. Minus the 15 minute buttered toast break at ten o'clock, we spread compost for about four hours, from eight until noon. Then the solar panel guy bumbled down the drive on his crotch rocket around noon, and we had lunch. I panted through my sandwich. Stan breathed smooth as a one year old. "That's your cigarettes," he said, pulling a cool and easy breathe. I attempted a rebuttal. "I'm 72," Stan said, "How old are you?" I took his point. After lunch Stan took his customary nap, and I retired to the terrace to smoke. Post lunch, I stepped on a rattlesnake while harvesting sorghum. I'd been wanting to see one, but not like that. I jumped. I shouted "Holy Fuck!" Stan came out of the house, wondering what the clatter was about. I finished harvesting the sorghum. "You better write about that snake tonight," Stan chuckled. "Yeah, I can see it now: 'Dear Readers, I'm in the Santa Fe hospital...'" So that's my snake story. Enjoy the hot new video...

Spanish Cemetery

2011-09-18T23:10:00.001-05:00

One thing you learn when you come out to New Mexico from the east is that "Mexican," "Hispanic," "Gringo," and "Spanish" do not mean what they mean back east. In New Mexico, if you say, "I got into a fender-bender with a Mexican today," nobody will bat a politically correct eye at you. Mexican people live and work here, and, as far as I've been able to discover, they are Mexicans, not Mexican-Americans. That much is pretty straight-forward. What I haven't been able to wrap my head around, however, is the Spanish thing. The Hispanic people in northern New Mexico assert that they are Spanish, i.e. once hailing from Spain. The Hispanic people also identify as Americans―naturally, they are Americans―and like many Americans, many of them tend to look down upon Mexicans. Now, I haven't been in New Mexico long enough to understand the fine cultural nuances that separate (and unite?) the Spanish and the Mexicans, but I do know that national identities are often fraught, complicated unions of history, shame, pride, denial, and so forth. How much does cultural-national identity matter to the dead? I don't know. Here's a Spanish cemetery I found today.

If I'd come out here to photograph the crosses that punctuate the roadsides throughout this part of New Mexico, I would have been a kid in a candy store. I don't know if the roads here are more fatality prone than the roads in the rest of the country, or if the Spanish culture here is such that all road fatalities must be marked with a cross. Whatever the answer is, you can't drive more than a mile around here without seeing a decorated white cross on the side of the road. I took an afternoon excursion through the mountains today, passing cross after cross, and so, when I spotted this full-fledged cemetery, I had to stop. I am a sucker for faded plastic flowers.

Being a mid-westerner by birth and an easterner by the course of life, the sparseness of this cemetery struck me. I mean, where's the grass? To me, cemeteries are grassy places with big trees and, for the most part, the dead seem to be a comfortable distance beneath the surface of the earth. In this cemetery the mounds of dirt made me think that the coffins were right beneath the surface, not six feet under, but six inches under, as if the grave digger had gotten tired and decided to just lay the coffin on the surface of the earth and heap some dirt upon it. Clearly, another burial culture prevails here. Perhaps the topsoil is just not deep enough for deep burial. I have no idea.

Almost all of the graves in this cemetery are marked with crosses, not the headstones I'm used to, and all of them are decorated with faded plastic flowers (it's just too dry around here for live plants), but this grave marker stood out to me because (a) it's the smallest and most discreet grave marker in the cemetery, and (b) because the placard looks a lot like a highway sign. This isn't the only grave in this cemetery with a highway sign-shaped placard, just the most poignant one (to me) because it's tucked at the back of the cemetery, right at the bottom of the hill, and because it's adorned with a single, faded, pink, plastic rose. This cemetery is really just like any other: some of the graves are lavishly marked, and some are barely marked at all. The most important unifying thing, however, is that everybody is dead. That's what all cemeteries have in common. Everybody is dead.

Santa Fe Farmers Market

2011-09-17T17:32:00.000-05:00

The Santa Fe Farmers Market is huge. And it smells like roasting chilies. When we rolled into the market at 6 A.M. on the nose, one man in cowboy hat was already roasting peppers in an enormous, perforated drum which he was cranking by hand. Chilies are obviously big in Santa Fe, but to clear up any misconceptions you might have, in no way do chilies dominate the market. Not in the least. If anything dominates the market, at least at this time of year, it's tomatoes, but you can't turn your head without seeing Swiss chard, purple mustard, potatoes of every stripe, and even New England's favorite crop, kale. We sold the hell out of some kale this morning. Sold the hell out of some spinach, too. Stan and Rose Mary Crawford's small farm may be notorious for its garlic, and it may be locally notorious for the decorative garlic arrangements Rose Mary makes (they go for 30 dollars a pop when she's selling them and 35 dollars when Stan's selling them), but garlic is merely the star of the farm. There's a heck of a lot of other stuff, including concord grapes.

Those aren't actually all concord grapes (the darker ones are wine grapes), and this picture was not taken at the market, and nor do Stan and Rose Mary customarily sell grapes, but all over their personal garden hordes of grape vines climb on everything, and the grapes, which, for fifteen years have been food for the birds, made their way to market this week after I picked twenty pounds of them and found, on Stan's head, a receptive ear. If nothing else, we thought they'd be a charming addition to the stand. At three dollars a pound, selling all twenty pounds of them didn't hurt. Better than a kick in the ass. Anyway, more charming than the grapes are Stan's signs.

If one thing really sets the El Bosque Garlic Farm stand apart from the hundred plus other stands at the Santa Fe market, it's definitely the fact that the farmer is also a very well known author of fiction and non-fiction works about agriculture. And A LOT of the customers know this. I overheard shy customers saying, "this is the Garlic Testament garlic," and more forward customers saying "when are gonna write another book?" At the Santa Fe market, and really, in general, it's impossible to separate Stan the author from Stan the farmer, and the customers love it. The stand is peppered with quotes. I like this quite little one:

"Eating is an agricultural act" - Wendell Berry. Well, I don't know if this sign floats above the spinach every week, but it was my job to tack up the signs this morning (actually, they go up with velcro), and I wasn't about to leave this one in the box. This sign is why I came out to New Mexico. And Stan didn't make this sign just to create the writer-farmer illusion. Wendell Berry books are all over the farmhouse. Eating IS an agricultural act, and way too often (and for way too long) we Americans completely forget this fact. We like to think of ourselves as a post-industrial nation where microchips and Wall Street are king, where HD, flat-screen televisions, and Blu Ray are king, a country where it's almost sinful to have sympathy for the itinerant and often illegal agricultural workers who are everywhere in our country but who are so rarely seen, if only because they are squatting over a row of radishes with a giant-brimmed hats on, or because, more likely, we don't want to see them and so we don't. And so eating is not only an agricultural act, it's a political act, too. And this is what Stan's and Rose Mary's stand quietly smacks of. They've been farming their plots of New Mexico land in the traditional manner since 1971. At 72 and 78 years old respectively (and they deserve and get a ton of respect), it's pretty impressive to see them get up at four A.M., hop into a van loaded with organic onions, shallots, garlic, buttercrunch lettuce, Swiss Chard, Russian kale, bunches of arugula, tomatoes, peppers, and on and on and on. Each one of us eats every day, and those of us who eat good food, food that is good on the tongue and good on the planet, we owe that quality to the farmers like Stan and Rose Mary who get down on their hands and knees and do the work. And who nap...

