COMING RAIN

The cloud cover was densing yesterday as evening neared, whole slabs of sky moving up slowly and warmly from the south, bearing the hard Spring rains of the next few days of rainy season.

Ahead of time got all the new firewood covered up and the basil sprouts too, shielded from the hammer of torrential rain that debasiled me a few years ago when I was more ignorant than I am now. The straightneck and crookneck squash plants from US seeds are now big enough to do fine under the skybattering. To my surprise, they're feeling right at home, though the scallop squash is a bit cautious.

The US yellow wax beans, though (can't find those seeds here, same for the squashes above), are reticent - most of them anyway - even though they don't have visa problems. They're wary about sprouting, even the few who tentatively poke up, but the ones that do get used to it. Plus I replant, and word gets around, so maybe. The US green beans, on the other hand, recognize the place, to a bean. "Hey, this is Japan, isn't it! I'm from the States! They have soil rain and sun here too! Cool!" (Sprouts talk like teens, as you know.)

The wild ducks are looking forward to the rains though, a duck couple is just now flying down from upmountain paddies, practically holding hands, wings whistling in the dusky silence that is deepest just before the big downpour. They swooped downward over the Lake then climbed and sped south, as together as ever, into the coming rain.

BUMBLEBEE

Lying abed this sunny morning, gazing up through the skylight I watched an aerodynamically impossible bumblebee hover right there on the blue air, chunky silhouette held up by one small wingblur on each side, taking advantage of the air currents above the warming roof to hover with that great perspective, whirling and scanning the morning surroundings in a focused quest for nectar-bearing flowers, suddenly going WHOA and instantly veering radically away to safety each time a bird or large insect flew anywhere nearby, then quickly back on point hoverwhirling and scanning, scouting for the wherewithal of survival.

It occurred to me lying there below that my morning empty mind was feeling some sort of kinship with that activity up there, and that perhaps each of us humans has in our nether makeup such an ancient familiar, a spirit-bumblebee always hovering above the roof watching, scanning, scouting for wherewithal, every now and then going WHOA! How important then, to never lose contact with that bumblebee.

HANDS UP

Upstairs yesterday in all the quiet of a sunny afternoon I looked out the window into the garden and saw what at first I thought was The Baron, browsing quietly on some potato shoots growing out of my compost pile. But his color was more tawnily intense, he had new velvet horns, and it looked like some white spots there along the sides: I went to get my glasses: Yup, it was not The Baron, it was a male that had been a fawn not long ago that we had seen following its mother around, it was Baron II, heir to these great estates. Unfortunately, however, he was even now eying my lettuce, and the garden gate was open.

So I headed downstairs to get my props and be ready to do the Deer Chasing Routine. I asked Echo if she'd seen the deer, she said no, looked out the window and said Son of Baron. Yup I said. He's just a teenager, which is why he's come into the garden so carefree in broad daylight. He sure is a beauty, but he's heading for the lettuce, so I'm ready to chase him: Why don't you go in the back room and make some noise through the screen door, maybe that will be enough. I was expecting some Echo shouting, some hand clapping, maybe some banging on the wall or something, as I prepared myself to go out shouting and making gruff Brady noises, but suddenly from the big speakers we have back there came the top-volume breakout hip hop beat of the Black Eyed Peas, doing Hands Up:

Coming with rhythms to make your head jerk

Hands up

We makin' the whole joint short circuit

Hands high

Touch the sky

Get 'em up

Get 'em up, get 'em up, get 'em up, get 'em up, get 'em up (get 'em up)

We goin' make you move

We goin' make it hot

Elbows above your heads peoples

We holdin' up the spot

and so forth...

Which is way over any deer's head, but an impressive choice for the purpose. That's Echo for you.

At the very first bass beat so alien to his life, spirit and environs, I thought for sure Baron II would leap straight up and prong for the nearest exit, like I would if I were a deer under such circs, or even myself suddenly at a rap concert. That's what he would have done if I had stepped out the door, clapped my hands and shouted-- but then I'm not the Black Eyed Peas, am I.

He wasn't shocked, even though hip hop must have been new to him; on the contrary, he looked more like pleasantly surprised. He raised his head with that natural grace we admire in our arts and gazed toward the source of the beat, that BIG beat, with the rhythmic voice-noises and the grip of the song; those big brown eyes with a look in them that I've seen in eyes before, of a hungry emptiness, a curious seeking, a question with some panic at its heart.

