root vegetables: plant roots used as vegetables (peanuts are not root vegetables; they're underground seeds), storage organs, enlarged to store energy in the form of carbohydrates:

celery, burdock, carrot, leek, rutabaga, yam, jicama, parsnip, daikon, radish, potato, ginger, turmeric, ginseng, garlic, onion, shallot

ten ways to use root vegetables 

miracle of a website: www.foodspotting.com

particularly, this one.

To ease homesickness: Heartless Bastards, Kings Of Leon, Jeff Tweedy, light

jimgermanbar

Last night the DSO and I went to the Jim German Bar in Waitsburg.  It was beautiful!  I wish I had taken the camera, so I could have saved some shots, especially of their private room, Heaven. Here's one imported from the internet, instead (shoddy lighting): 

Jim German mixes the drinks, and his wife (who we didn't meet, formally) cooks the food. Both are artists, and they live in an apartment above the bar.  The bar is classy; dimly lit, wood tables, paintings up, a Persian carpet laid out before the door.  Heaven is next door to the bar, and the gallery is next door to Heaven.  Jim let us into both so we could check out the art on display.  I can't remember the artist's name, but ultimately I was more interested in the building design.  The two completely renovated the place in the style of their favorite Seattle architect (again, wish I could remember his name--I knew I would have to write it down, but felt embarrassed pulling out a pen and piece of paper).  The art space and Heaven both look slightly unfinished, but I think that might be part of the purpose of the presentation.  They feel open, clean.  They also both hold a ton of light (lamped, and I'm sure incredible during the day, w/the huge glass windows at the entrance) and have great acoustics.

last night the dso told me that colorwise, i remind him of a brick red

and i love the way dead leaves look against brick

(couldn't upload this image for some reason, but: william morris's wandle)

--and want to look more closely at this soon, more time granted:
http://thetextileblog.blogspot.com/2008_09_01_archive.html

a friend's room

wild turkey leg + super-sharp claws

bookshelf w/books

two books on the table: one is Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead

typewriter on the table

pictures of indians on the wall

Cracker Barrel cup on the table, also cup with Alaska on it (this is the one I'm given when I come over)--both hold coffee

tall plank of wood, painted white and collaged over

i-pod playing Lightning Hopkins

guitar

green metal junk-box

couch, easy chair

small sculptures (metal, feather, string)

dried crocodile head

tobacco & rolling papers on the table

("Last night I dreamed I was being stalked by a cougar.")

***

Are you capable of distinguishing not among particulars but only among movements?  not horizontals but only perpendiculars, nothing human but only softness?

  Are you capable of everything?

--Peter Handke, "Suggestions for Running Amok"

what

While I was walking down the side of the road, someone screamed "Hey Sexy" at me.  I was totally shocked and confused, as I thought I was still within the parameters of the Whitman bubble.  Then I turned just in time to see a 10yr. old boy in glasses pull his head back through the car window.

v. good song: "Sycamore" Bill Callahan

+

My favorite thing to do in this town is go into Merchants early in the morning, around 5:00am when they open.  I'll buy a cappuccino or something to bring back home and drink while I work. When I arrive there, it's dark outside (and becoming colder--I think it'll be even better when it's snowing out).  There's always a group of older men sitting together, either on the patio or in the chairs by the stage.  Old friends probably, I imagine they meet there daily, because I see them on any given day of the week I randomly decide to go.  I think they're friends of the owner, too, because they all go around the counter to help themselves to whatever they please.  

I like this.  When I worked at Austin Java a similar group of men came in Saturday mornings.  Sit around laughing, leave huge tips, sometimes bring their wives!  One of them wore a Communist hat.  I became friendly with another who told me I have nice skin.

***

Sailor is becoming more and more affectionate.  I feel bad sometimes because I think he misses Macon (the ideal is another cat, not 2 human beings), but I feel less bad when he curls his body against my head at night.  Having him near is a little bit like raising a child, though; I'm bound by the thought that if I don't give him enough attention, he'll grow up with some kind of cat neuroses.  

When I was in seventh grade I had a powerful crush on a boy named Cory, who was a sk8r.  He often wore a shirt with "enjoi" written on it in graphic lettering.  I remember how impacted I was by the word, which I later found out is the name of a skateboarding company.  At the time I was struck by the simplicity of the concept.  Enjoy.  Doubtless some of the attraction (maybemost of the initial attraction) was sparked by my feelings for the boy, and by the presentation of the word; the spelling, which I couldn't understand at first, and then was surprised when I'd puzzled out the meaning: enjoi = enjoy.

