grow this

Tastes in November

2009-11-22T11:19:00.000-08:00

“I thought I had an appetite for destruction. Turns out all I wanted was a club sandwich.
Homer Simpson

I’m mostly inside these days, my obsession with the doll house once again activated by the cooler weather. I managed to get lights into the wisteria chandelier I’m making.

The purple beads themselves were acquired years ago - woven into a bonsai-sized tree with a twisted gold wire stem that looked pretty tacky. I got it at a festival in Pomona, and knew I was going to deconstruct the tree and use the branches for the chandelier. I wound several strings of white lights around the branches with floral tape. Here’s the first floor. Notice the inlay in the floor of the dining room at rear beneath the wisteria arch.

It’s November but it’s still summer here. This is the time of year when I usually decide there is no such thing as winter and I can garden comfortably year-round. Then, it gets cold and rainy and stays that way until March. It does cool down enough in the evenings that we've already had a fire and heard the furnace kick on in the early morning hours.

When I did get outside, I planted some recent acquisitions – this being the time of year to plant natives and drought-tolerant plants. In deadheading and cleaning up, I ended up with enough cut things to make a lovely arrangement at the side of the pond (below). I put the copper canyon daisy and my tiny pomegranate tree that was a volunteer in the Veggie Garden.

I got a ton of starts at the nursery yesterday for the Veggie Garden: snow peas, red cabbage, yellow cauliflower, more broccoli. I have to buy beet seeds, but found some golden ones to plant next to the red. Got some asparagus in six-pack starts, deciding against buying the bare root ones. We need things in the veggie garden that will last more than one season, so why not make room for the asparagus and see what they do, even if it takes them a few years to get going.

I found some lovely red lettuce and some spinach. We have some radicchio in the ground, but the outer leaves taste bitter and I’m not ready to pull out the entire plant to eat the heart until I get something to replace it – hence the lettuce and spinach. Spinach is my classic example of how something that tastes lovely raw in a salad (especially with bacon and a dressing made from bacon grease and cream curdled in the microwave and tossed warm). You can wilt it and it’s still edible, but if you cook it and eat your spinach like Popeye did, it gives you that squishy feeling when you swallow that my sister K used to say about eating canned peas: “It makes my head wiggle”. That was when she was a kid. She probably doesn’t say that these days.

I also got some shallots, and chard, but passed on the collard greens. I’ll only grow what I like to eat and cooking greens seems somehow sacrilegious. While I’ll stoop to growing chard, it seems to be taking things too far to cook collard greens or kale. Once, I went to a KFC in the hood in Oakland and they had a side called “mean greens” which sounded more appetizing than their international orange mac and cheesoid product.

The greens turned out to be cooked collard greens with some nasty hot sauce. It was like the cook decided if you were going to eat something with a texture like cardboard only slimy, you might as well spice it up with enough Tabasco sauce and salt to preserve an Egyptian mummy. Why not just eat boiled cardboard seasoned with ground up mummy powder? I’d rather eat grass: which I actually do every morning when I juice some wheat grass and drink a shot. Tastes awful but goes down quicker than Homer Simpson can eat a club sandwich.

Winding Safe to Sea

2009-11-13T10:59:00.000-08:00

“We are not sure of sorrow,
And joy was never sure:
To-day will die to-morrow;
Time stoops to no man’s lure;
And love, grown faint and fretful,
With lips but half regretful
Signs, and with eyes forgetful
Weeps that no loves endure,

“From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.”
- Homer, The Odyssey

I can see my mom on the resting on the couch one autumn afternoon like today when she was dying of cancer and I went to stay a few days to say goodbye. Dad asked her what she was doing and she replied: I’m fucking dying over here.

I wasn’t there when Mom finally died. One year later, I went to visit Dad to be with him on the anniversary of Mom’s death. Thus, I was there when Dad died, suddenly and without time to for either of us to be afraid. From hope and fear set free.

All these years later, there are few tears left to cry, and even thinking of them brings only a gentle tap of sorrow, like the velvet feet of my cat walking over me and waking me early this morning. There are few words left to say either, about how wonderful they both were and how idyllic our childhood home was.

Time dilutes sorrow. As loss recedes into the past, it slowly becomes buried beneath the present, like M-in-M’s back garden now covered in fallen leaves. But somehow, the memories remain – most of them are good, and many are profane.

No life lives forever, but I still miss you, Mom and Dad.

Divine Autumn

2009-11-11T13:10:00.001-08:00

“I am the eye with which the universe
Beholds itself and knows itself divine.”

- P B Shelley, Hymn of Apollo

Don't Disappear

2009-11-09T12:50:00.001-08:00

Don't disappear.... By disappearing from me,
you will disappear from yourself,
betraying your own self forever,
and that will be the basest dishonesty.

Don't disappear.... To disappear is so easy.
It's impossible to resurrect one another.
Death drags down too deep.
Death even for a moment is too long.
…

Don't disappear.... Give me your palm.
I am written on it-this I believe.
What makes one's last love terrible
is that it is not love, but fear of loss.

Poem:Don't Disappear, Yvegeny Yevtushenko, 1987, Translated by Antonina W. Bouis, Albert C. Todd and Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Pictures: my mums, transformed into gold by the late November afternoon sun

Guest Update from the Midwest

2009-11-04T14:25:00.000-08:00

Just a quick post to illustrate the typically indecisive weather in SE Michigan this fall. The glowing maples show the height of their color on Nov. 1, and our increasingly frequent frosty nights have elicited a growing redness in the leaves of the dwarf azalea in the second photo. But daytime temperatures have also gotten up to 70 degrees this month, which has the bulbs confused. Beneath the azalea, note the tender, spring-green tips of a sure-to-be-disappointed daffodil. Poor baby.

