लोवे Focus on Love.

Put the needle on a little Ornette.

Ornette Coleman Trio plays "Golden Circle," Stockholm, 1965.
Sounds like people tryin to stay warm.
Like creating an insulating bubble just big enough for that particular club,
for those musicians and that audience's open ears.
Great music to write to.
Right Now's perfect album.

I've realized, far more often than I find comfortable, that I'm not nearly as pissed off as I maybe should be. Or I'm just not writing when I'm pissed off. Or I'm getting distracted by the minutiae of my irritants and losing sight of the overarching injustices that I really oughtta be attacking.
And then not writing about it.

See, I've been having these godawful nightmares about the eventual, emotionally-vampiric visit of my now-mother-in-law, singlehandedly the meanest, most manipulative, psychically damaging/ed person I have ever met.
And I've spent jaw-dropping afternoons with lifelong Klansmen, fer chrissakes.
Those hooded monkeys ain't got shit on Hurricane Beverly.

There are circumstances that prevent my flat-out forbidding her from ever interacting with us again, circumstances too sacred for me to even consider contradicting. That may be why most of my dreams this month involve killing her in really slow, clinically involved processes.
Since murder isn't exactly something that appeals to me outside the realm of desperate fantasy, I'm left with this painful little dilemma, this trying to figure out how to "take care of" this awful woman without allowing her to run roughshod over me or, more importantly, Otter's and my relationship.
Cause Otter's and my thing is way too special to allow anyone to try and tinge it with anger, resentment, malice, backbiting, verbal manipulation, goading, spying, accusation, guilt trips, lies upon lies upon lies upon lies! Or, y'know what? Jeezusfuckinchrist, we're just too goddamned volatile to be bathed in anything but Love and our own Righteous Indignation.
...and Duck Fat.

...mmmm, duck faaaat.

The things that we fight, the institutions we speak against, and the ideologies we try to expose are quite enough negative bullshit in our lives.
Our home is where Love lives.
It's where we regenerate.
It's not where we're martyred.
Not even by his Mama.

So, I'm all wound up in the tiny personal details of this Bundle of Insidiousness who insinuates herself into our lives so often (if she comes down anywhere close to XMas, it'll be three, three times in six weeks), and I'm losing/have lost sight of the Big Picture. Assuming there is one. And if there ain't one, I intend to paint it.

The Big Picture is nestled somewhere deep in our hearts, is breathing in the air around us, is dripped from every palm leaf, is in the throat of every little Anole that follows me around the garden. The Big Picture in my life, in our lives, lies in our ability and desire to help those less fortunate than ourselves. We are remarkably capable of feeding people's bodies. We are also able to feed their souls, whether by birthright or fortunate upbringing (my mama, his daddy, both beautifully conflicted, warmhearted, just, and altruistic individuals), people seem to find us, to seek us out, and to gain some sense of joy and wellbeing from hanging out with us.
I know why.
I don't know why.
I know if I look it straight in the mouth and try to define it, it'll lose some sort of Power in its own awareness of itself.
...
My Mama told me once, several times, that I will not be able to effectively help anyone else if I do not take care of myself first. I rejected this piece of wisdom for a lot of years. It sounded too much like the All-American "Look Out for Number One" mentality that has destroyed so many, many lives. But the more I tried to help people without taking the time to help myself, without setting up my own sacred little parameters for personal growth and safety, the crazier and angrier I got.
The more resentful.
The more self-destructive.
Until it finally occurred to me that destroying myself would pretty much insure I'd never be able to help anyone again, ever.
How's that for a waste of a perfectly lovely life?
...
(turn the rekkid ovah)
...
So, I know this thing with Otter is the most beautifully, ridiculously sacred thing I've ever run up against.
I know that, between the two of us, we can help a hell of a lot of people, including each other.
And I know that, when his mother's in town, his heart beats hard like a train comin full tilt down a rickety old wooden bridge.
I know that when she stays with us, he feels caught in the middle of her hurricane and my planet-sized meltdown.
I know that when she's here, I don't sleep worth a shit.
I know that we fight more when she's here.
I know that, when she's here, our house is not a home, much less our home.
We have no sacred space.
We have no privacy (she peeks when we're sleeping and goes through our things when we're away).
I haven't stood up to her because I don't want him to have to choose between us ('cause that's just fucked up, folks, let's face it).
He won't stand up to her for the vow he made to "take care of" her.

Thing is, I made a vow, both to my Mama and my brother, to the ghost of his father, that I would take care of him.

I don't generally make promises.
I certainly don't vow anything or take sacred oaths.
Honoring that sort of thing is way too important to trust to my flaky ass.
You make promises, you'd better fuckin keep 'em, so I don't make 'em too terribly often.
But two weeks ago today, I made a big one.
I looked my Mama dead in the eye and told her I'd care for this man until one of us dies.
I promised my brother.
I promised the portrait of Otter's dead daddy that hangs on our wall.
I promised him.

The thing between us and within us is our Big Picture. It is nebulous and vaguely defined.
But it is solid.
It is Holy.
And it is the most fantastic gift I have ever been given.
The most fabulous opportunity I have ever been offered.
It is the beginnings of everything toward which my life has built.

It behooves us to redefine the parameters of that "taking care" commitment.
We need to nurture ourselves in order to nurture others.
I'll be goddamned if I know how to do that, but we'd better figure it out, and soon.
'Cause she'll kill him if we don't.
I can't let her do that and honor my vows to him at the same time.
I don't take those vows lightly.

Premonitory Anecdote

A gentleman at the bar last night, by way of good wishes for my upcoming marriage, told me this tiny story about his parents:
-----------------------------------------
"My parents have been together for 57 years.
They met in grade school & crushed on each other,
became sweethearts in high school,
got married as soon as they could,
and have been together since.

"Recently, Dad told Mom that if she dies first, he couldn't see it being more than two weeks before his own heart gave up and he joined her on the Other Side. Only slightly kidding, Mom said,

"What on Earth could you possibly have to do for two weeks?"
-----------------------------------------

What a wonderful thing.
Makes my skin crawl with recognition.

Four days 'til the Weddin.
See you soon.

All my love,

rd

Betrayed by the FBI; Saved by the Vegetables

...FBI, in this case, stands for Food-Borne Illness,
the bitch that's been riding my back for the past 24 hours or so.

I thought it was the tequila, but I didn't have much at all; like, four shots over the course of several hours. Realistically, that ain't shit. Even on an empty belly.
What the tequila did contribute to the evening's debacle was my tipsy mortal weakness in the face of a meat-laden, rubber-crusted pizza from Papa John's. Oh, lordy. Within three or four hours of ingesting a couple pieces of that stuff-that-claims-to-be-food, it was rocketing forth from my mouth at a velocity that'd make the Cape Canaveral kids blanch with envy.
Terrifying.
How can they say that stuff is food? I mean, it's (barely) edible, sure, but it has the ability to turn the palate into an absolute wasteland, the gut into a chemical testing ground, and the body into one's own worst enemy.
It's fuckin poison, man.

Goatheaded gastronome that I am, I determined to make myself some real food, whether or not my body agreed, and somehow force myself to keep it down.

First off, by way of scene setting, my sweetheart and partner, the guy with whom I share a kitchen, is a really fuckin awesome Cajun cook. Like, not a pretender to the cuisine, but a real live Cajun by birth and blood, a gentleman who was makin' roux on his daddy's stove at age 5. That said, there's not much besides meat in our fridge. And, ohlordgawd, there was no way in hell I could keep anything resembling meat inside my body after 18 hours of vomiting.
Not even his beautiful duck.

I was getting suckerpunched with nausea every 5 or 10 minutes so didn't feel like risking the bike ride down to Waterfront Market for some fresh veg. Everything had to come out of what we had.
And did I ever need vegetables. And broth. Vegetables and broth. Yes.

We always, always have onions, garlic, carrots, and jalapenos, those comestibles whose fortitude is fortunately stronger than their timid aging. Sauteed those with a little dried thyme (out of fresh), some cayenne and allspice, a bay leaf and a few cracked peppercorns. Added a quart of water and cooked it all down to Flavorful. In a separate little sauce pot, I had dried black-eyed peas, water, and a couple cloves of garden-grown garlic, cooking to creamy softness.

Otter came home in the middle of all this, after a long-assed day in the kitchen. Poor darlin was so tired and, after watching me chop, stir, stir, hold on to the counter and try not to puke, stir, stir, wobble with nausea, etc., he began determinedly trying to skooch me away from the stove so he could finish making my meal.
Sometimes, even if it looks like I couldn't possibly be having any fun whatsoever, sometimes gripping the counter top and supporting my weight with a wooden spoon in an effort to take charge of my own sustenance is exactly what I need for my well-being.

