Between the seedlings we bought and the seeds we germinated, the garden is starting to look very promising. The windowbox at right hosts a thicket of young radishes; in the greenhouse sits another windowbox the same size planted with cabbage and kale. I worked at this all afternoon and I’m so bleary I’m struggling with words. In fact, I have no idea what I’m talking about. So: ocelots. I haven’t been able to construct much of a sentence since we drove to the pinko health food store in Princeton and found a car in a handicap space with a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker and another that said SAVING AMERICA FROM SOCIALISM. In the parking lot OF THE HEALTH FOOD STORE. I guess you could overlook the organics, the grassroots political organizing, the employees’ Che Guevara t-shirts, the holistic medicines and natural body products for the crazy-expensive prepared foods, which smell good enough to be a crime. I mean, sheeeeeeeeit. I’d egg that car, but it’d be a cage-free organic brown egg and those fuckers are expensive!
Category Archives: Be What You Say You Are
He’ll Come Back To You Again
I think every American over the age of nine needs to hear this – no exceptions.
Right On Walking On Down the Line
On one hand, the World Chocolate Championships are on useless and lost Planet Green tonight.
On the other, what the fuck is this?
Shhhhh! We'we hunting wabbits.
Low-density polyethylene Above-ground portion is 23″ in diameter x 34″ H; basket is 15″ in diameter and 18″ H Installation requires digging a hole large enough for the basket to be underground A small amount of residue will eventually accumulate in the basket, requiring cleaning every few years
Okay, polyethylene tube, basket in a hole. Not a composter?
Zero-Waste Digester Handles What Composters Can’t
Unlike a composter, a food digester lets you dispose of all of your kitchen scraps, including dairy, meat and fish scraps, bones and bread. Rather than producing compost for your garden, its purpose is to reduce household waste. Materials collect in a perforated underground basket, where earthworms and other soil organisms break them down into carbon dioxide, water and just a small amount of solid residue. Works best in a sunny spot with well-drained soil. May be used for disposal of pet waste, too.
Excellent. I have wasteful pets. But wait: there’s more!
Dispose of all of your kitchen scraps, including dairy, meat and bones Reduce household waste in landfills Instructions for the Zero-Waster Food Digester
Not a lot of new information there, but still: if all it takes to dispose of most of your organic kitchen goop and pet poop is a 3′ x 2′ plastic tube and a 1′ x 1′ basket WHY DO WE HAVE A GODDAMN GARBAGE PROBLEM? Why do we have dumps full of carrot ends? Why did I throw chicken bones into a frigging Hefty bag after dinner tonight? Why doesn’t every house with a yard in America have a homemade version of this – since forever?
I DON’T KNOW.
I have GOT to stop shouting about trash.
Crazy Everything Seems Hazy
The restaurant supply store in town is a lightweight affair. Shelves are loosely stocked with one of each item, which the customer orders and which is delivered to the store at some time in the future. It’s all cups, flatware, sauté pans and aluminum trays of every description and dust. There’s been a for sale sign out front for years. I suppose when I imagined the restaurant supply store in Edison I imagined it would be like this: dusty, silent, oddly empty. It is not at all those things.
The warehouse sits at the end of an industrial park road that was paved at one time and never given another thought. The street sign looks new but it is rendered illegible by its angle to the intersecting road. The industrial park looks like it lost a battle with developers so it decays in the middle of remote and odd-looking apartment complexes. At no time does the main road through them identify itself. We found that many times during this excursion: you had to know something was there or you wouldn’t find it at all. So it came as something of a surprise when we drove over an abandoned railroad track, past a field and a dump, turned a corner marked with the name of another business and found the restaurant supply store. Despite the appearance of wasteland and open space, parking was cramped. Vans and SUVs circled, waiting for spaces. We happened to be in the right place at the right time and got a space. Inside, we waited as an energetic young woman registered Pete’s business, checked his license, his tax ID number. It took a very long time and a line accumulated behind us. A man holding a laminated bloody hunk of meat in his arms chewed gum and waited. The customers passed us on their way into the store represented a wide variety of racial and ethnic groups. About half the people passing us were speaking English. That seemed promising.