About halfway through the market, Stan turns his chair around, a chair that he doesn't spend much time in, faces it toward the train tracks, and takes a 5 minute nap. Even when Santa Fe Express rolls through. Another helper at the stand told me: "Invariably, when Stan takes his nap, some customer will come into the stand and want to talk about his books." Stan lucked out today. That customer came about two minutes after his nap.

Homesick

2011-09-16T16:25:00.000-05:00

It took me all morning to realize that the blahs I felt while harvesting spinach, chard, and red Russian kale for the Santa Fe market were not merely the produce of an overcast sky, but a twinge of homesickness, too. I sat down after lunch and wanted to cry, but men don't cry. Men lace up their fancy Swedish shoes with their vegetable tanned soles and head for the hills to photograph stones.

This big stone is almost entirely covered in lichens. I have heard that some hippie deodorants are made from lichen...my mind certainly races toward under arm smell whenever I look upon a heap of lichens. Why, just the other day I was loitering outside of the local Y when the most hideously smelling man on the planet bounded out the front door, eating a raw onion like it was a cantaloupe. Not a moment later five or six entrepreneurial-looking long-hairs charged up to him with bagfuls of lichen. "Put some of these in your pillow, and you will never smell again." I almost vomited.

Don't know what kind of ants built this mound of gravel, but I like them! Normally very conversant with plants, I couldn't get one stinking word out of the piñons today. Picture me, homesick and a little hungry, squatting on the precipice of an arroyo, gabbing with a scrubby little pine tree no bigger than a medicine ball. "Hey brother...wanna smoke some weed? How 'bout a beer? What's that? Your girlfriend doesn't shave her legs? She uses lichen deodorant?" Not one lousy word. Piñon trees got the lock-jaw these days. A few years back some bark beetles wiped them out. The population is so focused on recovering itself, it has no time for idle chit-chat with a blogger who is a long way from home.

That's a piñon tree, where pine nuts come from. Not today, however. No pine nuts in sight. Not the season for pine nuts. Don't know when the season is. Don't particularly care. Ah, now the tree is talking. It's telling me that it doesn't care when my birthday is. "My birthday can go to hell? Do you know how that makes me feel?" Callous tree. Probably bitter because it couldn't get a date for the Junior prom. "Not the Junior prom, bonehead," says the tree. "Senior prom." Big whoop. Get over it. Don't you see how beautiful this place is?

So yeah, I had the homesick blues today. Had them, almost cried, took a hike in the hills. In summation: lichens, hippie deodorants, pig man eating onion, ants, piñon tree who couldn't get laid, disappointing lack of sidewinders. Wanted really badly stumble upon at least one poisonous snake today. Poisonous snakes cheer me up.

8 A.M. Shrub Rip-Out

2011-09-15T21:51:00.001-05:00

Yesterday was a wash. It rained all morning. I delivered 70 lbs. of onions and 20 lbs. of shallots to the Santa Fe co-op, came home—home, ha! home sweet home with Stan and Rose Mary: the ten o'clock toast break, the noon lunch hour with sandwiches and an apple, the 5 o'clock dinner, and after the dishes are done, the walk down to the rio Embudo and back again. Home. This is my home and my rhythm. Yesterday was still a wash. How come? It was something to do with removing 20 elm trees along a fence line the day before.

You see that row of marigolds? Well, all along the right-hand side of that row a bunch of weedy elm trees once grew (and will grow again). There was also a wire fence into which the elm trees entangled themselves. So the morning began with long-handled loppers. Lop lop lop, down the fence line I go, cutting back branches. Then comes the enormous clamp and the steel chain. Then comes the bare-handed removal of boulders so that the clamp can get a good purchase on the trunks.

A piece of farm machinery near the chicken coop. What it does, I don't know. I only included this shot so that you could see the fence posts, stripped of their fencing. No longer do they stand where you see them. They currently lean against the backside of the chicken pen. If you are one of those readers who requires video proof, you can push the little triangle button and see for yourself. Not yet comfortable enough to take full frontal video of the patron, Stan, you literati out there will have to content yourselves with the back of his head as the tractor upon which he sits tugs out with ease yet another elm tree. As for me, there is nothing I enjoy more than total tree carnage at 8 A.M. on an empty stomach while a famous novelist and non-fiction writer/farmer sits comfy upon a tractor seat. Oops. Do I grumble? Hell no. The tree rip-out may have rendered me totally useless the next day, but I had a blast. Fuck trees. Long live sore muscles!

Carrots, Bears, Dead Pigeons

2011-09-14T11:42:00.000-05:00

Last night I heard some thumping outside my room. This morning I noticed that someone had pulled my front license plate off. The plastic frame was broken and on the ground. The plate had been folded in half like a taco. On my way out here, right after I crossed into Tennessee from Virginia, a pigeon jumped into the road and I hit it with my car. At the next rest area, I fished most of the pigeon out of my radiator. Obviously, though, I didn't scrape enough of it off my radiator. A bear frequents this farm at night and eats lettuce. Could the bear have sniffed out the Tennessee pigeon rotting behind my grill? I don't know. The rain put today's work on hold.

Onions

2011-09-13T17:12:00.000-05:00

Apples and lunch are important around here. A typical lunch goes like this: bread, mayo, tomato, lettuce, mustard, relish, and a lunch meat appear on the table alongside the cloth napkins, plates, and knives. My cloth napkin is the red one. I've been dabbing the corners of my mouth with it since Saturday. When the sandwiches are gone, Stan puts an apple on a white plate and pushes the apple across the table at me. Two seconds ago Stan popped out the back door, said "how's the work?" I said, "I'm telling the world that you force me to eat an apple every day." After lunch today we boxed up 70 lbs. of onions and 20 lbs. of shallots for the Santa Fe co-op. Then we dragged an enormous, 200 lb. clump of cattails out of the septic pond, i.e. the pond that processes the home's waste water. With the pitchfork, I turned part of the clump with a little too much gusto and we both got showered with some unpleasant sludge. Here's the onion bin. Rather, one of them.

Today's hard work, however, was not boxing up onions or working on the septic pond; it was yanking out about 20 small elm trees with a big, toothy clamp, a heavy-duty chain, and Stan's Japanese tractor. The elms had inveigled themselves into a wire fence, and it became a situation that was no longer tenable. I took some video of the process, and I will post that tomorrow or the next day. Until then, here's the Japanese tractor. If you're into tractor brands, it's a Kubota.

Dixon, NM

2011-09-12T18:06:00.000-05:00

Dixon, New Mexico, population, who the hell knows. I certainly don't. A rough estimate: about nineteen. There's Josh and Taylor, Stan and Rose Mary, a couple ladies, and the dude who walks along the road with the scar on his forehead. I think his name is Donald Trump. I could be wrong. I'm a little pooped out from hoeing.

