REALLY LOCAL NEWS 

• Wild pig invades property, ravages nothing in particular: “Just for fun of it” 

• Leaves filling culvert and accumulating on roadside await attention 

• Hornets nearly the size of  your hand invade carpenter bee nest in front eave; aftermath recalls Punic Wars 

• Crow stops using chestnut tree outside upstairs bedroom window for nationwide dawn announcements 

• Garden growing feral, organizing; home committee shorthanded, indecisive 

• Deer enjoys nightly snack of beautiful pumpkin leaves growing in all directions from compost pit outside garden fence; “succulent blossoms a special treat” 

• Fall of deceased oak awaited, chestnut going piece by piece 

• Green wheelbarrow with yellow handles full of broken garden pots; mental committee allegedly forming 

• Cherry limb that should have been trimmed a long time ago now popular woodpecker resort 

• Uncleaned rain gutter bitches and moans even in light rain 

• Brady hears loudest thunder in his life, in clear midday, right outside house; suspects unilateral attempt at stimulus 

• Mushroom logs confused by weather have no idea where they are 

• Anonymous midsized bird begins enjoying Brady cucumbers 

• Water pressure falls unexpectedly one morning for no reason 

• Generous village neighbor leaves some of her surplus sweet onions beside our door 

• Local farmers visit upmountain paddies now and then  

• All calm as rice grows 

MEETINGS WITH MYSELF

Being frequently alone up here I have a lot of these meetings, especially lately, what with the weird weather and with pushing well into my seventies, when new questions come up at an accelerating pace, like where in hell did I put that fill in the blank. Plus it's been oddly cold for early April days; my life habit takes it tacitly to be November or so, with snow in the offing and winter ahead, wants me to eat warm calorific foods and snuggle out of reach of aimless winds and fitful rains. 

It's as though the atmosphere can't keep track of the calendar. Lately the weather seems to have gone to the dark side, but that’s just me looking out the window into the steely air, holding a meeting as the cherry blossoms try to remember what they're supposed to do at around this time every year and how. Happens to us all. 

It's confusing as well to the shiitake, who were completely suckered by that 10 minutes or so of sudden warmthiness that happened earlier in the month. Spring can be so cynical. At the feel of it, many of the newly emerged and naive shiitake came running into almost full mushroomhood completely naked, only to realize 10 minutes later that the sudden northerly wind was effing cold, what is this, and they right away wanted to go back to nubhood, but of course they couldn't, once you’re a mushroom, you're a mushroom. Talk to immigration.

The ancient mushroom code is extremely strict about this, so all the shivering newbies can do at that point is what we ourselves would do if we were full out in the frigid air on a log on a mountain somewhere completely naked, which is stop it right there, do not invest another iota of energy in growth, forget about it, just hunker down forever, because this is it! 

It's not pretty, but as I say the shroom laws are firm on this point-- buncha permanently hunkering mushrooms out there now, and speaking of firmness, those hunkerees acquire a wondrous texture that human teeth - which I and many of my acquaintances still happen to have - find most toothsome indeed.

Now back to my meeting.  

INDIANA CAN HAVE THE PUBLICITY

I started growing - or rather attempting to grow - hiratake mushrooms sort of as a lark, a few years ago, as detailed here. I'd found the spore on sale, had a few oak sections available, thought I'd give it a try but didn't expect much, given my experience with other sorts of exotic mushroom varieties; plus, being in sync with dozens of shiitake logs all over the place for all these years, these mushrooms would provide but a drop in the bucket, if indeed anything at all made it into the bucket.

So far I've learned that hiratake fruit just after the shiitake have finished, at least up here in this ecolocale, and even though I got some sterling hiratake last year, the oak sections soon looked like they'd been coopted by shelf fungi, so I had by degrees begun giving up on the hiratake agenda. Thus it was that I 'forgot' to check the logs under their cover of leaves, twigs and burlap.

