WALKING ON THIN ICE

Venetian fotoblog

star door

 

fish statue reflection (trieste)

 

 

yarn shop (mira)

 

water door

1000 ways to prepare ‘it’

1000 WAYS TO PREPARE ‘IT’

Shmo or Joe, I don’t know, liked to torment his mother. So every day he’d ask her, “What’s for dinner, Ma?”

“You know darn well what we’re having. It!”

“Not ‘it’ again!”

It was it. All that was left. In the old days, there were plants and animals of various persuasions. Before the U.S. of Assholes’ Frankengenes escaped. Slowly one plant gene took over the whole green kingdom. Happened so long ago, we don’t even know what It was. It’s just called ‘it.’

After a while, all the things that ate other things died off. And the things that ate them died off. So now it was down to People, and It. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.

Can’t say what It tasted like, because it’s been just It for so long, there’s nothing to compare It to. The two jokes left from the old days are It tastes just like chicken and It tastes like republicans.

People wove clothes out of It. Processed It in various ways to make bowls, spoons, condoms. Life was bleak.

But there was hope. There were rumors of a new book, 1000 Ways to Prepare It.

Mutant gypsies from the east had it, the book. Trouble is, there was no way to buy it because there was nothing but It to trade for it. It was written in ink made from It, on paper made from It, bound in cardboard made from It. But it did exist. It was true.

Some of the book’s secrets were the use of special spices. If you took human shit and dried it for one year in the sun and mixed it with water, and then evaporated that water, you had a Spice, a flavoring spice. A second spice involved a lengthy process with human urine. Another condiment  was a tubercle thick phlegm from dying babies, harvested and dried at just the right time. Menses blood could also be used.

The trick of all this was It tasted so bad, even though nobody had anything to compare It with, that piss and shit and phlegm and menstrual blood were actually steps UP the taste chain. A few folks had tried cannibalism to get away from It. Unfortunately, humans have been eating It so long, they tasted like It. So that practice died out. Besides, the meat would rot and smell and decay, and then you’d have bad smelling It.

For a while there, before cars disappeared, there was a bumper sticker that said, It happened.

But if you had the book, and you bought the spices, and you didn’t know where the spices came from, there was hope because the book showed you different ways to grind, process, coagulate, curdle, blend and whip It. That, added with the various shit piss phlegm menstruum spices gave you quite a range of tastes and textures. Mucous snot was also highly sought after for a custard-like It pudding, for dessert.

There were also various minerals used for flavoring, like sea salt. And ground calcium from the bone yards. And dandruff flakes. All mentioned in the book.

These traveling mutant gypsies would crawl from town to town, set up big It fairs. Fix ten, fifteen kinds of It. Give It to the crowd in sample packets. Then sell the book.

Unfortunately, the only compensation they would take were babies less than a year old, used foreskins, internal organs and left testicles. These were all ground up for various spices. And of course the baby skins were also used for deluxe editions of the book.

A great but rare delicacy was frozen It. But because of the weird world weather resulting from global swarming, you never knew when this product was available. And for the less adventurous, there was pre-chewed It.

If It were grown in excessively hot, humid climates, It could be dried and smoked as a psychotropic. People would sit around and take a toke and say, Wow. Good It.

There were profits and foreseers and current way naysayers all saying It wasn’t always this way. It didn’t have to be this way. It won’t always be this way. But this It was the It it is. Although, there was a seed of truth in their prophesies. For It was dying.

Frankengenes have no lateral movement ability. They’re cut and dried. By taking over the Earth, they had changed the balance just enough that the Earth was moving outside their parameters. So It was slowly dying. Soon there’d be just humans. No animals, no birds, no fish, no plants. No movement in the sea. Just people. Which brings to mind that old Twilight Zone story, To Serve Man.

But until then, you could get a slight variety of taste by harvesting It at different times. Early It looked like a bad cross between a sick fungus and dog poo. Intermediate It resembled giant rose thorns. Mature It looked like sunshine reflecting on flowing water. Gorgeous. Old It looked like bad wrinkles on an off day.

It wasn’t always this way.  Originally, It was the best of wheat, rice, oak and barley. It was a gorgeous plant. Danced in the sun. Played in the rain. Every part was edible: seeds, sap, leaves, stems, flowers, pollen, stalks, roots. All could be cooked or eaten raw, woven into clothes, processed into ecologically-friendly pseudo plastic that degraded within weeks. But everything changes. That’s the law of Darwin.

