the discovery of farmer john

while reading in baltimore’s free magazine the urbanite for things to do this weekend, i found a listing for a screening of a film called the real dirt on farmer john “a 2005 doc that tells the tale of cross-dressing Midwestern farmer John Peterson, known for his feather boas and leopard-print coveralls, who created a successful organic farm in the 1970′s” (urbanite 53).

um…yes! i think i found a new personal role model.

then! at that precise second i was reading the description, my dad came upstairs with a book he found for me in south carolina. (my parents were away for a week visiting the area where my mom’s mom grew up). the book was none other than farmer john’s cookbook: the real dirt on vegetables: seasonal recipes and stories from a community supported farm! i cannot wait to make a chocolate beet cake.

in related news, i submitted my resumé and a cover letter to a community supported farm near york, pennsylvania. (i wont give the name just yet since i don’t want to jinx myself). but it seems so cool and i really want this internship that spans the whole growing season. (oh, please!!)

ha-aretz

ha-aretz means “the land” in hebrew, and also the name of an israeli daily newspaper. i feel like i’m going through a “fat” period. like, doing my storing up for winter now that we’ve got some real cold. storing up like eating, and also storing up on ideas.

i’ve been hibernating to some extent, dreaming of the spring instead of focusing on now. the cat’s got the same idea. now that his thyroid isn’t freaking out, he doesn’t pee on my stuff anymore. we’ve been keeping each other warm at night.

child care is hard work, but rewarding. i’m trying to influence their little brains about reading, using one’s imagination, and trying non-chemically foods.

i just read in defense of food: an eater’s manifesto by michael pollan. he spends a lot of time defining just what the hell food is not (factory-produced chemical garbage that makes “healthful” claims according to the current nutrition fad, for example) and gives a seemingly-simple strategy for making good food choices:

eat food. not too much. mostly plants.

i will include a few choice quotes from his book. note his oh-so-dry wit:

[A]s a general rule it’s a whole lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or a carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over in Cereal the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their newfound “whole-grain goodness” to the rafters. (Pollan 39-40)

quoting Weston Price (b. 1870), a dentist concerned with the rise of tooth decay:

“The dinner we have eaten tonight,” [Price] told his audience in a 1928 lecture, “was a part of the sun but a few months ago.” (99)

think about it! eating real food is like eating the sun! but it’s more than that–it’s connecting what one eats (which, when put through the mostly-perfect machine that is the human body, gives life) to the people who grow the food, to the sun and the water and the soil that produced the food, to the process of evolution…i mean, it gets really big.

in the chapter “eat food: food defined” one of pollan’s food-choice rules to follow is “don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” he elaborates:

Is a product like Go-Gurt Portable Yogurt still a whole food?…There are in fact hundreds of foodish products in the supermarket that your ancestors simply wouldn’t recognize as food: breakfast cereal bars transected by bright white veins representing, but in reality having nothing to do with, milk; “protein waters” and” nondairy creamer”; cheeselike foodstuffs equally innocent of any bovine contribution; cakelike cylinders (with creamlike fillings) called Twinkies that never grow stale. Don’t eat anything incapable of rotting is another personal policy you might consider adopting.

now–i enjoy a moon pie as much as the next junk-eating american but the man has a point.

[side-bar: in searching for a link about moon pies, i discovered the official website with a "moon pie memory" contest. this piece won "most unusual":

My favorite Moon Pie memory is one of the most bizzare experiences I've ever had. I was driving my squad car one Summer night, eating a Moon Pie, I received a call of a man walking down the highway, in the nude. I arrived to find one of our local eccentrics (actually bi-polar) named Jack *Smith* walking down the side of the road without any clothes, carrying a box of Moon Pies in his left hand & eating one with his right. As I approached him, he said to me "Here, ya' want one?", and I haven't been able to eat one since. As a joke, some of my co-workers will put a Moon Pie on my desk. I probably need counseling.

W.D.

enough said.]

aren’t there foods that “bring you back?”

the oxford english dictionary

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.            (Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, 1922, p. 4).

while searching a few sites for a used book, i came across powells.com’s blog. there’s a contest to win a 20 volume set of the oxford english dictionary (i want this SO bad) and to enter, one submits an english word and the reason why it’s so good. check out the entries.

i’ll share some gems with you:

Kit November 30th, 2008 at 9:10 pm

My favorite word in the English language is YES. Nothing sounds better than hearing that word =)

Brian November 30th, 2008 at 10:53 am

Bullshit – It just cuts through so many other words.

Although I would like the OED so I can learn some others.