I shooed Otter back with both a threat to disgorge on him and a promise to ask him for help if I really needed it. I added a couple of hurricane-emergency cans of Ro-Tel to the vegetable broth, smashed the pea-simmered garlic cloves with a spoon and tossed the whole mess into the soup pot, and then rough-chopped some on-its-way-out spinach and tossed that in, too. Yeah, I think that was about it. Oh, and good sea salt. Of course. I would've loved some fresh corn and okra, but y'know...for being on the cusp of projectile vomiting the entire time, I did pretty well.

And actually, the soup got Otter's approval.
Otter, who is suspicious of any dish without meat.
Otter, who thinks vegetarianism is some sort of mental disorder.
Otter, who cannot talk about "vegan food" without snorting.
He not only ate the soup (with a few extra jalapenos), but wolfed it down and was surprised it had so much flavor.
Vegetarian and vegan food is not as awful as most people make it.
In fact, veggies are the only thing my tortured digestive system didn't hurl back against the wall. This simple little soup took a few minutes longer (including swoon time) than ordering and devouring I'll Eat It If I'm Drunk pizza, but it actually contributed to my well-being rather than detracted from it. And I'll be goddamned if it wasn't tasty enough to warrant kudos from a carnivore. Hell, yeah.

राप्टर Return of the Turkey Vultures

Ohmygod, they're back!

The magnificent, graceful, utterly awe-inspiring turkey vultures are back.

I've been awaiting their return since March.

Otter saw a couple of 'em yesterday, but forgot to tell me about it. This morning, while out picking philodendron and papyrus starts from the yard, I saw a bird shadow pass me. A really big one. Then two more in quick succession. I raised my eyes and had to have been looking at about 30 or 40 vultures in flight, circling right over my little neighborhood. Nearly hyperventilating, I called Otter to tell him that I'd spotted turkey vultures, and lots of 'em. When I got off the telephone and went back outside, the vultures had been joined by about a dozen short-tailed hawks, all of the raptors circling past and through each other, the hawks's 3-foot wingspan looking positively diminutive next to the vultures' impressive 6-foot reach.

Their numbers continue to grow.

I'm popping back outside between every sentence or two to keep an eye on the birds. There are easily 50 or 60 vultures and maybe 2 to 3 dozen hawks up there at the moment. The cats are keeping low down. The chickens are fussing at their clutches, trying to keep their children together and hidden and as safe as they can be, under the circumstances.

The vultures, though...oh the vultures!

They slow Time.

They pass through Space like no other bird, as if they had claimed these patterns and passages long before humans ever even thought to notice Sky.

They are Divine, not just in their aesthetic magnificence, but in their utility as carrion eaters, as ferrymen for the Dead. They are absolutely awesome, in the weightiest sense of the word.

They are beautifully, wonderfully, jaw-droppingly perfect.

---------------------------------

"...and the Signifieds butt heads with the Signifiers,

And we all fall down slack-jawed to marvel at words,

When across the sky sheet the impossible birds

In a steady, illiterate movement homewards."

-Joanna Newsom, "This Side of the Blue"

----------------------------------------------

I sing this every time I see the vultures.

Every time.

When I've got a head full of pomposity and narcissism, I watch the vultures;

watch them do the things we are too squeamish and self-important to do;

watch them gracefully and unselfconsciously fulfill their genetic proclivities;

watch them make it look like God.

Thank You, Keep It Comin'

For You Who Are Happy & Relieved that Otter and I have each finally found someone as magically, beautifully, deliciously broken as we each are,
For You Who Want to Contribute something to our ridiculously joyous marriage,
For You Who (sadly) Cannot Be Here,
And for You Who Cannot Imagine What We Could Possibly Need,

We've set up a little wedding registry with the few things we need and want for our home.

It really comes down, mainly, to Reference Books and Children's Tales,
to Music and to Cash (much needed to assist both our move to New Orleans and our temporary flight out of the country).

We desperately Love You and Thank You from the deepest reaches of our palpitating hearts.

I Love Bitches

Aw, damn.

It's been so long since I've been able to hang out with educated women, who are just as beautifully angry and vociferous as I am, that I had forgotten just how much these women mean to me, how much courage they give me to continue my shitstarting, instigating, hopeful (if achingly gradual) reformation of the US' dominant sexist/white supremacist paradigms.

I stumbled upon Bitch Ph.D. today and am so utterly, completely grateful that this woman is on the face of the earth and that she writes so prolifically and so well.

Bitch Ph.D., I love you.

And thank you, with all my heart.

Aching for New Orleans

Oh, I am aching to move.

For a girl whose sense of self-worth rests largely on her ability to help people in some meaningful sense, my life in Key West is becoming more than a little depressing. Sure, I'm feeding people (always always always), but it's largely the wealthy, or at least the Wealthy Enough, those people who can afford to vacation here and drop several hundred dollars on dinner. When I'm painting for a living, it's painting the vacation homes of these same people, or painting businesses that cater to these folks. The catering business that Otter and I are starting up will, of course, cater to people with disposable income enough to pay several hundred or thousand for an inclusive meal in their own weekly- or monthly-rented domiciles. I mean, it's great that we can fill needs and niches, but...

...I know there are people out there who are hungrier, who are in more desperate circumstances, who need us far more than these priveleged sojourners want us. I also want to do more than just feed the hungry, y'know? I want to participate in the mycoremediation of New Orleans' soil, so damaged and diseased after being submerged in sewage for several weeks. I want to start guerrilla gardens all over town, not just for their beauty and edibility, but for their ability to brings bright spots of hope into places decimated by man and nature, abandoned by those elected to help them. I want to take Alice Waters' super-awesome Edible Schoolyard and try to duplicate it in other sections of New Orleans, bringing kids in close contact with the life cycle and their intrinsic part within it.

...For all my talk of wanting to do more than just feeding people, it's funny how all the stuff I wanna do just leads back to feeding people or helping them feed themselves.

Food is a beautiful thing.

Growing and sharing it is even lovelier.

Punkin!

We carved punkins at the Chart Room last night. It was far more fun than I had suspected it would be. I nursed a Neptune-sized snifter of Grand Marnier throughout the evening, accompanied by a squash-crazed Otter and an unnaturally calm Rubber Pig, who mostly stood watch over my drink.

This is the punkin Otter and I carved together. It totally shoulda won. Instead, the Dia-de-los-Muertos-lookin' one that I did placed third, and that's it. Otter's super-awesome punkin-with-folial-acne didn't get anything, and it was the most original one I'd seen.

So, if we're using a rubber chicken and gut-thick fake blood and squinty eyeballs in our punkin carving?

How could that not place first?

Seriously.

That's my punkin on the top, far right there. I loves me some teeth.

I always forget, though, what a pain in the ass it is to do all of those without destroying the face of the punkin.

...But goddamn, that is one happy cucurbit.

Otter.

His punkin.

Its follicular foliage.

I didn't get a single photo of this one that didn't cut off some part of its leaves or flowers.

It was really, really dim in there.

And I was really very drunk.

Too inebriated to be handling giant knives and antique icepicks, I'm sure, despite the exponentially raised Fun Level brought on by excessive inebriants combined with dangerous tools.

In retrospect, I'm surprised any of the photos turned out at all.

Painted Tits & White Guys with Cameras

For all the breasts that UStian males are exposed to, from every marketing firm on the planet, you'd think they'd know how to behave themselves when confronted with a pair of tits encased in an airbrushed "costume" and not much else.

Well, if you would think that, you would be dead fuckin wrong.

Key West is at the end of its much-touted Fantasy Fest, a celebration wrapped around the island's motto of "One Human Family," a festival intended to allow people to be/act as they really are, without fear of prejudicial treatment or arrest. It's like a mini-Mardi Gras without the historical backbone to hold it up and lend it credence. I mean it's a nice party and everything, but...

Seriously, dude, what's with the obsession with women's tits?

Please don't misunderstand; I love breasts as much and as contradictorily as most UStians, having been tutored, from the day I was born a girl, both in breasts' amazing qualities of form and function and in their absolute profanity, according to the also-obsessed Holier Than Thou churchmen, politicians, and etc.

Tits aren't the issue.

The Issue, the thing that completely and totally creeps me the fuck out, is the way the vast majority of UStian males behave when confronted with boobies made of real, live flesh and blood.
You wanna talk about watching a rapist-mob mentality, barely held in check by some dim, far-off awareness of the realities of jail?
You wanna talk rabid voyeurs with a sense of entitlement?
Watch a buncha drunk, white, US-born-'n'-bred dudes with their shiny digital cameras, turned loose in a festival that is one of the only places in this sanctimonious, self-righteous country where a woman can go out of doors, as topless as a man, without legal recrimination.
This week, anyway.

Okay, look,

1) Why the fuck am I, a woman, not allowed to walk outside without covering my tits?
Seriously. What the hell is so goddamned profane about my lovely, freckly breasts, especially when opposed to Shirtless Businessmen on Holiday, those bloated and pasty examples of UStian excess? I'll tell you what's profane about my tits: not a goddamned thing. It's the guys' preternatural fetishism that's profane. I have to cover up my sweet-creamy boobies only because the Boys are afraid they won't be able to control their dicks. And you can get, like, jail time for that.
Sometimes.

