San Diego

Oh, how beautiful is Little Italy neighborhood in San Diego! Caprese sandwich! Crisp lovely Italian bread, tomato, fresh mozarella, balsamic vinegar. Yet another taste that is Heaven on Earth.
I say this after ceating a beautiful Thai/Indian dinner, marinating chicken breasts in fresh dried lemongrass--yes, i grew it myself! Adding garlic, some Tikka Masala spice, extra turmeric, my very own garlic/chili rub, sesame oil, teryaki sauce, peanut/sugar/chili. Marinating chicken for 12 hours--like to do it for 3 days--also did not do coconut milk but next time. Stir fry, adding onion to acheive the caramelization (say that word slowly, it's like sex). Set aside. Rice with red chili, gulangal, coconut milk. Stir frying peapods, broccoli, carrots. Mix chicken & onion, serve with rice. Heaven on a plate. I would eat Thai or Vietnamese every day. Or Caprese italiano. Or Mexican. Or steak, lobster, crab, asparagus, potatoes, leeks, green beans, corn...fruit salad. Food is good, I say definitively.
Celebrate life, my children, and yes, the pleasures of the senses. What else is incarnation for?
Peace out.

Nuclear Rap Blues

OK. Spent today making a video. Started meditating yesterday and saw the whole thing, so had to do it. Wrote the intro text in about 2 minutes, finished meditating, wrote the rest of the text/poem in about 15 minutes, spent today learning IMovie & doing the video. It was fun!
So you know I had to be balanced after writing the Atomic Cocktail Party. It's all there in the video, it's useless to blame about the past, we have to build the future in the now. Click on the title, natch, to see the piece on YouTube.
Cheers until later.

Good Friday Dreams

Actually, I didn't think about the date until now. I dreamt that I was "climbing the stairway to Heaven," only it was a building, a tower whose rooms were open to the elements and some of which had no interior access. Each room had a purpose, and people were living in quite a few of them. There were also quite a few of us climbing upwards. It required a lot of agility and acrobatics, especially when you had to leap up to the next level! I was coached & cheered on by the Dalai Lama (I didn't know this in the dream, I just recognized his face when I woke up). I woke up right before reaching the pinnacle.
The next night I dreamt I was in an underground mall of pleasures and vices. I walked very quickly past the room where they were eating tigers and as I was passing the brothel next door a Himalayan snow leopard accosted me--in a friendly wrestly way. We became companions and I didn't remember much of that one.
Obviously Tibet is trying to talk to me! As I write I remember Bardo and in Wiki find that some of it is about the Peaceful & Wrathful ones--pleasures and vices.
The Eternal Now is always the moment of becoming, living and dying are both transitional states.

You ask, do I take this (and myself) too seriously? I take it so seriously I go through to the other side and laugh!
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

Justice and Mercy

Last three weeks was the trial of my distant cousin Mat for killing his grandmother, my grandmother's niece Dot, who we traveled with a few times. He killed her in February 2008 but reported her as missing and then confessed in March.
It went to the jury Friday and they returned the guilty verdict (guilty of murder and elder abuse, 25 years to life) at the end of the day Wednesday.

It never seemed that he was remorseful, but sometimes it's difficult to see inside another person's psyche. For me, I realized I'd been carrying around this great anger along with grief.

So I have been wrestling so with the concept of forgiveness and I think I understand more about justice, mercy, forgiveness & grace. At least to explain it to my Baptist-raised self.

Justice and injustice are what we receive when we live in the world of the Old Covenant; the 10 commandments are not God's whims, but the expression of the metaphysics of the created world, actions & consequences. When we repent (turning around) there is an actual movement in our lives & experience to live in the world of the New Covenant, Jesus' covenant, where the law is love and the consequence of love is mercy, i.e., forgiveness.

In the grace of God we experience that movement from one world to another; we are gifted with a new life, new hearts & minds, that we may experience the world of the Holy Spirit where miracles abound. This world of praise and wonder, gratitude and love, is the Kingdom of Heaven, at hand to us in each moment that we let go and let God be God.

When we are full of God's love is the only time that we can look on sinners (including ourselves) with compassion & mercy in our hearts...

If I look at Mat or anyone from this kingdom of love in God's heart, I can't hold on to judgement and anger; I can't say I don't have to forgive because that person hasn't repented.

Elections 2008

I'm getting mail urging me to vote one way or another in the presidential election...

I would remind those people once again that sometime about eight years ago it was proven that our votes don't count; the popular vote went to one guy and the other guy has been president for eight years.

I believe that while change can be legislated (and I do not want repression legislated) true change happens from the bottom up, not the top down; and that railing against any of the "parties" on the ballot is energy that could go towards changing the system and maybe getting some new Parties on board. The 2-party system is not in the Constitution. each party has made concessions to the "more-of-the-same" culture of Washington while claiming maverick status (yes, represented mainly by Biden and Palin).

And I can only speak for myself in that I believe in the Taming Power of the Small--that my true calling is to ACT with as much love every moment that I can muster and despite what the prevailing cultural society might believe, that is the true power and each act of Love will help tilt the world balance--or change the world's vibration--so that the Age of Love and Truth will manifest, i.e. Heaven on Earth. But that is in every person's hands, not Obama's, or the Democratic Party's, or even the United States of America's. We need an Inner Revolution in order to manifest a newer, better, world.

In fact the only way to manifest it is moment-to-moment, person-to-person.

And a reminder, all inner traditions say, that world is already here, now--the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Haven't you glimpsed this in your dreams?

And the greatest weapon against tyranny is laughter.

Love & Peace.