This is where I live now. Practically dead center of the shot is "the tower," a guest house plunk in the middle of the fields that Stan and Rose Mary rent to vacationers. That is to say, the tower is for rent, not the fields. When I arrived at 7:30 PM last Friday, the fields looked smaller than I'd imagined. I thought, "this is 'A Garlic Testament'?" It was sort of like when I went to see the Mona Lisa in the Louvre and found her encased behind panes of bullet glass and mobbed by Japanese tourists. Some things loom much larger in the imagination. That is, until you get down on your hands and knees with a bucket and a hand hoe, and start hoeing down the row. Perhaps if I'd been able to groom Mona Lisa's moustache, I'd have had a greater appreciation for her largesse.

When the mountainsides look like this, when this is what you see from the road, it's difficult to imagine that the bottom lands in the valleys could be all that productive, but we'll leave that to another post. On Saturday, while Stan and Rose Mary peddled their wares at the Santa Fe farmers market, I climbed the slope behind the farm to familiarize myself with the wild flora. About a decade ago I saved up $2000 so that I could travel to the south-west to photograph wild plants, but then Christmas came and my parents sprung a plane ticket to England on me. I ended up blowing most of that money on pints of ale and, I am not ashamed to admit, a healthy sum in a Soho (London) strip joint in which I tangled with the management for refusing to pay 85 pounds for sitting in a booth with a fully clad dancer. Make sure you read the fine print on those strip club menus, kids. Anyhoo...

In these hills there are piñon trees, the source of pine nuts. Or were. Apparently a few years back the double whammy of a beetle and some drought(?) wiped most of them out. What you're looking at might be a juniper, but like the population of Dixon, I really have no idea. (Stan later informed me that the population is not 19.) I guess I'm not much of a botanist after all. One thing I do know, however, is that, very nearby, there are some Pueblo ruins, so who knows...maybe I'll blog about an old school, Indian molar. Until then, here's the tarantula that I've been extensively emailing about. According to Stan, if you spot a tarantula in the hills, fall is coming.

Oklahoma Bible Thumpers

2011-09-11T23:57:00.000-05:00

Hey Everybody

I'm on the ground in New Mexico, getting acclimated, taking in the scenery and chatting like mad with my excellent hosts, Stan and Rose Mary Crawford. Rose Mary is an absolute joy and she loves tennis; Stan can do dishes faster than any many alive. The valley where they live and farm the land is abundantly beautiful, and you are abundantly beautiful for sending me here. Yesterday I had a run in with a fat tarantula. Pokey little thing had the nerve to waddle up to my camera when I bent down to take its picture. Tomorrow begins the farm portion of the X-Country Road and Farm Adventure. Until then, sit back and enjoy the old time religion of some hard-core, Oklahoma bible thumpers. I hated that state. Jono

Day Three: a conversation with President Obama

2011-09-10T12:11:00.000-05:00

My phone dropped a lot of calls when I was on the road, sometimes conveniently when I received a call but didn't want to talk, other times inconveniently when I wanted to talk. About an hour after I crossed the mighty Mississippi, I really wanted to talk on the phone but there was no service, so trained the dashboard-mounted camera on my mug and decided to hold a one-sided conversation with President Obama.

quick note

2011-09-09T15:58:00.001-05:00

Hi Readers

I made it to New Mexico. I crossed out of Texas about half an hour ago. Now I'm back at another, and hopefully my last, MacRonald's, scooping up their complimentary wii-fi. Video editing on the road has been tricky, but I'm still working on it. Days Three and Four are coming, eventually, probably soon. Until then, one shot from the road this morning, barreling out of Oklahoma City.

Day Two

2011-09-08T16:13:00.000-05:00

I'm at another McDonald's, this time in a small farming town outside of Little Rock. There's one piece of advice I can give you about long road trips and eating fast food: get one burger and nothing more. The guy in front of me in line just now had four sandwiches, a medium fry, and a full size drink. If you eat that much fast food while on the road, you might as well drive straight into a sidewall. Anyway, I can't babble too much right now because I need to make Oklahoma City by night. A little preview of of "Day Three," though: a phony phone call between Oilchanges and Barak. OK: here's "Day Two." Ciao!

X-Country Road and Farm Adventure: Day One

2011-09-07T10:35:00.000-05:00

I'm at a McRonalds in Wytheville, Virginia, having lunch This morning I woke up in a parking lot, a nice and dark one deep in the recesses of Blue Ridge Community College, somewhere between Harrisonburg and Roanoke. My bed's pretty hard and a little too short, but man was it sweet to wake up behind that college. It rained all day yesterday. Today, though, today is beautiful. I'm rolling through hard-core Christian land, where preachers on the radio talk about Egypt and the Pharoh, and where the secular right-wing pundits vent spleen against environmentalists. Wow. Editing video on the road is a little tough. Here's "Day One." "Day Two" is coming soon. Peace.

Dashboard-mounted camera

2011-08-30T18:59:00.000-05:00

The other night the old lightbulb in my brain flipped on and I had a vision of velcro. I thought I could easily mount my camera on my dashboard with sticky velcro tape. I thought it'd be as simple as a trip to WalMart. I was wrong. Nothing sticks to vinyl dashboards. Adhesive repellent vinyl dashboards are probably the greatest invention in history for parents with kids who cannot help but plaster the dashboard with stickers from the dentist, but they are not useful to X-Country Road and Farm bloggers who want kick ass road footage. I bought the envisioned velcro tape, but tape alone would not be enough. I had to "engineer" a solution with a plank of wood and some shims I made from downed tree branches. This X-Country Road and Farm Adventure Fun(d) Drive will be over tomorrow. The time to click the gas can is now. Until then, here's some practice footage I took with my dashboard mounted camera in Whatley, Massachusetts, where hurricane Irene did very little damage.

Thanks for hanging in there during the August-long Oilchanges X-Country Road and Farm Adventure Fun(d) Drive month. I will be on the road shortly. Jono

Bean Politics

2011-08-27T12:03:00.000-05:00

Last May I spent about five dollars on three packets of beans. It took me about 20 minutes to plant them, several hours to shell them once they were mature, and who knows how many hours to weed around them when the plants were seedlings. The yield? About two pounds of beans, black and anasazi. If organic dried beans command about $2.00 per pound at the supermarkets, and if "boutique" dried beans cost as much as $5.00 per pound at farmers markets, I might be sitting on as much as $10.00 worth of dried beans. Subtract the five bucks for seed, and you're looking at a whopping $5.00 profit. This is no way to get rich. So why do it?

Well, if you don't like the labor, you shouldn't do it. Most home gardeners work a plot of land that is too small for low value crops (like dried beans) to compensate their investment of time and, more importantly, the space the beans take up. The truth is that, from a dollars and cents perspective, there is absolutely no reason to plant and harvest your own shelling beans. I'm gonna dub them "pantry beans" right now, because mine are currently in my pantry, and they look fantastic in their jars. Does that make them more valuable? It does to me. I don't play the stock markets, and I don't have life insurance. I don't have dental insurance, but I don't drink Coke. Are we getting somewhere now?

