COUPLE DOZEN THOUSAND MORE REASONS TO GROW YOUR OWN

Pesticide Residues in Food and Feed

Veterinary Drug Residues in Food

via: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyLI8UVdTzQ   

(5 min)

(Love the way they gave it a Latin name resonant with "nutritional expertise")

and it's international!

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FOOD INC.

(Entire documentary)
(Effectively removes any remnant wool from eyes)

＋


GM Soy in animal food - Greetings from Monsanto

Short and to the point.

via: reddit

WHY GOOD CROWS GO BAD

This morning as I was making tea in the silence that verges a clear-sky sunrise - it was still rather dusky - out of the corner of my sensitive tea-making eye I noticed a large, dark shape shoot by outside just above the deck, where large, dark shapes rarely shoot by at any time of day.

I looked out the big window into the garden to see what it had been, and who was it but Dr. Crow. He was flying hard, had taken a brave and unprecedented shortcut right over the deck, which had always been a Dr. Crow no-no, since one of those featherless biped conundrums could pop right out of a doorway and grab him, teach him to say "Nevermore" or something.

Why did he break his rule and fly over the deck I wondered, why is he flying so hard when nothing's chasing him and there's nothing much going on? Then when he flashed by a second time I realized he was searching for a secure location, because gripped in his beak was an entire slice of bread, the equivalent of a week's salary for a crow, even a doctor.

Right away I wondered where he'd gotten a whole slice of bread up here on the mountain, but then I thought: he's a crow; of course he can get a whole slice of bread up on a mountain. He landed in the meadow across the road, then immediately flew back, straight across the deck, empty-beaked; he had hidden the bread in the grass!!

A moment later he was whizzing by again, straight as the crow flies, with another slice-- you could practically hear him panting, he was flying so hard in his hurry to get the heist all stashed, but this time he headed in a slightly different direction, off through the trees; he would hide this portion of his treasure in another place he knew about.

It was a haul; he had hit it bigtime, and was stashing it here and there in his version of the Cayman Islands. Soon he'll be seen in only the finest trees, smoking big cigars, a sultry crowette on each wing and no apparent source of income, used to work for Goldcrow-Sachs.

SPRUNG THOUGHTS

Out there today doing various odd jobs amidst the melting snow piles, Siberia still wailing just the other side of the mountains, I noticed that the jinchoge knows something, its bud tips barely beginning to well with hints of the color that blossoms with the fragrance of joy that is always a stunning surprise one morning in the dun of early Spring. Daphne. Sweet daphne. And each Spring when I dredge up the English name it gets me thinking about how when I was a kid there were so many autumnal women, aunts and grandmas, named Daphne or Myrtle, unlike today,when women named Myrtle are rare.

At the age of 7 or 8 I didn’t know that Daphne and Myrtle were the names of special flowers that everyone loved, so it always puzzled me why so many stately looking women had these odd and funny sounding names, so like daffy and turtle; then by the time I was twice as old, around 13, I'd learned that these were the names of beautiful fragrant plants that everyone loved and I was even more puzzled as to why these regal and rather hefty ladies were so named. It didn't deeply occur to me that they had once been my age, even younger. The first hints of Spring beget sprung thoughts from a past as long as mine.

So too the oddness of seasonal edges must have affected the panicky hiyodori (brown-eared bulbul), because as I went strolling past the garden, mulling thoughts like the above on my way to add some kitchen garbage and wood ashes to the compost pile, I heard a panicky wing beat, turned and saw that a bulbul had found a way into the netted portion of my garden (Winter is empty and Spring isn't here yet, so the big cupboard is empty except for my little cache), where he’d been enjoying a solitary repast of fresh greens until I'd come blundering along. When he saw me he leaped for safety, but straight up and into the net, there flapping like a moth at the sunlight, but unlike his usual panicky bulbul behavior he wasn't screeching all the while.

I began to think I'd have to go in there to free him and he would totally flip, maybe even die of panic, being among the more psychotic of birds. But  finally he fell back, tumbled into his secret entry hole and exited, flew up into the oak and sat here on a high branch screeching bulbulese insults at me for being such an idiot, for behaving so rudely in his presence, for coming upon him completely unannounced like that while he'd been enjoying a well-deserved banquet, this was his kingdom after all, and when he saw me  just stand there, obtusely insisting on my rights, he winged huffily away, grumbling across the air.