It's the same old argument:
"I wouldn't have raped her if she hadn't been wearing that hot little dress.
"I wouldn't have been spying if she hadn't forgotten to close the blinds.
"I wouldn't have followed her down the street taking photographs of her if she hadn't been outside without a shirt on."

Which, of course, brings me to the second query:

2) Why the fuck are you guys following these women down the street taking photos?
No, really.
What the fucking Fuck?
Don't you see how parasitically predatory that shit is? What the hell makes it okay, in your puerile excuse for logic, to grab a woman, a near or total stranger, and whip her around to face you so you can film her tits undulating? Who the hell are you? How disrespectful, how unforgiveable would that be if someone did that to your mom? Your sister? Your wife, girlfriend, grandmother, daughter?

I mean, Mister Old White Dude? If you get a girl to both expose and let you photograph her beautiful ta-tas, and you know you're gonna be jacking off to those same photos later? Muthafucka, you owe that girl some cash.

I am not fuckin lyin, either.

See, without that monetary exchange, your behavior is something I call Stealing.
That's what I call Taking Advantage.

Regardless how much your ridiculous indoctrination has eroded women's sense of self-worth,

Regardless how willing we are to allow you, a total stranger, to photograph parts of our bodies, knowing full goddamned well what you will eventually do with those photos, because we have come to see our bodies as being worth so fuckin little,

Regardless how innocent you have led yourself to believe you are in this ancient power dynamic,
You're still taking something from someone and giving not-a-goddamned-thing in return.

Steeeealiiing.
Cheating.
Lying from your eyeballs down.

...But, whatever, you're like, just another white guy, right?
That's just the kinda stuff you ignorantly priveleged white guys do.

...Man, what the Fuck is Wrong with you people?

Fantasy Fest Bar Notes ...or... Our Fest-Obsession and Puritanism Are Obliterating Small Town USA

At the Parrot.
Saturday night of Fantasy Fest week.

Brought food (delicata squash stuffed with andouille spicy rice, topped with a little bruschetta, toasty pecans, and parmesan; sweet pickled beets and peppercorns on the side) to a beautiful friend who's working a double, right in the thick of the crowds and parade.
Sat here at the back bar with the same friend and watched parts of the bodyart contest, which basically consisted of a buncha old white dudes taking photos of women's tits.

My beautiful friend told me how she has watched Fantasy Fest evolve, over the past 8 years or so, from an artsy, costume-float-frivolity-focused occasion into an event populated by middle-aged swingers lookin to see some tits and maybe, maybe get lucky with someone besides their own wives. While empathizing about the pathetic debauchery that is rapidly coming to signify the Key West Experience, it occurred to me that this same progression seems to happen to every place or event that is able to bill itself as some sort of bastion of freedom. ...Freedom, I say. Not that All-American crap that tries to fit in Freedom's underpants.

Maybe too many people found out about Fantasy Fest.

Too many people whose lives are otherwise totally constrictive.

Too many people craving an anonymous outlet for their Not So Deviant deviant behavior.

Too many people desperate to shake loose the Manacles of Propriety that they themselves helped fashion.

...................

It's pretty disheartening and more than a little disturbing.
...Y'know, the more I think about it.

....................

So, which is the next poor town or festival to fall prey to Ustians' flight from their own Puritanism? How will these (Our) towns and festivals pay for the privelege of being centers of openmindedness?
Will we pay with legal sanctions on/against our festivities?
Will we pay with our vibrant, living communities' eventual conformity to our country's mediocre standards?
Will we trade our neighborhoods and small businesses for the Big Box's cunning conveniences and contaminated comforts?
Will we pay, in effect, with the same qualities that made our towns and celebrations such wonderful destinations in the first place?

Birfday Barfday

Today is my super-awesome brother's 31st birthday. I will get to see him in a very little less than two months, when I'll squeeze him 'til stuff comes out.

Happy Birfday, Shane! You'll always be taller and more amazing than I, but I'll always be able to feed you well and knock you on the floor laughing.

I fuckin miss you, dork.

...and, y'know...I totally love you and stuff, too.

Big Ol' Cycle

man, this death stuff is heavy this week; the moon's getting darker.
this is part of a letter to my brother, d~, dated 24 august 2006. i'd forgotten it had been over a year. how did i forget?...
...feel all weird posting this, self-indulgent as all hell, but...sometimes that ain't so bad. -rd


on another note of longing, my amazing, ornery, foul-mouthed, big hearted, "darlin-i'll-always-keep-a-cowgirl-hat-for-you" texas grandad just died monday; his funeral's today. i am so fucking heartsore i can hardly breathe these mornings, too fed up with death and dying and suffering and missed opportunities and untold stories and lost links to other perspectives that i deeply treasure. i'm fuckin heavy with love that has lost three outlets this year, and with grandad it lost one of its main arteries. oh, d~... if ever there were a year to learn how to mourn and how to survive.... goddamn it. it's been 5 years since i've seen grandad. five motherfuckin years. i never wrote, never called. couldn't bear to hear his robust voice made small and flat by telephone lines. couldn't bear to try and write all the stuff i only know how to say with my eyes, to try and waste all my splendid vocabulary on a man who had no time for such things, who only had time for gut feelings that are too big for words. he was the first grown-up man i ever loved. ever. he was the first one to ever tell me i could do anything boys could do, that i'm just as smart (if not moreso) than boys and not to let anyone ever tell me different; he was the first one to lay out so many truisms in such plain language, language no one else i've known has been able to match: "just cause a boy's got a pecker don't mean he can tell it from his brain." he stood up for me to my dad. he wrote to me every year on my birthday, these past few always asking me to come and see them when i got the chance. ...fuck! fuck, Fuck, FUCK! and today they're putting him in the ground. today, six feet of earth step up to close the bridge that death first set afire. oh, d~, my heart wails a ululation as deep and slow as the very earth's rumblings today; i cannot separate this sorrow from the immense, unstoppable river of all humanity's woe. jeremy and jason's deaths were large rooms in my house burning down; grandad's exit is fully a third of my foundation rattled loose and crumbled beneath me. i don't know where to stand. i haven't been able to tell anyone about this, outside my housemates i mean, who were there when i found out. it's like i don't know how to say it. i don't know how to say "my grandad's dead" without it sounding small and insignificant, without belittling the enormity of its impact on me, without making it sound like just another body has passed from the earth instead of one of its titans. grief is a growling like no other hunger. i feel like a goddamned seive, full of holes, my love and perpectives and reasons for actively living, draining and changing, eroding down to nothing so that i might have room to rebuild them. ...at least, that's how i'm dealing this year. today, though...

today my bones cry.

Death? This is Doxy...

Every now and again, I am drawn along a necrophilic path of curiosity that never fails to uncover the most amazing observations of humans' relationships with Death. The woman to the left is from the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo, Italy. I have as yet been unsuccessful in gathering any other information about her. The Capuchin tombs are listed, along with the Sedlec Ossuary in Czechoslovakia, the necropolis of North Ossetia, and the burial sites of the Tana Toraja in Sulawesi, in a little article on humankind's most impressive extant tombs.

Further down this morning's path of beautifully confrontational mortality, please behold Kittiwat Unarrom, an artist who absolutely caramelizes my little bread baker's heart. In his shop in Ratchamburi, Thailand, he fashions the most heart-stoppingly realistic representations of (bits of) human bodies...out of bread. I read a blurb about him in Juxtapoz several years ago and only yesterday found this little video of the gentleman working in his shop. It's fuckin awesome.

Uhmmm, lessee...more dead stuff...

Yes, of course! The inimitable Sarina Brewer of Custom Creature Taxidermy has stitched together the most enchanting little capricorn in the whole wide world (and it's even blue!). Ms. Brewer's a naturalist with what appears to be a deep reverance for life, beginning to end. She deals with death by honoring the already-dead (roadkill, etc.) with beauty and immortality. I totally have a crush on this woman for both her aesthetics and her pragmatism; would that more people could see like she sees.

Another amazing artist in the necrophilic realm (and another girl, oh my palpitating heart!) is the taxidermist of A Case of Curiosities. She's done some chimerical physical illustrations of 18th and 19th century Russian, French, and German fairy tales. ...I'm talking real kittens in princess dresses here. Secondly, she's got a really lovely piece on exhibiting human corpses (mummified or taxidermied) and its longlived status as social taboo.

Yeah...,

Yeah, Death has been on my mind again, as she is during life-changing and -challenging spaces. I'm getting married, and so it is perfectly natural that my preternatural obsession with our inevitable quietus should resurface now, now, now.

