Archive for March, 2010

My buddy Greenie has the kind of rare sincerity that occupies the border between childlike innocence and experienced optimism. It is this, among other things that got me to go to the inaugural meeting of the Maui chapter of the Farmers Union. Now I'm not much of a participator or meeting goer as such. Lets say I've had my share and leave it at that, but seeing as how sustainable development, which includes forms of farming is the bug that infected me with the incurable disease of wanting to know what free feels like, nothing short of a radical curioscopy will stop the momentum toward participating in the unraveling of that mystery. To that end, it is always good to meet pilgrims on the path and hear what they have to say.

There were many familiar faces. Certainly a good turnout. People brought food and seeds and plants and the aura of hope that accompanies all such meetings designed to define and consolidate possibilities for satisfying legitimate needs and concerns regarding the production of food and the critical move toward "sustainability" which is such the cool buzzword these days, dontcha think?

My pal nurse Natty came along. We had just come from a screening of Avatar and were a might agog with the spectacles afterglow. We settled in the midst of the group and awaited the beginning of the formal portion of the meeting. Good time to check the room for familiar faces. I am always heartened to see so many old friends. Mostly because they're still breathing. Natalie has a degree in urban studies and has been to her share of organizing committees and programs designed to green up urban settings. I figured it would be good to be able to bounce my impressions off someone to see just how askew they are.

The room settled and folks sat down as the meeting began. Now Vince has the good humored enthusiasm of a Marx brothers film mated with the devotion to a cause normally reserved for the zealotor  phase of the twice born. His clear grasp and depth of understand speaking volumes about the hands on approach he has taken to create ways of supporting the farming community. He opened the proceedings.

Next, the interim president guy introduced the interim other guys and gals and a certain territory was defined. That territory included local and national organizations, government programs designed to fry your brain while indicating that there will be some money down the road if you stick to the freakin' parameters set out by said agency. Oh joy. I don't mean to be cynical. Its actually just experience based knowledge that tends to make me reflect on the real meaning and purpose of pursuing sustainable cultural models.

So, we're told that the farmers union will give us a voice. It will give us solidarity. It will give us dental and eye care. All that stuff has its merits, but does it represent a move toward realistically funding the farmers of Maui County in a way unencumbered by government agencies which are understaffed, underfunded, overwhelmed with applicants and often have the side effects of hair loss by pulling and anxiety spasms? Does it really give us solidarity with a national membership of nearly a half million coming from very different and sometimes disparate backgrounds? Such things run through my head at such times.

We heard from soil conservation and bamboo lady. The buzzkill started to set in during conservation ladies talk and got physically uncomfortable by the time bamboo lady finished.

Here's why. Solutions are inherent in problems. Sustainable developments seek solutions designed to limit, to the point of eliminating all outside inputs to the system. The question then becomes, do we as a local community of farmers seek to reach out to national organizations or state and federal funding to get what we need to farm, or do we eliminate the need for those inputs by tapping the private sector right here on Maui?

I heard the figure of four hundred thousand bucks available state wide this fiscal year, with no new projects being funded until next year. Lets say we changed our focus and thought of that in terms of four hundred people who were willing to cough up a thousand bucks apiece a year. People who were conscious of the goals set by our local and individual needs. People who understand the times and are willing to support local food production because they want to be assured that there will BE local food if the turds hit the turbine. People to whom a thousand bucks a year is chump change.

It seems inconceivable to me that given the capacity to network and develop grass roots connections with the locally empowered that it would be all that difficult to generate that kind of scrilla, and if we can't, well then at least we know we're screwed and might as well stick to the business of getting our hands dirty and flying under the radar.  Hell, I take down three to five bills at the farmers market and I'd be more than willing to contribute a weeks take to the kitty. I'll bet if we had a show of hands at the meeting for such an idea, we would have raised twenty or thirty grand a year, or more. Us helping us. Stick the cashish in a local permaculture credit union, develop equipment leasing systems, computer networking including forums and web site linking, share information and badda bing, we're a locally and privately funded non profit which is linked inextricably to a community of supporters who understand the importance of the connection and all that it implies.