You know those used-up CDs that farmers hereabouts hang in their gardens to let twirl in the wind, gleaming and blinking in the sunlight like big owly or hawky eyes to scare marauding birds away, well they don’t work. There were two such CDs hanging just above the briganding bulbul, who seemed to enjoy their helpful light, perhaps he thought he was in some kind of fancy wingless-two-legger dining and dancing establishment with funky walls, had gotten in without a ticket and was enjoying the free food, the kind that tastes best. I’m not happy being a bouncer, but sometimes a guy’s gotta do what he’s gotta do. The nasty language comes with the job.

Soon my thoughts turned again to the sweet old names Daphne and Myrtle... Since leaving home, I don’t think I’ve ever met another lady of either name. Geez, I have to debark some of this oak... Wonder why no men are named Oak...

SLOW CHOW

Not to change the subject, since there isn't one yet - only the title so far - but I'm getting to it, in my rambly fashion: lately Echo and I have been going once a week to one of our favorite free springs, one we revisited after it had dried up a few years ago and we were recently told it had started running again below Hira mountain.

We go there on Wednesdays, in preference to other days and springs we know because it gives us a chance to eat lunch at Hot Station, our favorite as-yet-uncrowded slow food restaurant around here. Located behind Hira Station on the Kosei railway line and seating maybe 16 real friendly people, Hot Station is run by local obachan (grandmas) that serve set lunches of home-made quality like grandmas used to make (and still do in some lucky households hereabouts). Small seasonal menu of excellent food, and a few items (kimpiragobo, miso, breads, rolls, cooked rice, sweet beans and bento dishes, among other things) always on sale near the vestibule.

What can be better than having a meal prepared by hands that have been preparing the same meals in the same way for 50 years or more, from ingredients grown and made by those same hands, all in the same way those hands were taught by other longlived hands, the line going back hand-in-hand over centuries, reaching back into times when food was still exactly and only food, no thought of fastness, still serving the actual basic purpose food must serve, i.e., to nourish and nurture those who are cared for? Not to kill tongue time or do a Las Vegas number for jaded taste buds, but to show a cherished body and its attendant functions that someotherbody cares about all this, cares about you, puts a pinch of love and joy in the growing and preparing, joy that does something for the flavor, love that grows it right, as those who care know it must be grown; creates it right as something so worthy deserves to be created- the miso, vinegar, tofu, rice, sauces, vegetables - cooks it right, the same care everywhere that you can view in the layout, sense in the flavor and freshness, and live in how good it makes you feel to eat it and be, your cells individually dancing and singing afterward, carrying you along for the fun, that kind of food?

We spoke to one of the busy ladies that run the place, she said it was started a few years ago by a group of 8 now-elderly ladies who sometime back in the 70s had gotten together and formed a company to create and market the miso they and their families had been making for centuries using their own locally grown soybeans. About 5 years ago in the same locally grown spirit, spurred as well by fading traditions of kitchens and foods, they started the restaurant, serving meals made the old way, using local farm products.

So if you're hungry at lunchtime in this lakeside neighborhood, be sure to drop in. Best misoshiru around, and all the other items are the fresh-best too, you could only maybe get better food if you had a couple of grandmas of your own. Barring that, Hot Station is the place to go on Wed. Sat. and Sun. between 1o and 5 (Nov-Feb, 10~4:30). They don't really want to make a full-time job or a full-fledged business out of it, just have a place to prepare and serve their locally grown produce to locally growing folk, like they've always been doing. You can tell they're in it more for love than money.

They also have a steady spring running outside, where you can fill up on your Wednesdays, if you prefer slow water.

WILD NEWS

When I go outdoors these winter dawns, before I make big human footprints all over the snow I spend the first few minutes reading the wild news on that big white page, checking out the animal tracks there, surfing the feral net to see who's been by and gone from where to where, what they did while here-- the Baron, for one, always comes out of the night woods from the south, circles the house, checks out the compost pile, browses in his favorite spots, avoids the fence around the garden, noses up some green weeds and at last moves on up to his place of daytime repose in the forest. Monkeys don't move by night, so there's no trace of them, which is fine by me, no news is headline news in re the thieving furballs. Every once in a while there's a fox pacing through, sometimes a hoppy rabbit or a maundering dog, now and then a wild pig nosing around for acorns and earthworms.