Pete tends to move quickly and lose patience with stores. I was determined to carefully examine every aisle and take in as much information as possible. The first discovery of real use was recycled paper products in bulk form. Pete walked through a doorway I missed and waved me in. It was the refrigerated section of the building. I hadn’t noticed it, but as we walked through it I realized the building was twice as large as it appeared. We entered an icy wonderland, passing freezers stocked with familiar restaurant size cases of hamburger patties, calamari rings and goat portions. We passed cheese wheels, halves and quarters. We passed bales of vegetables, packed to bursting. We came around a corner and found ourselves walking through corridors filled with meat. Giant cuts of beef, lamb and pork lined shelves and refrigerator cases; cases of chickens, ducklings and larger foul lined another corridor. It seemed to go on and on. My hands were stiff with cold. At the end of the rows, we found a spotless fish section that smelled like ice and the ocean. Crates of baccala and carts stacked with smoked fish formed a portico, on the other side: great banks of ice, beautifully arranged fish of impressive size gleamed. A whole tuna loin could be seen from some distance like a treasure. One imagines it was. We turned back and walked through the meat aisles again. The perspective shift – walking through stacked shelves of meat as opposed to meat separate, stored away – was jarring. I thought, ‘One hunk of this meat could feed us for weeks. It would be so much cheaper than the grass-fed free range beef we’ve been eating in small portions. But this stuff is mass-produced poison. The animals were raised and lived in terrible conditions. The factory farms are a blight. If it were a question of life and death, this might be okay but it isn’t, so this is disgusting. It would be easy to abandon what I believe and pick up that hunk of meat.’ And I really felt that temptation to betray everything I feel. I don’t need to eat that way, so this was a deeply weird sensation. I did not pick up a hunk of meat.
Back out in the main part of the store, we walked down each aisle, talked about everything we saw from salad dressing cups to the giant rondele pot I covet. Pete is going to do some personal chef work so he’s got supplies for that in mind. I was thinking about food preservation ingredients like oils, vinegars, spices in bulk. We were looking for useful flours, containers, work clothes, problem solvers. Of course, we walked down an entire aisle of #10 cans of tomato products. I started to feel grave doubt creep up on me. ‘What am I doing?’ I thought. ‘I don’t need to jar these small, crazy-expensive, boutique foods. This is madness.’ And for a few minutes, I heard the rush of blood in my ears. What am I doing? Well, what am I doing? We turned into the last aisle: condiments. Beautiful oils, vinegars, sauces, sauce bases as far as the eye could see. I sat down on a palate in the middle of the aisle and took a few deeps breaths. What am I doing? My plan is to spend the next six months of my life learning as much as I can about food. I could throw cans in a cart and sustain myself, but nothing would be gained by it. The idea is to learn. The idea is to push my brain, which I have had every reason to doubt in recent years, as hard and as far as I can; if I succeed, I can learn other things. I stood up and set about examining the vinegars. I might be able to do better on some of the prices.
We went to the checkout with a restaurant container of whole nutmeg: less than $8. That’s a good price. I didn’t say much on the way home, but I did say, “I feel like I’ve been to the House of My Enemy, and how am I going to use that without being corrupted by it?” We stopped at my sister Anya’s. The family can benefit from the restaurant supply store by buying in bulk and dividing between the houses. Anya mentioned that the food pantry and the soup kitchen might be able to use donations to buy in bulk there; I’d have to research that. Maybe they already do. But I was really shocked by the meat and how easily doubt and temptation shook me.
I was quiet for a long time when we got home.
It seemed very important to work in the garden.
You’re Such A Silly Woman
This may be the brightest idea I’ve heard in ages.
…Trade School encourages students to “barter for instruction.” Basically you take a free class, and in exchange, you teach the teacher something they want to learn about! Classes range from making balloon animals to making soup, from learning dance forms to public advocacy, and even a How to Teach A Class class.
This past weekend I took a 1.5 hour class with Brooklyn’s locavore and foraging specialist Leda Meredith. The class was Food Preservation for cans and jars, and was attended by a dozen students. In exchange, sometime in the future, I’ll teach Leda on how to use File Transfer Protocal (FTP) to connect to her own websites and servers! A real deal for me, because whereas I make my own kombucha, kim chi, and sauerkraut, I was unaware of the simple science behind hermetically sealing jars for pickling food — whereas I can teach about FTP while I sleep!
I do all my best thinking while I’m exercising. Last night, we had all of the weathers, so this morning I aerobicized before chiseling open the door to my frozen car. That sounds athletic, right? I can think of a pile of things I’d love to learn, but in an exchange situation, what do I know well enough anymore to teach?