My awe-inspiring brother D~ and I were recently discussing awareness as it applies to personal mortality. Knowing, or at least being pretty goddamned sure that we will eventually die, we agree that it behooves us to be as aware as mortally possible up through the very last moments of our lives, to be awake, in the most naturally esoteric sense, down to our very last inch. I have, of course, been reading about this awareness stuff through my whole life, through teachings of christ/buddha/mohammed, and etc. However, all my efforts at willful awareness, through meditation and the like, have proven pretty fruitless. The only times I have been really, truly in my skin, in my every breath, in whatever I have that feels like a living soul, are times when I have deliberately put myself in the way of Death:

Skydiving. Cliff-jumping. Formerly ingesting and insulflating massive quantities of potentially mortally harmful chemicals. It's like...

It's kinda like doing psychomimetic substances, specifically organic ones. Mushrooms, for example, always make me hyper-aware of beauty. When I'm up for a fungal, kaleidoscopic afternoon, colors seem brighter, more vivid, more like themselves. Ditto all organic shapes, smells, textures, tastes, and on and on. They help me remember how the world felt when I was a little, little girl. Y'know, back when I knew everything was made of magic way, way older than god.

Lovely as hallucinogens are...well, frankly, hallucinogens are tools, are means to an end. They are a cut-to-the-chase way to kick my brain out of its entanglement in the short-sighted day-to-day quagmire that we pass off as Reality with a capital 'R'. Visionary plants are not solely for recreation; they are not toys. They are keys to the doors in our own perceptions, our own realities. I take, have sporadically taken for years, mushrooms (and their organic cousins) to show my brain what it feels like to be open. 'Cause, y'know...sometimes I forget. The goal, though, the goal is to eventually be at a point where I can see Beauty for what it is all the time, without any additional help from the plant kingdom.

And it works.

Not quite like LSD does; I don't have uncontrollable flashbacks or disorientation. I don't suddenly see giant dahlias in my sautee pans or hear the cats talking to me (they do that all the time, anyway). It's way gentler than that.

I just perceive more. I actually notice season changes, even the super-subtle ones to be found here in the subtropics. I am much more prone to stop and smell the frangipani than I was before taking mushrooms. I observe and appreciate life. I know that the reward for occasionally sitting and watching the daily drama that takes place among the tiny anole lizards in my yard will far outweigh the "lost" time I could've spent doing something more industrially productive. I remember that this stuff, the unending performance of all living things, is actually important, each timeless moment of it, for reasons that are prohibitively difficult to articulate to the consumer-minded. And, difficult to explain or not, I am a hell of a lot wealthier for it.

So, back to the Death thing, I like to do stuff like skydive and cliff-jump and whatnot because these also function as tools to help my brain learn how it feels to be really, really present. While circling up and up and up in a little Cessna just built for jumping out of, Death is sitting, in all but physical form, right next to me, thigh to thigh. And lordy, is that girl grinnin! I've gotta be cool, gotta be calm so I don't do something stupid and panic-driven that might endanger myself or the pilot or the jumpmaster. Thus, it behooves me to look over at Death, acknowledge that she's got a job to do and know that I cannot stand in her way if it's my time, then just grin at her sweet and sideways, and give her a little flirtatious wink that says, "See ya at the bottom, baby; I'm goin for a ride!"

It seems to me that...well, that Death likes to give her blessing if you approach her humbly and mischeviously like that, y'know? And when I jump? Once I have come to that understanding with Death? I have absolutely nothing to worry about. Nothin. No future. No past. No grocery lists or social obligations. For all I know, I may be dead in a couple of minutes, and these sky-high, spellbound moments may be my last; I am sure as hell gonna live 'em. Peacefully. Thankfully. Joyously.

I will be Here.

Death is Birth is Death is Birth. Ain't nothin to be afraid of. In fact, I'm invitin 'em to my weddin. To all the events of my life, great and small.

All of the people I mentioned above?---the baker, the churchmen, the taxidermists and the preservationists?---all of them are working with their chosen charges in ways that pose a kind of anathema to our whitebread, plasticene, fear-based, UStian ideals concerning mortality and our relationships to Life and Death. In doing so, they absolutely honor us by gently, beautifully showing us what we fear to see: the immutable frailty of Life, and our heartbreaking, heartswelling connection to every single aspect of it.

How fuckin gracious and aware is that?

atlantic betrothal

swimming in fort zach's atlantic, while feeding fish and disturbing cephalopods, i became unequivocally betrothed.

i am absolutely ecstatic.

check out alligator death roll on today's date.

Fuck You, Kitchen!

I may have made it out this time.

F'real.

I'm painting for income and loving, loving, loving it. I have absolutely no emotional attachment to it. I can come home with a clean conscience. I am not prepared to fight to the seeping marrow for my "painting ideals." I am free...

I am free to cook, to bake in the ways I believe are right and true. Free to feed people--all people, not just the few who can afford it--as I believe they should be fed: with love.

So, fuck you, commercial kitchen! I hope I don't cross your path for a good, long while.

Guerrilla Food Wars

I read in "Restaurants & Institutions," a culinary trade magazine, that 52% of US consumers, aged 25-34, would "prefer to use convenience foods instead of cooking from scratch," "even when time is not a problem."
This disturbed the hell out of me: over half of UStians my age would rather not cook for themselves or their loved ones if offered a plastic-wrapped alternative.
How fucked up is that?
Do people remember how to cook?
How to sustain themselves without the help of corporations who lean toward profit rather than nutrition?
Do their tongues even know the difference between real and mass-produced food anymore?
To the last question, I present this observation:

To combat the oppressive heat and emotional simmering of the kitchen where I am employed, I started making ginger syrup for homemade ginger ale. Fresh ginger + sugar + water, cooked down to a thick, strong syrup, then mixed with soda water and a squeeze of fresh lime; it's absolutely refreshing. On my favorite prep cook's suggestion, I mixed the syrup with Seagram's ginger ale (loaded with high fructose corn syrup and artificial flavor) instead of soda, and was told by most of my coworkers that these new drinks were even better than the original, unadulterated product. My tongue being what it is, I wholeheartedly disagree with them, but that's a little to the side of the point. The point is that most of the cooks in this fine-dining establishment, cooks whose palates are daily exposed to high-quality ingredients, to better quality methods of preparation (food mills vs. giant mixers, hand-chopped vs. food processor, etc.) still craved the chemically enhanced taste of factory-produced soft drinks. We're not talking people who don't know better. We're not talking about folks with no other frame of reference than fast food. We're talking about fucking professionals whose job it is to know true flavor when they find it.
And, y'know,
...they didn't.

Inga Muscio offers this illustrative example in "Autobiography of A Blue-Eyed Devil":

"An old woman in Mexico was given a tortilla-making machine. It was explained to her how it works, and how much easier her life would be if she used it, and how much more convenient it is than forming tortillas by hand. She wanted nothing to do with this machine, and the person who gave it to her tried to patiently explain that she was being ignorant.
"The old woman sighed deeply.
"She patiently explained that her life, love, thoughts and memories all go into each tortilla she makes. It is this that nourishes her family, and the tortilla is merely a vehicle through which this nourishment is absorbed into the bodies of those she loves and feeds. A tortilla machine made no sense to her because it would separate her from the act of making tortillas, which was the whole fucken point of making tortillas.
"So who, exactly, is the ignorant one in this story?
"...You are what you eat, and when our entire culture eats mass-produced, machine-made food that is rarely, if ever, touched by caring human hands, it is no wonder that there is little compassion and respect for our food, our world, and one another."

Yeah.
What she said.

Why is this trend as ubiquitous as it is?
Better yet, what the hell can we do to stand in the face of it?
To threaten it?
To turn it back?

This isn't just the US.
Not by any imaginative means.
Cradled within the NAFTA contracts is a (UStian) law that destroys and prohibits collective, indigenous farms (ejidos) in favor of US-style agribusiness. Whole communities are now unable, by law, to feed themselves, their families and communities, in the ways that best nourish them. Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista movement refers to this as "a death certificate for the Indian peoples of Mexico."

The new Iraqi constitution, also handed to them by the US, prohibits Iraqis from using seeds that they have saved from previous harvests, demanding instead that they purchase their seeds from companies like Monsanto, companies that have trademarked seeds bred by generations of Iraqi farmers. Stealing people's livelihood and selling it back to them for exorbitant profits, at the expense of entire, ancient, tried & true means of survival. This is not only colonization, 21st century style; it is part of the New Slavery.

Along with rape, I believe that fucking with people's foodways is about the most destructive, invasive, soul-killing method of imperialism practiced on this planet. It is absolute physical and psychic murder, drawn out over generations, that will result in wide-ranging cultural genocide. And the thing is, we UStians, the ones who are exporting this shit all over the world, were the real test subjects for this brand of indoctrination. We didn't always eat the crap we currently tell ourselves is food. We didn't always eat like this. At the ripe age of 32, I am one of the only people of my generation I have ever met who was raised on home-baked breads, home-grown vegetables and fruits, and self-slaughtered animals. I am one of the few people I know who has a pretty damned good idea where my food comes from. I know what real food tastes like, although my taste buds generally suffer in this regard, living as far from any real farms as I now do. Too damned many UStians have never had this culinary luxury.