Then a couple of dawns ago, just after I got up and went to check the snow level out the front windows, I saw the delicate tracks of a cat, of all things, that had paused in its travels through the night blizzard to look in at the big glass doors at the front of the house. Perhaps it had lived with humans once. While wandering the dark Siberian world the cat had leaped up onto the deck, walked along the front wall and stopped there, with snow blowing under its fur, to look into the darkness of the house and remember as we slept.

Yesterday morning, before getting a day's wood from one of the stacks, while checking the snow for the latest news I saw cat tracks in the deep snow, where the cat had emerged from the welcome snowlessness under a long stack of firewood. In traversing our land the cat was traveling from understack to understack, in between stacks bounding across the snow in giant leaps and minimal pinpointy-feet landings that said in silent invisible exclamation points: YEW!! YUCK!! YOW!! SNOW!! The tracks led at last to the snowless space beneath the shiitake logs and thence into the mountain bamboo. I know that cats in general hate snow: my neighbor's cats, for example, shudder at sight of the horrid white stuff outside the doors of their warm house; just a glance at it out the window makes them leap to loll under the kotatsu all day. But this also snow-hating cat was living in the stuff, even during the night!

As I loaded up with firewood I wondered what cat it might be that is out here at night in such storms; I couldn't recall an eccentric wandering feline; any self-respecting cat around here that has a human pet will be in the house at night sleeping next to the warmest thing available... Oh yeah-- there was that cat I saw hanging around the Baron one day in early autumn, when the big antlered guy was browsing on the compost pile; the black and white cat came up slowly, the way cats generally approach feral animals fifty times their size. The cat got within a meter or so of the white-tailed noble, the Baron lifting his head now and then to assess this mite entering his field of vision, but he kept on munching as the cat settled nearby. For a long time they just checked each other out, the Baron dining and the cat sitting and watching the big buck eat, till I as a gardening human house owner had some task to do.

There can't be one cat that watches bucks eat from close-up and another cat that wanders in snow at night and knows what windows are. Must be the same eccentric cat, out there in the night.

That's the wild news for this morning.

WOODPECKERS AND KNOW-IT-ALLS

Another snowed-in day, watching my naive garden get buried, imagining my winter spinach patiently pressing its green face against the pale window of deepening snow. As for the rest, the flakey wind has had a ball with my varied anti-wind and -snow ploys. Next year I am smarter.

A couple of times a day I plunge into the storm and get some firewood at one of the stacks. This morning I uncovered one stack of 2-year-old cherry wood, split from a large trunk; the layered slabs looked to my hungry eyes like huge fillets of sun-dried wild salmon lying there, waiting to be taken in and roasted over a cherrywood fire.

That wood burns like a dream fuel: no smoke, hot, long-lasting embers. Brought armfuls back to the house to burn, some oak and beech to mix in and temper the fire, save the wood we have stacked in the rack on the deck by the door until the snow gets too deep for easy passage, at which point we start using the rackwood, a couple of week’s worth. If it snows beyond that, I’m into some serious shoveling and arm transport, but I’m ready. When you live up here, big weather is the university and the gym.

As it is for that guy out there in the whitestorm, the great spotted woodpecker, a juvenile male with his red belly, fresh and antsy even out there in a fierce blizzard, pecking hunger at one trunk of the cherry tree, the living and healthy (as far as I can tell) cherry tree, pecking like the king of beetle larvae is partying inside. Round and round he goes, pecking like mad, pausing now and then to listen: does he know what he’s doing, pecking where I’ve never seen another woodpecker peck, he’s just a teen after all, and this his first winter, he’s working really hard for lunch and nothing to show for it so far, in the 20 minutes I’ve been watching, first from the deck with arms full of wood and squinty-eyed from the blowing snow, then from the big kitchen window with the binoculars.

Sometimes it’s hard to see him for the streaks of snow across the air, as the white rush slides over the mountain from Siberia and down toward the lowlands, for a change just like the weatherman said it would... All the birds out there must be having a hard time finding meals now, even the nanten berries are gone... Every once in a while the youngster out there with the red crown stops and looks upward, turning his head and listening... how can he hear another bugsound elsewhere in that storm, with the wind rattling the naked branches, the snowclumps falling to the ground? He bounces slowly around the trunk, a natural dancer, fully dedicated to whatever may come, in mountain air now filled with diamond dust at a brief gaze from the sun...

Now time for my own lunch...