From there its just a matter of managing the funds in such a way as to take care of the real needs, not wants of the farming community, from funding well planned start ups to helping out old timers with worn out pond liners, to promoting educational outreach, workshops and farm tours. All of this in the name of working together with the people who will be eating the food that we grow and enabling the experience of being connected to the farms that grow the food that keep their families healthy. Do we want less expensive health insurance or the unabashed  freedom to insure our good health through the basic support and respect for the work that we do to serve the needs of the public? Just asking.

We left the meeting early, 'cause my head was beginning to turn to moosh. Nurse Natty listened with patience to my rambling observations as we motored home and after kicking my ass at gin rummy went to work creating more of her bottle cap earrings which she sells at the farmers market. Of course she stuffs them with zucchini, onions and bell peppers to give them the credibility necessary to make an appearance at the market. Talk about a great gig. You get to try out all the new local beers while recycling garbage into very cool and oh so trendy bling.

The light is dawning on market day. The day we have recognized as eat with reckless abandon day. I'm off to weigh up some Jaboticaba and vacuum seal some raw coffee. Ciao bella!

The more you show, the more we'll grow. Peace muffins, Jp

Driving home today, as I turned a corner there was an egret riding the wind. You know, the kind that can be found pickin' nits on the rump of a cow, or sorting through pies for undigested seed and tasty bits.

It looked like it was having much more fun than should be allowable to our avian friends, given the difficult economic times and the need to tone down the impulses to display feelings of exuberant well being (and that means you Rose Neptune).

Those among us who feel the economic pressure building and the interpersonal walls closing in should not have to be moved to suicidal thoughts over a random sighting of some boneheaded bird surfing the wind tubes with what certainly appeared to be a shit eating grin on its face. I mean c'mon.

So accordingly I have started the Eat an Egret for Easter foundation, dedicated to teaching those little fuckers a lesson in etiquette and the REAL pecking order around these parts. After all , can't go around letting this sort of behavior stand unchallenged. They'll just think that anytime the freakin' wind comes up they can just go have a good old time ripping about as they please without reaping some of the karma of the disturbing spin off created by their self interested behavior. Pish Toosh, I say, and with all due respect.

It's gonna take a couple a' few birds each to make a satisfactory meal, so we've posted a limit of fifteen egrets per household. In Ecuador, where egret is highly prized for its meat and the mojo it imparts when ingested, they often just deep fry the whole bird, guts, feathers, feet and all right after catching it so as to convey some of its mojo (found in the feathers and feet) into the cooking oil, which is then used to power a fleet of bio diesel vehicles which average just under three thousand miles per gallon, give or take. That's o.k. for Ecuador, but it does nothing for my depressed state.

I've heard through some deformed sources that Exxon/Mobile  has set up labs devoted to the breeding and genetic modification of egrets so as to corner the market with a patent on their mojo. They are working with the likes of Archer Daniels Midland and Fox News to include feather/foot meal in all their poultry and cattle feed as well as developing strategies whereby the same feather/foot meal can be pressure injected into existing deposits of oil which will dramatically increase miles per gallon allowing them to use a fraction of the oil to create gobs more gasoline. Mooowhaaahahhaaaahhaaaahhhaaaaaaa.

Some of you may scoff at the notion that birds flying free with shit eating grins constitutes a national security threat. Remember your history people. The pilgrims endured hardship beyond measure at the claws of wild turkeys who ate their grain and stole their children.

Remember that the creature created by the cross breeding of turkey and  Brit was simply called Indian and it was decades before one of these Indians stood up for the rights of the pilgrims and taught them how to slaughter turkeys and make stuffing. Do we want that happening on the slopes of Haleakala. I for one, think not.

Send your tax deductible donations to: E.E.E. c/o "Sweet Pea" Forster, 1212 potluck drive, grand cayman island, grand caymen.

I had a flashback about Tyler the other day. Back in the era of Banana Buddies, Ty was an aspiring squirt. He was just getting a grip on the talking thing and in some categories, he knew what he liked. One of those categories was chocolate.

