THE PORKY CHRONICLES, Part 2:
Cheaper than Wolf Urine

When I got home that evening from a full day of some of the most modern activities on the planet, Echo told me she had found in one of the local farm stores a product that claimed to be an inoshishi repellent but was pretty expensive, should she get some. It also claimed to repel bats, cats, snakes, rats, moles, raccoons,  just about everything except the IRS, which claims gave me pause, but though expensive it was a lot cheaper than wolf urine, so I put the mental barbed wire on one of my mind's wayback shelves and sprang for the stuff.

Next evening I came home from another day riddled with more of said modern activities to find sitting on the kitchen table what looked like a box of Satan's favorite cereal. The red-flaming garish package indeed claimed to repel wild pigs, prominently among all the other things. As proof, on the  front, above a wild pig in a red circle with a bar across it (could this really be as easy as No Parking?) growled a big, angry, sharp-fanged habanero pepper that evoked devilish gratification at sprinkling this stuff around my property, now pocked all over with holes that pigs had made in the ground.

It was darkly satisfying to imagine large porky pig snouts snorking along in the night, coming upon a little pile of this devilish stuff and just sucking it up into flaring pig nares-- oh, if I could only see the flames that would follow as the beasts ran off into the night, never to return; imagination is almost as good as being there. How many are the degrees of surreality, I wonder.

Repellently curious, I opened the box, then the plastic bag inside; sniffed, reeled. One kilo of pig antimatter, uncut. Looked like (but did NOT smell like) a chunky instant coffee packet for a large creature of the night. Contained dried habanero, NEET, creosote, garlic, an occult concoction of stuff that would repel anything, including vampires; it certainly repelled this mere mortal to a considerable distance, and might even work on zombies.

The next morning, with delightful images of flaming pig nostrils dancing in my head, I sprinkled the black magical piggypowder everywhere a porker might snork. The bag was quickly emptied, but those little nosebombs were everywhere enough that  during the night I might just hear the wild pig equivalent of Porky Pig sniffing up some scoville 5 million. Couldn't wait. At the end of my task, I split open the empty bag, laid it smelly-side-up in the middle of the slope the porks had made of the stone wall into my little deckside garden, and there pinned it to the ground with a rock, like a figurative middle finger salute to the night invaders.

The next night was pigless. And the night after that. It was working, at least; the porkers could smell it for miles and wouldn't be coming back, suggested the the "Curly" portion of my brain’s Corpora tristoogia. Cerebrally speaking, I should have twisted his nose with some pliers.

[Stay tuned for Part 3!]

THE PORKY CHRONICLES, Part 1:
The Mind Runs through Barbed Wire

It's not easy to imagine the things that rampage through an alien landowner-gardener-householder's mind at discovering in the morning that the inoshishi (wild pigs) have again rooted with feral anarchy all over his property like they did the other night for the first time in the 20 years he's lived here, but fortunately I am such a guy and can directly relate the trauma of all those heedless porky noses harrowing my tender garden soil, soil carefully prepped over decades, noses that (thankfully) ignored the trampled organic peppers, dangling organic zukes and uprooted organic cukes in preference to earthworms of all things, then rooted at the stony bases of my deck supports, and in the small deck garden - wild madness there - rooted deeply at the foot of the huge boulder that could topple either onto the deck and house or onto pig and deck, my own wild side sensing that naturally-natural pigs are way less likely to be mistaken than a delusional gardener, so it's the house-and-deck that will get the big rock, given the ways of the universe.

Plus there's all that here-and-there gravel the pigs have rooted into, leaving quarry holes, and the small boulders toppled from stone walls onto the driveway, the large and heavy slabs of granite tossed left and right like giant stale potato chips, the scattered edging rocks-- Monkeys were never this rampant or nonfood focused; what the hell do you do about recurring visits of  ruthless wormslavering hogs who have no compunction about toppling your house with you inside if there’s an earthworm underneath, and from the look of things those noses could do it.

The inoshishi trap that comes immediately to mind is a huge truck-borne rebar cage that would take up the entire driveway, so where do I put the car for a week or two and what do I do when I come out one morning on the way to work and find in there a trapped 80 kilo boar rumbling hungry frothing and gnashing his tusks with whom I have to deal in person, plus I need a costly license to enjoy that experience.

Some folks might want to be nice to the beast, since they're - well - green, which I can understand, wild things being so zoozy cute on the Discovery channel and YouTube and imgur, but when it's your property and your decades of effort, your eyes widen a bit with ancient rage and you too are wild, you've got fangs growing, feelslike, and a bloodthirst; had it in you all along. But nonetheless in time you come to your wisened senses, death is but a last resort, though a night-eyed boar clacking his tusks at me in his path to food will not think along those lines; such is the distance we have traveled to empathy.
   