He wasn't familiar with music, let alone with the Black Eyed Peas, to say nothing of lyrics; he stared for a long time - in grazing deer terms - at the roomdoor whence this mysteriously rhythmic and apparently human sound was issuing at chest-pounding volume greater than anything he'd ever heard, excepting maybe thunder directly overhead, backed by Echo clapping her hands. Should he run for his life, or could he safely ignore this amazing new thing? Could he graze and listen? He stood there looking, big ears focusing, trying to figure this out: was it a threat, was this a human in new form, was this... what was this? And he just a kid, these wild grape leaves so tasty, those lush lettuces just there in his vassal's garden...

The first several bars of the Peas seemed innocuous enough, but by the time he'd heard the hook and was getting into Verse 2 I could see he was getting antsy, the feeling was growing that this was a danger of some kind-- not sure what and maybe not imminent, but the wiser course was to get some distance into the situation, so he turned and trotted off toward the deep forest and a more traditional kind of music.

Who knows, though: having heard that beat, maybe he'll come back to stand in our garden and hope for more... he is a teen, after all, and there's nothing like that on his Big Radio.

I'll just have to be sure and keep the lettuce gate closed.

SCIENCE AND THE HEART

Since the strawberry events of a few days ago as related in my previous post, whenever I'm out in the garden now, every once in a while an irritated brown-eared bulbul - a skittish, reclusive bird that normally doesn't talk much at all, and then always from a place unseen in the screen of the trees - flies low through the garden screeching a new call that sounds to my gloating ears a lot like "Strawberry thief! Strawberry thief!" I'm sure the previously mentioned animal scientists would rotfltao at this idea, though they should really get back to work, but the redder, sweeter and juicier MY strawberries get, the more the bulbuls come right out and yell whatever it is right toward me, one wing pointing at the strawberries.

There are, let us admit it, countless places where science cannot go...

THE PROBLEM WITH NO STRAWBERRIES

Traditionally, my gardening opponents have been limited to the full range of insects and their countless friends, plus local deer, wild pigs, monkeys and crows, a bestial crew that has been more than sufficient to make the enterprise an entertaining one. My efforts to fence them out, threaten them with stones, scare them with snakes, shock them with bottle rockets etc. have earned me an extreme reputation among the local beasts, so I'm bothered much less than when I was just a new kid on the mountain. Plus the bugs and beasts themselves have taught me a great deal about their habits, dislikes and weak points, valuable information. So it's been a fixed range of opponents all this time. That's the problem with no strawberries.

This year, in a daring move to go where no me has ever gone before, I put in a couple of strawberry plants, much as NASA aimed for Mars. NASA got to Mars and I grew some strawberries that got redder and redder, which is a strawberry's line of work, so I put a net tent over the plants with the far end closed where it stretches all the way along the row to cover the new beans now sprouting (crows love bean sprouts, as I learned earlier in this history, and surmised that they would freak out over strawberries in the garden their human is planting for them).

With the nearer 'open' end screened by green pepper plants and tall parsley, I knew that crows, perhaps the least credulous creatures on the planet, who do not like nets at all, would not push their way through and walk along the ground into a netty underness, even to get at strawberries (if they could even spot them through the netting), but I did not know about the net-scoffing character of the brown-eared bulbul. Not growing strawberries can breed that kind of ignorance. Brown-eared bulbuls already know this.

I remained ignorant until I'd looked out the kitchen window a couple times while making lunch and saw a pair of brownears flying up out of the garden each time, which was strange, they never enter the garden regularly like that, sort of coming and going; what's more, there was something in the way the birds flew out of the garden that caught my attention.

The pair had that kind of furtive, purloiny look about them that science, cocooned in its latticework of logic, pooh-poohs as anthropomorphism, but that gardeners and pet owners know all about (for the record, let me state here that despite such shortcomings, science and its purveyors in many other regards deserve our respect and have a rightfully valued place in society). So, urged on by evidence of bulbul guilt, I went and looked at the strawberries and found that the reddest ones were pocked with brown-eared bulbul beak stabs and the soil below them was littered with strawberry banquet fragments.

The thieving pair stayed up in the cherry tree watching me and screeching their dissatisfaction at my fiddling with their strawberries - we found them, for godsake, bla-bla-bla - to the extent  of cutting off all the reddening ones and taking them into the house to ripen there, before securely netting the entire strawberry area.