***

Epilog: The next morning I went out in the snowfall to see what he’d been up to hammering away in ignorance at a healthy tree like that, just a teen after all, and had one of those experiences that know-it-alls always have sooner or later, kind of a nature-knowledge karma (now hitting us all big time), in this case that a woodpecker of any age, in just one look and listen, can tell more than I ever could about the overall condition of a standing tree and whether it's worth pecking at for a beetle larva, which to be fair is not one of my personal priorities, which I guess gives him a useful edge… He’d been hammering away right at the perimeter of where that trunk was beginning to rot… Another job for me, come late winter…

TIME BEFORE TIME

Culture changes perceptibly even over just a few years, like language does - things are no longer square or groovy and we all remember no internet - but the change seems to be accelerating lately, now that I've lived long enough to have had my childhood in the stone age. That's how prehistoric the present era feels now for a child of the 1940s, a time that at the time was impressively current with essentials like marbles, yo-yos, trolley cars, typewriters and carbon paper, clickety-clickety standup phones with four- or even five-digit numbers, with all the young men in fedoras, the grandpas in derbys, women in odd hats and long dresses; there was penmanship with steel pens dipped in school desktop inkwells, there were stenographers and mimeographs, horse-drawn wagons delivering milk and ice, there was no tv, no everywhere plastic, and the old styles and language (don't say ain't), culture and mores, social borders-- racism, sexism, everywhere everyone smoking, heavy social drinking, normal obesity, litter, penny candy, cigars, spittoons, the list runs on like time...

I was prompted to recherche those temps perdu when I heard in a documentary film (Scorsese's No Direction Home-- Recommended) an old-school British journalist with all the attendant perceptions, blinkers, mindsets and perspectives (he may well have interviewed young Churchill), there in the mod 1960s asking the young and sassy, full of beans, off-the-wall-out-in-left-field Bob Dylan a rhetorically baroque question that meandered along a familiar old path wound with vines and blossoms framing a white picket fence before a little cottage with maybe a portrait of Disraeli above the mantel, the kind of question that even back in the 60s was so shakespeareanly orotund　and sesquipedalianly circumlocutory that when confronted with it, or rather wrapped in it, Dylan oddly became so sympathetic as to not get his usual sassy, and as I listened to the question unwind I too felt sympathy for that elder statesman of journalism attempting to speak as though the past fit perfectly into the right-nowness of that moment, assuming that he could pinpoint this young musical upstart in the Victorian pantheon of marble-halled literary icons and empirical ideals, that he could understand in his horseback telegraph spittoon way what was now going on around him like lightning on vinyl. In his long professional life he himself had no doubt at last become his ideal of an Edwardian journalist, hadn't felt the need to make any serious self-adjustments since then and here he was, speaking from the distant past to the distant future. I suppose I'm much the same by now, how can one tell as one rambles on...

There is always a special preserve for the youth of the day, but the changes since the 1940s have been more radical than any before in history (I was　born before the atomic bomb!) and have caught many unprepared, like that senior journalist at the peak of his game, whose name might as well　have been "Mr. Jones." Used to be that small adjustments were enough-- a fancy new harness, a bustle, the latest height in a beaver hat or　a new pair of spats to get one through a life, but this acceleration is new to us cutting-edge elders; we have to adjust more quickly and to greater extremes than any of our foreparents ever did. How does one adjust to extreme changes at this speed of life?

I trust the mind, though; as it always has, it will learn new ways of keeping up with the new tools it has made, especially in the coming and coming young ones-- but this need for speed of adaptation is becoming exponential, so presents a more interesting challenge than ever before to elderfolk, who no longer sit in armchairs with ashtrays beside them and read newspapers while listening to the radio in the evening; rather they dive headfirst, over and over, into the global infosea. There's　no end to news now; we are living headlines. A most exciting time to be of advanced years.

PLACES OF CALM

From my morning perch before the beloved woodstove I take calm delight in the blizzard out there, all that blurry air roiling across the mountainside the way mountainsides make blizzards do, and wailing around the house the way houses make blizzards do.

Out in the deeps of the storm I observe that despite the wild roil, even the smaller birds now and then fly hellforleather through the blinding tempest in search of the odd seed or berry (bold red berries are a bright help in winter, as I see from the diminishing supply on our many nanten bushes around the house). And when, after winging across the white whirls of the open stretches, the flying featherbundles reach our tall hedge of evergreen kinmokusei trees they swoop beneath the lowest branches and swerve upward into the inner recesses as into cathedrals of calm, where they can sit and be out of the wind and the snow for a time, shiver off the rime, plan their next move across the maelstrom to wherever a stock of food might be, plot their next path through the storm.