Maybe we are no longer able to see how our food choices impact our lives and the lives of our progeny, the lives of the animals and plants with whom we share our great blue-green home. Perhaps we are unable to see how our dietary proclivities affect our minds and elusive spirits as well as our bodies. We don't receive proper nutrition from boxes, regardless what those boxes advertise on their exteriors (low fat! low cholesterol! high in nutrients and vitamins!). Our bodies do not absorb chemically manufactured vitamins as easily as when they are naturally occurring in our food. For example, we are obviously better able to use the Vitamin C found in fresh oranges than we are in orange-flavored chewable vitamin-pills; so why do we, as a nation, so often choose the latter over the former? Are we so goddamned lazy that peeling a fragrant, dribbling-down-our-elbows, pop-juicy orange is too much trouble for us to handle in the middle of our workday? Are we so hopelessly inured to our truly meaningless, wage-slavery jobs that we cannot take an extra couple of minutes to care for ourselves the way our employers never will?

Have we forgotten, collectively, how joyous eating can be?
Have we forgotten that joy is necessary to our evolution and survival?

This is an opportunity for guerrilla warfare on a domestic scale if ever I've seen one. With agribusiness not only flooding our grocery stores, but also whittling our food choices (both in product and production) down to a Lesser of Evils decision, growing our own food, or paying our neighbors for their willingness to grow real food for us, is tantamount to sedition. I believe it is a choice that will bring heavier penalties from the corporate-government as time goes on; a choice that may one day require us to pay with our lives and/or livelihoods, much as it now does in places like Mexico and Iraq. If we're not brave enough to stand up to our government and its corporate henchmen (or is it our corporations and their government henchmen?) over basic things like healthcare for all people, equal and adequate pay for equal work, or the ridiculous breach between monetarily rich and poor peoples, then maybe, maybe we can find it within ourselves to at least stand up for dinner. Quit making excuses, start scrubbing our brains and palates clean of the pap we've been fed by people who don't give a shit about us, and do a little something that
might
mean
everything.

Find the space. I've grown tomatoes and herbs in buckets in my bedroom when I didn't have gardening space. There are tiny strips of dirt in every urban area, just begging to be brought to life. Herbs and vegetables, especially all kinds of lettuces and greens, will grow in the tiniest of spaces, with the tiniest bit of care.

Make the time. How cool would it be to just push back a little dirt with your fingers and plant some seeds leftover and dried out from that awesome tomato you had on your sandwich last week? Or that cool-looking cucumber you saw in someone's trash? How hard is it to do this in a little weed-patch on your way to work or school, somewhere you pass every day? How good would it feel to actually care for something that will in turn care for you?

Find the space, find the time, find the heart still beating in your chest---
y'know, the one that still cares?
The one that isn't totally jaded and Over It?

It feels So.
Fucking.
GOOD!
to bring your own food to life!
It feels even better to be able to grow enough to share with a friend, whether that friend is human or animal. And fer chrissakes, preparing food for ourselves doesn't necessarily mean dragging out a bunch of pots and pans, dirtying plates and forks and counter tops; it can be as simple as plucking berries from a vine or fruit from a tree. I am faaar more satisfied with simple snacks of found-food than I am with anything taken out of ecocidal plastic and reheated in a cancer-causing microwave. Done and done. It is high time...hell, it's long past time that we extend an effective middle finger at the forces that try to stiflingly rule us. They're not gonna listen to us, no matter how loudly we shout or how pointed our protest-sign slogans. We've gotta do something meaningful. Take back what no one has ever had any right to take from us. We have got to relearn what food IS and how it is us, from seed to waste.

52% of a population is a scary statistic.
That's a lotta people done been brainwashed into thinkin they can't care for themselves,
or that caring for themselves is best left to someone else.
To this brainwashing, I say,
"Pffft!"
We're smarter than that, damn it!
Way smarter.
And we deserve better.
We all do.
The whole crazy mess of us.

Now, how best to disseminate that knowledge through a vast population of people too nervous to hear the truth of their own bodies....

The Bile Piles Higher

I either have time for the briefest of notes, or I have time to write a novella.

Welcome to my see-saw.

Yesterday the 'chef de cuisine,' someone who was once an ally (I thought), engaged in a completely unprovoked, very personal, verbal attack against me that very nearly turned physical.

Kudos to me for avoiding the assault train.

I was in the bakery, back to the room, beating egg whites with a frenzy, when I hear this chef say "Are you done fucking over my friends?!"

What?
Is she actually talking to me?
Jeezus, she is talking to me.
What the fuck is it this time?
I thought she was in a good mood today, and I could slip out largely unnoticed as soon as my work load was finished.

Wrong.

She has apparently set it in her mind that I am in league with the Devil and have been doing my all-fired best to screw over everyone she knows. Her initial question, followed by my repeated queries of "What are you talking about," followed by a string of accusations of a purely personal sort (I've gotta stress that through this whole confrontation, not a single word about my job performance was uttered), quickly escalated to her pointing at me and yelling, "Fuck you! Fuck you!"

At that point, I realized that this was never going to evolve past vituperation into an actual conversation, so I started packing up my things to go. For the record, I never leave my necessary jobs unfinished, so, y'know, I was pretty upset. I've worked straight through 14 hour days, with a vomiting migraine, without leaving my work undone. However. I had told the executive chef, last time this happened, that if it ever occurred again I was gonna walk. Fair's fair. So, I get almost all the way out to my bicycle before I realized I'd forgotten to clock out. I returned to the kitchen and clocked out, with her sending up high-school style taunts of "Oh yeah, that's a good idea, fuckin clock out, you stupid bitch."

Fed up, tired, and...well, just fed up and tired, I sighed, "man, fuck off" as I was walking out the door. I heard her behind me, heard her anger building in her voice, say, "What did you just say to me, you little bitch?" as she's stomping, trotting, running up the ramp behind me. As she exited the kitchen, 10 feet behind me, in full chef's whites, she yells in full view of incoming clientele, "Do you wanna fuckin GO?!"

"No, Martha. No, I don't (just keep walking, get on your bike and go, go find Niki or Otter or anyone who will let you be calm and help you think)."

"Fine, then! Get the hell outta here! And don't come back!"

sigh.

Now, the fucked up part was (yeah, more fucked up than all that), she waited until everyone had exited the kitchen to unleash her vitriol...everyone except the three illegal immigrants who work with me, the three people who could never in a million years stand up for me in any legal sense because to do so would be to endanger their families and their livelihoods. She did that the last time, too.

Diabolical.
Absolutely diabolical.

I talked to the head chef on the phone, after I had calmed down considerably, and briefly explained what had happened. He's such a sweetheart, and I truly love him as a fine and very funny, warmhearted human being; he is also even more averse to confrontation than I am. When he told me he'd "try to get to the bottom of this," I understood that she would likely run roughshod over him the same way she does over everyone else. It's a lose-lose situation.

So, now, right now, I'm looking at the clock, know she's done "working" and is outside drinking at the bar by now, and I am absolutely sick at the thought of having to return to that place. Absolutely sick.

I'm looking for alternate employment, but, let's face it folks, this is the off-season, the hurricane season, when most places are shuttering up for the first few weeks of September. Ain't nobody hiring right now. My weekly checks are a full $500 less than they were in the winter months, so it's not like I've got a big ol' pile of cash to support me. Otter has a lovely new job, but he, too, took a massive cut in pay when he went to a smaller, more "respectable" restaurant. I mean, we'll get through. It's not like we're in a war zone, not like we're in Mexico having to kowtow to NAFTA-endorsed slave labor. We can still feed ourselves and we still have a roof over our heads (and a rare-as-emeralds sweetheart of a landlord). We have a wide base of beautiful, wonderful, openhearted friends who have shown their willingness to help us in whatever ways they can.

...But, goddamn.

Goddamn.

I think I've shown myself to have some pretty good willpower, some no-small-power to put up with a lot of psychically damaging nonsense, but...

...but goddamn.

I'm holding monetary struggle in one hand and my sanity in the other. I know what's most important to me. But how many other people are gonna have to pay for my decision? Otter, of course. But also the executive chef, who will have to take on all my baking work until they can find another freakishly-rare baker/pastry chef (and why is that? why are bakers so goddamned rare when bread is, and has always been, the acknowledged Staff of Life?). How many people have to pay for my sanity?

I say, goddamn.

Whatchoo Eatin?

Proposed introduction to Otter's and my joint food history/education project:

This project is an endeavor to educate ourselves and each other about the stuff we all eat.
This isn't to suggest we all eat the same stuff.
Not by a long shot.
This is to suggest that, amidst the gamut of worldwide gustatory experience, we do crash into each other's mouths a lot more often than most of us think.
We are related by a whole string of culinary coincidences, a zillion different people peppered along a chain of sociopolitical, economic, religious, you-name-it events in which food has often been our only common bond.
What we aim to do is illustrate how we're formed and connected by a very basic, very necessary understanding:

We need to eat.