I know this will all soon end, for this year at least, and anyway I've gotten what I consider my share of the vegs out of what I still perversely think of as my garden, but these pigs and their piglets, and all the piglets after them on down the countless porky generations, intuit this property in the deepest sense, that it formally belongs to them, as it has for thousands of eons thus far; they have simply reclaimed it, left their marks here and there, so they'll be back, one way or another, one inoshishi or another - How long the mind on the train wanders amid strange themes - lost vegetables and saved, rifles, toppled walls, night watches, poison, traps, spears, the price of wild pork, barbed wire, wolf urine (expensive!) and at the end emerges as from a cave of night, heads for what the hell is an office, where he is a modern man, doing modern things...

Out in the garden
blossom to blossom
butterfly starts the vegetables

MOVE OVER, JIMI

We all remember that summer morning sunrise at Woodstock when Jimi wailed away at his guitar and polished a fresh facet on the new age with the first explosive chords of The Star-Spangled Banner, in a musical performance that has become an icon of national change; well move over, Jimi. Make room for Miasa, who took it to an international level.

Miasa, who with her sisters has for some time now been studying the traditional 3-stringed Japanese instrument known as the shamisen, for some reason selected as her solo recital song a piece titled: Amerika Gasshukoku no Kokka, which translates as "The National Anthem of the United States of America," an anthem that, needless to say, is familiar to all the world but new to 9-year-old Japan resident Miasa. In fact, I'd say that, when she took to the stage at the recital and began to play Amerika Gasshukoku no Kokka on her shamisen, she hadn't heard that uplifting melody in well over 9 years.

As she plucked out each of the song's single individual and separately notated notes in her spritely manner, it came to me that never before in their long history had the international relations of Japan and the United States been deconstructed in such a youthful way in a public arena, particularly in the plangent musical vernacular unique to the shamisen.

The liberty of tempo, the individualistic bending of traditional notes and chords into modern cultural commentary, with implicit political overtones, had every member of the Japanese audience - all thoroughly familiar with the noble song - on the edges of their seats, somewhat as the folks at Woodstock were, even without seats, when Jimi cranked it to the limits in his inimitable way, transforming that staid anthem we all know into an icon of neorevolutionary aspiration that lives on today in cultures around the world, and that found even newer resonance at the shamisen recital on Sunday.

Miasa's own unique 2nd-generation American-Japanese interpretation of The Star-Spangled Banner on the shamisen before a fully Japanese audience set a new standard for interpretive listening, one that will live on in all those hearts, and thence into the ages.

Well done Miasa. Two nations, now much closer, salute you. 

Jimi, thanks for the precedent, and for moving over.

BLUE MOONS

Traditionally, defining a blue moon can drive a conversation crazy. I remember a heavy-dictionary definition I read years ago: "Blue moon: the length of time between recurrences of an exceedingly rare phenomenon" (dictionaries really used to talk like that). The latest and simplest definition is that a blue moon is a second full moon within one month, which means that the next Blue Moon will be tonight (just about while this is posted; been a busy day), since there was a full moon on August 1. But his definition is controversial because it's just too simple and easy to remember for something heavenly. Those in etherea seem to think should be more like the definition of Easter or Thanksgiving, which were set up back when everybody knew all about the moon and the stars, which played a big part in their nightly lives.

As so often happens therefore, if you go back in history you spoil it, which I will now do. Because historically there are multiple definitions that by the time you try to figure them out the blue moon has long gone and you couldn't care less if the moon was blue or where the name came from, just give me a single malt and make it quick. 

An earlier definition holds that a blue moon is the fourth full moon in a season, when normally there would be only three, but you can see that this is pretty much the same as the two full moons in one month, which that older blue moon would have to be anyway so why not boil it down, I can't see why some spoilsport from back before there was electricity would have to muck everything up like that, when at night there was only familiar starlight and old friend moonlight, no harsh streetlights or crass neon and lots of old-fashioned time, with "up there" so important and a simple blue-moon definition right at hand; what's more, my glass is suddenly empty. 

Just to liven things up a bit, here's some more confusing moon data:  

Seven times in 19 years there are 13 full moons in a year. 

Anyway, tonight be sure to enjoy the blue moon that isn’t blue; how did that get here? 

TROMBONCINO DEFINITELY

I must say, I am impressed by  the Tromboncino, having had mixed success with pattypans, sunbursts, regular zukes, acorn, crookneck and other squashes (the monkey-resistant hard-skinned butternuts were good).