Then a few days ago I entered the jungle of my garden and headed along the ancient path toward where legend had it that some old logs had been sequestered under forest debris, plus some older cover; upon exposing the logs, I found that one log had done nothing, as expected, but that the other had sprouted half-heartedly about a week before, so such mushrooms as there were were no longer prime, but even subprime hiratake are a gourmet experience, so we enjoyed them. But I figured that this year was the last gasp of an amateur effort. I had learned some stuff, and might try again with some other varieties, maybe get some a couple years down the road.

So I forgot once more about checking any further until a couple of days ago when I chanced upon familiar signs of an ancient mushroom tomb and decided, albeit pointlessly, to look once more, see if the other log had done anything. I pulled back the cover from the unproductive sections and saw there amidst the crumbly dun of the forest debris the most beautiful fronds of graduated pearl-gray mushrooms cascading down in lifeglowing perfection that I have ever seen.

No treasure hunter has ever felt more awe. Well, Indiana Jones might have come close for the first milliseconds of beholding that golden idol he had expected to find, but the gorgeousness of this natural radiance, shining there amidst the the dull matte of leaves, twigs, burlap and duff where nothing at all had been expected, I think puts me a few paces ahead of that intrepid movie character, plus there was no curse on my discovery. And as to the deliciousness, I got the better deal. Indiana can have the publicity.

MUSHROOMS AND RELATIVITY

I'd given up on the hiratake mushrooms in the many years since I'd inoculated the logs-- those fussy mushrooms would never emerge, they're so neurotic, as I observed on a tv program where the tyroshroomers sterilized the log sections with steam, inoculated them, wrapped them, buried them in the ground, covered them with leaves and left them alone for who knows how long, did all sorts of terminal care stuff and after all that got only 4 logs out of a dozen successfully inoculated, it was all true 'cause I saw it on tv, so this was really just a bit of mad whimsy I was engaging in here, with my simply principled approach of "just inoculate the mothers, put them under a tree somewhere, cover them with something if you want and forget 'em." So I did. Inoculated them, stacked them on rice straw under some cedars, covered them in rice chaff, more straw, burlap, and left them. But I didn't forget them.

For a good while, I'd peek under the burlap whenever I went by those cedars, but there was never a fungal sign on the logs, other than slow relentless peripheral invasion by small shelf fungi - the turtles of the mushroom world - the logs looked less and less promising. After a time I concluded that the spore had been pre-empted by shelf fungi; the logs were beginning to look forlorn in their ragged, dirty burlap carelessly tossed over woody shoulders, in comparison to the sleek but as yet unproductive shiitake logs leaning nearby in their natural tuxedos, looking ready for the Oscar red carpet, they were so trim, sharp and stylish, clearly prepared for the big time. The formerly alleged hiratake objects, in contrast, were more like under the bridge in a burlap shawl with a bottle in a bag.

Though I hadn't forgotten them, I didn't have much hope for those ancient H-logs anymore, thinking that at least they'll rot down in a few years and make some good compost, in which spirit I was raking leaves and cedar sprigs thereabouts the other day when something graceful and unfamiliar caught the eye of that little mindscout that's always watching through hope's tiny windows even when we daydream, that never lets go of possibility, which is really why we humans are successful as a species: it never lets us give up, is always on the lookout for a revelation... mindscouters DaVinci, Franklin, Einstein are a few good examples - not that I myself am in such company, but the list is - where was I... Oh yeah, those wonderful and elegant, Oscar-winning Hiratake Logs... Boy, were they beauties; I've never seen Hiratake that size; they're never that big when you see them in stores... and turns out that, unlike the lazy shiitake logs, the Hiratake were inoculated only 1 year ago, when in my head it used to be three or more years ago! Time is slowing down for a change! It's like when I was 10 years old! Today was a week long! Tomorrow, yay!

Not forgetting makes time longer than forgetting does. Or it could be all these mushrooms I'm eating...