I might be playing a fool's game, running this miniature farm in my front yard. Spending as much time as I do to produce food (and luxury goods like flowers). The market can easily undercut me. Time is money, but I still invest my time in the "profitless" enterprise of gardening and self-sufficiency. Why? The answers are many. Here are three: (1) The high quality food I get cannot be obtained at any grocery store for any price; the goods are simply not available. Not even the most high-brow posh brands can compete on quality. (2) The work gratifies me. When I tend my garden, I feel good. My garden keeps me interested in living this life. For someone prone to depression, putting a price tag on time spent in the garden is an impossible and foolish enterprise. Finally, number (3): beans are political. Anymore, I don't rant about the gross injustices of this world, but I do plant beans. I prioritize my time so that I can do what I intend to do, and I intend to run a mini farm in my front yard. Penny for penny, the massive food corporations can beat the pants off me. They can sell me a pound of dried beans for peanuts, but at what cost and to whom? If I replant a handful of the beans I harvested this year, next year I will know the entire arc of the beans I harvest. I will know the entire arc of their existence. The beans that tumble out of the bluk bins and into my baggie at the grocery store...I don' t know squat about them. I don't know who picked them, who shipped them, who hauled the heavy sacks of them on and off a bunch of trucks I don't know anything about. The point is that the food system is a system like any other, but also that you can opt out of it with each bean you shell.

Can I opt out completely? Probably not. Would I even want that? Is that even a good idea? Also probably not. But is it important, both actually and symbollically, to take the power back? You bet it is. That's the real value, and it's a value that's hard plug into a spreadsheet. And it must be this way. In a world driven by dollars and cents, by profit, the meaning of "value" is flattened out, it becomes, to use the term coined by Herbert Marcuse, 1 dimensional. Value has only one meaning, and that meaning is $$$. This is precisely what the powers that be want. They want their value to be more valuable than your value. They don't even want you to have your own notion of value. This why I plant beans: I don't like those guys; I think their value stinks.

Hello New Readers

2011-08-25T19:25:00.003-05:00

Welcome to Oilchanges.
Pop on your headphones and enjoy.

Keep your eyes on Oilchanges. I'm headed out to New Mexico this September to work on Stanley Crawford's famed garlic farm, and my readers are behind me! Throughout the month of August my readers donated $1600 to make this Oilchanges X-Country Road and Farm Adventure possible. Thanks to them, me and Oilchanges will be packing up the station wagon and heading out west to do some top notch road and farm bloggin', so keep your eyes posted. I'll be bloggin' all the way. Until then, check out the easy-browse archives at the top.

Cheers,

Jono

Activity Centre

2011-08-24T11:14:00.006-05:00

Yesterday's 5.8, Richter scale magnitude earthquake that wobbled a couple chandeliers in D.C. and made pin-flags shimmy up and down East coast country clubs probably meant zilch to the bees and other flying objects that buzz about the "activity centre" in my front yard garden. More and more, my garden is less about the food I take from it and more about the food and employment it gives to the native insect populations. Rather, I should say it's more and more about pleasure I take from watching the bugs, most of which are very cooperative (unlike some baristas I know) when I stoop down to snap a photo with my 12.1 megapixel PowerShot.

This is Henrietta. She's feeding on a zinnia. If you look closely, you can actually see her proboscis dipping into one of the flowers. One of the flowers? Huh? Well, I did not intend to launch into flower botany 101 this morning, but here goes: zinnias are compound flowers; compound flowers are flowers that appear to be one flower but upon closer inspection are actually a bunch of flowers. So, to be technically accurate, the actual flowers in this photo are those little yellow, trumpet-shaped buggers in the middle. Hence, Henrietta is dunkin' her tongue into one of them. I should add that Henrietta stands alone among the butterflies that frequent my garden. She sat still for numerous shots; most butterflies have ants in their pants. They don't sit still.

The honey bees, on the other hand, don't give a damn about me. I've poked them before with the tip of my lens. They just go about their business, a business that is just as serious as any I know. Don't tell a roofer that a bee works harder than he does, but the next time you see a roofer chucking an old shingle onto a garden, think it. One time I told a dude in the construction biz that the raccoon we were watching pick through a garbage can was "earning a living." This did not go over well. "Earning a living" was exclusively reserved for people, preferably people who sit in cubicles, pay cellphone bills, and pump gas. (Oh, gas...I'd nearly forgotten that we're racing toward the end of this Oilchanges X-Country Road and Farm Fun(d) Drive month. Click the gas can.) Anyway, we're all earning our living, even the plants.

This wild member of the onion family opened shop and immediately attracted customers. In this case, just this one honey bee, George. On both ends of the time continuum that surrounds this photo, George can be found extracting onion nectar from each of the open flowers. What's the price of that nectar? The onion shopkeeper told George that he could have the nectar if he would get some pollen on his body and move it from flower to flower. George agreed heartily. He carries his wallet on his fuzz. I have one last point I want to make about the activity centre.

I love a green lawn as much as the next guy, and if I didn't have a lawn to mow, by my calculation I'd be 14% less happy, so don't start thinking I'm a lawn hater, because I'm not. I'm a lawn lover. Still, though, lawns do come at the great expense of possible activity centres everywhere. My neighbor's house is exactly the same as mine: same layout, same lot size, same amount of front yard. His, however, is crabgrass. Mine's garden. His front yard is bug-free. Mine's bug mania. Mine's activity centre. His is go away. If your heart doesn't bleed for bugs, you might appreciate the human consequence of a crabgrass exterior. I have all sorts of neighbors that stop by my porch and shoot the breeze with me. I give them dill and flowers. They give me chicken manure and eggs and bottles of craft ale on my birthday. I don't know what my neighbor's yard and porch attract. A lawn mower, junk mail and bills. We share that base-line existence. I just personally think it's important to encourage a little community, from the bottom of the food chain up, by planting some flowers and letting some wild plants grow. The rewards are many and nice. According to the poet, A.C., I am my garden's "animal." I work for it, and it works for me.

D.I.Y. Home-Canning or "Screw You, Vlasic!"

2011-08-22T16:21:00.001-05:00

Yo yo yo, Friends and Fans, this X-Country Road and Farm Adventure Fun(d) Drive is rounding third and heading for home. Nine days left to scoop up the remaining $520, and then it's Goodbye Pledge Central, Hello Road! Until then, there's work to be done.

Fear is a huge part of our food culture. First time I canned spicy beans, I nibbled the end off one bean and immediately called my parents to warn them that I might be dead by morning. "Don't cry, Ma," I said, "Botulism's as good a way to go as any." I was in the dark and afraid. Fear is rampant in our food culture, and the giant industrial food producers love it this way. I'm not sure that The Man created this fear, but you can be pretty damn sure that he has zero interest in making you feel empowered. He wants you to think that P**si and Chicken nuggs are safe and that home canning is demonic. But it's the other way around. Home canning is glorious and safe. It's a helluva lot safer than driving. Check out this video, and then keep reading.