So from strawberries I learned how to piss off bulbuls. Some kinds of knowledge are more satisfying than others.

PATH TO FREEDOM

"THE ORIGINAL MODERN URBAN HOMESTEAD
pioneering a journey towards self sufficiency, one step at a time."

"Path to Freedom is a grassroots, family operated, original urban homestead located in the midst of Pasadena.

Surrounded by urban sprawl and just a short distance from a freeway, the Dervaes Family have steadily worked at transforming this ordinary city lot into an organic and sustainable micro-farm."

via

RUSHES

When freewheeling down the mountain on clear cool Spring mornings like this, I am rolling through a broad and accelerating river of warm air rising from the Lake as the sun begins to warm the mountainside. The tide of air is a rush of fragrances from the fields, the village and the lake below, a potpourri of tilled earth, new rice, lake water, garden flowers and morning coffee, countless other scents all mingling together that the nose knows but the mind can't rightly find, though it enjoys them all the same... Yes I know that scent, what is it -- It's gone, it was -- Now this scent I know; this is... There are some herbs in there, fishing boats and breakfasts, the wild and the civilized blending with the living scent of the Lake, rising toward the mountain summits and thence into the heavens, I down here descending through it all, head back, breathing in the gift...

Then when I come home at night and am wheeling up, the darkling sky is pouring down the mountainside as the land cools and the air above the daywarmed Lake is beginning to rise, pulling the mountain air down in the great daynight backforth that betides this time of year, but this cascade is a rush of scents entirely wild, a bouquet rich with the tang of cedar and pine, whole mountainside forests of sundrawn tree breath, blended with the essence of tumbling streams and the spice of native herbs, the wildflowers that work at night sending out their subtle musks on the moist air as I rise through it all, breathing deep with discovery...

Either way, it's real wealth.

LOUVRE OF THE MOMENT

Out this morning among the new pepper plants, wanted some slender bamboo stalks to use as props for when the peppers get too heavy, so went to the bamboo stash I'd cut earlier that was now dry and leaning between a couple of firewood cords, a perfect spot for the full morning sun to beam all its glory on for just that brief moment, so I couldn't go that way to get to the bamboo stash because there was a work of art there-- a web of impossibly fine silk, woven by a true master, who sat immobile at the center of her shimmering spiral of blues, reds, golds and greens in barely visible strands that rippled softly in the slight morning breeze, like the afterimage of a sleeve of a no longer visible goddess...

How could I barge through that to get the bamboo who cares about bamboo, I'd as soon spray paint the Mona Lisa, so I just stood a long while looking, there in the Louvre of the moment. An indefinite time later, back in the outer world recalling the minor matter at hand, I went the long way around, reached over the neighboring stack of firewood to the bamboo stalks and lifted them out. As I walked away I noticed that the Mona Lisa was sagging. It had been braced not by three invisible strands, as I'd thought, but by four, one of which had been attached to the bamboo.

Now if that creation had been mine, I would have been majorly peeved. But the spider, in her now half-perfect web - the other half of her world wavering and useless - wasn't wasting time and energy cursing whatever clumsy beast had done this to her life's work. She just stood there sensing the setup, then headed immediately out along the nearest intact support strand and doubled it, buttressed its end, then sped along the opposite one and so on, back and forth as I watched, back and forth across the new wasteland that would in time be restored; the past was gone, the future was yet, only she was now...

Gazing at masterworks is never a waste of time.

SITTING SIMPLY

The sublimity in simply sitting here, with only nature as my companion, one that speaks to the nature in my body, summons my kinship with branching trees, rising clouds, singing insects, flowering air-- the colors, the dances, the perfumes, the music, so free in their way to my clockwound being as to ease me to their time, the real time, to be among them as part of the family, sharing the sublimity in simply being here...

A growing list of inspiring links on Ken Elwood's epic links page...

KARMIC DEPUTY

Given my former lifestyle and its related Karma, having made it to this age I'm familiar enough with the receiving end of the Big K in its many forms, and with the volatility of the Karmic Exchange. This morning though, was something new for me.