Photo

THIS ONE’S FOR YOU.

On an evening in late November, after a dry spell in the weather I went out to dampen the mushrooms and water the garden. It was one of those evenings poets try to capture in disjointed sensory words (Prussian blue air of chill stillness, like vodka 30 minutes out of the freezer), the ground ankle-deep in red-to-gold cherry and chestnut leaves as I walked around with the garden hose, dampening the mushrooms that were growing larger by the day.

As the Prussian blue darkened I looked up and there not 10 yards away, gazing at me and chewing on dinner, was the Baron himself, intrigued by that non-deer creature over there who was streaming from the ends of his upper limbs such interesting shapes that sounded like rain and waved around in a way he'd never seen before... He was enthralled, didn't show any sign of panic when I moved along, he just looked on intently, now and then bending down to take another nibble (he's a big fan of my compost pile with its apple cores, cucumber vines and potato peels), lifting up his big crown of antlers to look whenever I moved, watching the water stream from my hands. 

He browsed on across the ground as I continued watering, first the mushrooms, then the spinach, beans, shungiku and other  greens, shallots, chard, onions, closed the garden fence, then rustled back through the glow of leaves to put away the hose-- and there just above the Lake was a full moon rising from the far shore, a ball of sunset-red at first that slowly lightened as it rose, casting a glittering pink-gold trail across the calm waters (even though it was a blue moon all along).

One can get along very well on far less natural beauty than this... I was blessed by this largesse, let the moment keep on filling me with the rainbow on the ground, the trusting Baron, the red moon rising, the clear, brightening night, to share later with you.

THE EFFECTS OF PROTRACTED MONKEYLESSNESS ON WESTERN CULTURE: A Brief Analysis

Can there be too much monkeylessness? Up until  yesterday I would have answered hell no, give me even more monkeylessness than I have now! But perhaps I can't really be impartial on this question, since I come from a historically monkeyless culture that - apart from politics and finance - has no experience with truly guiltless intelligence. The continuous monkeylessness of the West, I now suspect, has put the West at a deep cultural disadvantage, one that Westerners aren't even aware of, largely owing to their endemic monkeylessness. Sort of like genetically never having been exposed to measles.

The above question posed itself to me the other morning while I was waiting for the train, when my thoughts drifted to my innate desire for monkeylessness vis-a-vis the startling intelligence I have perceived in those beasts, who exhibit ancient patience combined with the original lack of conscience, yet bearing in themselves at least the surface manifestations of guilt, like their merely facial expression of the smile-- so much like loan sharks and politicians...

Recently I had gone through weeks- months, in fact - of monkeylessness, and, being a child of the West, was growing complacent raising mushrooms; I was no longer on my toes. I'd get a couple baskets of mushrooms in today and a couple tomorrow, "there are too many, so I'll get the rest over the weekend," I'd mumble to myself in a monkeyless stupor; it was then that the monkeys struck. They knew. They'd been waiting. And watching. Their scout saw me complacently take off on the motorcycle and according to his database I'd be gone all day; then they waited for the red car to leave with Echo inside, when they stuffed themselves at leisure with most of the rest of what in my monkeyless fog I'd naively thought were my mushrooms. I had fallen for the simian ploy, and so had learned once more. By these subtle stages have I become less Western, drifted more toward the other side of the Never the Twain Shall Meet boundary-- which no one to my knowledge has ever attributed to protracted Western monkeylessness.

On the other hand with its opposable thumb, monkeys are integral to Asia and its religions; thus the reality of monkeyfulness and dreams of monkeylessness have intrigued monkey-plagued Asian philosophers since the dawn of civilization, and may go a long way toward explaining the inscrutability attributed to these regions by the chronically monkeyless West. For with the presence of monkeys comes the deepest, most formidable aspect of "Where did we come from": "What is the difference between man and beast?"