The Low-Down on canning high-acid foods:

You don't need any special equipment to can a few pints or quarts. You only need a big pot, some mason jars, some canning salt (which you can find at any grocery store), and some tongs to lift the jars out of the pot. You should also read up on home canning and use a recipe to make yourself feel more comfortable and confident with the process. It's really about the confidence: the confidence that you can make your own pickled peppers, that you don't need a monolithic corporation to do it for you. This is about wrestling power from greedy hands. Here are some basic things to do:

1) Do sterilize your jars and two-piece lids in boiling water for the required time
2) Do follow the recipe, especially when it comes to vinegar-to-water ratio of your brine
3) Do "process" your stuffed jars for the required time
4) Do watch those lids:

If the lids suck down and stay down, you're in business. Processing the jars in boiling water causes gasses in the jars to spew out. As the jars cool, a vacuum will be created inside the jar. Yes, the botulism bacteria, Clostridium botulinum, does require an anaerobic environment, which is exactly what you create when you process the jars, which is why you should sterilize your jars and process them for the required amount of time, i.e. to kill any bacteria that might be present. REMEMBER: the botulism bacteria must be present in the first place. If there are live cultures in your jars, you will soon find out. The bacteria will produce gas as a by-product of their existence in your jars, and thus the lids of your jars might bulge. There is some risk. THE REAL TRUTH, THOUGH, IS THAT THE PERCEIVED RISK OF HOME-CANNING IS MUCH HIGHER THAN THE ACTUAL RISK, ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU ARE CANNING HIGH-ACID FOODS. It's this artificially high, perceived risk that the industrial food mofos want. They want you to think that you can't can, because if you can't can, then you gotta buy their crap, and crap is what it is. Between me an you, we all know that the megalithic food giants don't give a flying f**k about us or our health.

Peace

Tomato Sauce (double video special!)

2011-08-19T10:43:00.001-05:00

Hi Friends and Fans

The switch-boards are bleeping and blopping. The gas can is 7/10ths full! Dennis, the floor-cleaning robot, spent the morning at the groomer's, getting his wires tightened and the ball bearings in his wheels lubricated. I spent the morning on the interweb, learning how to read and write html, to prepare this blog for the onslaught of new readers who will arrive shortly. When Oilchanges becomes a blog of note, thousands of new viewers will pour onto to it, and like you, they'll be expecting top notch content.

Hopefully they will like what they see. They'll be a little wet behind the ears; they won't know Dick from Harry or Tommy from Tortelloni. Not like you. Some of you have been coming to Oilchanges for three years now! I posted the video below on August 13th, 2008. Thanks for all the support and feedback. Remember to click the gas can.

Jono

Big News from Pledge Central

2011-08-16T18:42:00.002-05:00

Friends and Fans

I don't know what the weather's been like where you are, but around here it's been solid rain. But rain can't stop this X-Country Road and Farm Adventure Fun(d) Drive from moving forward. Oh no. We got some big developments here, real big developments.

On Saturday I started drafting a letter to a woman named Lisa D. who works for Google. Lisa D. is the one who maintains Bloggers' blog, "Blogs of Note." "Blogs of Note" spotlights cool and notable blogs. Thanks to your enthusiasm and donations, pledge central is buzzing. I drafted the letter and sent it to Lisa D. Your support inspired me to do it. Yeah, we still need to nail down the remaining 800 bucks, but guess what? Lisa D. wrote back to me and said they'd love to put Oilchanges on "Blogs of Note." What? Huh? Hell yeah! Thanks to you, Oilchanges is going big time. On top of that, I just turned down two contracts to teach English Comp for the profit-movitated behemouth corporate educational institution that I work for, so that I can focus on the road and the farm. Don't believe me? Check out this screen-shot!

That's right, friends and fans. I turned those contracts down ruthlessly. Mark my words: I'm gonna push this X-Country Road and Farm Adventure as hard and as far as I can push it.

Yrs, Jono

SAVE SEED!

2011-08-12T10:52:00.004-05:00

Hi Friends and Fans

The X-Country Road and Farm Adventure Fun(d) Drive is booming! We're twelve days deep, here in pledge central, i.e. in my cluttered little bedroom-slash-office, and we've already crossed the half-way mark, thanks to about 25 generous donors. The tech guru behind Flying Object converted my "tank you" postcard sketch into an Adobe Illustrator file yesterday, and so, in about ten days, that sucker will fly back to Flying Object as a couple tacky polymer plates. They'll literally be tacky so that we can stick them onto the Vandercook letterpress, print them with red and black inks on yellow postcard stock paper, and load them into my X-Country station wagon. I'm compiling addresses and planning my route, but it's not all pledge-logistics around here. Sure, the floor sweeping robot, Dennis, is still zooming around the switchboard, using his little hose attachment to clean the lights, and sure the odious business of being forced to fire Mike Velasquez for "sleeping" on the job is still a wound that smarts, but there's more to life than all of this. There's a mini farm to be taken care of, and it's the balancing act between taking care of a farm and taking care of one's letters that's behind this whole trip anyway. This is peak seed-saving season! Well, it's about to be, anyway.

Pretty soon, drying seed heads like these will drape from the walls of my apartment. During seed-saving season, plates and jars abound, all sorts of plates with all sorts of seeds on them and all the little jars I can get my mitts on. I cannot eat enough mustard throughout the year to meet my mini container need. Warning! I'm about to rip a page straight out of the Martha Stewart Lesson Book on How To Be a Cheese-Ball Blogger, but here goes anyway: last year I realized that I could solve my jar shortage problem by making attractive garlands. Above are last year's zinnias. Among all the other grandma sh** that dots my apartment, there is a giant tackle box of a sewing kit, and in that tackle box are some heavy-duty needles and heavy-duty thread, which is exactly what you need to make garlands.

If I had to label myself, I would put a sticker on me that says, "seed-saver, exercise caution." Last year something happened. On my walks around town I started to covet certain plants I'd see. I'd pass by in July, mind the progress of some giant red zinnias, and make a mental note to swoop by in another month to snip off a flower head or two. And that's exactly what you see above. The red ones on the left are from the corner of Union and Parsons; the pink ones on the right, I snatched those from some public street-plantings in downtown Holland, Michigan. Fortunately, in addition to my mom, my sister and my sweetie, I was with my proud-to-be-a-seed-geek brother-in-law, and so nobody minded too much when I whipped out my key-chain pocket knife and started snatching flower heads in broad daylight. Hell, I'd just be dragged through Talbot's! I had to do something to make the afternoon shopping excursion pay.