Paul M December 23rd, 2008 at 9:34 am

Tortfeasor – Sounds like the person is a villain from a comic book, which I guess is kinda true

rick s. December 23rd, 2008 at 1:07 pm

Rick – Not only is it my name, but it also means a pile of hay. Though I have never asked my parents, I have created my own back story as to how I was conceived, and eventually named. On a crisp autumn Iowa evening, as my parents drove home from eating a nice dinner and sharing a bottle of Chablis, the car broke down. On the way to a distant farm house, they stopped by a pile of hay and did what non-violent drunk parents do. Thereby creating me and my name. The probable reality is they had already seen the syndicated episode of MASH three times and were just rather bored, but a person can dream.

i miss the OED. at school, the library paid for a subscription to the online source and i could spend a few hours looking up a word, then looking up all the words around it, the literary quotes in which the word is used, its first appearances.

i wrote a paper in spring 2007 about the definitions and origins of the word “memory,” using the OED as a reference. here’s me getting all sci-fi:

The definition of memory has changed more recently due to the development of science. In psychology, memory has come to be defined as how the brain physically changes when a memory is formed. In the science of materials, substances are said to have memory. That is, a material may have a natural tendency to return to its original shape. Only in the past fifty years has the word “memory” been used when referring to technology and computers. A computer has the capacity to remember stored information. As this technological science progresses, it will be interesting to discover what effect this artificial memory has on the way humans remember things. If memory is also referred to as “recovering from unconscious,” could artificial memory be the means to an artificial consciousness?

that homework assignment led to the discovery of my favorite word:

mnemon, n. The minimum physical change in a brain, or other system, which constitutes the storage of a single piece of information in the memory; a unit of memory. (OED)

memory takes up space?! i mean i know about using the word memory as in a storage facility, but memories are not cards in a card catalog (wouldn’t that be a trip?). this concept blows my mind. in that same class, we read marcel proust’s remembrance of things past (or, a search for lost time, or, a la recherche du temps perdu), one of the best concept books i’ve certainly ever read. some people would say of all time. i’m not about to read the full 3,200 pages or whatever, but maybe one of these days. proust had really interesting ideas about space and time, involuntary (triggered by, say, a smell) vs. voluntary memory (trying your darnedest to remember this memory from way back when).

i’ll leave you with another quote from the memory assignment:

According to the Dictionary of English Language (1755), “Memory,..[is] Exemption from oblivion.”

a child of nurses, doctors and teachers

the kids i babysit are with their dad today until i don’t know when. so my day is kind of prematurely aborted. i finished the cat who ate danish modern and then talked to my dad about some writing he’s been doing.

my dad just finished his first semester in a nursing program, and being one of the only men, one of a few white folks, and the oldest person in the program, it’s been inspiring for me and others to see his progress and enthusiasm. there aren’t too many 50+ folks who would change careers with such zeal.

he worked like crazy this semester, taking 18 credits in a master’s program. i’m impressed by his diligence. my mom told me that in graduate school in the 70′s my dad would write over a dozen drafts of a paper. ocd? yes. he’s evened out since then except when it comes to, say, organizing the freezer. (i know where i get these habits…)

there are a few experiences that have really touched him and he says he wants to relate how it is to be a man in a nursing program, what men can contribute to nursing. i suggested he make a zine. it’s low-key, low-tech. he can get his ideas down on paper and out there without too much fuss. and it will be fun. i think he’s into it.

i did a genealogy report in middle school(?) and discovered just how full my family is of interesting nurses, doctors, professors and teachers. my mom’s dad wrote quite a few books on topics ranging from how black communities in the south could reduce hypertension through traditional methods of medicine rather than expensive doctors to how mining minerals affected the development of the soviet union. my mom’s brother was a journalist for newsweek during the vietnam war. he died there in an accidental bombing and was m.i.a. for about 20 years. my dad’s parents were both teachers and school administrators in new jersey public schools. my mom is a psychiatrist in the veteran’s hospital and, previous to nursing school, my dad worked for an insurance company researching injury prevention.

quite a list of helpers!

i like education, information technologies, publishing…i’ve lectured for several college classes on transgender issues [make another page about this]. i’m concerned about making sure radical, queer books stay in small public libraries. i like the idea of zine distribution as a form of personalized publishing. like, “oh, you need to get this information out to that group of people? on how small a budget? well, i have just the thing…”

also–a side note. there are two people my dad knows who have shifted careers in the most interesting way. one guy used to design car parts for nascar and, after helping to design a kind of neck brace, is now the one who just got his phd in psychiatric epidemiology, hoping to apply it to figure out how people can bounce back better from brain injuries. the other guy used to be a civil engineer and now he is a genetic engineer. i have a theory about connections between physical map-making and the process of fabricating a life story but that’s for another time…

scents and poetry

this morning i brought my cat to the vet. mostly to figure out why the hell he keeps peeing on beds and couches. last week he woke me up at 5:30 in the morning by peeing on me in my bed! i don’t know if you all know about how cat piss smells but it’s awful! we had another cat for years that just loved to “bomb” the shit out of anything that sat out of the way for too long. or–this was just great–he would pee on clean clothes and you didn’t find out they were pissed on ’til you were in class that day.