The Ways and Whys and Hows of our eating proclivities are the places where all the really interesting stuff comes in. Those are the places that teach us about each other and ourselves. There are old folks and young kids and everyone in between, scattered all over the globe, who are inventing new ways with food and/or sustaining ancient traditions, many of which are rapidly disappearing in our "free-traded" world. We love learning about, and challenging, sacrosanct truths concerning food and diet, and some of the best ways we've found to do that is by, flat-out, asking questions of absolutely everyone about absolutely everything food-related. We encourage you to do the same.

Hell, we demand it.

We love food. We absolutely, passionately adore flavor. We will eat damned near anything and are attracted by everything from home-grown vegetables and wild-gathered fungus, to alligator backstrap and duck-stuffed Javalina. When it comes right down to it...

We just love to eat,
We love to feed people,
And we love to learn about food:why we eat what we eat.
Salud.

Come on, Hurricane!

There's a hurricane headed our way.

At the moment, it's a tropical storm, goes by the name Dean. By the time it gets here Monday or Tuesday, though, it should be the real deal, a Category 3 or 4, if the meteorologists are to be believed. Of course, it may bypass the Keys completely and just head to the interior of the Gulf of Mexico. Yeah, 'cause New Orleans and the Yucatan totally need to get hit again.

The impending storm has finally managed to give us a break in the hordes of gawping tourists that plague Key West year-round. We island-dwellers are doing all the regular preparedness stuff: stocking 20 gallons of water per person (though that can hardly be enough the way Otter and I drink and cook), gathering candles, checking all the shutters for both windows and doors, dragging potential projectiles (lawn chairs and tables, and etc.) inside, making sure the genny's in good working order and has plenty of fuel and that we've got propane for the screen porch stove. Of course, we also have to make sure we have sufficient amounts of our chosen inebriants, good books we haven't read, games to play, and a 5-gallon bucket of lubricant.

Just in case.

Wait, wait, wait...the two of us, shut in for a few days with just enough power to keep food and cook it? Baby, that ain't nearly enough to keep us occupied. There's gonna be a lot of drinkin, smokin, and fuckin, and not too much ambient noise to shield my yelling from the neighbor kids.

Come onnnnn, hurricane!

Forgiveness.

See Alligator Death Roll for today's date.

चंगे Willful Evolution

Man, it's crazy how fragile human emotional webbing is.

Just finished reading "Bastard Out of Carolina" by Dorothy Allison, and all my will to go out and see Otter at work, to see Niki rock her Hairstiks at Mallory Square, to do anything but mourn the cursed relevance of that book to my own experience, just kinda got swept out with the tides I won't be swimming in tonight. Lord almighty. I squirmed and fidgeted, put the book down and smoked a bowl to stop my nervous, ghost-encounter tremors. Yeah, the story mirrored enough of my own childhood that I was nearly derailed by the Flashback Memory Train...

...but it was more the idea of another living human being having to go through that bullshit, more the idea of another unfinished child being forced to mature like that, so lopsided and hardened, so broken by force and mended by will alone, that drove the meaty, bruising fist into my belly. Oh, what an aching thing.

I decided a long time ago that I could either be victimized by my experiences or I could learn from them and make myself grow strong enough to never let them hurt me again. Strong enough never to hurt another person out of some backhanded effort to get back at my own past. Sounds easy enough, but, y'know, it's a daily decision-making process. A willful reformation of one's own ethos. I am still, a thousand years and a million miles later, affected by the virulent rage that accompanied my maturation, still feel like fighting at the slightest provocation, still am afraid to get too drunk or too wound up because that fire is still in my belly. Though I have learned to control myself most of the time, though I have learned to soften my brow and loosen my muscles, though I have learned to express my rage through more effective means, to meet anger with love and find laughter in slaughter,

The fire in my belly still burns.

Goddamn it, it burns.

I do not desire children of my own, indeed I fear for any offspring of my body, but I am fiercely protective of other children. Protective of children, animals, any who are not able to defend themselves effectively against unsought pain. I vacillated from wanting to destroy absolutely everything to wanting to destroy the people who think like me. Like I used to think. Like, some days, I still do.

Mama taught me, forever ago, that the only thing I can change with any certainty is Me.

Both my parents were beaten, lacerated, bruised, and just outright abused when they were children. When I developed language skills, my erstwhile father naturally assumed his parental role as household tyrant, raining down the verbal, emotional, and daily physical abuse that he suffered in his youth. Mama, on the other hand, realized how fucked up it was to have the people you were s'posed to trust treating you worse than the dog got treated, beating and cursing you like the meat they wish they'd never met, and she decided never to do that shit to her own kids.

She didn't always succeed, from what she's told me.
More than once, she laid her hand across me and meant it.

But I don't ever remember her beating me.
Never.

I remember her getting mad sometimes.
After I turned 11, I remember her being really tired a lot.
Tired in some place in her head that I couldn't touch.
Somewhere I couldn't help fix.
Somewhere that was probably my fault.
Maybe...

I probably had that same look myself.

...

It's pretty astonishing to me to hear people excuse their aberrant behavior with the phrase "I can't help it." Like that just fixes it all up and makes it just another shitty hand we all gotta play as best we can. Like there's nothin for it.

Baby, back the fuck up and look at yourself:

The shitty hand you got dealt was your bigoted community.
Was your manipulative, vindictive mother.
Was your hard-drinkin, fist-swingin father.
Was your sexually abusive grandfather.
Was your lack of family.
Was your lack of history.
Was your abject poverty.
Was your minority status, by sex or pigmentation or economics or religion or whatever.

The Way You Play Your Hand is the way you choose to conduct yourself in spite of what you've been dealt. The way you play is by trying to find and create honor in dishonorable circumstances.

To create love where there is too little love to sustain you.
To obviate violence with compassionate action.
To find peace deep in the very eye of chaos, deep within the bones of your ribs.
To reinvent yourself as only
You
Have the Power
To Do.

It's maybe the hardest thing you'll ever do. It'll keep you busy all your long life. But, y'know...

You're it. You're the only one. You are the only person in the whole wide world who can teach you to be the most rock-solid, fun-lovin, life-grabbin, experience-swallowin person that only you can be. I've heard a thousand times that the Cycle Ends With Me, that the violence has gotta stop somewhere, and it's gonna stop with me.
And that's true.
But what's also true, is that you are, I am, We Are the crazed solo inventors of our own fuckin cycle. The Cycle Starts With Me, goddamn it. The Love's gotta get up in my life somewhere, and I'll be damned if it's gonna be in anybody's bed but mine.

I choose.
You choose.

You're it.

I love you.

Bitter Bakers

There's such a dark undercurrent that runs through every kitchen I've ever frequented (and is probably why I keep going back), but professional bakers...

Bakers are somethin' else.

If most kitchen denizens delight in being analogous representatives of bright, slickey slaughter, bakers stand in for the darker, stickier blood, the next-day's-leftover stuff that's still thick and viscous by the bed, even after buckets of hot water and heavy scrubbing, ever ever after.

I think it may have something to do with...aw, jeezus, with a buncha stuff.

Like working day after day with egregious, brashly joyous celebrants of carnage who obviously would never in a million years have the patience and meticulousness to gracefully, mercifully kill another living being.

Vitriolic Vituperation

This is a Crab-Like Spiny Orb Weaver. This spider lives in my backyard. The exquisite arachnid not only does not bite me, but also eat gobs of other bugs that do like to bite my flesh and suck my blood. Thus, CrabLikeSpinyOrbWeaver is not only totally hot, but also one of my favorite Key West carnivores...and don't its markings make it look happy? Of course, what looks happy could just as easily be Nature mocking me for my lack of superhero silk-production glands in my backside. Like she already mocks me for my marrow-rich bones, incapable of easy flight. Damn you, Nature! I'll mutate yet!

Just you wait.

I get kinda confused sometimes about, about...y'know about a lot of things. Anyone who can see several different perspectives at once is bound to get a little turned around now and again. Lately, though, like over the last several years, magnified over the last several months, I've been getting tied up in the Justice of Balance.

How much Beautiful can outweigh or balance how much Awful?
And how awful is it if you're learning stuff from it? How beautiful if it's hurting you?
And isn't there always, always, always a vast expanse of Grey Plains that stretches endless between the black and white extremes we hold so dear?

How much do you take before you fight back, and then how should you fight back?

Yeah, maybe that last question's the real one, the one that keeps me up most nights. I spent so many years not asking too many questions about whether or not my self-righteous anger was justified. Or, y'know, fuck that, whether or not my high-volume vituperation was always totally justified. ...And, y'know, actually...goddamn it, I am tied up so tightly in this web, I'm choking on my own desire for wisdom in the form of pat answers. I am so twisted over another person's drama I can hardly sleep some nights. I have been making every effort I can, lo these past 7 months (aw, jeezus, has it really been that long?), to act honorably, to refrain from returning this person's vile and prolific gossip, refrain from behaving as spitefully and as egotistically as she. And lord knows...

