Oh (insert fireworks here) hello,

Wow, where to begin. I mean, independence! Is it the raucus celebration of bbq meat, chicken and shrimp with beers, cob corn, tater salad and token greens? Hell yeah. Is it a tribute to some hemp raisin', slave lovin'guys who had a smoke filled vision? Say again. Is it a chinese conspiracy designed to sell more fireworks? Fuckin' chinese. Could it be something we haven't quite grocked yet? "Freedom from dependence; self reliance; direction of ones own affairs without interference". So says the dictionary. Anyone out there feel that way?

Having stumbled into this Permaculture thing like a drunk getting lucky and finding his car after a bender, its main appeal has always been a focus on solution orientation. Deconstruct the problem and many solutions appear. Whining is easy; puzzling out and explaining takes a fortitude born of common sense. Are we independent if we can't explain our existance in terms that find common ground and cross all cultural borders? Can we say "I'm free" if everything in life requires external inputs to give it meaning? If selfless giving isn't part of day to day life, do we possess the virtue necessary to free ourselves?

Balderdash, you might say if you'd been drinking too much stout. There is no such thing as true independence. It is, in fact our very reliance on each other and the connection to our senses that gives meaning to life and allows us to dream the dream of independence. Poppycock, you say? It is a strictly intuitive phenomenon born of our innate fear of parents who eat their young, in one way or another, producing populations ranging in temperment from cowering whimps to all embracing ego maniacs passing on those qualities from generation to generation.

More than ever independence hasn't got much to do with anything but the money that buys it. Nice for those with oodles to spare or the guys at the federal reserve who spin it out of thin air. Not so nice for that vast majority of people whose overall condition might be described as enslaved servobots and whose mindset is pissed with two scoops of what the fuck on the side.

What to do, what to do? It is nothing if not a sense of helplessness that shrouds that inquiry because breaking out of the mould into which our lives are poured becomes increasingly difficult with the passing of time and the control of resources going increasingly to the few. The upside? Even small acts of civil disobediance bring a measure of satisfaction when these acts are aimed at breaking the cycle of dependence so vital to social control.

Permaculture constructs methods by which humans can learn to cope with life in ways that demand a deepening of purpose and meaning. Disciplines which reconnect us with the core of ourselves and whittle away at the whole "meaning of existance" fetootzmah. Got anything better to do? Seriously, lets party hardy, but let the revelation at the peak of whatever experience one manufactures be the insight that our independence relies entirely on our ability to evolve a future that has meaning globally and is woven into a set of priorities that find resonance in the heart, because the heart is the only common ground. All else resembles a brisk walk across a field of quicksand.

I screwed up yesterday and as a result got fired from my job as boss. Nurse Lindsey with her Betty Grable gams and snappy patter gave me the complete bootation after I tried to edit a caption to a picture on the "organic farm" page of the website. This, she warned me ahead of time, will not be tolerated as it messes with her HTML coding ( or some such gobbledegook) and causes a sort of rage to percolate up from the depths of childhood memories associated with abandonment and percieved inadequacy. I am now a blank space on her hard drive where a once vigorous cyberlife flourished. Like a plague infested village razed by a napalm flyby. I'm mortified of course, because i meant well and only failed for lack of skill and with no intent to heap her with additional work. She has freed herself of my senseless tyranny and walks around here with the feather infested grin of a Cheshire gone loony. I enjoy empowering women by my bufoonery.

Made up a batch of froozies with ms. Noemie. We used papaya, white sapote, mango and banana combined to create a taste sensation highlighting each of the flavors yet featuring the blend. A raw, dark cacao sauce was layed in double decker style so as to avoid the crime of being left without sauce for that last bite. We're serious about our chocolate around here. Been planting a few varieties of melon to see which ones can resist the fruit fly circus. There are a good many acorn squash coming in and more flowers opening by the day. We're planting flats of lettuce every couple of weeks to keep the supply up through the summer and fall while tending to the more perennial vegetables like chard and kale by pruning and feeding. The massive mango flowering of a few weeks back has produced a remarkable fruit set. The recent afternoon rains have served to plump the young fruits quickly.

I was once again amazed by the prices of food when cruising through the Superette the other day, i caught sight of some boxes of mangos from Yees in kihei. I looked at the price and thought it read a buck sixty nine a pound. "Cool", I thought. "A reasonable rate for a first rate product". I picked out a couple of beauties for the heck of it (they weighed about a pound apiece), put them in my green cloth shopping bag and walked around the boxes to inspect the potato/mac salad. I glanced down at the price again and saw that in fact, it read Four sixty nine a pound. Nearly ten bucks for two small local mangos. Tomorrow i'm going to count all the mangos on all of my trees, estimate the weight, multiply by four sixty nine a pound and determine whether or not i'll have enough kaching to buy that Lamborghini tractor i've always wanted. It does zero to sixty in four point six seconds. Now That, my friends is Independence.

Peace out, Jp