Over the millennia, monkeyful societies have perforce pondered the in-their-face fact of natural intelligence in natural combination with natural consciencelessness. Europeans, Americans and Middle Easterners, in contrast, have never had to confront this daily reality in all its nakedness, never had to deal with the deeper implications unrelated to nature/nurture. Thus there are no monkeys in their holy books or shrines. This may be why they needed powerful, angry gods, strictly stipulated commandments, hardwired messiahs and suchlike.

It is my thesis, cursorily examined here, that much about the East that the West characterizes as inscrutable has to do with what I call the Simian Index, which concept I may pursue in future, if I ever start an anthropological career, and lots of luck on that one; or I may not, depends on whatever. I was, after all, raised in a culture where free will is heavily promulgated, though I have since lived and traveled for over three decades in rampantly monkeyful cultures that are less individualistic and more collectively serendipitous, so at the moment I'm not sure of my true place on the Simian Index, but I'm definitely closer to something.

NATURE GOES WILD

Nature can be pretty sardonic, especially when it comes to mushrooms. Like the other day, when I was so certain about my shiitake situation, nature did that whoa thing it does whenever it senses complaisance in the human condition, sort of like what it's doing now to the world economy. As to the point I just deviated from, I guess I have about 50 shiitake logs going at the moment, some newbies at 1 year old since inoculation, some 2 or 3 years old and others getting into their dotage, which varies depending on the size of the log and the amount of sapwood it has.

Commercial shiitake growers and vendors - to set off on another vaguely relevant tangent - have to grow or buy their own supply of logs, logs of consistent and manageable size for stacking and moving-- not too heavy etc., especially if they're selling the logs directly to consumers at the farm stores, either for inoculation or already inoculated (designer logs, I call them), as they do around this time of year. But since I'm non-commercial and have no oak-laden property (no way I'm cutting down my old oak!), nor do I buy designer logs, I must take whatever incidental fresh oak I can get from other sources (landscapers, developers, folks with too many crowding trees etc.). Thus my oak logs tend to be a bit larger, and opportunistic in shape, so often not straight or easily manageable. I also wind up with a lot of odd-sized bits of scrap timber that goes into a special firewood pile under the deck. Vague relevance is drawing nearer.

In any case though, in managing my shiitake logs I inoculate them, incubate them, move them around, water them now and then, stack them, restack them and finally move them to a corner place where they can shroom at last, and there I keep a close eye on them. So close that my mushroom eye is pretty much blind elsewhere, as it turns out. You see about the relevance? To get closer to my wandering point, I have the logs arranged by age too, so I always know what's going on, and over the 15 years I've been doing this I've gotten hardwired into thinking I had it all nailed, well in hand, right in place, tabs on everything shiitake-related around here, that's the kind of mental state I was talking about above; nature abhors both vacuums and self assurance. As for me, I didn't notice for a few days, because this was in another place, it was under the deck, you see. I didn't-- Who would expect -- I've never-- Why would I-- but I digress from my tangent.

To wend once again toward my point, a couple days ago I was walking toward the shiitake section way over in the corner of our lot, when I nanonoticed that under the deck there were some big healthy shiitake mushrooms growing. But I'm not and never have grown shiitake under the deck, so I only nanonoticed, because such a thing was impossible. But it kept nagging down there at the corner of my mind, so eventually I macronoticed. It was an odd feeling, abruptly observing mushrooms growing there on their own, and then going "Oh yeah, they can do that..." and then the question of actual IQ arose.

I've seen kikurage and lots of other mushrooms growing wild, but I've never seen shiitake growing wild. Let alone under the deck on a small section of oak firewood about 30 cm long that had been placed there only because it was an odd length and small, so would dry quickly and could be easily tossed up top for use in the nearby stove.