Vacation Part 1: North Carolina

2009-11-01T15:33:00.000-08:00

“She’s a quiet clapper in the bell of the prairie,
a girl who likes to be alone…
“The stiller she is, the more everything moves
in the immense vocabulary of being.”
- Margaret Hasse, Being Still (2001)

In mid-October, I went to visit J & R for Autumn in Asheville NC. Actually, they live in Marshall NC about 40 minutes into the mountains from the airport.

Winding through late summer hills in their final blaze of green, now following, now leading the shallow, fat French Broad River. We make a final crossing, leaving a rear-view mirror-full of Marshall.

Winding up through back public and private roads, waving to every car we pass. A sharp turn from this road into a driveway in need of more gravel, through some trees and around a corner into a high meadow. Welcome to Shangri-La. Later, our host stands at the far end of the porch, from which you feel like a sentry on look-out at a medieval castle at the top of the peak with a view of all who approach.

The driveway climbs toward the west, then abruptly right-turns into an open high meadow of natives grasses and wildflowers – an approach that can be overseen from these windows.

The driveway curves up the meadow and circles around to the east of the house. Here is the view of the top of the driveway, looking mostly east from the dining room.

We walked a path in these woods in the mist. The pines are unusual in that they were cultivated by a prior settler in this place. In America, anything over 100 years is ancient. Echoes from the Civil War seem to echo faintly in still in the air at twilight.

Later we walked through the open high meadow and heard the lowing of the cows on a nearby peak. We picked wildflowers, and the last of the cutting flowers. The next night it froze and killed the cutting garden. I was there at the exact moment the seasons changed.

The view from the house-wide covered porch facing west is of ranges of mountains, in different shades of purple The views near and far in every direction are more priceless than the clichéd punch line of a master card commercial. I walked part of my brother and his wife thirty-acre spread over the next few days.

We visited a nearby botanical garden and saw a row of trees burst into red flames. I cannot remember their name, but their beauty was unforgettable.

We drove the Blue Ridge Parkway and back into Marshall and saw the sun set from the Grove Park Inn.

Once in the “Historic” Grove Park Inn, thoughts drifted to the past. The hotel is about 100 years old and filled with relics reminding us of our past.

Back home, walking the 30 acre spread with the proud farmer. Turning a path into hardwood, we stroll by a tumbledown barn made from chestnut wormwood.

We passed a crumbling outhouse with a crystal door knob, and a four-room house with peeling ancient wallpaper, a tree through the roof, and a lovely crumbling porch with an overgrown view.

A world-class organic vegetable garden maintained by a world-class professional horticulturist. You can imagine the delicious food because I was too busy eating it to take a picture before dinner.

Autumn seems to be the season to remember. We who cultivate our gardens store up the bounty of the harvest that is bred in our bones. We remember the long days of summer, storing memories to warm us through the long nights of winter.

This is the season of remembering. I felt close to many of those strangers, friends, family members who are no longer here to see Autumn. We talked about friends and families who have died, who have moved on, who we barely had time to know. I loved the autumn colors, smells and sounds. I even enjoyed the gaudy fluorescent leaves and brazen purple berry clusters of the beauty berry at Biltmore. It seems to childishly shout out that all autumn isn’t muted, sometimes it’s brazen and drinks a bottle of red wine each night before the fire.

We have come of middle age, those of us who met as children. We are our families’ middle generation. Our collective, beloved parents and grandparents are long gone, our children and their childrens’ futures seems impossibly far into the future. But this season, we try to build a bride of remembrance. There is an urge to pass along stories, legends, family jokes, and love.

I enjoyed autumn with close family members to recollect, remember, and, to revel in the memories. And to pass along some wisdom I heard the day I returned to parched San Diego. Something I’m sure my parents once said to me: Thoughts turn to things. Pick good ones.

Happy Haloween

2009-10-31T12:22:00.000-07:00

"So Autumn’s not the end, not the last rung
Of any ladder in the yearly climb

"When that is deathly old which once was young,
Since time’s no ladder but a constant wheel

"Like an old paddled mill that dips and churns
The mill-race, and upon the summit turns

"Unceasingly to heel
Over, and scoop fresh water out of time."

Poem:  Vita Sackville-West ,  The Garden, Autumn
Pictures: Greenfield Village in Dearborn Michigan, October 2009

Vacation

2009-10-13T08:39:00.000-07:00

And now, hark at the rain,
Windless and light,
Half a kiss, half a tear,
Saying good-night.

- Edward Thomas Sowing

It rained last night! I'm off for 2 weeks.

Can This Marriage Be Saved?

2009-10-03T14:09:00.000-07:00

After all, tomorrow is another day. Margaret Mitchel

I think that was the name of the column in Cosmo. You’d meet Dick and Jane who would each frame the issue from the standpoint of themselves as the longsuffering victims. Then the Wise (i.e. Real) Doctor would preach at them until they were Saved and whatnot.

Tech Support Guy and I went to the grocery store yesterday. We each came home with our favorite staples replaced, and each made our own favorite sandwich for dinner.

TSG speaks:
I ate a baloney sandwich on Styrofoam day-old, generic, wonder-bread slathered with the butteroid material in the half-gallon vat of generic you-won’t-believe-its-just-lard, and topped with several peeled slabs of generic processed cheese log of orange rubbery heavy-weight jello-cheese product. I plated that with ruffled cheesy potato chips in a relatively somber international orange, that we both agree is god’s most perfect food. My meal was accompanied by an amusing little pink wine from a box. Note also, that I decant my beverage into a foggy plastic glass stained with your farmer bros coffee and/or your cola and artificial sugar flavored phosphoric acid. A plastic tub of plastic chocolate pudding and carcinogens topped off my meal.