Here is a VERY STAGED photograph of Seed Saver Central, 2011. When I was home last winter for Christmas, which is something I absolutely dread, I picked up the Hooiser cabinet that has been in our family, hailing from my dad's side, since the Depression. All my life, it's been a junk storage area in one basement or another. (It also happened to be the area where my brother would hide his "friend's Playboys.") It's much happier in its new home, performing its frugal function, being Seed-Saver-Central. I was talking to it the other day, and it told me that it feels like it's back in the Depression again. "Ah, the Depression," it said. "There weren't any bionic legs back then." That's right, Hoosier Cabinet; it's hard times for everyone. Click the gas can to spread the love. Yrs,

Jono

waiting

2011-08-11T11:45:00.002-05:00

This morning I had a very strange dream. I was on a barge that a close friend of mine owned, and we were about to haul a shipment of chairs down the river. My friend piloted the barge, and I took charge of handling the crew, or rather, the guests; they weren't much crew at all. Early in the morning, before we set off, two guests arrived, acquaintances, and my hand brushed itself across one of their chests while I was explaining how the ship would run. This did not go down well, and doubt was cast upon my ability to be first mate. Other guests milled in and arranged themselves on a sunny deck. I established a new policy: in order to speak to the captain, the pilot, guests had to ask for permission to speak. Then we set off down the beautiful, snakey river.

I woke from my dream and went outside to view my garden. My tomatoes have been bothering me lately. I am waiting for them to ripen so I can turn them into sauce. The trouble is that they don't all ripen simultaneously. They stagger-ripen. I am not in charge of this ship. There are ways to "hasten" ripening, but it's not ripe tomatoes so much that I am waiting on; it's this trip to New Mexico that I have been plugging away at, calling the Oilchanges X-Country Road and Farm Adventure. I am doing all kinds of waiting lately.

I am waiting on two thousand dollars. As of this morning, we are at $950. That's very good. (Thank you.) Between me and you, this fun(d) drive has done all sorts of things to my psyche, to my family, my friends, my work, and even my garden. The support I have been shown has forced me, in the space of one week, to stop considering myself an amateur. The support forced me out into the open, a place where I am not entirely comfortable. I now must be able to deliver the goods, I must now be able to successfully galvanize the crew and get those goods downstream. Yesterday I had my way with the garden. The flowers and the tomatoes grew so much, I could no longer work around them. I'd been "letting my garden go" because, truthfully, it was vanishing with each donation, with each indication that my departure is indeed drawing near. I am more afraid of this trip than I know.

Tomatoes on the left, flowers on the right: this is the space that I crawled through, a couple posts ago, in The Marigold Murders. If you flip back to that video, you'll see for yourself that it was choked with weeds and overspilling plants. I'd let it go; all my thoughts trained on this fun(d) drive and on my big trip, I'd simply given up on my garden. But that won't do. I am still here. I am a little tired, but I am running the Oilchanges X-Country Road and Farm Adventure to the end, and I am still gonna make a boatload of tomato sauce. We are nearly half-way to our goal of $2000, and we have not given up. We can't. I can't. Two days ago it dawned on me that, because of this X-Country Adventure, I will be unemployed and without pay for four months: September through December. Scary. Exciting. I thank you for your support. Please click the gas can to get on board. Yrs,

Jono

Half Sour Sleepwalker

2011-08-07T12:04:00.001-05:00

Friends and fans,

Here's the latest news from pledge-central: Mike Velasquez, pledge master, drank too much last night. All that champagne he'd brought on Thursday, all 12 bottles of it...he drank those. I found him this morning, in the middle of pledge central, his headphones still on, passed out in the baby pool. In his right hand he clutched a little gas can keychain, and in his left, a champagne cork into which he'd carved, "Go Oilchanges! I can smell New Mexico!"

And it's true. Thanks to all the generous donations, the Oilchanges X-Country Road and Farm Adventure crossed the $800 mark yesterday (hooray)! That's 40% of the way to our goal of $2000. Thanks everyone. And now, ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy the latest Fun(d) Drive Feature Film, "Half Sour Sleepwalker."

Untitled from Jono Tosch on Vimeo.

   LIKE THIS VIDEO? CLICK THE GAS CAN!

X-Country Fun(d) Drive "Tank You" Letterpressed Postcard

2011-08-05T12:36:00.002-05:00

Oilchanges friends, family, and fans:

Pledge central is hot. Mike Velasquez rolled in this morning with three portable AC units and a kiddie pool full of party ice. I was like, "Mike, what's the party ice for?" And Mike was like, "To chill the champagne, bro."

Champage? At this early date? The Oilchanges X-Country Road and Farm Adventure is definitely rolling along. Thanks to nearly 20 doners, we've raised over six hundred dollars. That means that there are a lot of wonderful readers out there. It also means we still need to raise $1300. I just recieved an offer to teach two sections of comp for the massive on-line educational institution I work for, AND I BADLY WANT TO TURN THEM DOWN SO THAT I CAN FOCUS ON ROAD BLOGGING AND FARM BLOGGING!!! You can help me do that by clicking on the gas can.

In the meantime, to say thank you to everyone who has donated (and hopefully to everyone who will), I'm working up a thank-you postcard to post from the road. The post-card will be letterpressed on the Vandercook at Flying Object, the letterpress cooperative/multi-purpose space and independent bookstore in Hadley, MA. Here's a glimpse at my working sketch:

Sometime in the next week, I will head over to Flying Object to convert this pen drawing into a digital file that will then be sent to a company that will convert that file into a polymer plate, which will then be sent back to Flying Object, which will then be printed and sent to you from the road...to thank you for your donation. Here's the actual sketch, sans colors:

OK fans, thank you so much, and keep it coming. I always knew this trip would be educational, but I never predicted that it would teach me about pledge drives. As M. Velasquez is fond of saying, "Trips teach you all of what you didn't expect, and none of what you did." Cheers folks, jono

Mike Velasquez, Pledge Central Master

2011-08-04T10:13:00.001-05:00

Oilchanges Friends, Family and Fans:

It's a quiet morning here in pledge central. The switch-board is having a little snooze, and the floor-sweeping robot, Dennis, is back in his charger. I'm feeling reflective. I sat down at my desk to respond to some old e-mails from Michelle Obama (about Barak's gray hairs) (apparently the tough decisions he's making in Washington are too much for any hair coloring product to match)...and who rolled into my office but the man behind the plan, Mike Velasquez! That's a name that's probably unfamiliar to all of you, but it's a name you should know. See, Mike is behind this whole trip. You could call Mike The Engine of My Subaru, The Heart of Pledge Central, The Farming Blood that Roars through My Ventricles. Lemme fill you in.

photo of a "rio" near Stan and Rose Mary's farm

Mike is this adventure's throbbing river, the life-blood to its fields. Yes, Mike is a character I invented in a fiction workshop that Stanley Crawford led; and yes, Mike was, initially, a response to one of Stan's writing prompts; but Mike grew and grew and grew. Each week, Mike would appear in another short piece of writing. The semester neared its end, and Stan supplied the class with one last, crazy prompt. I have mislaid the prompt, but it went something like this:

You are aboard a bus bound for the annual AWP (Association of Writing Programs) Conference, when your bus is hijacked by a handful of vegan terrorists with colorful names and assorted mental peculiarities. Your goal is to write your way to freedom in under 500 words.