Lord knows I'm about at the end of my goddamned rope. Yesterday, she tried (tried) to diss Otter in front of a kitchen full of our professional peers, then pulled Otter aside, ostensibly to apologize for her behaviour, but really to tell my Otter how awfully I had burned her, how I habitually burn people, and that she loves Otter and hopes he's not just the next victim on my list.

...Grrr...

Now, first of all, Otter is smart, is canny, is wise in a lot of ways, and, fortunately, can see through bullshit like it was virgin kitten breath. Like it was Wonder Woman's airplane. So he didn't buy into the manipulation she was layin down. I don't have to worry that she's gonna worm under his fur any time soon: her skull is just another mussel to be bashed against the stone Otter carries on his belly. Otter can see my heart through the miasma of my reasoning and knows that my Love is true, just as I know Otter's love is true.

I'm not worried, I'm just...

I'm just...

I'm just incredibly pissed off! I mean, this woman---well, her diabolical girlfriend should really be included in this, too, as an instigator on a power trip---these women seemed so down-to-earth when I met them 11 months ago. They seemed bereft of the overweening egos I find running so thickly among rock stars of kitchens and bars; they seemed like they valued food and communion above status. They seemed honest.

...They seemed like they might Get It.

And, oh lordy, was I ever wrong. I was so Wrong, I was out of sight of Right. I have never seen such aberrantly malicious posturing, such a campaign of abuse and slander directed by people who apparently have absolutely nothing better to do with their energies than manufacture a pouting resentment and vengeful vitriol against someone who did not turn out to be the succulent angel they assumed her/me to be. I've tried to figure out where it all started, and the closest I can come is the night I turned away the girlfriend's lascivious advances. She was very drunk, trying very hard to make out with me, said that they (the girlfriends) "had an arrangement" and that it was okay for me to kiss her, and I, I didn't want to kiss her or touch her or anything her; I couldn't bear the thought of her bitter, petulant mouth against mine. And the next day, the next many days, her manipulative crying began and continued. The gross gossip I overheard in the middle of the night when they thought I was asleep. The physically abusive things she did to Frida, my now-disappeared feline familiar. There were long months of violently whispered insults, the most hurtful followed by some gift or another (chicory coffee for my Sua Da, antique fabric so beautiful it hurt to look at it, a nice word or two dropped on my behalf to someone sure to repeat it to me), followed in turn by even nastier gossip, even more strenuous efforts to get anyone who might know me to see how hollow and callous I could be...though I have no idea why they really think those things.

There's a long string of indecencies, including these two colluding to ruin the food I make for work (oh, and you wanna see me go all Mama Bear, just fuck with my loved ones or my food!)---taking desserts out of the freezer and leaving them on the counter, repeatedly turning off the heat beneath my cooking custards, etc. There were several weeks where I had near-strangers approach me and tell me how sorry they were about what these two women were doing to me, weeks where people would ask me what was going on between me and the awful couple, when I was forced to reply honestly, "I have absolutely no idea," and listen to third parties relate lie after lie they had been told about me. And then when Otter and I got together? And when we were both so good for each other? So happy? Oh, lordy. Those women were aaangryyy! They've vociferously accused me of trying to take all their friends away from them, but the only thing I've done is try not to put same friends in the middle of whatever imaginary battleground these women have created for themselves. By refusing to return the women's slander, I have refused to force our mutual friends to choose between us and, thus, they have chosen for themselves (though I think that having to choose one-or-the-other is a buncha bullshit). As I said, I've been working my emotional ass off trying to follow my Mama's admonition to always treat people with respect, to respect them as the tortured individuals they and we all are, and, naturally extended from that, to never, ever gossip about someone, to never talk outside my own experience. And, y'know, the moral high ground thing does feel right, does feel like the appropriate action to have taken these last several months, and...

...and I'm fucking sick of it. Like, I just want to grab both of those women by the hair and drive their faces into brick and mortar until they are totally unrecognizable. I have dreams about putting them in unimaginable pain, about looking them in the eye and seeing that they know they got what they deserved. Short of physical violence, I at least want to return their vitriolic naysaying, a game at which I have no doubt I could emerge an unquestioned champion. I know the short-lived satisfaction of choosing violence over more difficult communication; I know that violent outbursts are common and generally endorsed in this society, that there are a lot of people who'd back me up if I chose that route. I mean, jeezus, I at least want to quit my fucking job, just so I don't have to see these women all the time, don't have to depend on the monster to order basic ingredients I need to do my job. ...Oh, yeah, one of 'em is almost my boss, is the 'chef de cuisine,' just under (resentfully so) the executive chef. The EC and I get along well enough; I like him and love him like family; but then he's not on a massive power-hungry ego-trip like she is. He's not out to induce an entire island, including my beau, to loathe me like these women are trying to do.

Man, I'd love to know what I did to trip these women's Psycho switches. That's a kind of thing so powerful, you don't wanna do it by accident.

So, back to the Balance I wrote of at the beginning of all this bitter drivel: this is where I'm at, trying to figure out what to do. The Awful Twins are obviously trying to goad me into quitting my job, or making a grand mistake (oh, 'cause you know she'd love even more to get to fire me), or just breaking down and crying. Or returning fire. Of course, the last option is appealing far and beyond any of the others, at the moment. But, I dunno. If I can find other work, I am fucking out of that kitchen; I don't care about the kitchen or its so-called reputation; I just care about the food, yo (aren't we all supposed to feel like that there?) But, if not, do I really want to stay in this opressive environment until we move to New Orleans in six months or so? Are the lessons I'm learning worth the frustration? Worth the daily temptation to maul and physically maim another human being? Or two? Is it worth the lost sleep? The pitiful turns my food takes in the face of so much negative energy? Is the revenge taken by not crumpling beneath their pressure enough? Is it worth it? Will it balance?

Envy.

That skydive, that preternatural flight, was absolutely extraordinary. I needed to see this particular part of our planet from just that height. Needed to see Nurse sharks patrolling from 1200 feet. To run my toes through the top of a rainbow. To pass through cumulus clouds with my own fast-moving skin. I needed to fly through rain into sun. Needed to feel a planet impacting my feet, so gently so gently. Needed, just for a few moments, not to be jealous of the birds...though I envy them for much more than their effortless flight now. Now I know the soft, open whistling that composes so much of their auditory lives. I cannot help but want to hear it, too.

जुम्प. A Good Day to Die.

A couple of weeks ago, I told my Otter that I wanted to get off the island, off the Keys. Gettin kinda feverish with my lust for space, for breathing room.

So today, I got up, had Cafe Sua Da and a fresh-made bagel, and then, under the aegis of the literally-minded Otter, tossed myself out of an airplane, two miles up in the air, with some guy I'd just met strapped to my back.

...As you can see, I was terribly indifferent to the whole endeavour...

Honestly, it was one of the sweetest, most exquisitely beautiful things I've ever experienced. I totally expected a titanic adrenaline rush, expected to be giddy, shaking and stuttering when I hit the ground, but instead I was happy, calm, fulfilled. Grateful, more for the experience than for my continued life. There's nothing like participating in something 'common sense' dictates is a Really Bad Idea to make your blood flow a little more smoothly, to remind you to breathe.

...It's so...

Y'know, it's so calming. It really soothes me to put my body and my sanity in Harm's way; it soothes me to teeter at the edge of an airplane door, over 10,000 feet up, and know that today is not my day to die...and if I'm wrong, if it is, so be it.

It's a beautiful day for an Exit.

I'm still not really sure how to function in the Day-to-Day, in the mundane; but if you wanna throw me out of an airplane, drive 85 mph down West Virginia mountain roads at dusk, or dunk me in the Atlantic with a spear gun I don't know how to use, wearing a 20-year-old pair of fins...well, then! Baby, it's on!

I did go spearfishing a few days ago. I managed to get all the job-baking done in about 4 hours, then ran home to meet Otter and team up with a hardcore, shark-hunter friend of ours for an afternoon's shenanigans in the big Blue. I was more anxious learning how to use a spear gun in the high-rollin ocean water, with an inebriated Otter and a Captain on a killing spree, than I was falling out of that Cessna today. Fer damn sure. I was prepared to hit the ground and die instantly if anything went wrong in the air; I was not prepared to suffer, or watch anyone else suffer, the injuries I imagined a misfired spear gun could inflict on human flesh.

Unfortunately for my documentary madness, I forgot both an underwater camera and my super-cool, super-retro, early 60s turquoise-colored bathing cap with white plastic flowers. Pity. 'Cause with my beautiful bathing cap and a spear gun? I'd look like the love-child of Aquaman and Esther Williams. I'd look like the love-child who, early on, fell in with a gang of surly chefs and rebellious literati, who chain smokes and has a fondness for both saporous sinsemilla and herbaceous elixirs from South of the border.