It was the variety of oak that designer log sellers prefer (some variety of red oak, I think), not least because shiitake seem to prefer it, so it is in strong commercial demand. I don't recall seeing it growing around here, so now I intensely wonder where I got that piece. Anyway, just lying there in the stack under the deck it had been inoculated naturally, unlike the standard oak all around it! I'd walked past there many times while those mushrooms were swelling into largeness, but to me there were no shiitake growing there: that's the odd-size firewood storage place, not the shiitake growing place, which is over there, where I organized it...

Nature loves to go wild.

MUSHROOM PASSION

Shiitake can be surprisingly erratic when it comes to the eroticism that is their destiny, they'll be tiny for a few dry days, then after an overnight rain they're umbrellas for increasingly larger elves.

All last night there was a heavy rain that is still ongoing, and a glance out the window this morning showed me an elf umbrella expo out there on the stacks of logs and on the ones laid out under the trees by the inner road. With this ongoing downpour I didn't want them to overdose the way they do sometimes, get all quick big and watery, so I donned the old trusty raincoat and went out there with a basket and harvested in the pouring rain.

Not surprisingly, shiitake are slippery when wet, can skitter all over the place if you don't have a grip, plus the escapees always try to hide, stubborn and sly as any natural thing. They'd much rather stay right where they are and pigout on the rain of course, this being their one big shot at fulfillment2Zmax; they do not want to go into some old final basket without having experienced their ecstatic role in the vast and complex process that is mushroom eroticism, with which emotions I sympathize, believe me, I went to Catholic schools, but there are other priorities here, such as imminent human mealtime, human in this specific case being the guy who inoculated these logs years ago, and to whom in his world they therefore "belong."

Perspectives are particularly limited just before lunch, but I do leave some of the mushrooms in place to fruit; whose heart is so cold that it cannot honor passion so manifest?

HIRATAKE

I now have enough inoculated shiitake logs to supply me with those exquisite fresh mushrooms for the foreseeable future, so I decided to try something a bit more difficult, the silvery Japanese mushroom hiratake (a variety of oyster mushroom - Pleurotus ostreatus). Like shiitake, hiratake goes well with just about everything, but it has different subtleties of flavor and texture. It is also a valued as a medicinal mushroom.

I've seen folks try to grow it on tv programs, and it appears to be rather fussy, but I thought I'd give it a try anyway-- I've got some nice rice straw to store the inoculated logs on and under, over there by the new cord of wood out of the wind and sun.

So over the weekend I got some hiratake spawn dowels and on Monday sectioned some 20 cm diameter oak logs I felled a few weeks ago into about 30 cm lengths, then today drilled them all over, inoculated them and stored them on a mat of rice straw over by the firewood, covered them with more rice straw and fallen leaves,and watered the pile with the hose for quite a while.

Will post again when there are results, however it goes...

Further info:

On Japanese mushrooms

International hiratake spawn source+instructions (looks like a slightly different variety than the one I just started)

Detailed info on hiratake as 'gourmet' mushroom

Helpful site on wild mushrooms of Japan

CAWCUS

I was out on the sunny deck this morning drilling and inoculating the first of this year's new shiitake logs, and when I'd finished and was carrying the heavy logs two by two out back to lean against the stone wall where it's dimmer and damper than elsewhere, as I went about my work lugging and standing the logs where they'd stay for a couple of years or so till they began to fruit, an impressive committee of crows followed me back and forth, curious about my actions, cawcusing loudly overhead, observing and commenting the while on my behavior (crows are as judgmental as they are nosey).

Admittedly, my Crow is poor; I get to hear a lot of it up here where the native speakers hang out, and I've picked up a little over the years sort of by osmosis, so from all the ruckus I could piece together a few fragments, like “Look, the [featherless] creature has pieces of trees… it's moving [them] from one place to another place, why would it do that, when it could just leave the trees where they were? Besides, it just threw away some tasty [garbage]! Incomprehensible!”