As I was freewheeling through the village down to the train station, I approached the little Shinto shrine that sits right by the roadside midvillage and always has, probably a shrine there 1000 years ago. It's tended mostly by the elder ladies of the village, who keep it clean, put flowers there in season, come up the mountain past our house to cut sakaki branches for it in winter, put some sake there, and a rice ball or some mochi, with incense on special days. Like every religious structure, it's about a lot more than religion; it embodies the local spirit, reflects the care of the community. The tenets of religion are actually the least of it by now - the whetherness of gods and so on - it's the collective face of the village that is kept clean and presentable to all who pass by, a symbol of their unity. To let it slip into dilapidation would be unthinkable. To violate the shrine or its trappings would be unhuman.

A description that fits Crow perfectly, but he of the darkness couldn't care less about such folderol, it being morning, he being hungry and lord of it all anyway. He always knows where the food is. Monkeys do too, but Crow, an early riser with wings, was there first, filching a big fresh rice ball from the shrine altar. He was just digging in, on the very altar itself, when yours truly, a spontaneously deputized agent of the Karmic Division, came quietly freewheeling down the road.

Crow's dark eye spotted my approach; he stopped beaking rice long enough to grab the rice ball with both taloned feet and take off fast, but fast was no longer an option, given the dead weight that is a rice ball. High was no longer an option either, so crow had to fly low, and in only one possible direction away: i.e., across the road right in the path of Karmic Agent Brady, who was quickly drawing nearer with weighty retribution, leaving but one heartbreaking way to escape the impending karma: by lessening the overall weight. So crow did the unthinkable, what is pretty near crowly impossible: he let go of the rice ball in mid-air, let it fall into the road where somebeast else could get it, in order to gain the speed and height he needed to avoid the jaganath that was speeding toward him, me atop the hell on wheels watching the whole show with amazement that Karma was using me as an agent... Apparently I had turned a spiritual corner of some kind, which is news to me.

It's probably not cool to complain after being Karmically deputized, but I wish the crow had been a monkey...

SIGNS OF THE NEW ECONOMY

Here's hoping this kind of thing happens more and more in the coming new world economy...

THE DISPLACED MIDWESTERNER EXEMPTION

Like many Americans, whether expat or frontline domestic, since reaching working age I have questioned the mental integrity of the IRS, an annual questionfest whose intensity is heightened after one has lived awhile in Japan among rub-it-in foreigners of other nationalities who gleefully pay no double taxes to their mentally healthy home countries.

That annual event came round again this morning, when my eyes fell upon this line while wading through the 2009 tax year's phonebook-sized "1040 FORMS & INSTRUCTION FOR OVERSEAS FILERS," to wit, form 1040, line 42, Exemptions, which states: "If line 38 is $125,100 or less and you did not provide housing to a Midwestern displaced individual, multiply $3,650 by the number on line 6d. Otherwise, see page 37." The coherence just leaps right out at you.

Mind you, I've never been one to turn down a tax exemption, but I've checked carefully and no matter how I tweak it, I haven't provided housing to a displaced Midwesterner, who at my house would have to be about as displaced as he could get. So I guess I'll just have to multiply $3,650 by the number on line 6d, whatever good that does. Did I mention that this Exemption is offered in the instruction for OVERSEAS filers?

It is also most unlikely that many of my US expat friends here, wherever they live in Japan, are housing any displaced Midwestern individuals, but it just goes to show you how obsessive the Gollums of our econopolity have become. No doubt there's a law somewhere saying that if you house a displaced Midwesterner then you can get a tax credit or a free coupon to Denny's or something, but the fact that they ask it of expats is a good indication of just how far the neomalignancy has advanced, how it has all become intertangled into one globally grossly expanding tax phonebook-producing moneyfeeding hydrabehemoth that has grown beyond control except by those at the top who push the dollarsign buttons and make billions yet pay no taxes. It is the domestic frontliners like you who pay the taxes, and those like us abroad who get the tax phonebooks that beget manic rantings like this, Hahahahahahaha, even though, living abroad, we are not taxed unless we're also rich, in which case we do not pay either, because we're rich! You see how it all holds together, don't you? Hahahahahahaha!

Say-- you look like you might be from the Midwest...

REQUIREMENT #3

The police in Japan of today aren't nearly as ShowMeYourPapersy as they were back when I first came here in the early seventies and folks in Tokyo used to stare at me in my rareness like folks in China do now to their visitors. Back then the police would stop you on the street or jump out of one of the corner police boxes and with one of those guilt-generating immigration faces ask to see your passport or alien registration, even though world terrorism wasn't yet much of a fad. We foreigners were a threat of some other kind, a threat that's no longer really a matter of papers, but has been reduced to its essence. The fundamental fact of foreignness in this "ethnically homogeneous" society is still here. [Ad before video, but worth the wait]

The other night I got off the train back from work in the big city, went to get my motorbike to head home, and even from a distance could see an ominous yellow tag on the handlebars. Some authority had been here. What had I done now. Untwisting the wire that held the tag in place, I took it off and saw that it contained a list of 9 items, one of which, #3 , had been checked by the observing authority. It was from the police.