After watching the first couple of birds do that this morning, I imagined swooping with the next few, up from out of the howl into the calm perches that the inner unleafed portions of the smooth kinmokusei branches so generously provide, perhaps for just this use by just these birds! Who knows what forms of natural "friendship" abide out there in the deeps of the real world, how far these homely allegiances go, and where they integrate like two hands clasping. Or how far back in time they reach, how they began to be-- seems as much like an interweaving of wild wisdom as a mosaic of chance that worked out well.

Plant and bird have been carrying on this way for far longer than the flash we call history, the birds over eons perhaps carrying seeds, or paying a small toll in fertilizer for the privilege of stopping to rest during the times of hardship both forms of life have ever gone through together, and there in the hearts of the trees the birds can enjoy the quiet that abides in a plant, in exchange for the motion that abides in a bird; plants seem to appreciate rhythms of all kinds-- they dance in the wind, as I observe from my cathedral of calm, up here at the fire in the heart of the storm...

It must be that in all storms there are places of calm to be found, havens in which to pause and renew, from which to prepare for advance, that in all paths of life there are ancient sanctuaries where the traveler can stop to rest, where there is calm, where there is no pain; for that is how we ourselves survive the storms of living, stage by stage, how we nourish an entire life before moving on to the next discovery.

TOM SAWYER GRANDFATHERING

Wow, do grandkids want to help! Fortunately there's over a foot of snow all over the car that you would have cleared off earlier this morning but you knew the three grandgirls were coming for a visit today, so now that they're here excited outside, all dressed up for snow and wondering what fun to have first, before their curious eyes you wield the magic extendable snow brush in a fascinating way over the roof of the car and a big chunk of snow puffs to the ground in a joyous manner, when all at once a flurry of 7- and 10-year-olds are grabbing at the snowbrush, saying "Me! Me! Me! Let Me do it! I'll do it! I can do it, give me that! No, I want to! No, Me!" and so on in childy warmth at the heart of the mountain whiteness, actually fighting to help, and it just so happens that you have two other brushes at hand; the car is snow free in about 2 minutes.

After sufficient pause in admiration of such thorough work, you wander onto the large deck that has nearly 2 feet of drifted snow on it that you would have shoveled off early this morning with the big slide shovel, but you knew the grandies were coming so you waited for the high tides of energy and enthusiasm, i.e., after the car is cleaned, and before there's any mention of sledding. You reach with interest for the handle of the shovel, just to casually clear that large playful deck of so much fun snow. You give an easylooking artistic push, the snow gathers in a writhing pile as it glides across the deck and spills over the edge in a cloudy thump to the ground below as you return for more glee in this snowy wonderland, when three snowgirls as one grab the shovel handle saying "Me! Me! Me! I'll do it! Let Me do it! I can do it, give me that! No, I want to! No, Me!" and so on in wintry playfulness. And as luck would have it, there are two additional shovels right at hand and the big deck is clear in about 3 minutes, under careful direction from the head artist.

The reward for all this generous effort is the mention of major sledding, another big feature of mountainsides, where squeals of delight are right at home.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

 2011: 

THE YEAR OF THE RABBIT

- The rabbit mends fences -

MAJESTY

Now and then we get into deep rhythms that are more of the world than ourselves, rhythms of breath and time, of heartbeat and task, of that goal we must reach using hands, legs, feet, eyes, whatever we can bring to bear, and by the time we've gone that deeply the who of the action is mostly an absent participant-- like me of whatever name out there in yesterday's clear winter dusk-- a body following its breath around, assemblage of hands, legs, feet, eyes, heartbeat, powering a wheelbarrow amidst stacks of firewood here and there,with a task to complete before dark by over-and-over loading the barrow with firewood and getting it by whatever means up onto the deck and thence into the house beside the stove to warm the coming winter night, for which process the nameless fellow has over time developed a rhythmic system and so disappears into the systemic rhythm, minimindedly lifts the wood from the wheelbarrow, hefts it up onto the deck, carries the first load into the house, stacks it beside the stove, emerges empty-armed for the next load and stops awestruck, reclaimed at sight of the vast rosy herd of sunfired buffalo clouds wandering by overhead, grazing the blue prairie of evening sky on hoofs of silver, drifting slowly southward, no hurry, what's hurry, what's time, what's a heartbeat, how much can it hold? Firewood can wait, warmth can be later-- the darkness is coming in majesty, and I have eyes.

THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PRESENTS

In Japan, December 25 is pretty much like February 26: a date of no particular importance to everyone in the world at the same time. Everybody in Japan goes to work and so forth; same as always, in the office where there is no eggnog. Of course just about everybody in the country knows that the 25th is "Christmas," that western religious holiday that's supergreat for department stores, parties and gift giving; for bakeries too, with all the Christmas cakes.

Which can't really be all that humbuggy, can it, but there's none of what I remember from my childhood as "Christmas spirit," the uplift of Christmas carols, ribbon candy, holiday spices, evergreen scents, jingling bells, Santas everywhere that look like Santa-- I saw a skinny Santa on a motorbike the other day, heading for work somewhere north of here, hat on his helmet, obeying the law-- had sneakers on too, no respect for a tradition from elsewhere-- as is naturally pretty much the case for alien traditions everywhere in the world.

Fact is, there aren't any religious holidays in Japan; maybe the closest is the birthday of the current Emperor, whose father used to be a god; it falls tantalizingly on December 23 and is, yes, a holiday, but everybody's back in the office on the 25th, a date that tends to lose importance after you've been here a few years, when like everybody else you're looking forward to the awesome New Year holidays, one of the two major chunks of time off in this country, that if played right can be stretched to last a week or more.

The Japanese don't have national holidays like Columbus Day, Christmas, Independence Day, Martin Luther King Day or Washington's birthday, either, having had no discoverers, saviors, founders, profound activists or iconic politicians. They tend to have more practical holidays, like Respect-for-the-Aged Day, Greenery Day, Coming-of-Age Day, Vernal Equinox Day, Children's Day, Marine Day (for the oceans), Health and Sports Day, Autumnal Equinox Day, Culture Day and such like, with a couple of Emperor's birthdays thrown in, one to honor the era of the previous emperor and the one aforementioned for the current Emperor. Apart from the imperial aspects, I think it's a good combination for national focus on worthy subjects.

Many of these holidays however are shifted to the nearest Monday, much to my lament-- not because of the base falsehood that I enjoy being in offices on Mondays, or even because in fact I abhor spending Mondays (and most other days) in offices, but because I do NOT work on Mondays anyway, and so cannot get them off. I know that sounds paradoxically Scroogy, when in fact I'm perceptibly sweet not very much of the time, but there's just no Christmas spirit around here, except for some jingly, snowy, evergreen memories...

And no, I didn't say Humbug.

SPARTAN LUXURY

Not that I'd prefer living 2500 years ago, or agree in any large way with the overall Spartan philosophy, but being a poor boy you learn a lot about how little you need. As any long-term traveler knows, he is freest who elects his own direction. He also travels fastest who doesn't bring every damn thing along. Spartan is the way to go, so it's mostly the way I've always gone: One-bowl meal, sleep anywhere, one change of clothes, your best friends a good pair of highway shoes and a good sleeping bag-- that's the way I traveled and that's the way I've tended to live ever since my feet first voted: walk whenever possible, learn to make and repair, never throw away what can be mended or fulfill another purpose, and dress and live accordingly, traditional standards of decency and decorum notwithstanding.

The best aspect of the spartan code is that it makes the occasional bit of luxury all the moreso. At my age I deserve it. You can have some of that chocolate if you want. Yes, I gave in and bought myself a present this year: a set of way unspartan flannel sheets and pillowcases. Each colder night I now drift off to sleep with a big smile on my face, warm with smooth luxury whichever way I turn, nuzzling wantonly into downy dreams.

I had been using regular Japanese sheets, which seem to have been made for folks who don't move during the night; I turn over once and half of me is in the cold. Which for years was ok by me, until my lifetime reached last month and a yearning niggle surfaced when I saw in a catalog some FLANNEL SHEETS and a mindbell rang like I was off to the races. I sent in some digital currency and got these luxuriously smooth red flannel sheets that don't just equal the size of my bed-- unlike the bonsai J-sheets, they are much bigger than the bed, and can be tucked in! So smiley sleep now rules, unlike in the flannelless nights of old Sparta.