Now I've been thinking about the word's meaning for a while now, six or seven years, and I think I may only recently have begun to be able to live with "enjoy"--to think about its implications and its presence as a word in intimate relation to my own life.

I guess pleasure and enjoyment (joint words, often) are sometimes difficult to come to terms with, because there's so much else that comes to take priority in a person's life--and so to sabotage the space p & j might otherwise occupy.  For me, it's difficult to return to a more sensual way of experiencing the world, in part because I've spent so many years practicing a very analytical, abstracted way interpreting/finding meaning/learning.  Now I'm trying to re-learn how to think about things.  At the heart of this reeducation is enjoyment (something strange, becoming more familiar...).

A couple weeks ago, when I was going through a wild emotional upheaval, I was sitting on the doorstep w/Noah, trying to puzzle through the mess.  We were petting Sailor who was nestling in Noah's lap, and I believed then, and told my friend, that the kitten was probably one of the main causes of my anxiety.  

So much of my attention and energy was devoted to figuring out the cat's needs, and most of my days were spent in the apartment, with a sleeping sister and a sleeping kitten (a utopia, actually).  Sailor just acted like a baby animal, and he is incredibly well-rounded.  In fact, I haven't been able to find any quirks in his personality.  He's loving, and loved, and to be around him is to feel as though you're in the presence of something very--simply--good.  A joy.  It was hard for me to go back and forth between that and: school, uncertain relationships with others, & Noah, who reminds me of Sailor, but who insists, as a warning, that he is "a fucked up human being."

It's hard to maneuver these seeming-dichotomies sometimes, but maybe I can make "enjoy" something of a constant mantra, even when among something that is painful, confusing, or difficult to untangle.

Anyway, I enjoy these photos:

notes

(from Jay Griffiths's article for Orion, The Sound of One Trickster Clapping):

"Motivated, like the Trickster, by powerful appetite, the winged media swoops on the odd, glinting incidental."

"but the boulevard of public life needs both Les Funambules and Le Grand Theatre, needs what in Latin is called altus, a word meaning both high and low: high as a man on wire, and also low, profound, deep as the spirit under the land."

"The tricksterish media needs to be heard against a backdrop of the older, slower voices of the pantheon: storytellers, artists, shamans, call them the poets for short--those who attend the deep voices of the body politic." 

"The academy is terrified of taking up a moral position as if that would undermine its authority; although arguably this abnegation is a corruption of its authority." 

"In Greek, truth is alethia where lethe means forgetting, as the souls of the dead drink to forget from the River of Lethe.  To tell the truth then is to be unforgetting, holding the past in present mind."

"There is a direct--inverse--relation between environmental devastation and the respect given to the voice of the shaman-poet.  When either one is in ascendance, the other will be in decline, which is why that voice has never been more ignored, never more reviled, and never more needed than now." 

link to the article: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4944/

some notes from the week:

A. drinking an entire bottle of wine and a 40oz b/c she wanted to be drunk when she saw S.  Depressed that he spends all his day time with another girl, his best friend, and only wants to see her (A) at night, 1/2 hour before his bed time.

Alumni in the quiet room of the library with her two sons.  Telling them about how smart their mama is.  Now she is a housewife, but she was the first person to achieve honors in economics at Whitman in three years.

A sad separation between Noah and I.  Sad because we spent so much of our (short) time together talking about how we didn't want to perpetuate old, destructive habits.  We had a lot of hope for this, but maybe history is inescapable.  Is it?  I, the motivational half, kept insisting on agency, then did the same things I did two years ago to L. 

 ("To tell the truth then is to be unforgetting, holding the past in present mind.")

We're still trying to figure out if people can change.  Yes they can, but can two people change together?  Do they have to be exactly the right kinds of people (together) in exactly the right circumstances?  Is that thought just another fall-back on fate? 

--first venture in the direction of campus since we spoke & somehow ran into him. awkward.  rainy, he on the phone, I, unsure of whether to keep walking or wait in case he wanted to get under my umbrella. he crossed to the other side of the street. 

The worst part is that we talked about God as much as we did (& is God just an excuse to run after white rabbits?)

I miss Austin and not feeling claustrophobic.