A policeman or two had come out here, to this little motor/bicycle parking lot beneath the tracks of this tiny railstation - where at night I often detrain alone - to go from bike to bike and check these 9 items, such as "There is no lock on your vehicle," "You forgot to lock your vehicle," The handlebars of your vehicle are not locked," or (in my case) "The theft insurance on your vehicle has expired." (Bicycle and motorcycle theft insurance is required by law(!) in a country where crime is so rare (relatively speaking) that the police have time to visit little motor/bicycle parking lots beneath the tracks at tiny rail stations to go from bike to bike and observe 9 items regarding your two-wheeled vehicle. This is amazing only to a foreigner, so there is something to this foreignness...

Not that I'm complaining, mind you; it is a privilege truly unimaginable in the West - and just about everywhere else I've ever been - to feel so safe and enjoy such civility-- and by extension, to feel so remiss at having violated requirement #3. I'll get right on it.

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF DISCERNMENT

Choice is not a big deal in traditional Japan and never has been, especially out here in the countryside, where vanilla ice cream is exciting and everybody drives a white pickup truck. I could go on, but then I'd never finish, so I'll stop here if you don't mind, and take a quick right to get to my point.

Every couple of months we ship to Kasumi and Family up north a big bag of the organic brown rice we buy unpolished from Mr. S., an elderly rice farmer who lives across the Lake. We then take it to the community rice polisher down in the village, dump in the rice, use the graduated knob to fine tune the settings for optimal brownricedness, put in the coins (yes it's a rice-polishing vending machine!), then let it run and out comes rice polished just the way we like it. We ship the appropriate portion of the result to Kasumi; the grandies love that fresh natural country rice.

A side benefit of this is that now and then we get to meet various neighborhood folks down there, which can be interesting, plus we can store more rice at home, and for a longer time, because it has the hull still on until we polish it in the village, plus we get the bran and other husky stuff, that's emptied into a large barrel beside the polishing machine. I take the bran home and use it on the garden; it can also be used for making pickles, skin scrubs etc. (A mesh scrub-bag of organic rice bran in the bathtub!) How I dream on...

On Wednesday, a rainy season day, we headed down to the village with a 30kg  bag of rice to polish and send to Kasumi and family, went up to the old rice polisher and found that it was a new rice polisher. Looked real slick. Big, fancy buttons. Maybe even digital. Never had digital rice, no doubt it's fast and convenient. But on closer inspection we found that the concept of fine tuning was no longer appreciated, had been deemed an outdated thing of the past, and was not available. Gone was the big old friendly knob that had enabled infinite polishing choices. In its place were two buttons: 70% polished or Complete Obliteration of Any Indication that This Is Rice. For a higher price, too. Plus in its obsessive efficiency it sucked all polishings into a black hole; no bran was returned. This would not stand. Plus, we'd paid for that bran. (I suspect we may be the only ones around here making that argument.) We put the rice back in the car and headed north along the Lake to find another village rice polisher in an even more rural place where a spectrum of choice might still prevail, a last bastion of preference.

We went on quite a while through the downpour till we came to the egg cooperative, where they have a rice polisher in a shed out front. It was new, too, as it turned out, but offered three choices: 50%, 70% and Complete Obliteration etc. (What are these tiny translucent granules?) We like our rice around 35% polished, so there was no game in town for us, and it was now raining extra hard, which let me tell you makes it difficult to find new rice polishers tucked away up little village side streets, a demanding task at the best of times. So we put in our rice, put in our money, selected 50% and went for it, vowing to find an older, more liberal machine if there was one still around within a reasonable distance, though it probably wouldn't be there long if no one out here was opting for brown rice choices. Who's gonna support that? This sleeker, quieter, faster and more expensive rice polishing machine took our bran, too, and could not be insulted.

It seems that no one wants to choose the degree of polishing anymore, that there is no demand for the full-spectrum brownricedness, that in the new world we are all becoming, deep choice is no longer efficient.