Well, I knew that Mike Velasquez was the man for the job. My classmates had come to expect big things from Mike, had come to love his hilarious incarnations, and so I packed up Mike's duffel bag and bought him a bus ticket.


one of Stan's garlic fields

For our last class, we all met in the basement of a cheesy pseudo-Mexican restaurant, the perfect place for our hero, Mike Velasquez, to really shine. We munched on chips and margaritas, and Stan told us that we had to vote for our favorite reponse to his prompt. There were three prizes and the winners could take their pick of the prizes. My classmates read their prompts, and then it was my turn, or rather, then it was Mike's turn. At the bottom of this post, you can find Mike's winning bequeathment to this pledge drive. Winning? Right, my/Mike's response to Stan's prompt won first prize: my choice of one of Stan's books. I chose "A Garlic Testament," a non-fiction account of growing garlic in New Mexico. I'd never read a single word of Stan's work before, and had Mike Velasquez not done his work, I probably never would have. But there it was, a free book about a subject I was interested in (farming), and so I read it. And then promptly invited myself out to New Mexico, to see, in person, these garlic fields:


Stan called this one "garlic harvest with brownies"

Click the gas can, folks. Thank you. And enjoy Mike's little romp (below). yrs, Jono

First of all, I did not expect Mike Velasquez to be on the bus.

“Well if it isn’t Mister booney fuckin’ bone bone,” he said to me when I boarded.

“Yeah, I’m mister boney bone bone,” I said. “Now tell me, where can I get a drink around here?”

Mike made a sweeping gesture that included every square inch of the extraordinarily long bus we were on and said, “A drink? This isn’t Vegas, knucklehead. This is the A-W-P-Mobile”—and here, Mike copped a mammoth Spanish accent—“and we’re headed to Ciudad Ins-Pir-A-Cion!”

“Ciudad Inspiration,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Never heard of it.”

I took a look around. There were about two hundred poets and one hundred and seventy fiction writers aboard, and they all looked sweaty, irritated, and uninspired. People’s clothes were sticking to them in the most cliché ways. A shy poet unstuck his skinny purple jeans from this thighs and said, “ick.” A fiction writer wearing a straw hat recorded the action in a notebook and clapped his hands together. “Brilliant,” he said. “Kinda great,” someone else said.

I’d picked up the line at Bonaparte Junction, and I’d left my patience pills at home.

“Listen Mister Battery acid,” I said, “If you think I fell off the banana boat yesterday, you’ve got another thing coming to you.”

“Incorrect grammar!” somebody shouted.

“Incorrect, but achingly real!” another voice resounded through the bus. I turned back to Mike.

“It’s not about what you think,” Mike said, “it’s about what you don’t think.” The bus oohed and aahed at his words.

I was completely flummoxed.

“So you’re dishing out big-time philosophy now,” I said, holding my balance nicely as the bus jolted to a start. “Not bad for an intellectual munchkin who used to wet his pants.”

Mike was unimpressed. I found my seat and sat down.

In the back of the bus two ultra-young poets munched silently on a humongous bag of pretzels. I approached them.

“What are a couple of degenerate wordsmiths like you two doing with such a respectable looking bag of pretzels on a clap-trap bus like this?”

No answer. I repeated myself:

“I said, what are a couple of degenerate wordsmiths like you two doing on this bus?”

A fairly well-established young poet craned around in her seat and said to me through her bangs, “They’re dead. It’s a troubling zoo, this life. We’re leaving them with their pretzel memorial.”

This produced an inordinately loud “here here” from all the poets aboard. I couldn’t understand it.

“Well fuck that,” I said, “I’m fucking hungry.”

I took the pretzels and devoured them immediately. The bus screeeeched to a halt. I was knocked to the ground by a first edition, signed copy of The Bell Jar, and then knocked unconscious by a braile edition of Moby Dick. When I woke up, Raynbo was holding a wilted piece of asparagus across my throat, telling me that if I moved one muscle, he’d turn me into a tofu pup before I could say hegemonic, white male, corporate oppression eats a dick!

“Is this an execution or a potluck?” I said.

“YOU PIPE DOWN OVER THERE,” Jared shouted.

Kriisten was running around the bus, checking notebooks. Instead of a bone, she had her hair tied back with a rib of celery. If she found a poem with a mention of animal product, she threatened the poet with one hundred years of sexual dysfunction and chronic nightmares involving suffocation by Big Mac.

That’s when Velasquez stepped in. The radical vegans who were holding our bus hostage had thrown a twenty-four by twenty-four foot needlepoint representation of a moose in front of our bus, thereby broken its front axle, and foreced it to a dead stop.

“Listen up, vegetable heads,” Velasquez shouted. “If you think versification is antithetical to the peaceful cohabitation upon planet Earth of man, plant, animal and sponge”—and here Velasquez mounted the crest of a sweaty bus seat, tottering but keepin’ his balance—“then my name isn’t Mike Velasquez and I’m not a would-be poet.”

Raynbo loosed the asparagus from my neck. Jared popped a couple Aderol. Kriisten rapidly removed the celery rib from her coif, licked it, rapidly re-inserted it, and Mike continued:

“What I’m trying to say is that eco-hostages and eco-terrorists alike can live peacably together, that tofu pup can exist peaceably beside hot dog, that hamburger can tango with sunflower patty, and that if we really want it”—and here Mike really raised his voice—“that if we really want it, veganaise and mayonaise can lounge, cheek by jowel, towel by moist towelette, together beside the great uncheckered pool of humanity.”

“Puff!” Raynbo said.

“Puff!” Kriisten said.

“Plllgfump!” Jared said.

And then there was silence. Helicopters swirled all around above the bus. I was just resuming full consciousness. There were nine or ten poets on the bus that I badly wanted to have meaningless and indiscreet sexual intercourse with, but Mike was still holding the floor.

“This is not about cock-blocking,” he said, “this is about living together and together fighting the corporate oppression that turns each and every one of us—flexitarian, vegetarian, freegan, hard-core pork-o-phile, halal, kosher, weekend baconista, ovo-lacto-pesci mixatairan and die-hard carnivore alike—into do-or-die, mixed up, pseudo-religious, quasi-mother fuckers with deep down hatreds for all things corpo that burn in our hearts, incessant and eternal.” Mike was really killing it now, and no animals but the great animal of the English language were paying the price. I took the floor.

“I think I just shit my pants,” I said.

Ranybo bent down and sniffed my pants.

“Confirmed,” Ranybo said. “We have an incident over here.”

Just then all of our cellphones vibrated at exactly the same moment, bringing us the news.

Osama bin Laden was finally dead. They did the autopsy and determined that he had died from bad breath.