Beneath the canopy of trees still bearing their leaves, the ruckus was aggressively loud, so I responded just as loudly (my spoken Crow is even poorer than my heard Crow, though, since I rarely get a chance to speak it in daily life; plus, I grew up hearing American Crow, which is pretty different, but I try. It is not commonly known that Japanese crow is one of the most difficult languages in the world): “And what the hell are you guys doing here, making so much noise, don't you have anything better to do? Besides, you hate mushrooms!”

The responses came racketing down: “What is it doing with pieces of trees? It must have to [work] like that for a [living]! Haw! Haw! Our [friends] tell us that it also goes off into the gray (philosophically, crows see everything in shades of black) city and works in [skyless] boxes up in the air, how does it stand that? What is a [salary]?” and so forth, all in the extremely limited Crow vocabulary-- basically one phonetic syllable with countless minute variations.

I asked why they didn't try to acquire an actual language like we humans have; they responded “Where did that get [your species]? Look at you, crawling around down there, never even come up here, working your life away for food when food is lying around [rotting] everywhere, and [for free]! Haw! Haw! You need a [house,] too! Our [house] is everything we see! You need a [wheeled vehicle] to go far! And you think we should change? You must be as crazy as you act!

I was way outnumbered, and this was going to be pretty much one-sided (crows never listen anyway), so when I finished up I went inside for lunch; the committee is still up there hanging around the house, laughing.

Bet they can’t blog, though.

MAX

To be honest, I had never seen a happier mushroom. And that unexpectedly - as if anyone ever expected to see even a happy mushroom - but so it was. I hadn't been thinking of mushrooms at all, which is my normal state of mind, generally. I can go many days without thinking of mushrooms.

For example, I hadn't thought of mushrooms for about a week, I believe-- it's not easy to quantify mushroom-thoughtless durations-- then this morning I totally maxed out my mushroom thought quota by harvesting a few new shiitake that had emerged after the big rains of recent days (I tend to harvest them young before they grow too big and before monkeys, snails or other bugs can take advantage of my largesse). So much for mushroom mentation over the next few days, or so you'd think.

Then this afternoon I was just back from bucking some oak trees up mountain and was putting the chainsaw away, my lunch hunger growing by the minute, when I noticed an alien object atop the firewood stack nearest the tool shed. What could be forming that weird shape - in sort of an ET color - I went closer and saw that it was the biggest shiitake I have ever seen - though I expect there may be bigger ones down the line.

Last autumn I had spontaneously used one of the thinner Jumbo shiitake-inoculated logs I mentioned in an earlier post to hold down the plastic sheeting atop the firewood, and that one log had put its entire focus into sending up just one mushroom, which because of its odd location had not been noticed by insect, monkey or human, until I was the first to behold its magnificence. I ran off at once to get my camera to photograph this monster, since I had spazzed out on my previous Jumbo photo-op (as also indicated in said post), and as I was about to snap the photo I realized I had to put some object in there for scale, 'cause this thing was just too big, so I put in a cigarette lighter that I always carry for burning tree trimmings etc., but a bright red plastic cigarette lighter just seemed inappropriate, not to say garish and profane in the august presence of this Caesar of funguses, so I took off my glasses and put them on top of it, took the photograph and saw that the mushroom was quite handsome with my glasses on, they seemed to fit that noble countenance - in fact the mushroom seemed to be quite smiley now that he could see clearly.

His name is Max. He makes a peerless garlic-mushroom fettuccine.

THE SPEED OF FUNGUS

A couple years ago I selected a number of good oak branches from among some fresh firewood oak trees I'd been given, and set them aside out in the garden under the chestnut tree until the annual late-autumn sale of shiitake spore. At spore time I went to the farm store where, in addition to standard shiitake spore, they were selling spore for a new shiitake I’d never heard of, called JUMBO shiitake. The photos looked impressive so I decided to give it a try; anyway I already had a lot of logs producing the standard shiitake.