WATERMIRRORS

These are the early days of rice growing season, when the leaves of the new rice are all but invisible upon those many facets of water that just a few days ago were filled only with mountains and sky. Heading down the road these dawns is like traveling through a whole mountainside of optical illusions, passing by mirrors of open water where the farmers have planted their family paddies with the barest of rice stalks that from a distance are invisible, those small leaves placed 30 cm or so apart; in the slanted light it is a visual treat to slowly roll toward the village on my motorcycle and at first, looking down from above each watermirror, see nothing but sky reflected-- then a vague geometric pattern begins to emerge as the light changes and the tiny rice plants become manifest - mere wisps of green, the lines and rows of them curving and turning to fit the shape of the respective paddy - then when I draw to the level of the water there is suddenly a soft green layer floating there at eye level, like a jade mist above a mirror, then I look below to the next paddy and again it is only water, upon which a geometric pattern of green slowly resolves and turns to mist as I descend...

In a paddy here and there along the way stalks a crow, egret or hawk, searching for frog, insect, little fish that live there-- they pause in their breakfast labors, lift their heads above the green to watch me as I pass, then get back to the big menu...

BATHOS

About 11 o'clock this morning as I was clearing the old onion bed and prepping it for what I haven't yet decided (the possibilities in gardening are as many as those in youth, which can be at once nostalgic and unsettling, an interesting combo), some of those youth of Japan who are mute in the sociospiritual sense and depend upon incoherent loudness for public expression - hundreds of them in this instance - came motorcycling past on the road down by the Lake, flicking their accelerators to flatulate the fact of their presence.

This usually occurs at night in the city, to the delight of those heavily put-upon urbanites trying to sleep on the other side of thin walls a few feet away, but on nice sunny Sundays like this the mutes sometimes roar collectively out into the country, where they can eructate in the light of day.

As they did so en masse, moving on by in their superficial soundcloud, a startled frog in a nearby kinmokusei tree suddenly began chirping rapidly with irritation. I couldn't make out all that he was saying amidst that torrent of noise, but before he was drowned out he said something like: What the hell is that? Who are those amateurs? How come they're saying nothing so loudly?

Amazingly, he was voicing the very same thoughts that were even then burbling up from what must be the amphibian levels of my bathoconscious!

How unlike an exhaust pipe!

FOREST MONKEYS, STREET MONKEYS

As a sapient being and anciently practiced discerner of patterns amidst chaos, I can't help but perceive the similarities between the lowdown thieving conscienceless behavior of my local simians at one end of the Intelligence Spectrum, and the lowdown thieving conscienceless behavior of Wall Street simians at the other end. The forest monkeys in their basal integrity come and take a few onions, bite a radish or two, then are gone till they're again hungry in this neighborhood and there is nothing better around than my onions. They never get bonuses or flaunt the success of their scam, they never make off with more than they can carry.

The Street monkeys, in contrast, find that integrity gets in the way of their desires; they want more than just the onions of it all, they want the yachts and the golf courses, the 25 million dollar houses, they want the respect of folks like themselves, who can only envy. So they package a dozen actual onions and millions of promises of onions and trillions of onion IOUs into tranches that they get rated AAA 100% ONION by some bribed rating agency, then sell the Fully Onionized Derivatives at declared value to widows and pensioners, mayors and governments all over the world, who then believe they are rich in onions and will be even richer when they cash in their fat onion portfolios in 20 years.

Both parties of perpetrators know, somewhere in their "Heart," that they are committing dishonest acts, the main difference being that it's easier to perceive in the forest monkeys. You can see they feel guilty when stealing - which they know must be clandestine - and they look guilty when caught red-faced. The Street monkeys, in contrast, feel no guilt; in fact they reward themselves all the more handsomely the greater their dishonesty. What's more, they even flaunt their actions, lately praising themselves for so many brilliantly (and honestly impossible) profitable quarters in a row, achieved by further milking the biggest scam in the history of sapience.

Forest monkeys, with their ingrained integrity, would never stoop so low.

A SMALL JIG

The monkeys of course know when I am at home, and they know that when I am at home I am ever on the watch, gardenwise, that when I see a monkey in the vicinity I am a man of fast and accurate rocks, loud scary fireworks and other advanced forms of dastardly insistence upon vegetable possession.