I was nonplussed by the among-others fact that the sunbursts and friends would just take off cross-country with no sign of vining, just plunge on through the garden undergrowth, loving travel but not stopping to produce and properly nourish their cute little vegefruits.

The butternut was a spreader and as climber, so it could get up there and use a lot of space, and it produced quietly all over the garden. I especially appreciated the fact that the squash was so hard Monkeys couldn't bite it so gave up on it, there were a lot of monkey bitemarks on our butternuts. The implicit frustration added to the savor.

Also, being the only planter of such things up here, I suspect there are bugs up in the treetops singing my location to their buddies flying by overhead, "Hey, there's non-sprayed peppers down here, cukes too, and tomatoes, zukes, you name it-- bring your family and friends!" So this is action central, especially since I'm doing it all organically, meaning the wildlife gets its varied vigs.

So upon learning that the Tromboncino stem was resistant to borers, I sent for some seeds and in my ignorance planted 2 hills, 4 to a hill, envisioning cute little Italianate tromboney squashes here and there, pretty much in fixed locations. Going was slow in the beginning, this not being the Mediterranean, but somehow it had escaped me that the Tromboncino is a climber; it showed no such inclination at first. It seemed rather to be a timid life form, plus it had heavy competition from all the sprouting (100%, seemed like) pumpkin seeds from the kitchen compost.

Before too long, though, the Big-T had overgrown and overshadowed the other paltry vegetative life forms with its huge, dark, milk-dotted leaves. With its cablevines and KingKong climbing power, its presentation of blossoms one after another in the first few weeks (but all male-- I was beginning to wonder if plants can be gay), I questioned whether all this splendor was going anywhere; but now in their nobility putting out female blossoms too, being perhaps a bit more laggard in this than other squash, but quickly catching up, and what growing power! They're already reaching out beyond the top of the 2-meter-high net fence where they're winding among the goya and outclassing the pumpkins; elsewhere they're snaking along among the netted cukes and staked tomatoes with their majestic leaves...

Now, the female blossoms are growing into long fruits that after a few days are already bigger than the standard zuke and seem to double every day or so; if they are allowed to hang down, they don't curl a la the archaic trombone; these noble creatures can grow to over a yard long, most of which length is seedless! I’m speechless in my garden, and in my kitchen, where the pale green beauties saute to a beautiful jade, they are delicious in taste and texture as well.

I bow to my noble nourishers, vowing to grow them again next year, yes. Definitely.

ONE SUMMER AND THE MORNING AIR

How easy it is to let the time slip by as though you're 18 and have little to do with it. The older you get, the faster it glides, but with age comes perspective. So that if you've been paying some attention all these years, you can ignore the pace of time and focus more on its depths, where so many treasures are. 

Unless of course that all becomes moot because at the moment one happens to have a house full of preteen granddaughters, which pretty much lifts one out of time's inviting deeps into the broad and shining shallows of ultrayouth, which is where I've recently been spending time like a senior kid with the Trio of Brio, while their mother is visiting the US. Thus, I've been doing physical labor at a child's pace, which goes so sloooowly to me, but still sweatful, and going thence to Little Pine Beach to spend days or was it hours in the cool blue waters, or frolicking under the garden hose, spraying water up among the overhead leaves of the chestnut tree, or making a jacuzzi out of the wheelbarrow for entire afternoons and so forth, which is why I haven't thought too deeply about the rice harvest.

Then this morning as I was freewheeling down the mountain through the dawning sunlight, no breeze but that caused by my gliding quietly through the broad fields of nodding rice now almost a meter high, the tall, heavying rice heads now leaning over the tops of the string fences as though peeking into the road... My mind went freewheeling too, realizing that soon all this vigorous beauty will be cut to the ground and harvested, winnowed into big bags and sold or stored away for winter, as it has always been. But none of that mattered today, these green summer lives had been waiting all night for the morning sun and now it was here, and in the gift of that golden warmth the whole mountainside of rice grains began to live its day.

Thus into the warmed air issued a fragrance as rich as butter, rich as oils, the perfume of true wealth, essence worth more than all the rest: the fragrance of life itself living, a joy that filled the ready morning air with the contented sigh of an entire amber mountainside of rice being fully morningly alive; it was a joy that we alive are all familiar with: it was the joy of a fine occasion. It was a big mountain morning party, and I was a welcome guest.

Got me to the station, got me to the train, got me to the office, got me to work, but mainly stayed at the party. The lucky Brio Trio spent the whole day right in the middle of it. Maybe when they're older they’ll remember that day back then, when they were kids one summer and the morning air...