Weeping Sore speaks:
I had a sandwich composed of artisan cheese bread, gourmet mustard, Swiss cheese and pastrami and topped with a couple of fresh organic romaine lettuce leaves. My sandwich too, was also accompanied by god’s most perfect food ruffled cheese chips. I sipped a martini made with vanilla vodka and organic Italian blood orange soda, mixed 1:1.

Wise Counselor
No. This marriage cannot be saved…. Well, let’s see if we can’t make something good about this crap sandwich of a marriage. The gulf in the culinary tastes of TSG and WS might at first seem irreconcilable, but…

Ok. Let’s suppose no evidence remains about how the spatter stains of that luminol-fluoresced wall got there. Let’s say forensic analysis of samples taken do not match either TCG or WS, or their latch-key child’s blood.

Didn’t T, (can I call you Tech?) use coarse kosher salt, and didn’t W use homeopathic doses of the same coarse kosher salt? Yes? Yes! Didn’t you both design, build, and consume a sandwich composed of bread, filler, lubricant/sauce? That’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout!

And, at the end of the day, it isn’t about the more sophisticated chemical compounds Mother Nature wouldn’t know from a chicken in an orange jumpsuit. It’s not about the preservatives, pesticides or other carcinogenic trace materials consumed. The one unshakable foundation of your marriage must be the potato chips.

Think about this. How many kinds of potato chips are there in this universe? There must be hundreds. And yet, you both agree that the foundation of your diverse sandwich tastes is the potato chip that meets the following criteria:
1) ruffled to permit maximum transfer of your topping of choice (T: canned onion dip. W: homemade Holy Christ roasted tomato ketchup).
2) Seasoned/coated with a fine grit dust of orange powder of various tones ranging from Headache International Orange Neon to clay-colored turmeric yellow.
3) Composition of Seasonal Dust is preferably cheesoid, but honey mesquite barbeque is acceptable to W whose more sophisticated palate enjoys a savory adventure from time to time.

Which, if I’m not mistaken is the secret to a perfect marriage that will transcend any difference in sandwich composition. That, and plus lies. Can’t have a lasting love without a generous pinch of denial in these tough times.

Voiceover in a voice of Kent Brokman:
TSG and WS lived happily ever after, at least according to the settlement decree approved by the courts and published by TMZ. And who the hell are you to raise your redundantly Supercilious eyebrows?

Did I mention I’m hormonal? Forgot what a mood swing felt like. It’s a bumpier ride than I remember, but something is twitching inside my brain, and I’m holding on so far. There may be something to this bio-identical hormone replacement therapy. But then again, Big Brother would say that’s anecdotal, invalid, femino-centric discourse. To which I’d reply – Dude, stop blathering. Take a placebo and chill.

My blood tests surprised Doc who said my testosterone is “off the charts”. T is out picking up my estriol and som’pin else that is not horse piss bottled by Big Pharma that causes breast cancer (oops their bad). So no wonder I want to bite the heads off chickens. You may ask yourself - how did I get here? Me, I ask myself, why not make another martini? But the doc told me to cut back on the testosterone. He promised that way I won’t grow a mustache, or attend a monster truck show in the arena wearing a Jack Daniels baseball cap backwards. Or at least, not yet.

Stylish Garden Aprons

2009-09-30T15:05:00.000-07:00

Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.
Quentin Crisp

So, what else can I do when it’s too hot to garden outside? I’m so restless, I’m almost at the point of knocking on somebody’s front door and running away and hiding behind a tree and giggling. If my Mom was around, I’d call her and say, Maaaaahhhm… there’s nothing to do!

So, I went shopping. The local quilt store has rooms and rooms of fabric, and I fit the perfect profile to be wandering about a quilt store: pudgy middle-aged person in need of a project. Fifteen minutes and $73 later, I had six different patterned cottons all on a vegetable theme.

I made six aprons, lining them each since the stupid quilt store only carries the thin cotton stuff suitable for quilts, and I want heavier aprons with pockets because I loose about a pair of clippers a week if I don’t have a pocket to put them in while I work. The first apron took an entire afternoon because I use the sewing matching so rarely these days I have to re-learn how to thread bobbins and correctly thread the machine itself. Then, I had to undergo the humiliation of moving up, yet again, to a larger needle to do the hand sewing because I can’t see the damn hole in the damn needle any more. Damn.

By the time I was on the last one, I had it down to about 45 minutes, and could even re-wind a bobbin without resort to profanity or medication. Of course, by then, I was on liquid medication, it being happy hour. The happiest part of this is that I set the sewing machine up in the living/dining room where we can close the doors to the rest of the house and turn on the old air conditioner. I can’t hear the TV with the AC on, but I was rocking out to the iPod anyway.

So, now I’ve got stylish aprons for my teammates who volunteer with me to maintain the veggie garden. Since nothing can grow without being subject to grasshoppers, bunnies and squirrels, nothing can grow outside of our custom made chicken-wire cages. This is our in-between season when the tomatoes are about done but it’s too hot for the broccoli to consider growing. It just hunkers there under it’s chicken wire wondering what we were thinking to plant it in the heat.

We all know who we are. We may not be good gardeners, but we’ll look stylish as hell in our veggie-themed aprons.

Glitter and Aromatherapy

2009-09-21T11:11:00.000-07:00

‘I’ve been on food stamps and welfare. Anybody help me out? No.’
Craig T. Nelson, telling Glen Beck, with a perfectly straight face, why he’d like to stop paying his taxes.

The real world is pretty crazy these days. Nelson personifies the un-contemplative mindset so much in evidence these days. He makes as much sense as those opposing government healthcare while on Medicare. In order for me to hold on to the shreds of sanity that I have left, I sometimes have to retreat inside.

If you read about the history of gardens, you’ll find that one of the oldest forms of garden: the hortus conclusis, or enclosed garden, was created by religious people provide a peaceful quiet place to retreat from the noise and stupidity of the outside world.