"The Marigold Murders," an Oilchanges Fun(d) Drive Feature

2011-08-01T22:37:00.006-05:00

Hello again Readers and Fans

Today has been an exceptionally busy day, here at Oilchanges pledge central. The Endust is flying around the room, the Swiffers are zooming left and right, and, as the phone lines light up and the facsimilie machine roars, our enormous team of miniature maids and manservants is preparing the celebratory dolmas: gold-plated grape leaves stuffed with diamond mousse and suckling pig, eye-boogers. This is to say that we are five days deep here at Oilchanges pledge central, AND WE COULDN'T BE HAPPIER. With your help, we have already summoned 600 + bucks! That's 30% of the way to our goal of $2000. Thank you. (You know who you are.) To all of you who donated, and for all you new readers, please enjoy this OilChanges Fun(d) Drive Feature Film, "The Marigold Murders." If you like it, continue reading after it's over. I want to tell you all the backstory behind this Fun(d) Drive. But not now. Now you should put your headphones on and switch into full-screen because it's showtime! (Oh, and if you are reading this in google reader or something, click THIS.)

Untitled from Jono Tosch on Vimeo.

Oilchanges is heading out to New Mexico this September, i.e. me, to volunteer my labor on Stanley Crawford's farm in Dixon, altitude 6000 feet. Me and Stan planned this trip to his farm (I live in Massachusetts) early this summer after I read his excellent book, "A Garlic Testament." One quick email, and boom, I'd signed myself up to be a farm hand beside Stan and some dude named Miguel de Guanajuato. Caught up in my enthusiasm to take off and learn about farming from a master, I'd completely overlooked the fact that this trip, as important as it will be to my personal growth and development, could also turn into a major financial sink-hole. Bummer. Regardless, I decided to go forward with it. Furthermore, I turned down a number of on-line teaching contracts (I was gonna teach while on the road and on the farm) so that I could better focus on the work at hand: kick ass road and farm blog content. And so, for the month of August, I've turned Oilchanges into a revenue generating monster. We are doing pretty well so far, thanks to ten generous fans and readers, but we need your help. Please climb aboard. I will trade you top-notch road and farm content (not to mention awesome fun(d) drive content) if you pony up some gas $$$. Click the gas can in the upper right-hand corner and show the love. Thank you, all you beautiful people.

Jono

shellin' beans

2011-07-30T12:22:00.006-05:00

Folks, if you haven't already heard it through the grapevine, me and Oilchanges are hitting the road this September. We're packing up the station wagon, old-school family vacation style, and burning rubber down twenty-one hundred miles of American asphalt to finally plop down upon our ultimate destination: Stanley and Rose Mary Crawford's farm in Dixon, New Mexico, elevation 6000 feet. That's right(!), me and Oilchanges are heading out west to farm. Yeah, farm. I turned down a good teaching contract (one with benefits) in favor of a road trip to New Mexico, to volunteer my labor, side-by-side, for peanuts, in a field with some dude named Miguel de Guanajuato. (Stan told me to brush up on my Spansih.) This trip means a lot to me, a lot to my personal growth and direction, and it would mean even more to me if you could help me and Oilchanges out. Yeah, I'm hitting you up for gas $$$! I'll trade you top notch road trip and farm content for some gasoline. I don't know what sorts of characters I'll meet along the way (I'm gonna sleep in my car), but I do know I am devoted to turning my path out west into the best Oilchanges entertainment I can. Gas isn't cheap these days, but I have a paypal button! (See top right hand corner of this page). OK, shelling beans! Put your headphones on and enjoy.

a hill of beans

2011-07-19T14:35:00.001-05:00

A small one. A small hill, but my hill. My little hill. My little bean hill. Say hill too many times and it stops meaning anything. Hey Chuck, where's my hill? Do you know where Beth put my hill? Beth, what did you do with Chuck's hill? What the hell is a hill? I don't know. Beans beans beans. Was it a big mistake to plant them? One day I would like to plant nouns in the ground. Then the plants would spring up and throw hoops and diamonds into the air. I'd like that. Hill me up some hoops and diamonds, Gary, STAT!

So the big question all spring and early summer has been: will the beans I planted yield enough to be worth the real estate they took up? Whatever these beans are, I only planted one pack of them. The plants are looking dead nowadays. I started plucking their dried out pods this morning. That packet of beans amounted to something like eight square feet, maybe a bean hill more, and once I've picked and shelled them all it will amount to one good pot of beans, a good pot but not a heaping pot. One meal for two. Eh. Not bad, if you chuck in the fun, but also desperately below subsistence level! You can't hack it on a tenth of an acre, folks. Blah blah blah.

Here's the contraption I rigged up to finish my beans. See, they were still a touch moist, a teeny bit like hard rubber, when I harvested them this morning. I wanted them to dry out quickly, but I didn't want any animals to get at them, and I didn't want the sun to scorch them, but I did want air to circulate around them. These wicker plate coasters are the best! What a solution. Bean hill, bean hill, little quart of beans. You're gonna be super yummy when I return from New Mexico in the fall. New Mexico, you ask? That's correct, Oilchanges reader. Oilchanges is hitting the road this fall. Get on board. Keep your bean ears tuned to this blog. We've got big plans. Big plans that you can get behind. Uh, just remember what they say about beans: they give you gas. Well, you can start thinking of yourself as a bean and me as you. Yep, just keep your eyes on this blog! Later taters

the aroma of a roma

2011-07-14T10:38:00.001-05:00

This morning I pulled the t-shirt off my head (most mornings, around eight, I put a t-shirt over my head) and thought to myself: It would be cool if you could text an aroma. I wasn't thinking about the aroma of a roma, of its leaves, the pungent dark smell; I was thinking about my two-day-old crock of pickles in the basement. I wasn't sure who'd I text an aroma to (probably not a cousin) so I opened my computer which happened also to be in my bed. The good thing about sleeping with a computer, I thought, is that they never steal the covers. I opened it up and facebook told me that today was the last day to call Heather Christle to hear her read a poem from her new book, The Trees, The Trees.

Heather read me a poem about someone in a balloon, way up in the air, so high that all the people below look like placemats to him. Or her. For me, it was me up there, looking down on the world. We chatted a bit and hung up the phone. Then I started looking for Ernie, my coffee mug. Ernie was where I left him. Now there is coffee in him, and I cannot remember where that was. I am completely without anything to say about romas today. I am free today! When I purchased these plants, I had no idea that their fruits would be so long and slender! This photo is now about a week old. That's the thing about tomatoes: they only get bigger.

I also didn't know that these plants would make tomatoes with little nipples on their ends. They are also quite fleshy. They are mostly wall. Not much cavity. Speaking of cavities, have you been to the dentist lately? You should go. You can read magazines while you wait. There are certain classes of magazines you never see in a dentist's office: poetry magazines come to mind. Is this because people who care about their teeth do not care about poetry? But do I care about poetry? What about my teeth? In the future, dentistry will be practiced exclusively by text message. You will put your phone into your mouth and a dentist in Bombay will text, "drilling." "Spit." "Bite down."

Well, I just went outside in my boxer shorts to get a fresh photo of the romas, but a little sweat bee suckling on my zinnias bit me in the back of my left thigh, so I decided to take a picture of my zinnias instead. They are finally blooming. The bee who stung me is smaller than the pink bite mark on my thigh. That means if I bit a horse, I could put a pretty good dent in him. I should do it before my teeth fall out.