Photos for my imaginary posterity.

Funny...

I thought that after plummeting through the troposphere, I'd be spilling over with verbiage, with my effulgent circumlocution, what Otter calls my "high-wire vernacular." Ain't the case, apparently. I can feel the spill coming, can feel myself full and needing an overflow, but I keep stopping short, keep getting distracted. I'm a goddamned butterfly today instead of a Luna moth; I am driven by distraction instead of burning passion. My heart is too calm.

...Huh.

And here I thought peace was something I needed more of.

म्म्म्म. The Kitchen of Inebriation

Mmmm...
This is how we do it in the undulating kitchen:

Simmer Chayote (a.k.a. Merliton) with Jalapenos.
The Peppers' texture is mellowed by squash, the squash's subtlety set afire by the chilies.
Drain 'em, chop 'em up with Avocado, Cilantro, Chipotles. It's just enough smoky red to accentuate the layers of soft, creamy greens; the herb and pepper's vivid viridian to the squash and stone fruit's berylline subtlety. Sultry, creamy, sinfully sensuous textures playing footsie with cheek-reddening heat.

Fresh Corn still on the cob, whole Tomatillos, quartered Red Onions and navel Oranges, whole Jalapenos and cloves of Garlic, Coriander and Cumin seeds, a little Thyme: toss in olive oil and roast together.
Fresh, sweet Costa Rican Pineapple, cut 3/4" thick on the latitudes: smear it with Date Sugar, Molasses, Olive oil, Cayenne, roast it 'til it softens a little, 'til it browns a bit, 'til all those earthy flavors really lock tongues with the sunshine, 'til Soil brings Sun closer to the ground without compromising either's intensity.
After all that roasting, everything falls beneath Knife: cobs kerneled, vegetables and pineapple chopped, caramelly oranges squeezed over all. A handful of chopped fresh Cilantro. Good sea salt. Smoked Paprika.

Lasciviously rub cold muscle, Rib Eye, with Spice, --Spice!-- complex and hand-mixed; a great part of the mix's heat supplied by homegrown, home-dried, home-ground chili peppers from a friend in New Smyrna;
This Spice is so spicy, it sends me into convulsions of sneezes when Red, Red Meat hits hot Cast Iron.
Sear it. Bloody rare. Cut on diagonal, 1/4" thin or so.

Tortillas (masa o harina), warm and soft, homemade if I'm not too muddled to deal with all that kneading and rolling.
Perfectly ripe, raw Avocado.
Two really stoned and inebriated cooks, terribly in love and surprisingly self-satisfied.

Tuck in.
Let the grinning begin!
Let Fingers and Teeth commence their voracious degustation!

मोवे ओवर! Interdependence Day

On this our Interdependence Day, I would like to call out those who believe we are truly independent and ask them...from what, exactly, do you believe we are independent? And is this really an ultimate goal? One that we even understand? And what's so wrong with interdependency, especially when contrasted with codependency? And why do we so resent anyone else fighting for the desperate independence of which we, ourselves, are so proud? Why do these series of rhetorical questions always come back to the same goddamned one: Who the fuck are we to think we have the right to tell absolutely anyone, anywhere, what to do or how to think? How out-of-control is that ego?

Bluh. It's not even 6a.m. and I'm already clambering up on the first available soapbox--not really making much sense about it, but definitely making a mess and a ruckus. Most days I just wake up growling, y'know? Not mad at anything, not in an ill mood, just...ready to sink my teeth into some kinda meat and shake the life out of it.

However, it's kinda difficult to pontificate wildly about the ills of the Earth when I am otherwise so deliciously happy. When all possibility lies prostrate and smiling mischievously before me. As I sit in the burgeoning dawn and try to put down Some Great Meaning before I head off to my meaningless job, I am aware of my Otter, on my vision's periphery, sleeping soundly, sweetly, on the couch, ensconced in pillows and fuzzy blankets and beauty, O! in beauty... My anger melts in the face of this Love. It's funny how immediately my Life To This Point has begun to make sense (even if my ramblings this morning do not). I dunno. Maybe this shit happens to everyone. It's a first for me. The first time I've watched so many movies pass my eyes and make sense,
make sense!
Like,

Oh, That's why I went through that terrible, awful, heartwrending, mindnumbing bullshit; so I'd be really ready for this really amazing, fulfilling part now. Okay, I guess that education doesn't suck as hard as I thought it did. Fair's fair, in a really fucked up kinda way.

Everything, everything has clearly led me to exactly where I am at this moment. The lessons I've learned, from rolling in the various piles of shit the Universe has left out for me, are duplicitous and deep and often seem ridiculously, unnecessarily dramatic. However...

...well, sometimes you do what you've gotta do to get through to someone, y'know? Especially someone as goat headed as I am. Ain't no way in hell I'd've been able to accept, and I mean really gratefully openheartedly accept, the Love I am being given now were it not for some murderous bullshit knocking me off my Pedestal of Untouchability and showing me that vulnerability doesn't always mean defeat. Sometimes it means we get to refuel and fight even longer, become even stronger, pair our righteous anger with heartfelt compassion. That's a pretty powerful lesson that I maybe only could learn by powerfully violent means. I never in a million years would've accepted the gifts I have been given had I not been metaphysically tied down and forced to accept them at some point.
And lord knows I tried to struggle, tried to wriggle out from under it, tried to deny, deny, deny, until finally I collapsed and had to admit,
had to admit
I couldn't stand in the face anymore.
Had to admit Mama was right,
had to admit the wisdom of my own wisdom,
had to admit that we deserve to be loved as much as we deserve to be punished.
Had to admit I deserve...
...I deserve...

I deserve the Struggle, deserve the Fight, deserve the Pain because I can feel the PainFightStruggle a thousand miles, a thousand years away. I deserve my Cassandra-sight because I will not, I cannot ignore it. I deserve my heartsickening Empathy and merciful Anger because my voice and will cradle and strengthen them. I deserve punishment for humanity's ills because I hold the root of these ills within me...

...And I've known this shit since I was a little kid, yo. Kind of a fucked up thing for a 9-year-old to understand on a fundamental level.

Thing I didn't get, am just beginning to get, was the whole Love part of the equation. Like, I figured I was this one-woman emotional balancing act, the Scales of Justice made fat and bone; all evil in the world could enter through me and be somehow purified into love, love that would then leave my flesh to find those who needed it most.
And, y'know, sometimes it worked. Sometimes I really nailed it and was able to give some beautiful succor to those who really needed it.
Sometimes I was able to save people.
But the Love...

Oh, the Love.

Man, I had no idea I needed Love like other people needed it. That I maybe needed it more than most other people needed it 'cause I was draining it outta myself so quickly, so often.

I was empty.
Empty and desperately tossing down whatever I thought might take up space in the reservoir. Empty and without hope of there being another living human who could possibly comprehend all the girls in my head, all the pounding ache in my heart (and most of it not even mine!), all the rage in my muscles, and understand that these are Love.
These are how Love escapes my skin, this is how Love looks when it is under- or malnourished.
This is the burning in my eyes, the vitriolic admission of Need that my lips will never allow to escape,
not ever,
not never.

And then this Otter,
this Otter walks up outta the river, outta the Ocean, outta the water that surrounds my solitary island, and it looks me dead in the eye and sees those fuckin girls hidin out and gettin lazy and jaded, and they see the Otter and feel kinda like lookin at god and feelin ashamed of being naked and damned if they know why, and they kinda sheepish stand up slow and increasingly brazen, defiant; and the Otter grins at my all-girl firing squad and tells me it thinks it'd be just grand if I(we)'d come swimming this afternoon, and it's not like we could say no, y'know? In fact, one of the more mischievous girls said,

"I would absolutely love that"

before I could shut her mouth,
before I could remind her, remind her that we don't need,
we don't,
don't need...
don't need any mythic creatures because there aren't any on this continent, not any more, not besides me,
and I don't really remember the old Magic, how to turn the Earth inside out, 'cause I got tired of having to justify and explain it,
so I just kinda quit and
kinda forgot and
and just ended up with all these voices who weren't allowed to speak, who grew swollen throats and milky eyes and bitter, icy hearts.

Tell you what...a talking Otter who laughs and swims webs of bubbles around my body, who can not only see all the girls behind the screen door, but also entice them out to play, an Otter who accepts, without question, that Mama found me under a mushroom at the foot of the tallest tree in the forest (glowing blue, glowing blue),
an Otter who can
See.
Me.
...That's something I shouldn't walk away from.
Can't walk away from.
Not after all this, after all this leading up to...
This.

This is my Interdependence Day.
I thank the Water for this Otter, for these lessons indelibly written in my heart.
I thank the Sky for showing me my weakness and reinforcing my strength.
I thank Tragedy and Disaster for laying me low so that I could be raised up.
I thank the Otter for needing me as much as I need it, and for reminding me of things I had long forgotten.
I am grateful.
And holy.
And going back to bed.