Perhaps this began as an attempt to recreate the original garden, since once in the garden you couldn’t take two steps without tripping over some religious icon or symbolic plant – like the white rose which everyone knew stood for the purity of the BVM. I find that when it’s too hot to retreat from the political news to my own backyard garden, the world inside my head works just as well.

Whenever watching the news or reading the paper gives me a headache, I can always undergo my own aromatherapy cure. There’s nothing that beats the smell of roasting tomatoes with plenty of garlic and onions.

While the oven performs the miracle of caramel-ization, I entertain myself with clip art and make creative labels. Whether it’s Dirty Girl or Green Monster, I always finish off a label with glitter.

Glitter makes the dirty girl’s bathwater or the dragon’s scales sparkle. There’s no therapy like the aroma of garlic, Photoshop, and a glitter pen to make things right in my world.

Choosey Beggars

2009-09-18T15:56:00.001-07:00

“The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can superseded the necessity of being forever on the alert.” Hank Thorough (sic), Walden

Gardeners always want it all in the garden. Both perpetual spring, the lovely labor of summer, and still we want to welcome the harvest of fall and light the first fire in the fireplace. Whether you are rich in worldly wealth, health and happiness, or a beggar beneath a bridge scratching a lettuce garden . Forget those rays of summer sunshine, coming through the west-facing bedroom window. Stretch across the bed at 14:00, turn on the fan and nestle with your cat for a last summer afternoon nap.

Soon, with the tilt of the globe, the sun will depart earlier, the weak winter sun will permit the blinds to be completely open for the first time since last Winter. Mail order catalog season is upon us. No more summer sunshine naps, feeling the warmth of cat and sun mingle on my skin.

Henry David Thoreau seems to be saying that if we just pay attention, we will be rewarded. He goes on to elaborate that more valuable than the most prestigious advanced education, just learn to see what there is to be seen.

Here’s what he wrote about he learned in his first summer at Walden:

“Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, admist the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveler’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time.”

If all you have is one window that faces west, this is the moment to sit or stand there and watch the garden one late September afternoon. Pay attention as the golden sun fades into the trees across the canyon, and dusk creeps in. Even beggars don’t have to chose our favorite season, we can savor them all.

Mother Nature’s Spa Day

2009-09-12T10:31:00.000-07:00

“…
For lying broad awake, long ere the dawn,
Staring against the dark, the blank of space
Opens immeasurably, and thy face
Wavers and glimmers there and is withdrawn.
And many days, when all one’s works is vain,
And life goes stretching on, a waste gray plain,
With even the short mirage of morning gone,
No cool breath anywhere, no shadow nigh
Where a weary man might lay him down and die,

Lo! Thou are there before me suddenly
With shade as if a summer cloud did pass,
And spray of fountains whispering to the grass.
Oh, save me from the haste and noise and heat
That spoil life’s music sweet:
And from that lesser Aphrodite there –
Even now she stands
Close as I turn, and O my soul, how fair!”
- E. R. Sill, Venus of Milo

Thank You for Not Gardening

2009-09-09T12:51:00.000-07:00

“Just because I don’t care doesn’t mean I don’t understand.” – Homer Simpson

Now, I don’t claim to have a perfect marriage to Tech Support Guy. We like to joke with the cops replying to the 911 call that we’re one restraining order away from a perfect marriage. But lately, I love the guy.

Because late into the night last night he photoshopped >100 photos so I could open them w/o crashing the computer and do my monthly newsletter. Which is just as well because it’s once again so freaking hot outside that the potted plants are becoming mummified and the plastic flower pots are melting.

So, it’s back to the newsletter for me. And just because I have a short attention span doesn’t mean

Roasted Tomatoes and Red Wine

2009-09-04T11:59:00.000-07:00

“Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat history class”.
- Some Guy

So, one thing I have learned is that it’s too bleeding hot to grow anything outside besides fennel vulgaris that seems to invade every empty lot, roadside and unplanted corner, incidentally making brush fires burn hotter and longer. Thank god for farmer’s market tomatoes.

I quartered 6 pounds of very ripe tomatoes, added a whole yellow onion and a whole head of garlic. I toss them in a bowl with balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt and a little sugar to jump start the magic of caramelization. I add whatever fresh herbs look good: in this case, some oregano, red basil and some fennel seeds. My daughter taught me that you can spread this in a cookie sheet, put it in a 250F oven for FOUR HOURS, and they taste like heaven. Okay, this doesn’t help the ambient indoor temp, but boy, does the house smell delicious!

After the pan cools, I shovel the lovely muck into a food mill, using the middle blade. Some tomato seeds get through, but the peel is left behind. It takes about 4 batches in the mill, turning until the only thing left in the top is dry-ish peel. Between batches, I wash the food mill to clean out the holes and remove the skin. (I can’t compost what’s left because of the oil, and I’ve learned that the coyotes don’t care for it if left in a bowl outdoors overnight, so I grind up the peel etc in the garbage disposal.)

The longer you roast, the darker the sauce. Plus, I’ve learned that the difference between a juicy tomato sauce and a thicker tomato paste depends on roasting time.

I put the sauce in a saucepan and simmer it while I’m sterilizing the glass jars, and depending on what I want, I might add some red wine to thin and darken the mix.

I’m getting better and more organized about the actual canning process. I always clean more jars than I think I’ll need – better to have too many than not enough. Notice the glass of red wine, which I sip while working. I’m pretty sure this enhances the sauce.

The filled jars are left in the canner for 20 minutes. I want to be sure this stuff keeps until the gloom of winter when a zesty fresh tomato is mostly a figment of my fevered imagination.

We couldn’t resist the lure of the dark red paste however, and made some of the best pizza in the world with a whole wheat dough in the bread-maker, grated fresh mozzarella and Romano cheese. I also add some of the sweet onion and thyme relish and more fresh herbs.