Eeeeeeeeeeeeons ago, I taught gymnastics, dance, creative writing generally and poetry specifically, but since my brain spazzed, I don’t do those things anymore. What do I do? Well, I sleep poorly, stutter a lot and buy savings bonds for children. I can’t follow a recipe, bicycle on sidewalks, knit cat blankets, write postcards to Grandpa, ignore phones, scoop cat boxes, wear comfortable shoes and grow arugula.
My sister Daria can’t fold fitted sheets. It’s easy.
Come to think of it, Daria hasn’t eaten a stuffed artichoke since our grandmother Edith died 19 years ago.
I can pick a bold paint color, give cats medicine, say what everyone’s thinking, decorate with shiny objects, live thrifty, bake healthy cookies, wear silly clothes and polish nails. I can bake fruit breads, forget secrets, think two boxes outside of the regular box, stretch muscles, hunt for bargains and pack large volumes of stuff into small spaces. Does anyone need to learn these things? I dunno. These are not necessarily useful social social skills that’ll make you popular at parties. But maybe! I suggested my sister Anya start this same kind of exchange in town. She has doubts.
Anya: I like it. We could totally do this. What could I teach? How to argue with husband. How to clean the house without help. How to skirt cat puke until husband comes home. How to sit on my ass and watch the Daily Show. How to avoid paying bills until your phone company makes threatening calls. Why, I’m a jack of all trades!
I suppose a master class in sarcasm is out, but maybe not. What could you teach? What would you want to learn? Could this work where you live?
While My Coffee Grows Cold
Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.
Mohandas Gandhi
Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.
Thomas A. Edison
Abortion Law: Mother Denied Abortion, Then Had To Watch Baby Die
Nebraska’s new abortion law forced Danielle Deaver to live through ten excruciating days, waiting to give birth to a baby that she and her doctors knew would die minutes later, fighting for breath that would not come.
And that’s what happened. The one-pound, ten-ounce girl, Elizabeth, was born December 8th. Deaver and husband Robb watched, held and comforted the baby as it gasped for air, hoping she was not suffering. She died 15 minutes later.
The sponsor of the controversial Nebraska statute, Sen. Mike Flood of Norfolk, told the Des Moines Register that the law worked as it was intended in the Deavers’ case.
Remember when I quit drinking? I’m thinking of quitting quitting drinking because all I can clearly think of is how Mike Flood deserves to have his windpipe squeezed for fifteen minutes every day for the rest of his miserable life. If I were depressed, I might crawl into bed and stay there, but as a matter of fact, I’m in a pretty good mood. Hey Mike! I wish you every happiness you’ve left to the Deavers! Bon appetit, motherfucker!
Obviously, I’m getting more enlightened by the fucking minute.
Sing A Simple Song
America is not broke.
Pass it the hell on.
High High Above Me
I’m a focused American with a folder full of current coupons. Did you know the Koch Brothers, evil underwriters of the anti-union Republican Teabagger Revolution, peddle consumer products you can boycott? Here’s a delightful and terrifying list. Let’s have a quick look, shall we?
Wouldn’t now be an excellent time to switch to recycled paper products?
Crossposted at Brilliant@Breakfast.
My Friend And I Will Defend
Via Miss Sasha, Aaron Traister issued a challenge to men both overdue and gloriously craptastic.
Why men need to speak up about abortion
Ahhhh shit. I’m already angry.
My mother doesn’t hide the fact that she had an abortion, but she also does not talk about it freely or with ease. I did not find out that she had an abortion until I was in my mid-20s. Asking her for permission to include her experience in this story was one of the more difficult conversations I’ve had with her in recent years, but I wanted to, because this conversation has become important to me, a fact I’ll explain later.
The story goes like this: A year and a half after my mother and father welcomed my sister into the world, my mother found herself pregnant for the second time. Early in the pregnancy there were complications that put the health of the fetus and my mother at risk. After careful and difficult deliberation my mother and father chose to end the pregnancy. No one was happy about the choice, it was not approached in a cavalier fashion, but my mother and father decided it was the safest course of action, and the one that was in the best interest of the entire family.