By the time I got started, I had so many logs waiting under the chestnut tree it took me a while to get them all inoculated, plus the weather was on-and-offy, plus the old drill finally gave out after years of struggling against sheer oak and I had to get a new drill, then the spore-plug-sized drill bit broke and I had to go find another one right in the middle of log-drilling-bit-demand season, each delay extending the task (ideally, fresh cut logs should be inoculated asap, or at most within 6 weeks) while the logs waited on the ground. I finally wrapped up the JUMBO inoculation quite a bit over schedule.

Leaving the logs on the ground like that, like any old fallen-in-the-forest logs, was not a good idea - indeed in some mushroom quarters it would be considered log abuse - but I didn't know that at the time. In the next couple of years I learned, though, as I watched various fungal growths emerge from my now sullied logs. Despite the impressive fungal diversity, though, there were no signs of JUMBO shiitake-- not even minijumbo shiitake. I began to think that my mushroom ambitions had been crowded out by these fungal opportunists that do have their proper place in nature, which is anywhere far from the elite society of my select logs. I’m beginning to sound like the bad guy in a Capra movie.

In fact the fungal world put on quite a display using my logs - all at the speed of fungus - for my painful education: wild species of all descriptions I had not seen or noted before, that apparently were always lying in wait for innocent logs to come along; they were now partying big time. There were shelvy fungi and droopy fungi, hard liquescent ones and rubbery ones, even hairy fungi, some of them probably glowed in the dark too, even sang to each other in the evening… ah, but you get the drift of my mushrooming despair... Yes, not only would there be no JUMBO mushrooms for yours truly, there would be less than none, given the profusion of undesired species; what's more, it would take at least three years for me to find out for sure!

Thus it was on that early morning that I passed by without even wanting to look at the mongrel shiitake logs on my way to the compost heap - not that I was going to jump in or anything - things weren't that bad, I was just going to toss on some kitchen garbage - and I bumped into something at knee height that felt like the edge of a sofa. I looked down and saw that it wasn’t a sofa, it was a mushroom!

Altogether there were about 8 sofa edges in this first emergence. Apparently these babies, unlike their conventional relatives, are not much affected by mere intrusions of feral spore. Even only 8 of them was too much for us. We carried a couple over to some big-eating neighbors. I sliced a small one thin, as per one of my shroom recipes, and had it for a large lunch. Great flavor, pleasantly al dente as compared to the standard shiitake, plus did I say they're HUGE. Just picture the edge of a sofa. They were gone before I could get any photos, but next time...

So to get to my point, when I recently got some good Jumbo shiitake logs from my clearing work with Mr. H., while I'm waiting for the spore to get marketed I've stacked the logs carefully on the dry stone floor under the porch roof, off the ground and out of the rain.

Not that I've got anything against the wild side...

WHAT FOOLS THESE SAPIENTS BE!

I was driving Echo down to the train station a couple of mornings ago when I rounded a bend in the road and saw one adult monkey sitting in the middle of the way and was surprised, since I had for some time been reveling in the broad delights of monkeylessness.

I was even more surprised when the redfaced roadhog didn’t do what monkeys generally do in such a situation, i.e. beeline asap for the immediate roadside; instead he did what action movie characters on foot being chased by cars always do for the convenience of the action director - even though the audience sees through it immediately every time - the otherwise savvy action star runs straight away from the car when all he has to do is zip right to the roadside and be free, thence into an alley and forget about it, but no: he runs straight down the street at 10mph away from a car going 80mph! Well, this ape must have seen a few action movies, 'cause that’s what he did, very unapelike, against every instinct: he loped off straight down the road, for a long way. And I, an experienced action audience member, in my conviction that this was a mere ape, was none the wiser.

A little sidestep here to touch briefly upon a relevant but much-ignored aspect of our human heritage: along with sapience, morality, conscience and all that other stuff in the attic, living area and basement that makes us ‘superior’ to simians, we inherited a characteristic that, although not often noted as the severe handicap it is, may perhaps be our greatest flaw: the ability to be complacent. Just look around you. Monkeys, in contrast, like all wild creatures, are utterly free of complacency. You have to be sapient to plumb the furthest reaches of ignorance.