How Hot is It?

2009-08-29T14:58:00.001-07:00

"Always remember the first rule of power tactics; power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have."
Saul Alinsky

If the enemy is heat, petrifying, mummifying, melting your eyeballs, triple-digit Fahrenheit heat, then the power to conquer is my air conditioner.

There was a time, in the misty past of my youth, when I scoffed at wussies who needed their air conditioned. I’m talking to you, Gramma. That was when I lived in the swamp that Washington D.C. was built on. Humidity in the high 90s, and it would cool off to a mere double-digit night, when you’d try to fall asleep in a position in which none of your skin touched any other part of your skin. If you so much as moved your elbow into a 45-degree angle, water would drip from the fold in the skin after about 30 seconds. Nighttime was as hot as daytime, just darker. But I was a young teen then, and I was immortal.

That was then. This is now in Southern California, the edges of the Sonoran desert, expanding like bloated roadkill in the sun, into the coastal climate after six years of hard drought. The good news is, there’s virtually no humidity. The bad news is that there’s virtually no humidity, plus I’m not an immortal teen now.

You have to drink about 23 gallons of water a day just to be able to sweat. And sweat – that manages to ooze through your pores – sizzles as it drips down the sides of your face. It’s the same as the way the snot in your nose used to freeze and crackle when you were a kid out sledding down the suburban streets, only different.

So, I managed to get outside today, primarily to take a picture of the thermometer reading 108 in the freaking shade. Then I retreated inside. Perhaps too over-exposed to see, are some drops of water on the thermometer. They are from me wiping the display with water to get a clearer picture, but they make it seem like the thermometer itself is sweating.

There are two climate zones inside. The computer room and adjacent kitchen, where my tomatoes and garlic have been roasting in a 250 oven for just about 4 hours, where I had to close the kitchen window because the breeze blowing in was hotter than the oven-heated ambient air.

Past the closed doors is the living/dining room, cooled by a ginormous room air conditioner that will blow the pollen off a silk plant 20 feet downwind.

So far, we have been spared the winds out of the dry basins to the east of the mountains that separate El Cajon from the Anza Borrego desert in El Centro. Such summer winds often accompany such high temps: the legendary Santa Ana wind that blows from the east, pushing the city’s smog out over the ocean and replacing it with furnace breath on your neck if you venture outside. We have also been spared the back country fires that are raging 100 miles northeast of my house and roaring down the rich canyons leading to Malibu. It’s always a form of entertainment for the masses when movie star houses burn down in metro LA, but still. But still, there’s plenty of regular summer and Native American Summer left to come before the theoretical rainy season begins in November.

The enemy is the hot weather, and huddled here inside my air conditioned cocoon, I hope it doesn’t call my bluff: I don’t have the power to survive on my own out here in the daytime.

Our nights however, are mercifully different from my teenage years. Because there is no coastal cloud cover blowing in from the west, as soon as the sun goes down, the heat rises visibly into the empty sky. If you pick just the right moment to open the windows and doors, reverse the fans to blow in the cooling evening air, you can go outside, water the parched patio, you can moisten the cool evening air the fans are sucking in. Sleeping with the windows open and the fan on is actually a rather pleasant alternative to snuggling under sheets because the bedroom is air-conditioned.

Tropes – A Discovery!

2009-08-25T15:35:00.000-07:00

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [of pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."
- United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in his decision in Jacobellis v. Ohio.

My big brother in real life told me about this awesome site called TV Tropes that seeks to catalog tropes, as a sort of instruction list to write any work of fiction, drama, television, etc. “We dip into the cauldron of story, whistle up a hearty spoonful and splosh it in front of you to devour to your heart's content.” This is made to order for the wanna-be creative writer without a creative bone in their bodies. Like me. They even have a one-push button for a random trope if I'm too lazy to surf the index.

Here's how they 'splain: “Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations. On the whole, tropes are not clichés. The word clichéd means "stereotyped and trite". In other words, dull and uninteresting. We are not looking for dull and uninteresting entries.”

Clearly, they’re more interested in quirky and interesting at the expense of trying for Wikipedia or other higher academic standards. This is another plus in my mind because I've always been a sloppy researcher and typing topics into Google isn't terribly productive these days. (Note to self: if Wikipedia is considered a high academic threshold for legitimate research, I'm not alone in my sloppy research style.) Their Main topic index lists categories by genre, by narrative style, media or topics.

Some examples of particular tropes:

Applied Phlebotinum is summarized: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad-hoc plot device" — David Langford, as a corollary to Arthur C. Clarke's third law

or:

As Long As There Is One Man says:
When you fall, my friend,
Another friend will emerge
From the shadows
To take your place.
— French Resistance Song (partial)
Parodied in The Simpsons, during a standoff between Homer, head of "Springshield", and Fat Tony. Homer: You can kill me, but someone will take my place. And if you kill him, then someone will take his place. And if you kill him... well, that's pretty much the end of it, the town will be yours.

A couple of other topics:

small town boredom
For which examples include: Luke Skywalker in Star Wars; This is a good portion of JJ's backstory on Criminal Minds, and Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters.

Finaly, Olive Garden about which: Maybe we could have dinner! Perhaps the Olive Garden! It's like dining in the private kitchen of a delightful Italian stereotype! Cinnamon J. Scudworth: Clone High

My one complaint? Two actually. Too many of the people on forums have id pics like Japanese animae characters. Also, their main site says, “We are here to recognize tropes and play with them, not to make fun of them.” Ok, I get it about overdosing on irony, but you sound a little teeny bit like Sister Alice Maureen.

Words and Pictures

2009-08-23T12:11:00.001-07:00

The words are from Francis Bacon, Friar Bacon His Discovery of the Miracles of Art Nature and Magick. The pictures are from this summer in and around San Diego.