THE LACKADAISICALITY INDEX

It's because I'm generally not lackadaisical that my experience with wild pigs is limited. However, because I've only seen one monkey in the last few months, my LI (Lackadaisicality Index) has plunged. You see at once how this all fits together. Monkeys keep me on my toes, LI-wise, and if you're on your toes in regard to monkeys, you're on stilts when it comes to wild pigs. If you're not thus on your toes, then you are a welcome mat for the porkers. That's my deep philosophical lesson of the week.

To begin not too long after the beginning: while making my breakfast tea this morning I looked out the big window in the kitchen and noticed that out in the garden, inside the high net fence, the large bucket of bokashi juice had fallen over. I knew I had not been so careless as to place it in such a way that it could be toppled by a strong wind. Anyway it was ¾ full, and heavy.  I also knew that monkeys would not have toppled it, because there was no reward in doing so, and monkeys do not do anything for nothing; they're almost as bad as Wall Street. I couldn't see any other signs of destruction out there, which also mitigated against monkeys. In rural shamus fashion I would check it out after breakfast, on my way to work.

As to my LI, I've been leaving the garden gate open lately because as I say I'd only seen one monkey in a long while, that one cowering behind a rice paddy downmountain; anyway the thieving beasts don't need gates unless they're infirm, and there aren't many infirm monkeys. A mother with clinging infant might opt for a gate rather than climb the high net, but that's another time of year. You can see I've got this all figured out. The deer take advantage of the open gate when there's Spring spinach to be had, but there's so much fresh wild food everywhere for deer to eat now that we don't even see deer any more, they haven't come into the garden in quite a while; no need for them to leave the forest. Couldn't be Littlefoot, he never leaves a mess. My LI was pretty well justified, if you ask me. So what had happened? What had I overlooked? Were my tromboncino now under threat? My cukes? My peppers and pumpkins? Tomatoes? Nobody bothers hot peppers or goyas, thank goodness...

When I got out there for a quick check it appeared that all was well, oddly enough; then when I reached the far end I saw that the soil of one entire corner, perhaps 6 square meters, had been deeply and violently ripped up. I'd seen this before, elsewhere: wild pigs after earthworms. Also, I had planted potatoes there last year. An irresistible combination to wild pigs deprived of the fresh rice growing all around them but out of reach behind electric fences - you can imagine the frustration - but fortunately Mr. Nice Guy of the declining LI was living nearby. The snouty beasts work at night, quietly, so I hadn't heard a sound. Didn't touch the nearby tomatoes and just missed some goya and cuke vines, though one cuke vine had to be listed as collateral damage; nothing else. Those big porky bodies had no problem shouldering that heavy bucket out of the way of fine dining.

This is the first time I've ever been invaded by wild pigs, but only because of my gradual LI reversal. There's a big lesson for the world somewhere in there, but there's no point in throwing pearls before politicians. For their part, the porkos probably broke up their garden party at dawn, but I bet they'll be back for more: tonight one garden corner, tomorrow you know what. My gate, for one, will be closed.

You've been warned. Metaphorically too.

IT'S EASY TO FORGET A NOTBOOK

It's easy to forget a thing that isn't a book. Especially something that pretends to be a book. The other night I put my Kindle Fire - my large-paperback-sized notbook containing Joyce, Chekhov, Thoreau, Vonnegut, Tolstoy, Dick, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Fitzgerald, Hardy, Hemingway, you name them, and many other favorite authors' books - down beside the bathroom sink, and when I'd finished brushing my teeth beside all those literary icons I turned off the light and went upstairs to bed, where I was going to read, and forgot to take a whole library with me. We have much to get used to in the world that is coming.

I forgot my Kindle Fire because as I say it's not a book; my mind doesn't love it the way it loves a book, doesn't heft it or revere it like a book, and never will. My realback books, on the other hand, I have always guarded like my own skin and never left behind. I'd leave my bag behind sometimes, or even my wallet or glasses or car keys, but never my book. The book was always in my hand, where it was held dear. There was an umbilical aspect to our relationship.

When I use my notbook, even after several months I still can't fully digest the fact that there are hundreds of volumes in there, largely public domainers I used to have to pay for nonetheless, because they'd been "published" in hefty paperbacks that were in themselves an accomplishment of manufacture, but back then their cost gave them worldly value. In the notbook, a big thick book is the same as a little thin book; all you get is one silently sliding page at a time, though out of lifelong habit as my eye reads down the page my dutiful forefinger creeps up toward the corner to get ready to turn the page that - is not there - the finger nonetheless searching in space on its own, like an inchworm. Even after several months, my faithful finger refuses to abandon this lifelong occupation and slides up to the corner, to - oh, this isn't a real book, is it - the forlorn digit (big etymology there...) reminds me with its sudden unemployment. Moreover, I don't close the device, I turn it off. You don't turn a book off! And how do you console an unemployed finger?