anyway, the cat has a problem with out-of-whack thyroid glands. so his metabolism is speeding up. he’s lost too much weight, even for a previously fat-cat. (maybe this reveals too much but i’ve been re-reading the first 6 or so books in the cat who… series by lillian jackson braun. and now i pay closer attention to the cat’s behavior–his tweak-outs, what he sniffs, how he explores outside, etc. the cat who… books are all about some striking siamese who seems to know just a little bit more about a murder than his owner, a middle-aged, somewhat-sexy journalist bachelor.)

this also reminds me of the movie never cry wolf–one i have loved for a long time. i seem to really enjoy books and films about a person or people finding themselves alone in the wilderness and surviving (cast away, island of the blue dolphins, hatchet, the lord of the flies, etc.) in never cry wolf, a movie adapted from a book by canadian author farley mowat, a man is sent to the canadian wilderness to find out why caribou populations are declining–the wolves are blamed. but he finds out that the wolves mostly eat mice. (also where i get my thrill of mouse-hunting.) mowat writes in the book:

“We have doomed the wolf not for what it is, but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be — the mythological epitome of a savage, ruthless killer — which is, in reality, no more than the reflected image of ourself.”

in one scene in the movie, the narrator “creates” a scent radius around his campsite by–well–pissing, duh. and if anyone has really watched a dog on a walk, it’s kind of amazing to think of all the smells that we miss. anyway–

my uncle came over tonight from dc to drop off a futon and hang out. he brought his little dog, appropriately named “doggy” who stayed with us for over a week when my uncle was volunteering for the obama campaign in new mexico. this little doggy is a bedraggled looking, low-to-the-ground, grumpy old man but he was really fun to hang out with once he got used to me. we’d go out exploring the neighborhood and noticing the weather changing.

by the end of the night my uncle and dad and i (and my mom a bit too before going to bed early) were reading poetry to each other in the dining room. my uncle read the love song of alfred j. prufrock by t.s. eliot. here’s a section of that:

Do I dare	45
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

we also read some robert frost, a favorite of mine, if only for his naturely observations mixed with gloom. here’s a good one:

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain –and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

i have felt, walking through my own neighborhood at night, that i wasn’t supposed to be there. that my very presence in a sleepy neighborhood was suspect. it’s easier to feel unafraid as a boy, but instead i feel devious.
—
[i originally included some writing about dead cats, a particularly disturbing subject for me. maybe another time...]

found poems

there’s this short story i wrote during senior year of high school that’s semi-autobiographical and it seems to like hiding from me. so i was looking for that again–didn’t find it, but i found two poems instead.

the first is from february 26 2004. my sister and i “took care of” the house in massachusetts for my last year of high school. shit was crazy then and i felt like i was quietly spiraling out of control. to top it off, two months later we moved out of the house i knew so well. it was like a death. i thought i would include this as some kind of eulogy to 41 delmar. maybe i’ll write more about that house later.

I’m on the highway. I know when I get home tonight the house will be empty. Everyone seems to be away this weekend. For now, it’s just me and my car and a half-empty pack of cigarettes. The cigarette burns red like the taillights head of me. Behind me, headlights shift lanes and distract my eyes. I can feel the acid in my muscles.

At least my car behaves how I want it–just one determined swerve and they’d have to sift through the wreckage to find me.

I see the old exit sign up ahead. The radio sings something about fighting your battles all alone and a feeling I’m ashamed of flashes over my face.

Today a girl said it smelled like summer. She said it was like standing outside a restaurant in July. The frozen ground said otherwise, but I believed her. I took a greedy drink of the smooth air. I can’t ever remember February being so cold.

I speed into the left lane, but there is no hurry. By April, my childhood home will be full of moving boxes. What I’ll miss most is how the summer rain carries the sweeping sound of the highway across the lake and through my bedroom window.

the other poem is found from a collection of shorts stories called Descent of Man by T. Coraghessan Boyle, pg. 45. i wrote this in september 2003.

The dam.

Impossibly swollen, rain festering the yellow surface,
a hundred new streams a minute rampaging in,
the pressure of those millions of gallons
hard-punching those millions more.

There! the first gap,
the water spewing out,
a burst bubo.

And now the dam
shudders, splinters,
falls to pieces like

so much cheap pottery.