“As for words, they are hatched within, by the thoughts and desires of the mind, sent abroad by heat, Vocale arteries, and motion of the Spirits…”

Or, the words could be conveyed by cell phone. Just be careful you don’t let a pelican grab your cell phone or a lego man might have to try to recover it. Legoland, about 20 minutes north of San Diego, is typically a destination of families with children. Visiting the place with a group of senior is a bit creepy, but creepy has never stopped us before.

“…The places of their generation are in open passages, by which there is a great efflux of such spirits, heat, vapours, virtues, and Species, as are made by the soul and heart. And therefore words may so farre cause alterations by these parts or passages, as their Nature will extend….”

Or, the words could be used to describe new species of food at the county fair - for the soul, heart, and ultimately, the backside. There's no entertainment that cannot be enhanced by combining it with the consumption of unhealthy food.

“…For it's evident, That breathings, yawnings, several resolutions of Spirits and heat come thorow these open passages from the heart and inward parts: Now if these words come from an infirm and evil complexionated body, they are constantly obnoxious…”

Now, I’m not saying cellulite equates with evil complex- ionated bodies, but there have to be some parallels there. It may be a cheap shot to observe fat people these days, but still. I don't expect everyone at the beach to look like they just stepped out of a Pepsi commercial, but there is way too much information about these women in this picture.

“…But if from a pure sound and wholsome constitution, they are very beneficial and comfortable.”

Seriously. If words are from a pure sound and wholsome (sic) constitution, we can benefit as much as the next person. We may not be great readers here in So Cal, but we do like our art. What a perfectly beneficial and comfortable category of book: "coffee table books". Here in So Cal, Thomas Kinkaid is to art, what coffee whitener is to cream.

Pay Attention

2009-08-22T15:10:00.000-07:00

“Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you”. - Annie Dillard

Never Follow A Terrible Gardener on Twitter

2009-08-20T12:51:00.001-07:00

"Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks"
- Raymond Chandler, talking about the “murderous summer heat”

I’ve been out of sorts lately. Also out of Cool Ranch Doritos, and energy to work out in the yard. It’s not you. It’s me. It feels like there are little bugs crawling around on the inside of my skull, leaving tiny footprints on the gooey surfaces of the curly pink glial cells. I think this intracranial bug traffic may have somehow re-written some of my short term memories. All I can think of is how lovely my melmac dishes would look in a table-setting for 4 on my new dinette set.

Yet somehow, this feels wrong. I have neither melmac dishes, nor a dinette, and I certainly don’t have four people to entertain. Further, my dishes are made from a space-age polymer extruded from an industrial syringe and stamped with brown roses. Finally, the dining room table is never used for eating family meals. That’s what TV tables are for. The dinning room table’s used to leave things on that you don’t feel like putting away until later, much later.

In a sort of dramatic foreshadowing of my eventual death of pneumonia, Tech Support Guy reports that last night in my sleep my breathing sounded like I was underwater – with burbling and wet snuffling. Charming. While my bronchial compromise has made it harder to perform any task requiring more aerobic stamina than making expresso, it has made it easier for me to sit and think. This is not generally a good tradeoff, since too much thinking often makes me angry about something. The focus of my anger is completely irrelevant. I find myself musing sadly about how, when DFW tried to write sober, he stopped taking his antidepressants and alcohol, and killed himself. Note to self: don’t stop taking medications. Self-medication is the key to the devil’s workshop.

So, what have I been thinking about?

Shall I compare gardening to particle physics experiments conducted in those big cyclotrons like the one in CERN in Switzerland or the slightly smaller one beneath Sanford University? Researchers speed up tiny things inside the merry-go-round tunnel, and then crash them into each other to see whether the universe ends in a tiny pop, or in the alternative, whether a new and more effective mouthwash springs magically into being when the particles collide. Various parts of my garden often have that particle colliding surprise outcome - like Dopey on the steps, musing over the water lilies in the pond below. Nah, probably straining that metaphor beyond its design parameters – catastrophic and destructive testing proves only that my metaphors are a weak as I’ve been.

Sleeping like the dead for 10 hours helps my pulmonary functions to improve. However, dreamless sleep provides no new insights into the dim and shifting shadows lurking at the edges of my awareness. Trying to think straight is like asking my cat to promise not to leave the litter box until the poop disconnects from her butt. This is either one of the warning signs of a psychotic break or my blood sugar is low and I should stop for lunch.

By the time I’m finishing the third bowl of puffed rice, I’ve created this lovely milk and sugar reduction in the bottom of the cereal bowl with the consistency of gritty molasses. Instead of creative or inspired writing, I tackle one of today’s biggest quandaries. I ask myself why I should follow anyone on Twitter.

Upon serious reflection, in order to induce me to follow you on twitter, I’d have to have one of the following reasons:

I find myself on the open sea in a lifeboat with a cannibal and Methodist (and Internet access).
I foolishly stop taking my meds, and find myself alone in a closet one quiet afternoon with a noose and a stool.
I find a dead body in the woods and now I’m lost and trekking across a railroad bridge to get back to civilization, and a train is approaching from behind. Quick – twitter me to run like hell.
My one remaining ambition is to die doing what I love, but can’t for the life of me think of what that might be. Twittering?
I find myself watching 2.5 Men on tv and thinking it’s funny. Twitter to remind me it’s not funny.
I find myself considering self-trepanation to stop the crawling bugs inside my head from leaving sticky footprints in my short term memory.
The best free advice in the world isn’t as good as my mom and her inchoate threats on a bad day. E.g. if you misbehave while I’m out, I swear to god.
You know the difference between allegory and metaphor. You explain in twit.
You neither attempt to talk like a cool urban hipster yo, nor do you succeed.
You promise never to do jello shots at my new ex-friend’s party and proclaim a fatwa on blogging while under the influence of Nyquil.
Somebody twits: It’s quiet outside. Too quiet. Let’s split up and investigate.