Nothing like book2notbook has ever happened to humans before. When we went from scroll to Gutenberg we didn't have any trouble remembering the book; we didn't forget the book because it wasn't a scroll. Nor did early scrollers-to-booksters try to unroll their book to open it, or try to roll it up when they finished, they just closed it. They slipped easily into the book groove, their forefingers happy with their new job; there were none of the surprises that await me at every nonturn with my notbook, unlearning things I never thought I knew, like my forefinger, or the entire me, unnecessarily rolling over in bed to comfortably read the next page.

Now I can read in complete darkness! Or turn up/down the page brightness! These are not book inherencies. The digital book has brought with it a whole new set of concepts I've had to open up to for the first time: how, for example, take possessive delight in a masterpiece in digital form? I still can't. A file is not a book, insists my old mind, even as I read; I don't feel the visceral connection of true possession. When it's only numbers, there's just something digital about it.

The bookmind has other problems, some of which may fade as I advance into this new and deweydecimalless life, carrying my library in one hand. For example, Great Gatsby and War and Peace now have the same heft. Also, the fact that I am devouring Ulysses is unobservable by others. How can I impress an interesting lady at the cafe by browsing an invisible Tropic of Cancer? Scorsese's cinema masterpiece After Hours could never have developed if the main character had been reading a Kindle. That feeling of weighty accomplishment under way is gone too, as is that deep sense of reward implicit in the heft of what is being portioned deliciously into my mind, of feeling how much has been read and how much remains to be read by the relative volumes of pages; priceless measures of effort and gain to the veteran reader. But no more.

So what happens from here? Digitally, so much is now out of the question. Terabytes of zeros and ones just ain't got it. Spacial and voluminous reality will always matter, at least until we ourselves become digital; but in my present form, how backbreakingly heavy are the many hundreds if not thousands of actual books on my shelves and in boxes stacked upstairs that I dare not open or I'll be absorbed for hours, dare not move or I'll be in pain. Fact is, they're getting to be a burden by comparison: how crude, to be lifting and moving those chunks of increasingly dead weight around for the rest of my life...

Yet I can't forget them, unlike the entire canon by the bathroom sink.

THINGS YOU MISS WHEN YOU LEAVE JAPAN 

A quick list of things I shall miss about Japan :(: (self.japan)

submitted 11 hours ago by grooviekenn

Background: I grew up in Japan and have been living in the US for the past 15+ years. My grandmother passed away in May and so I returned to Japan after being away for many years. Here is a quick list I compiled of things that I will miss about Japan when I go back to the States tomorrow.

(via http://www.reddit.com/r/japan/ )

HOLDING NEW HANDS

Soon I will be another grandfather, when my daughter Kasumi brings her second baby into the world, a brother or sister for Kaya. In the same way that one is a new father for each of one's own children, one is a new grandfather for each new grandchild.  Another grandfather is a remarkable thing to be, as anyone knows who's ever been one; it's a special experience never twice the same, like being an elephant now and then, or a giant redwood, or a choo-choo train, mountain, horsey or pogo stick, as required, and on through the endless list you now have time for.

It's not being full-time responsibly busy on all fronts, the way parenting was; now is when you get your chance at being that more flexible ancient continuous one we all are, layered over with being whatever you can muster up right now from the mythology: sort of post-graduate parenting. Being another grandfather is a newer thing than I expected. (And what if it's a boy?)

Still, it's not as though you have to learn how to be another grandfather; if you've managed to remain genuine, and still contain the magical savor of your own childhood and parenthood (you find that out with your first grandchild), then every subsequent grandfathering should come as naturally as holding a new hand.  One is already familiar with grandfathering, and whatever you give in that capacity is returned in more than full measure.

One evening recently I was walking with 2-year-old Kaya in the light of sunset, when she pointed to the western sky and shouted: "Pink!" while jumping up and down. I hadn't looked at the sunset in that full-eyed, amazing-discovery way for 60 years and there it was again, fresh as the first time, because I was holding a new hand.