Of course the monkeys know these things. But they also know that I work in the city on Tuesdays, and that Echo is away on errands all Tuesday afternoon. So they are patient. They don't often come on those other days, unless they're strangers, who are easily chased off. The native monkeys wait, hold the kids back, restrain themselves. They come on Tuesday afternoon, after the red car has been spotted and confirmed as coming down the mountain. "Red car descent confirmed, let's move out..." the monkey Godfather says into his virtual wrist mike.

So it wasn't really a big surprise when on Wednesday morning, one of my at home days, I awoke and looked out the window upon my garden, where I perceived even with sleepy, eyeglassless eyes that that the few onions that had remained did so no longer. Some form of lowly, crass and uncaring beast had paid a visit to my onions, as depicted in those impressionist flecks of white scattered there among the long, blurry brushtrokes of toppled green.

The reason I wasn't jumping up and down possessed with Gardener's Rage, however, was that I had been quietly and inyerfacedly harvesting and consuming my very own onions for some time now, as per reasons posted of previously; hence there weren't that many onions left, and those of lowest value. I had also scored 99.99 percent of the shiitake in my daily log scans, so when the drooling beasts came upon the empty logs after the paucity of onions there was likely much gnashing of simian teeth in that quarter, which pleases me immensely.

I don't really mind the monkeys taking their vig in exchange for my use of their ancestral turf, especially a radically diminished vig, such as I've been contriving of late. It's not like we have a contract or anything. Also they left the garlic alone and don't like spinach, chard, radishes, shungiku or peppers, among other things. And there aren't yet any cukes, tomatoes or squashes, which I will hawkeye like I do the shiitake, so all in all most of my garden remained mine, a matter of not-too-small a jig on my part, even before I found my glasses.

EXPAT BOOKWORM JUBILATION

As a long-time traveler who has experienced many of the world's markets (in fact, sold in a few) and the infinity of trickery therein, I of course did not believe it when I visited an online bookstore with an Amazonlike selection range and Amazonlike prices, but that offered FREE SHIPPING WORLDWIDE (Amazon offers "free" shipping in the continental US for only $79 a year!), I thought who are you kidding, from Seattle to here it's usually book price plus ca. 50% for shipping costs, and this new place was in the UK, but then after checking a bit deeper decided to try it and see, ordered two paperback books (one of which Amazon had only in hardback (to be pre-ordered!). Received the two books in perfect shape by air, the first in about 2 weeks, the other at a bit over 3 weeks (delayed by to the Icelandic volcano, as discovered via order tracking). I don't know how they do it but I hope it lasts. I suspect that Expat English bookworms worldwide are now rejoicing.

PROFESSIONAL

This morning I was restacking the old firewood into a new and improved arrangement for next year, and was just lifting the last 10cm diameter cherry log from the northernmost cord open to the wind so I could stack some newly split wood there, when all of a sudden on the support cedar log below was a professional baby mamushi, going "Huh?" "Wha?" "I was asleep, man, what the..." looking around and talking kinda slow like the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland saying Wwwhhhooo aaarrreee yyyooouuu??? Actually he was a bit older than a baby mamushi, which would be more like the snake I found under my front door one morning.

He'd be about a foot long were one to stretch him out, which I was not about to do, you can if you want, and even though he was curled up small I could tell he was a mamushi because of the casual and fearless way he addressed me, a giant looming over him with giant claws and clothes and stuff. He didn't dash off at lightspeed, the way venomless snakes always do. Plus there was the professional pinstriping and other decorations along his body, even though not in the black-and-brown of mamushi adulthood, or the black-and-gray of infancy-- more like, I guess, an adolescent red-and-green-- but even if you've never seen it before, way in your inherited archives you always know exactly what it means-- that "zero at the bone" that Emily spoke of. He slowly tilted his head up to better see what the hell, and though tiny, his head was triangular like that of a pit viper, all the more beautiful for its perfect, gemlike tininess.

It was morning and still cool, so he'd been racked out since dawn after a night on the new job, and had not expected an interruption to his snaky dreams. However, I already had his former roof in my hand and was not going to put it back because I'm restacking this firewood so get over it, was the thoughtwave. After a loaded pause (Hey, I got venom you know...) he did the reptilian version of Good Grief..., slithered slowly to the ground and huffed off into the downmountain underbrush to find a new place to crash and not be interrupted by one of these crazy, legged creatures.

Not long after, as I was stacking the new wood I could have sworn I heard some tiny snake snores, but that was probably just the bamboo leaves rubbing in the breeze.