No wonder those Spartans were so serious.

BRAND-NEW WORLD
 
On the train the other morning I saw a poster for one of the local ski resorts, boasting that it has been in business since 1964. Noting that the poster featured a picture of two women in the style of the 1930s or so, I at first laughed inwardly at the designer's naivete in thus interpreting the 60s, until it struck me that it was I who was being naive: this was very likely the way most skiers now, who are predominantly in their 20's and were born in the 1970s, view the 1960s; they view that quaint, pre-life time period in the same way I, who was born in 1940, have always viewed the 1930s.

Then came the exponential rush that this same realization washes over each generation in its turn, and is what gives older folk that distant look they sometimes have in their eyes. I never knew what that look was until now, when I felt it in my own gaze: it is the look of having once lived in a lush land that is no more, that is now only reported upon, less and less accurately, as time goes by-- the 60s were now ancient history.

That immediate and ineffably memorable and exciting time of my life-- indeed of all life subsequent, whether it knows it or not-- that post-Screamin' Jay Hawkins-Little Richard-Buddy Holly-Elvis rock'n'roll booze Beatles politics Dylan Benzedrine Hendrix civil rights LSD Stones Vietnam war Joplin sexual liberation Doors mescaline college madness summer of love Woodstock Washington protest march marijuana melange was now ranked with the dallyings of Antony and Cleopatra.

So it was exciting there on this morning's train - suddenly become the express train of history - to sit there looking out of time-rich eyes at the world rolling by in a newness all my own.

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...

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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.

 

EVERYONE I AM

Today, after spending the morning out in the blue air with that bright warm ball of gold way up in it that drifts across the upness like a sunbow, doing a few hours of raking leaves for compost, planting onions, cleaning the woodstove, lugging some wood and harvesting some greens and mushrooms, while later lunching on the freshest food there is, it occurred to me that when I head on into the office tomorrow, punch the time card, sit down at my desk and begin tapping away at a keyboard for a few hours, I'll be doing artificial work: work that only peripherally needs a body, just two eyes, some brain and ten fingers would do, since that's pretty much all that's used, in exchange for some numerical fluctuation in a virtual money bank account, but that when I do this other work - actual work - I'm using every single thing about me, every move I can make, everyone I am, in completely different ways with every task, and a self-diversity occurs, a natural diversity that excites all the entireness a body is, lets it be its whole self in all its reaches, in the same joy that dance is.

Even in this actual work though, in this body dance, that bit of brain that gets its exercise over a keyboard is still working, but not at someone else's semantics; everyone I am is at its own native endeavors rather, such as effervescing little ideas and turns of phrase into its head (commonly called 'me'), unlike when I'm in the office and the largely ignored but multicapable body just sits there in corporeal neutrality with no other task than to basically keep everything erect and in place, as it has been trained to do since childhood (all those years at school desks), when all along it has naturally craved to do otherwise than merely maintain posture for a fixed duration, like a soft rock with circulation. No wonder, the pressing need in the fully civilized world for huge medical programs, when so few can be the everyones they are...

IMPERIAL YEARS

Being American, I've never had a king, to say nothing of an emperor. Thus the wonderful absence that lies at the heart of my difficulty in keeping track of Japan's imperial year system, which for me began when I arrived here in Showa 47, according to quick calculations on a sushi napkin. 

 

To further simplify things with a brief labyrinth of clarification, the Showa era began in the final year of the Taisho era (Taisho 12, I believe - I should check Wikipedia), which itself had begun at the end of the Meiji era (which had begun on some date/month in 1868 and lasted 44 years) and lasted until the first year of Showa, which in turn ended in Showa 58 with the naturally timed death of Hirohito (who has a different posthumous name, which used to be stored in one of my Showa brain cells). And just as Taisho 12 was also Showa 1, Showa 58 was as well the first year of Heisei, the new and current imperial era that has screwed up my drivers license renewal.

This multiplicity of dating gets confusing if as an American (other nationalities can speak for themselves) you go mentally non-imperial for any extended duration while living here, because every now and then in dealing with the J-world you suddenly have to convert between calendric systems, which was easier during Showa, because all you had to do back in those heady days was add or subtract 25 years to or from either calendar, respectively, piece a cake. I forget what you do now, something like you do (I don't) between Centigrade and Farehnheit, I think there are retrograde fractions in there. Then January 1 and the emperors' naturally arbitrary birthdays and deathdays confuse things. When I was about to renew my license I thought this year was Heisei 18, which turned out to be off by about 4 years when I finally asked my wife what year it actually was. For the information of those abroad who might be coming to Japan to renew their licenses or something, it's Heisei 22.
 