***

[Wrote this way back then (2003) but never posted it, because Kasumi had twins(!) girls(!) and it got lost in the ensument... Came across it putting the book (Monkeys & Onions) together... RB]

Why genetically engineered food is dangerous:

New report by genetic engineers

One of the report's authors, Dr Michael Antoniou of King's College London School of Medicine in the UK, uses genetic engineering for medical applications but warns against its use in developing crops for human food and animal feed.
Dr Antoniou said: "GM crops are promoted on the basis of ambitious claims – that they are safe to eat, environmentally beneficial, increase yields, reduce reliance on pesticides, and can help solve world hunger.
I felt what was needed was a collation of the evidence that addresses the technology from a scientific point of view.
Research studies show that genetically modified crops have harmful effects on laboratory animals in feeding trials and on the environment during cultivation. They have increased the use of pesticides and have failed to increase yields. Our report concludes that there are safer and more effective alternatives to meeting the world’s food needs."

Another author of the report, Dr John Fagan, is a former genetic engineer who in 1994 returned to the National Institutes of Health $614,000 in grant money due to concerns about the safety and ethics of the technology. He subsequently founded a GMO testing company.
Dr Fagan said: "Crop genetic engineering as practiced today is a crude, imprecise, and outmoded technology. It can create unexpected toxins or allergens in foods and affect their nutritional value. Recent advances point to better ways of using our knowledge of genomics to improve food crops, that do not involve GM.
Over 75% of all GM crops are engineered to tolerate being sprayed with herbicide. This has led to the spread of herbicide-resistant superweeds and has resulted in massively increased exposure of farmers and communities to these toxic chemicals. Epidemiological studies suggest a link between herbicide use and birth defects and cancer.
These findings fundamentally challenge the utility and safety of GM crops, but the biotech industry uses its influence to block research by independent scientists and uses its powerful PR machine to discredit independent scientists whose findings challenge this approach."

The third author of the report, Claire Robinson, research director of Earth Open Source, said, "The GM industry is trying to change our food supply in far-reaching and potentially dangerous ways. We all need to inform ourselves about what is going on and ensure that we – not biotechnology companies – keep control of our food system and crop seeds.
We hope our report will contribute to a broader understanding of GM crops and the sustainable alternatives that are already working successfully for farmers and communities."

Full article and links at Earth Open Source

FRESH CURRENTS: FREE DOWNLOAD

Kyoto Journal/Heian-Kyo Media's latest special publication, on Japan's present and future energy policies-- released on the day angry citizens surrounded the Japanese parliament buildings to demand an end to nuclear power.

"Fukushima has raised, once again, the perennial questions about human fallibility and human frailty, about hubris and man's arrogance in thinking he can control nature. The earthquakes, the tsunami, the meltdown at Japan’s nuclear power plant are nature’s reminders of her power… Alternatives to nuclear energy are a thousand times more abundant and a million times less risky. To push nuclear plants after Fukushima is pure insanity."

— Vandana Shiva

http://download.freshcurrents.org/ 

TA PROJECT JAPAN ASKS:

"Help us send the kids in Fukushima to camp.

Because of the Nuclear Plant Disaster, 

the lives of the children in Fukushima 

have been turned upside down. 

 Let the Kids Play!!"

ZUCCHINI HAVE NEEDS

I was hoping this year to avoid getting physically involved with my zucchini, as I have tended to do in the past - it’s difficult to end some relationships, what can I say. But zucchini have needs. It is said that successful pollination of squash blossoms requires an average of ten pollinators, which seems a lot to ask, up here in the woods where zukes have never lived, historically.

This year, therefore, since in my ongoing naivete I planted a few zuke varieties, to ensure an optimal number of natural pollinators I planted a borage plant right beside each zuke patch, knowing that borage is a top bee attractor cum edible herb; plus the blossoms, which have “a sweet honey-like taste [are] one of the few truly blue-colored edible substances,” as Wikipedia puts it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borage).  The blossoms also look great floating on my wine. Not far behind borage in pollinator attraction is the nasturtium, which - in addition to its bright varicolored beauty - provides edible blossoms, leaves and capery seed buds.

Looked like a sure win-win, but as I often learn in the Big Vegas of Life, that jogging tunnel is just a painting on that stone wall. Apparently there hasn’t been a succulent full-grown borage plant up here on the mountain for a million years or so, because a few mornings after my two magnificent borage plants neared their full height, those big beautiful blossom-bunches were toppled into caterpillar fodder and the succulent leaves were the ghost of lace. It was a savage sight to see; better to turn away and think of pleasant things.

So bye-bye pollinators, if you were ever here. Within a week or so the nasturtiums had completely disappeared beneath the lush canopy of zucchini leaves over the dark rain forest of vigorous zuke stems and yearning male blossoms and the occasional coy female, but no zucchini.   