Upsetting the Rabbits

2009-08-17T12:10:00.000-07:00

No air is sweet that is silent; it is only sweet when full of low currents of under sound—triplets of birds, and murmur and chirp of insects, and deep-toned words of men, and wayward trebles of childhood.
— John Ruskin, Unto This Last (1862).

I’ve had the flu, perhaps even the swine flu. Felt more like a goat than a pig, braying and hacking. And the sound effects don’t stop with coughing. On each inhale, I made a noise like a rusty metal door hinge, and upon each exhale my lungs crackled like cellophane. Yesterday, I spent the day in my recliner, next to the strategically placed vaporizer, sipping that nasty licorice-tasting tea to sooth my throat and watching a marathon of Bridezilla on basic cable.

There is simply nothing like watching Americans behaving badly to each other to sooth a fevered sick mind. Somehow, watching spoiled narcissistic trailer trash with their French-manicured acrylic claws and those knife-thin eyebrows that look like you drew them on with a Sharpie made me feel smug and superior, which was at least some comfort in my time of sickness. Which teaches us, children, that no matter how bad we are, we can take comfort in realizing that there is probably somebody else out there somewhere who is worse.

Watching with me, Tech Support Guy theorized that perhaps it’s only the fat chicks who manage to look so small-minded and so badly raised. Unfortunately, I couldn’t agree with his fat chick theory. I explained that when you have reality TV, you have reality-shaped women. Alas! It came as a complete surprise to him that there are so many fat people out there in America.

My favorite remembered line was the one spoken by the bride-to-be as friends separated her from another drunken guest at her “bachelorette party” the night before the wedding: “Hey, you’re upsetting my rabbits!” who, sure enough, in their wire cages on the floor of the living room, appeared to be agitated by all the profanity-laced hair-pulling goings-on before order was finally restored and the gals made up over Marlboros and Bud Lites.

Meanwhile, while I’ve been hacking up a lung indoors, the weather outside has been amazing, even for paradise. Imagine if you got a weather menu each evening and selected the weather for the following day. Sunny, with temperatures in the mid 70f range, with puffy white clouds skidding around the sky and light breezes blowing the leaves around like they were applauding the weather. And the smells. Unlike a hot dry summer in the desert, there has been marine moisture in the air. I had simply forgotten about how good growing things smell, and how all it takes is a bit of humidity to make those smells of fresh life fill the air. Eucalyptus trees with their menthol always in the background, the foliage of a tomato plant, with its smell that somehow encapsulates every childhood garden memory, the fennel seeds smelling like Italian sausage. Even the mint underfoot everywhere in back smelled somehow fresher and more grateful this morning than I recall.

Although it’s not like I was on my deathbed or anything, I feel that magical second-chance feeling an invalid gets upon returning to the world of the living. The birds are singing sweeter, the air is smelling fresher, the sunshine is glowing softer, and my metaphorical rabbits are all calm and snuggly in their cages.

True Genius v. Truly Stupid

2009-08-07T13:53:00.000-07:00

He whose genius appears deepest and truest, excels his fellows in nothing save the knack of expression; he throws out, occasionally, a lucky hint at truths of which every human soul is profoundly, though unutterably, conscious.
Natianiel Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse

As a gift to you, I’m throwing out some profoundly truthful stuff that you might not be conscious of. My allergy report says I’m allergic to psychedelic mushrooms (Amanita muscaria), stale fruitcake, Maybelline Blatantly Bold Brown nail polish (taken internally), monstrous apparitions in the night, and that white cheesy stuff that develops in skin folds of obese, incontinent, hygienically challenged old ladies.

Here we have two stupid birds, perched on the sunflower. The highest one is trying to decide if it’s seeds are ready to harvest. They’re not. He’s patient, which is a sort of shame because if he was impatient and hungry, perhaps he and his buddy would eat the damn pests who are turning the sunflower leaves into worn-out lace antimacassars.

Now, I’ve recently spent time with some stupid people who can charitably be described as suffering from the lack of the knack of expression. Here’s a hint about the best way to deal with stupid people. Slap them. Should you find yourself confronted by somebody who needs to be slapped in the face, or heaven forbid, shot in the face, you should stop, breathe, and count slowly to any two-digit number. Then, if you still think they should be slapped, go ahead and then slap them. Don’t shoot them. It’s not nice and it’s almost certainly not legal. As a retired lawyer, I could probably make a case for self-defense if you shot somebody who was so stupid you were harmed psychically just by conversing with them. But, I’m retired, so I won’t.

Besides, where I live things are a bit different. Here, it’s legal to shoot people who demonstrate an inability to reason and/or who profess to believe in fairies, the intrinsic value of collectibles, the innocence of puppies, and/or who believe too much carbon dioxide in the air can’t be bad because it’s “natural”. Now that I think of it, we should all slap people who reason that antifreeze tastes sweet, so what can be the harm in using it as a martini cocktail mixer. If you are of a non-violent bent and find slapping too confrontational, consider making them an antifreeze martini instead.

Of course, upon consideration, don’t (shoot/serve antifreeze-tinis, or slap stupid strangers); because it’s probably as illegal to poison stupid people as it is to shoot them. See, this is what happens when it’s too hot for me to get outside enough…

Something Like That

2009-08-03T12:59:00.001-07:00

“I don’t see why our coffee pot won’t work. They perfected them back in the twentieth century. What’s left to know that we don’t know already?”

“Think of it as being like Newton’s color theory. Everything about color that could be know was known by 1800. And then Land came along with his two-light source and intensity theory, and what had seemed a closed field was busted all over.”

“You mean that there may be things about self-regulating coffee pots that we don’t know. That we just think we know?”

”Something like that.”