We used to buy fifty pound boxes made up of five ten pound bars of both dark and milk chocolate. This would be used to coat the bite size pieces of dried banana which would then be cooled, dried, packaged and shipped.

One of the benefits of having ten pound slabs of chocolate around all the time is that you can at least in part, act out the life of Caligula. It was not at all unusual to think of a fist size serving of chocolate at eight eleven a.m. as perfectly normal, nay super-normal. And here's this kid who thinks its totallycool super-normal. Probably dreamed about the stuff days before coming to visit.

I never kept any in our house, just in the kitchen on the lower part of the property, which became known as "down below", or in Tyler speak, "donnabloww"? I write that with a question mark because it was always used that way, as in "go donnabloww"?, followed by the same sort of shit eating grin that the egret wore. This inquiry usually resulted in a mock argument where I refused and he insisted and I refused and he insisted until I gave in followed by a walk donnabloww and further negotiations over quantities consumed.

We had been experimenting with dried pineapple and dark chocolate. We'd take several slices of dried pineapple and stack them to about an inch and a half. Then we'd cut them into six or eight triangular pieces. These would get coated with dark chocolate and were going to become the next member of our product line. Pineapple Pals, naturally.

One time I had some friends coming over so i'd brought some samples up for them to try. The samples were sitting on a plate which rested on an ottoman  in the living room and Ty was tripping on some legos in the office. I went to take a walk around the yard with my friends and upon returning found the boy sitting on the floor next to the ottoman attempting to chew up an entire slice of this dark chocolate feast. He could hardly cram a whole section into his mouth, no less chew it up.

His mouth said everything. It was filled to brimming with this partially chewed extravaganza. His lips ringed with an orgy of overflowing darkness resembling the Devils goatee. His entire little face fixed in a smile which conveyed this message alone: "I know I'm fucking up, whaddayagonnadoaboutit?" I fully cracked up.

Not since walking into that bakery in Stamford Connecticut, the morning after an acid trip with Anton Selkowietz, and having the sight of an elderly woman in curlers and bunny slippers send us dashing for the door in paroxysms of laughter have I seen the pure humor of a moment so plainly and beautifully spelled out. He might as well have had Tweety Bird's  feathers sticking out of his mouth. Thanks for the bubble, man.

Party season approacheth. We are consulting the homunculus for dates, themes and undergarments. Posting will continue when a final arrangement has been struck and the proper burnt offerings gathered.

Nurse Caley and I are working up a set for the Mana'o radio upcountry Sundays gig in May. I am inspired and energized by the way this kid can kroon. Nuff said.

The more you show, the more we'll grow. Peace of Love, Jp

Man, was that close or what? I thought about writing the latest blog during the hours before the inevitable crushing blow delivered by the tsunami of the century and chronicling  the various aspects of human behavior involved with handling the situation. I've lived through these scares before. No disasters have resulted. But this one, this one was a wave generated by a magnitude  8.8 earthquake. A wave moving, by some estimates at five hundred miles per hour. A wave with the potential to cause ripples of destructive force throughout the Pacific. A wave that caused an exodus of lowlanders to seek high ground. They parked along the kula highway and filled up Rice park and Keokea. They brought coolers and beach chairs and binoculars. They lined up for gas with tempers flaring and fears surfacing. There was a strange kind of exuberance underlying the vibe, like mail call at an insane asylum. Would there be enough toilet paper to go round?

In the grip of such moments of dire speculation there are two basic revelations. One, that we are at any given moment at the whim of natural forces that in an instant can change our lives forever, and two, that we better have adequate party supplies to deal with it when the slurry hits the sluice way. For the most part we are hedonists at heart because feeling good is the only antidote, period. After twenty, thirty years of practicing whatever discipline, it occurs to you that a vicodin, glass of wine and spliff are about as good as the collected works of Rumi, or the Bhagavad freakin' Gita.