Now I have to go out there early in the morning at open blossom time and physically introduce some wallflower male blossoms to some comely female zucchini blossoms, who are all just hanging around under there hoping for quick fruition. This kind of sordid activity can make one cynical, but more importantly, what if my neighbors see me? “Morning, Bob!”

Erotically speaking, though, Japan is a way old culture. I’m sure they’ve seen every strange thing at one time or another, though perhaps not this type of thing, especially involving a foreigner.

I’ll do my best to represent the West.

MASSIVE ANTI-NUCLEAR RALLY STAGED IN TOKYO

MORE LIGHT THAN DARKNESS

I didn't see the whole thing, didn't catch the name of the small town, just saw the last bit of a news report I guess it was, then it was gone; clicked in right where some Japanese schoolgirls age 12~13 were walking cheerily along a just-cleared road amidst mounds of tsunami destruction in one of the severely afflicted towns, a place of narrow valleys among small steep mountains where folks still live at heights the tsunami hadn't reached.

As the girls walked along they tossed a volley ball up into the air, chatting and playing, passing through the devastation they had just survived. They were on their way to a playground somewhere, I thought, taking that to be the point of this little clip: have hope, don't give up, get some fun, live on and brighten-- until they arrived at a rare surviving building, slid back the door and entered, put down the ball and each shouldered an old-fashioned basket backpack that was heavy with something. They then departed and with their burdens began walking once more, this time in twos up the steep ways that threaded the sides of the mountains and led to houses up there, mostly occupied by elderly folks cut off from a world that is no more, a world erased as far as they could see.

As the girls neared each house they called out a friendly hello, said their names and Here's lunch! From within came a glad response, the pair then entering to bring a meal to one or more elderly folks who had been waiting. Thus the girls went from house to house, calling friendly greetings and being welcomed with happiness. In this way they were meeting the elderly people in their town, folks they would otherwise never have known but now were visiting daily, knew now by name and feeling, saying good morning not by rote but in a friendly, even familial way, bringing food and new companionship to these elders who in their lonely places were grateful… 

At each house they'd chat a bit, those elders now having two young girls in their daily lives, like family, bringing them aid without obligation, in return the girls having all these grandmas and grandpas; the girls do this every day and they like it, they like the smiles that greet them and the cheer they cause, the chatting with and helping all the elders only yesterday absent from their lives, as it is also for the elders, who are joyed to have youngsters come to their home and relate to them personally, in a caring way -- it was uplifting to behold. 

This is the way it should be, these young women happy to be giving a gift that is more than just the food they bring, each day doing wonders that they never thought of before, in turn receiving the gift that many never come to in all their lives: the understanding that elders need the young, but the young need elders just as much. How better to uplift a society than by such ways as this? Things should be like this, things should always be like this: no distance between the generations, no life without their touch. 

On they go even now, the girls among the smiles, beyond the end of that brief part I saw-- they lift up all those lives with their baskets of food, their warmth and words, happy in calling out Good morning! Hello! See you again tomorrow! and going on their way, up to the next neighbor on the mountain. They are heroes, those girls, to themselves and to us all, even to those who have not seen this little story. 

I will never forget them, walking through that wreckage, rich with future, on their way to share that wealth with those who yesterday were isolated strangers having nothing but a roof and what was left of life, who thanks to the girls have lived to see beauty rise from devastation with a shout of greeting and the wave of a hand, living proof each new day that the heart holds more light than darkness--

As if to give some other depth to the value of this task, at the end of the clip the adult female reporter, who has been following the girls around the mountain paths for the story, one morning tries on one of the baskets filled with bento lunches and staggers backward at the heaviness...

***

This ramble appears in Kyoto Journal's first digital issue, #76, a fine publication to be released just as soon as the magazine's long-awaited new website is finally launched. Meanwhile, KJ is best tracked here: http://www.facebook.com/kyoto.journal

FINAL REPORT (1):

TEPCO, NISA's dilly-dallying caused 'man-made disaster'

Fukushima radiation sizzling at 10 sieverts 

in flooded basement of unit 1

BOOKS AND PENS

Now that I've had my Kindle Fire for a couple of months, I saw a guy reading a physical book the other day on the train and felt a touch of how old-fashioned it was, turning paper pages, page after page... The pace of tradition...

My Kindle isn't even nearly filled, despite all the free (public domain is vast!) and purchased books it contains (before too long it will hold more books than I have in physical form, a voluminous heaviness of former trees, believe me!) What's more, I can find any of those ebooks within seconds. (I don't know where the hell my actual copy of Emerson among the Eccentrics is; it's in one of those boxes in one of those rooms upstairs, knock yerself out.)