Well-- as to that, you see before you the current king of complacency, because I fully believed , and acted upon, what I merely thought! Can anything in retrospect be more ridiculous? (We won’t go into the elections right now, this is neither the time nor the place.) Yes, in the comfortably abject faith that is so easily induced by protracted monkeylessness I had fallen into the habit of harvesting my shiitake as I needed them, letting the small and midsized ones grow a little larger for later etc. Indeed, that very morning I had walked by the lushly sprouting logs and mentally selected the mushrooms I would take at noon for my lunch.

When I got back from the station about 15 minutes after the monkey sighting, I went out to harvest said mushrooms and found that despite the ongoing monkeylessness I had been so sure of, the logs had been tossed by a large party of hairy marauders and every single mushroom was gone. No sign of apefulness around, though, excepting the one in the roadway-- which, now that I gave it some thought amidst the plasma of fungal absence, explained the simian-action-hero car escape nonsense: he was leading me away, as he thought it, while his companions pillaged my fungi!

So it seems that monkeys are getting smarter at a steady pace, which means that soon they’ll be complacent! I’ll be ready for that day. But no matter what, I’ll never run straight away from a monkey at the wheel.

THE MUSHROOMS OF UNDERSTANDING CHINA

There I was the other day - a fine day - with 40 beautiful, fresh shiitake oak logs tapping their feet waiting to be inoculated with that fine megashiitake spore I'd copped at the farmer store along with a special shiitake-inoculating drill bit, but by the time I got home from the store it was too dark.

Then after a next day in the office doing one-after-another-after-another of just a few of all the things that are distinctly unrelated to the task of inoculating shiitake logs (there are approximately 10 trillion such things), early the next morning I stacked up the already ongoing shiitake logs for the winter, then did some editing of mere words, saving the late afternoon hours to inoculate about 10 logs.

Then a little more than an hour before dusk I plugged in the long extension cord for the old 100W drill and began, got about 6 logs drilled and inoculated, when on the seventh log the tired little drill said Nope, no more, Bob; this is it pal, see ya in heaven, then darkness fell exactly the way it does after your drill gives up. Then I was in the office again among the 10 trillion things.

In time I managed to reach the shore of another weekend and went off to the farm store once more, this time in search of a bigger, better, more powerful drill, and found one I wanted, a Japanese brand-name 400-Watter, for about 120 dollars-- and then another I wanted more: a 430-Watter with an extra sidebar handle for about 160 dollars, but I didn't want to spend that much, since I'll mainly be using it just to drill shiitake logs once or twice a year as the old logs get used up and become great compost.

As I stood there pondering a solution to my econoshiitake dilemma I noticed some other, differently colored drills lower down on the tool display shelf-- way down there, in fact, sort of pushed to the way back of the way bottom. Their price was too low for the kind of drill I was after, but I hunkered down there anyway, since I wasn't going anywhere at the moment, reached in and pulled out one of the boxes, noticed that it was in fact the same kind of drill, except that it was a 480-Watter, had one of those great sidebars, and cost about 30 dollars! And was made in China-- probably using fine, Japanese-made electric parts.

One-fourth the price of the higher-up drills of less power and more costly utility, Japanese drills that only a moment ago had gleamed in my mind's eye as equipment of the highest standard, prestigious and priced out of reach; they now looked a bit forlorn, their luster dimmed, their true price now apparent (approx. 80% markup over labor cost, since they too were assembled in China, I'll bet).

So of course I bought a bright and shining miracle Chinese drill, took it home, plugged it in and finished five logs like a dream, in a tenth of the time. It was the Ferrari of drills, as far as I was concerned. And as I drilled on efficiently into the dusk I suddenly saw first hand what China was really about to do to (and at the expense of) the developed world and its laborers, apart from vastly increasing my shiitake crop.