So when the wave doesn't come, and our view of mind numbing devastation is put off till another day, there is a strange sense of being let down, like finding out that the phone number some uber hotty gave you was to the local Jiffy Lube. Cause really, what could be cooler than seeing Wailea turned back into a pristine coastline marred only by one of Helen Hunts Gucci dresses hung up on the branch of a Kiawe tree and flappin' in the breeze. There's no turning it back, there's just wiping it out. Rumor has it that mother nature has been revving up to do a serious cleanse due to a burgeoning infestation of mammalian bipeds irritating her skin.

We got a hundred two day old chicks in a couple of weeks back. I know, I know, its a love/hate thing. Got one breed called Cuckoo Maran, said to lay dark reddish brown eggs. This will give us the much needed contrast to the white to cream to light brown to brown to speckled brown to dark brown to blue to blueish green to reddish brown spectrum of colors necessary for us keep our adoring public amused and well fed. If only the yolks matched the shell color. Did you know that you can tell what color egg a chook will lay by the color of its ear lobes? Did you know that chickens have earlobes? File that  under obscurely cool factoids.

Since the last post detailing my delusional view of the molt cycle, the little darlings have stepped it up to eighty to ninety eggs a day. When the current batch of youngsters reaches laying age around July we'll have scaled up to about half the potential productivity of the property when it comes to egg output, and that, as they say in the biz is a crapload of eggs. Its one of those aspects of Permaculture that stimulates the brainstorming potential in any situation. Yes, diversity is the key, but addiction creates its own mojo and that's what our marketing strategies are based on. People love (are addicted to) eggs. We arrange ours in the carton such that the combination of colors and their juxtaposition in the box opens up a delta brainwave moment at which time subliminal messages written in invisible ink on the egg shells spell out our various instructions to the customer. There is also an invisible disclaimer.

There's this nice little water feature out the back of the house that has been providing a lovely sanctuary of sound and reflected light and fish moving in ways we can only dream of. In the course of the past six or seven years there have been numerous changes in plant life patterns. Lately a new kind of algae has shown up. Not the kind that just makes the water green. Its kind of light green and gloopy with air bubbles all through it. It hangs down in the pond and floats around presumably growing. The fish don't seem to mind it or particularly like it. Its not like the guppies  are bellying up to the bar.

Well awhile back I pulled some out and laid it on the rocks bordering the pond and the other day, nurse Natalie and I found some that had been dried by the sun. It looked like an oddly shaped sheet of seaweed, stuck to the rock and crispy dry. It peeled off the rock real easy and had a kind of iridescent sheen to it in the sunlight.

We looked at each other in that sort of dare you to eat some kind of way and I tore off a little piece and placed it delicately on my tongue in plain view of my taunter. It had a rather pleasant, somewhat salty taste, which I conveyed to the smiling Natty who then went ahead and tore off a small green corner of her own. After agreeing that it wasn't an entirely unpleasant experience, we went on about our day.

It wasn't until the next morning that I noticed that Natalie's dread locks had unraveled, floofed out and resolved into a kind of mega-mullet riding atop her elfin visage and that I was growing what appeared to be a third testicle just bellow my left elbow. As if listening to Johnny and the twins banter on about sex all day isn't bad enough. This was rather distressing to both of us and I decided it would be good to consult an expert. So I called the local ag extension officer in charge of aquaculture. A fella name of Roland Plotzkrell phD.

When I described the look of the algae and the side effects there was a pause on the phone followed by a long drawn out, "oh my".  Apparently we have been sabotaged by a group known as Permaculture Sucks who, along with Monsanto have contaminated our waters with a gmo algae designed to forever alter the genetic makeup of anything that comes in contact with it. I was wondering why the Gamboosia looked liked members of Duke Ellingtons orchestra.  Plotzkrell thought it most likely that we would both experience our "District Nine" moment and with any luck wander off foraging the land until morphing into a pile of charcoal.

"Oh c'mon unky jp, thats audacious even for you."

"I know little fella, aren't pain killers and scotch great?"

"Great indeed, unky jp."

The more you show, the more we'll grow. Be disturbed, be very disturbed, Jp