A year later my mother was pregnant with me. In a weird way, I owe my life to an abortion. Not that I ever saw it that way, or gave it much thought at all. Strangely, the idea only occurred to me as I watched last year’s Super Bowl, as Tim Tebow appeared in a pro-life ad to talk about how he owed his life to his mother not having an abortion. I thought: I am the Bizarro World Tim Tebow.
And on that third planet behind the sun where medical care is in the patient’s best interest, my mother did the sensible thing, had an abortion in 1962 and I don’t have to listen to this story. But I digress.
I grew up in idyllic ’80s and ’90s suburban Philadelphia, not giving a single thought to issues of women’s health or reproductive rights, aside from the occasional unwelcome intrusion from my older sister (she’s sorta into that kinda stuff). I spent a good deal of my high school thinking about females, but again, not very much of that thought had anything to do with actual reproduction. And because I was insecure, and handsy, and immature, I spent my high school years listening to my sexually active guy friends discussing their conquests and telling the occasional joke about how they had to go get “the swab” at the clinic. I was left to self-medicate with copious amounts of booze and ganja, both of which I would have gladly traded for the opportunity to need “the swab.”
At 18, toward the end of my first year in college, my outlook changed dramatically. My girlfriend was a close friend, a few years older than me, and we started a physical relationship after I graduated high school. She was kind, and sensitive, and caring. I was self-involved, self-loathing and self-destructive, and while there wasn’t a lot of room for much else in my life, I loved her with all the space that was available to me at the time.
She had battled health issues for most of her life, and growing up she had spent a great deal of time in the company of doctors. From an early age those doctors made it clear she would be unable to have children. So we were careless and stupid, although, truth be told, we probably would have been careless and stupid anyway. I got her pregnant, or she got pregnant, or we got her pregnant.
She was in her senior year at a college in a different city and she couldn’t get ahold of me. I wasn’t great about checking messages. It seems amazing that I once lived in a world where you could reasonably expect not to get ahold of someone for more than a week.
I long for the time before I read this article, so we’re even.
When she finally tracked me down she told me she had been pregnant and had gotten an abortion all in the same breath. The conversation was amazingly short. I reacted with all the petulance and anger of the messed-up child I was. I suddenly had a perfect excuse to remove whatever room I had made for anyone else in my life and make my self-absorption complete. This culminated in my dropping out of school and retreating to the safety of my sister’s apartment in Brooklyn, N.Y., where I spent the following year hiding out.
With some distance, I see that how I responded to the news was Exhibit A for why I wasn’t even close to being ready to take on the responsibility of a child. Exhibit B, C and D were that I was stoned and drunk out of my head all the time in those days. I was a wreck before the abortion, and I was wreck after she broke the news.
Not until years later, when I had dried out a little and grown up a lot, did I ever consider how difficult it must have been for her, or how terrible she must have felt about her own life and where she was; to give up what, to the best of her knowledge, could have been her only opportunity to have a child. It must have crushed her. It did crush her, I think, for a time. I would see her sporadically over the next several years, and from afar she seemed to be mirroring my path of self-punishment.
Yeah…Aaron, your problems make me want a drink, too.
When I called her for permission to write this story, we had another short and difficult conversation, one that was 15 years in the making. She gave me her blessing and made two requests; the first was not to identify her, the second was that I make it clear that nothing about this choice was easy, or done without hurt, but that ultimately she still believes she made the right choice. Then she told me something that I hadn’t given her the time to tell me 15 years ago; she had asked to see the sonogram before she had the abortion.
“I could see all the options in front of me and I knew where they would end, I couldn’t bear to be pregnant one more day, it hurt too much.”
Fifteen years later and half our conversation still consisted of trying to apologize to one another.
None of these choices are made easily, or without hurt.
Goddamnit, let’s stop right there.
One of the worst, absolute worst aspect of the recent conversation is this: the need for a woman to suffer related to an abortion. She can’t have an abortion because it’s the sensible thing to do. She can’t have an abortion because she’s already decided not to have children and birth control failed. She can’t keep her feelings to herself. No. We require tears and suffering. We require sorrow and rending of garments. I’m really sick of this. A woman’s decision to have a legal abortion is her business and not ours. We are not entitled to demand ANYTHING, but especially not suffering and especially since abortions in many cases prevent much worse suffering. We’re being tremendous dicks about this and we should knock it the hell off.