On top of that, when I summon any one of my ebooks from their endless bookshelf, it opens to where I was last reading. Also each word is a link to a dictionary, there is also wi-fi for interneting, and I can read in the dark without turning back and forth to get to page after page, also keeping hands warm in winter. I can read even a 2000-page book without danger of falling asleep and injuring myself. Physical books seem so HEAVY now... I used to carry two books max in my bag; now I carry hundreds in the weight of one.

I look at my stacks of physical books and boxes of physical books and rooms of physical books and shelves of physical books made from who knows how many pulverized trees that over the decades I have bought and read and kept and stacked and boxed and dusted and lifted and carried and moved from home to home and shipped both domestically and abroad, put into and taken from vehicles and picked up at the post office and lifted into rooms and unboxed and shelved and reboxed to make room for new books, back in the days when the world was going postal...

And fountain pens, remember fountain pens? In grammar school I learned the Palmer method (!) of cursive writing(!) with a steel-nibbed(!) quill pen(!) dipped into an inkwell(!), an inkwell set into the desk itself! Is that immediately post-stone age or what? Back then, fountain pens were sold everywhere, even in pharmacies! Like books! All professional men had a fountain pen clipped to their shirt pocket.

But the inky fountains were soon being backgrounded like so much else in this modern age; you gotta wonder where it's all heading now, as those beautiful things (like the Japanese writing brush of not so long ago, now exclusively an art form, like Western calligraphy is fast becoming) being shunted into the past where they'll be missed by those who remember, but what will my great-great-great grandchildren do with a fountain pen if they can find one?

I feel the same kind of thing I feel now when I come across my beloved old Mont Blanc: I love it, and love writing by hand, which draws from the mind the rhythms and breathings, the flowings and secret urges of words, lost to those who learn to merely tap on a keyboard. I love writing by hand as much as I love physical books-- I've always worshiped the reality and magic that pens and the books contain in their silence, always loved their heft and scent, the sound of the ink flowing out onto page, from page into eyes, into meanings... how can that become anachronism?

Armfuls of books, roomfuls of eloquence, pages of elegance written by hand, all heading for long ago now; we elders are the formal bearers of these things into the past, where books and pens will one day be like hieroglyphs on stone walls beneath desert sands...

After us they will become mysteries, and will have experts down the ages to tease out their secrets, but they will no longer be lived...

It goes without saying that I'm keeping my books and my pens.

RAMBLE: TRAVEL INCREASES SEX APPEAL

Odd it should take a magazine so long to discover this - and by survey, not personal experience - but I guess that's the price you pay when you spend your life sitting at a desk doing traveler surveys.

I found this "revelation" to be true as soon as I hit the road way back in the 60s, when BAM! things changed radically from when I'd just been idling and getting stranger due to a job-induced deficiency of significant motion, both psychological and spatial. Distant gazes fade in the absence of horizons.

You can get a fast car and blur the spatial aspect a bit for as long as you can keep the pedal to the metal, but apart from road rage, there are no psychological changes. Then you leave the fast lane, pull into your garage at the end of a blurry day with bugs in your hair, maybe a speeding ticket or two and there you are, same old psyche taking the key out of the ignition and just... going into the house. Where's the sex appeal in that? Then there's the mortgage and car payments.

Travelers, on the other hand, almost by definition don't need cars - strong legs are fine; good pair of highway shoes, maybe a bicycle now and then, often just rented - sometimes other peoples' wheels, if hitchhiking is of use. And being of increased sex appeal, travelers don't need houses either. Apart from worldliness, multilingualism and several other qualities, newness is a big factor in sex appeal. And nobody is newer than a traveler. Casual freedom is the key. You're just as sexy wherever you go, so what's the hurry? Just a good sleeping bag, quality ground cloth and you're there. Plus, this way you get to go slower through all the places you can be sexy in, meet the locals; as for pieds-a-terre there are meadows, caves, beaches, pro tem couches, verandas, rooftops anywhere in the rest of the world, which is sexier if there are travelers around. You really meet people when you sleep on their surfaces.

Those magaziners might have asked me or any of my worldly acquaintances, but like true travelers we're not talking, except in the present instance to esoteric readers. You'd think word would get around, but travelers don't let on about this aspect of the Big Road, never have, really; who would? Word gets out and all at once everybody is on the road; no more couches, no more porches, beaches, caves and forests all at once full of folks who in their natures would actually rather stay home, now diluting the ratio and before too long the overall sex appeal plummets, like the quality of travel magazines...