- Philip K. Dick, A Maze of Death.

Ok, this has no connection whatever to gardening. But it suggests there may be wisdom in continuing to study garden design, cultural anthropology, connections between fundamentalism and unquestioning blind obedience, and even coffee pot technology. You never know, you might stumble on some new knowledge that will make this world a better place.

Nobel Prize in Garden Blogging Nominations Now Being Accepted

2009-07-31T14:00:00.000-07:00

My alphabetized list of suggested categories.

1. Chacun a Son Gout Award – for blogging about your personal taste in gardens that, until you explained, would have been likely to strike others as bizarre, or even disturbing. Also known as the “strawberries grown in tires painted white award.”

2. First Degree Plantslaughter Award – for a post about the most inadvertently cruel murder of nursery starts. Simple neglect doesn’t count – go for creativity.

3. Freestyle Pruning Award – for blogging pictures of topiary that might have been trimmed by a striking longshoreman with delirium tremens. No gum-drop shrubs EVER.

4. Gilding the Lily Award – for blogging about not leaving well enough alone in the garden. You know who you are.

5. I’m Just Saying Award – for a garden post that seemed to make sense at the time, but in retrospect manifests at best the blogger’s twisted sense of humor, and at worst his/her clinical insanity.

6. I’m Special and You’re Banal Award – for a post about the most pretentious groin-grabingly transcendent garden design ever. Extra points for smugness and passive aggression.

7. Moral of the Story Award – for a post that succeeds in refreshing a garden cliché, thereby teaching the rest of us lessons about wildlife survival, beauty school drop-outs, grave robbing, or other obscure topics whose connection to gardens and blogging would have otherwise seemed tenuous or contrived.

8. My Grass Is Greener Award – for blogging about executing a garden idea plagiarized from someone else. Extra points awarded for cloaking your envy with sophisticated disdain.

9. Not My Fault Award – for a garden-related blog post that incorporates a self-deprecating critique of the gardener’s failures, but without including self-pity or homicidal rage.

10. Pride Goeth Before a Fall Award – for a post about a garden ambitiously planted in Spring that turns out by Summer to be more than the gardener could possibly maintain.

11. Squint and It’s Lovely Award – for a post describing a garden that incorporates otherwise offensive elements which, at a proper distance, acquire a degree of sublime beauty.

12. Swing and A Miss Award – for blogging about a boldly attempted, but poorly executed garden vision.

13. That’s Not What I Meant Award – For blogging about the unintended consequences of a specific garden design idea, preferably positive, but consideration given to results that created a mutant strain of Japanese Beetles impervious to any pesticide including napalm.

14. What Were You Thinking Award – for blogging about the gardener’s worst implementation of what seemed like a good idea at the time, but which turned out to be as inviting as cupcakes topped with grease that congealed in the frying pan after Sunday breakfast.

15. Zone Maps Be Dammed Award – for blogging about successfully cultivating an unsustainable garden or plant that has no business trying to survive in your climate zone. (Note this is a high bar to pass because I’ve tried for >20 years to cultivate lilacs (syringa) in Zone 22, and my current attempt still has a few leaves on it’s stunted branches.)

Escape from the City

2009-07-30T12:35:00.000-07:00

Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze,
A visitant that while it fans my cheek
Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings
From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.
Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come
To none more grateful than to me; escaped
From the vast city, where I long had pined
A discontented sojourner: now free,
Free as a bird to settle where I will.
- William Wordsworth, The Prelude; or the Growth of a Poet’s Mind

As tempting as the hip urban loft life sometimes seems, I cannot imagine being happy in a high-rise. Even if I had a large south-facing balcony filled with containers and pots of every description, I just don’t see a balcony of potted plants providing any sort of bucolic peaceful oasis of my back yard. Life in an asphalt jungle, no matter how hip or idealized, no matter how good the sushi, how seductive the nightlife, seems to me to be too hard. I’d prefer to spend an afternoon pruning rose bushes or clearing brush, earning the scrapes and bruises and the dirt under my fingernails, instead of earning bruises from bumping into the harsh edges and hazards in the city.

Being somewhat hearing challenged in recent years, I find nothing sinister about the silence of suburbia. The unintended consequence of playing music too loudly back in the day is that I have adapted to the muffled sounds of the real world today, punctuated by the nonsense babbling of a senile person who lives in our house. The background noise of passing traffic on the busy thoroughfare a short block from my backyard provides a sort of background of white noise, punctuated by the noisy birds conspiring to spread the birdseed as far from the feeders as possible. I sometimes hear owls at night, much softer than the sound of car alarms on city streets.

There’s nothing better than smelling the nighttime air this time of year. I live in a Mediterranean climate, 20 miles east of the Pacific Ocean. This time of year we’re getting a bit of cloud cover during the day – they call it a marine layer, but I prefer to call it smog – that moves onshore at night, but not far enough inland as my house. Without cloud cover, the land cools off substantially as soon as the sun goes down – the heat of the day is not held on the ground by clouds – leaving clear chilly nights where the fragrance of eucalyptus trees and night-blooming jasmine permeate the air. I’ve even come to appreciate the occasional earthy smell of skunk as the night critters jostle each other for the water left strategically about the garden.

In contrast, I presume that those city lofts are left sealed against the auto exhaust and car alarms, their inhabitants left with aromatic candles and air fresheners Americans seem so addicted to these days.

The other night, in a major national franchise restaurant, we noted that the small print on the menu warned about food-borne illness eaters risked in ordering dishes with eggs, lettuce, and even antibiotic-saturated beef. Yummy. Even the sushi may be tainted with mercury and other heavy metals meant to be enjoyed best via music, not food. There’s even poison on the night breezes wafting through city lofts – auto exhaust, industrial pollution. Now more than ever, all my senses appreciate my timely escape from the city.