Until recently, my family never knew any of this. I repressed it, even when I heard about my mother’s abortion. I didn’t want her to know I understood something about what she was talking about. So when I see my guy friends — who are more than happy to wax philosophically for hours about the “conditions on the ground” in Libya and Bahrain (admittedly important), but who make nary a mention of issues that might directly and immediately impact them — I wonder if their careful avoidance isn’t born of a similar kind of embarrassment. I think this may be one of the reasons so many men have trouble talking about this issue. For me, it represents my low point as a human being and as a man: I was a failure, I couldn’t take care of myself let alone a child, I couldn’t provide for myself, or a wife, or family. My weakness and carelessness resulted in people hurting. I was not a man, I was something so much less than that. Why would anyone ever want to talk about something like that? I recognize that not every man out there has found himself in my situation specifically. I’ve been told a lot of pro-choice guys don’t talk about “women’s issues” for fear of saying the wrong thing. All I know is: We’re not talking — as if it doesn’t have to do with us, as if it’s “their” problem, not ours.
Sigh. Aaron, my darling: abortion can never be about you. I appreciate your desire to be an ally, but this can’t be about you. I have more to say about this, but you are still talking –
Half a country away and a few years earlier than the story of my college girlfriend, my wife was 18. She had been with her college boyfriend for about a year when she went to Planned Parenthood for her first gynecological exam. She had decided that she was about to start having sex. She had decided that she did not feel comfortable going to her parents with her decision (which I imagine is not an uncommon feeling among most humans. I wonder how many of us who don’t live in an ’80s sitcom have heart-to-hearts with our parents before we lose our virginity). But she felt she was ready for a physical relationship and she wanted to be as responsible about sex as possible.
Planned Parenthood gave her the ability to take personal responsibility for her body and her future. It also helped keep her safe and healthy at a point in most people’s lives when those concerns are not yet a priority. That first visit to Planned Parenthood gave my wife a foundation of responsibility for her sexual health on which she ultimately built a future that included a husband (me) and two amazing children.
I owe Planned Parenthood an unqualified debt of gratitude.
Good. Write your local clinic a large check and ask Planned Parenthood’s national org why they threw us under the bus during the health insurance bill debate. That would actually be helpful.
I’ve quietly watched the debate around reproductive rights and women’s health for most of my adult life and, frankly, most of it seems very foreign to me. It is spoken about in such simplistic ways. I don’t understand how people can throw around the word “murder” and talk about taking lives. By the same token, I don’t understand how some people can be so unconflicted about being pro-choice. Having experienced the second guessing, the what ifs, the sense of failure and the guilt, I don’t find anything simple or unconflicted about it.
Hi. I’m deeply unconflicted about being pro-choice and your conflict is not constructive here.
But mostly, I don’t understand how these issues are still simply referred to as “women’s issues.” The destinies of men and women are intertwined by sex, and pregnancy, and childbirth. It is time for more men to sack up and start taking responsibility for their end of the conversation.
These “women’s issues” have shaped my life: my birth, my adulthood and the children for which I am forever grateful. So yes, I support women’s health programs and a woman’s right to choose.
Even though I know that none of these choices are made easily or without hurt.
Aaron, I’ve had an abortion. It was the right thing to do. My reasons were my own and it’s very annoying to have to stand around as a little old lady and waste what could be important minutes of my life assuring you that I’m not suffering for your moral high ground. You want men to talk about abortion? Fine. You talk to them. As far as I’m concerned, men talk too goddamn much about abortion, mostly about its evils and how it should be regulated out of existence. Why? Because when women make their own decisions, a much larger subset of men than would like to admit it get verrrrrrrry nervous. Last week, I got into it with a progressive guy – animal activist, union dude, single-payer supporter, righteous in many ways – who decided taxpayers shouldn’t fund perfectly legal medical procedures for women. It’s a dealbreaker, Aaron. I’m done with that guy. Maybe the reason your guy friends don’t want to talk about abortion or repro rights is because admitting he doesn’t really believe in them isn’t going to get a guy laid.
If you want to help, talk to other men, but don’t try this patter out on women. No one wants to hear that you understand. Be an ally. Keep your distance.
They Raise the Parking Rate
I’m watching the weather map, the spreading labor demonstrations and the PT schedule. The weather map. The spreading labor demonstrations. The PT schedule. Weather. Demonstrations. PT. What am I going to do?
Poor Impulse Control 