Many government agencies here use the imperial year on driver's licenses and other bureaucratic forms, to keep everybody in that old imperial frame of mind, so being ignoble I get it wrong and am late a lot. Also when I fill out those forms I always put down the easy-to-remember estimated number of years since the virgin birth of the savior of humankind, also called a lord to satisfy those old royalty cravings, though I try to remain my own noble, to the extent possible. I was stubborn as a kid, too; I've had my own system of time since grade school, if not earlier. I don't wear a watch either.

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.

PUNCH LINE

Windy days are frequent this time of year, now that hurricane season is past and we're down to winds that just blow local trains off their tracks. The savage breezes also kindly remove the rest of the leaves from the trees, but can dry out all those shiitake I've still got out there unharvested. Such are the autumn zephyrs up here on the mountain, where all through the night I hear the hiss of reluctant leaves along the ground, and then in the morning the public announcement far down in the village saying something about the wind that the wind renders incomprehensible, another example of man and nature battling it out in harmony. Such early windy morning announcements probably concern train delays, but from up here I can't really tell.

I could search around on the tv channels for the transport bulletins on such mornings, but by the time I'd find out that my train is on time it would be too late to catch it. No point in calling the village station either, because the semiretired guy who works at our minor stop doesn't arrive there till about the time my train departs, so the phone in the little office would just ring until it was too late for me to catch the train if it was on time. I could call the big central train office and get put on hold, but most mornings I'm fairly sane.

This morning just after dawn I heard that chime-y PA fanfare (Bing, Bung, Bong, Bing!) that prefaces the loudspeaker announcements, then the perhaps male voice saying what seemed meteorologically like "Because of what the wind does to these announcements there's really no point in my doing this, since none of you can understand a word I'm saying, especially you folks far up the mountain, but all the same it's my job, so did you hear the one about the nun, the banker and the frog who went into a bar...." The rest was blown away by the same long, strong gust of wind that blew the ladder off the toolshed roof, but none of that mattered because today is a holiday anyway, I forget what, but I was back asleep by then.

Later when I'm down in the village I'll ask around, see if anybody heard the punch line.

PEBBLES IN THE MINDBOOTS

Who at my age doesn't have countless regrets? There is no way to get through even a well-lived life without regret. I'm not talking about the Waterloo of regret that everyone carries in the Napoleon of their souls, regrets that are even more pointless (less pointful?) for being so vast; no, I'm talking about the numberless nanoregrets, the rankle of instants, the turning points of the tiny dances that moments are, in which we performers of life are not as gracious or perceptive, sensitive, intelligent or discerning, thoughtful or eloquent in retrospect as we are now (retrospect grows with age), and as we now wish we had been been back then, were we thus gifted by the gods, for it is all a matter of godgifting, of probabilities, of impulses pulsed, chances taken and lost or won, the regrets being the times we got it wrong, and not on purpose.

There were some victories in there too, of course, the times we got it right, but we remember few of those, for they fit seamlessly into the natural flow of life, are not remarked upon especially by our mind's eye, and so in our habitual looks back do not cause a ripple on the horizon of the past; no, it is those little regrets, the nanonubs that forever rub the wrong way, the mini-if onlys and micro-I wishes-- It is bad to live too much in the past that way, but they make you do it, those little slivers in the mental underwear, those pebbles in the mindboots, those crumbs in the spirit bed.

None of us is alone in this; we all have such regrets, and the older we get - it's only natural - the more regrets we have. No one escapes this irreducible, utterly personal burden. By my age there's a whole diverse library of things I should/shouldn't have done/said, of turnings taken in youthful or other ignorance, word or silence, east or west, yes or no, decisions I made or didn't, things I could have done better or differently - such is one life, after all, and ignorance is beyond numbering.

But when I think about it, the brightness is that in all that cloud of misdoing I must have done so many forgotten things well, made so many good choices, because I'm still here, alive, sensing the darkness in a day's joy. And so I am privileged, in a way, to have all those regrets I pester myself with now and then, when I'm not paying enough attention to being--

When at last I do pay attention I realize that at the very least, I do know better, now.