Wacky Physics

I'll have to post later about the joys of Laughter Yoga--yes, yours truly now a Laughter Yoga Leader, equipped to laugh at all times in all places.

But the nerdfighter dudes should hook up with the rappin' hip-hop physicist:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3iryBLZCOQ

You go, girl!

Bourdain Experience II

He’s very tall and surprisingly energetic after having been on the road all day. Even though his demeanor is laid-back, you can see the ten-to-seventeen-year-old Tony, eager for new sights, sounds, experiences. I read the books, I watch the show, and I am pretty much counting on him being a no-bullshit guy; one of the few people on the planet where what you see is what you get, on the page, on camera, in person.

I relate to Kitchen Confidential, I am only two years younger than Tony and was two years ahead of my class and therefore those restaurant days and druggie 1970s were my coming-of-age as well—I was some of those people and knew the other ones. He did heroin and restaurants, I did LSD and went from restaurants to the religious commune.

While the guys are getting some film outside, Bourdain & I chat about quitting smoking and the effect of children on one’s will to live (positive).

The guys are done outside. We ask if we can get a shot of Tony toasting the success of “not” launching a Titan missile. Don’t really want to toast the annihilation of Switzerland on camera—or do we? The wonders of post-editing will tell. Then drinks for the crew, chips & salsa in the break room. Don’t know where I get the guts or stupidity, I ask him if I can shamelessly plug my book. He says yeah. He actually picks it up and holds it for the camera!!! Atomic Cocktail???, he says, with cameras rolling.

I was supposed to tell the story of how the book came out of the Titantini Cocktail recipe, created to celebrate the upcoming 25th anniversary of the museum. I think I say the press-release-atomic-angst shtick of writing the book, give the recipe, and we toast to peace. He says, It’s good, surprised. Awkward, all of it. Who knows if it will make the show.
But he does finish the drink, post-camera, and compliments my homemade salsa and guacamole. This doesn’t go to my head—I take it to mean the food doesn’t suck—which was my reason for making it instead of picking up from Tucson, or recommending a restaurant down here. There’s no place decent open from here to Nogales at this hour. (10 P.M., if you’re wondering. This was before the wonderful diner Spanky’s opened next to the 99cent Store.)

I hate those guacamoles that look like vomit or congealed pea soup and even when they’re fresh I don’t like tomatoes or jalapenos in it. Garlic, lime, and avocado, that's it. Bourdain says Mexican food is like Italian food, it’s either done so well it’s great or it’s truly terrible. I wax rhapsodic about fresh food, ask where they’re going in Hatch, say in a worshipful voice, chiles, and it’s another bonding moment—he says, Red or green, and I say without hesitation, green—he says, me, too.

He does sign my book, and I tell him I’ve enjoyed it and grateful to know that I can throw out most of the knives from my home kitchen that I’ve been lugging around for thirty years. He tells me the story of watching swords made in Japan.

Then that’s it, they’re done, just grabbing a bite, driving the 4 hours to Hatch tonight to have breakfast at The Pepper Pot in the morning. He accepts a copy of my book, we give the crew Atomic Cocktail T-shirts, he says on the way out the door, “I have a feeling we could have talked food a lot more,” and I am touched. He didn’t have to be so gracious. Don’t know what all will end up on TV, but I learned some things from reading Kitchen Confidential, cooking for, and meeting Bourdain.

I learned that I am a nurturer; I didn’t need to impress with the food, because I don’t want to be a chef, or run a restaurant—I cook for friends and family and get to pick my guests—that’s what I enjoy. I learned a long time ago that you can’t cook good food if you’re thinking about yourself—whether trying to impress someone, or being out-of-sorts—from piqued to suicidal. It’s all about the food and how it tastes. And thanks to a Shirley Jackson story I read as a teenager, love in every third stir.

One of the things Bourdain says in Kitchen Confidential is that food is power. I’ve thought about that from a political point of view, saying how dangerous it is to import so much of our daily produce and grains and canned food. I didn’t have an aha! from the book how in my own life food is personal power—but I had to make fresh food for those guys, it was imperative. I had to then think about how I have cooked for people since I was 10 years old. Even in the religious commune, I was the cook. (And I learned to grow my own food and can it, another kind of personal power.)

Making people feel good is personal power, and it’s what I do. As a writer, as a home cook, and hopefully more and more in my personal and working life, it’s what I do. So maybe it’s not a surprise that Bourdain is personable and gracious—because even when cursing and railing and even saying the truth about when things are bad—the end result for a cook, the result you hope for, is for people to feel a little bit of grace, of amazement, of freshness and beauty—a little bit of heaven. To eat is to live, to cook is to give--the end result a celebration of life.


So, I get to put together two more equations in my life: Love is power, cooking is love, cooking is power. And I learn from the on-camera thing I need to be as funny in person as I am on paper and be more of a storyteller if I want to be interviewed. So I still have my ongoing battle between the extrovert and introvert within—but all in all, I feel lucky, too. Lucky to have survived childhood, adolescence, restaurant work, drugs, depression—to be alive, to have love, and to be learning still in this precious world.

P. S. I confess, I do care if everyone really liked my food. The crew kept saying about the salsa, “This is homemade??” I sure hope it didn’t taste as bad as store-bought. And Todd said the hot version was not either that hot. But Jared said Todd’s been divorced 4 times. They were, however, happy to take the leftovers.

P. P. S. By the time Bourdain and the crew blog and edit the show, it’s clear that the Southwest road trip is just one long haze of heat, dust, fumes, and alcohol—and while their visit to the Titan Missile Museum is a chapter in my book, it’s a paragraph, a sentence, a joke, a blip in theirs. But thanks for playing, guys! It was fun--or should I say, It seemed like a good idea at the time...