Plus, It was created by greedy, impatient Republican scientists who didn’t properly tie all their gene nodes down.  There’s always the inevitable going awry-ness associated with any new technology. Man first makes, then tests. Then corrects.  Well, It didn’t wait for correction. It just took over. Left no room for biodiversity. Mutated into its own madness. Castrated the food chain.

The first to go were butterflies. Fish soon followed. The flesh of mammals shrank, and what little was left tasted sour. Dust mites died. The resulting buildup of dust killed off the plankton. Once the plankton went, it was over.

Initially, It met all the nutritional requirements for humans. But as It mutated, people began changing as well. Eyebrows and ear hair grew excessively. Flesh withered. Skin turned sallow and hung. Wrinkles everywhere. Which caused sexual problems because folks became too ugly to have sex in light, so resorted to darkness, which resulted in frequent wrinkle intercourse rather than procreation. Sweat pooled beneath the wrinkles, so it was hard to be sure which wet place you were in.

Some folks blamed all this on Clara Bow, the old time movie star, because she was known as the It Girl. But it really started with a prophetic movie from the fifties, titled, It Conquered the World.

The fact that It was dying out, leaving only humans, isn’t totally true. Because it was hard to tell the difference between old It and wrinkled human. In fact, sometimes if you had too much fermented It in a bar, you couldn’t be sure if you’d wake up with a human or an old It. There was so much Human-It sex going on, that you would never know what was going to be born. Folks frequently ate their offspring and married off their produce.

So it was a strange blending of It-Human Human-It slowly eating each other, fertilizing each other, loving each other. And the Earth became wrinkled.

– Kathy Ireland Smith & Steven B. Smith, January 16, 2007

the un-do undulation

 

what this blog needs is MORE KATHY/LADY text and words commentary… we need to counter-balance the constant never-ending smith bilge blather.  love her photos i do i do – the lady has a fine and balanced eye – but her words worth are worthy as well, and we want more of them.  WE WANT KATHY…. WE WANT MORE LADY ! ! !  for example, here’s a poem she wrote 2 weeks ago:

GAP CRAP

Capital fosters relativism, illusion
or barks parts, ad hoc sound bites,
gravel beneath the wheel.
Worship of the chant chatter
shatters the patter of pattern.

I slip from the gristleless lisp,
rub stones into the chasm gap.
I want to tender render
slip ball between tooth point.
I look for fringe folk,
missing teeth and dentures.

– Kathy Ireland Smith, 1/3/2007

beginning to wonder if kathy is from this world, or from the elf woods – look at her ear here.  this is not a normal ear, more art deco retro… and her earlobes are lobe-less.  this ear looks like some vulcan who had cosmetic ear surgery so they could pass for human – tho why anyone would want to pass as human is beyond me.  i thank gods i’m mutant.

do the un-do undulation … went to wash kathy’s sweater, washed my own by mistake.  now i can’t wear mine to town tomorrow for warmth.  then i spilt coffee grounds all over the floor and on two of her new art pieces, so i washed her pieces off in the sink – and washed the salt crystal growth she thought so special off one of them.  can’t un-do – so re-do, make do. it is not a flow day for me.

here’s a chronological list of 26 sovereign countries the peace-loving u.s. of a. has bombed since world war 2, often repeatedly – i guess we didn’t get it right the first time… had to hit guatamala on 4 different occasions, bombed nicaragua for 10 solid years, and of course we’re now in our 17 straight year of bombing iraq:

China 1945-46, 1950-53
Korea 1950-53
Guatemala 1954, 1960, 1964, 1967-69
Indonesia 1958
Cuba 1959-61
Vietnam 1961-73
Laos 1964-73
Belgian Congo 1964
Dominican Republic 1965-66
Peru 1965
Cambodia 1969-70
Nicaragua 1981-90
El Salvador 1981-92
Lebanon 1982-84
Grenada 1983-84
Libya 1986, 1989
Iran 1987-88, 1998
Panama 1989-90
Iraq 1991-2007
Kuwait 1991
Somalia 1992-94, 2007
Croatia 1994
Bosnia 1995
Sudan 1998
Afghanistan 1998, 2001-07
Yugoslavia 1999

might don’t make right – in fact one might say it make wrong.

didn’t bomb anyone 1947-1949 (president truman), 1955-1957 (president eisenhower), 1974-1980 (presidents ford and carter)… that’s 13 bombless years out of the past 62.

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee, I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee, that says: Fool me once, shame on [pause] shame on you.  Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.” – george w. bush at the Nashville high school.  This man knows fool, is fool, done got fool down good.

mira, venice, trieste & coca cola

venice, italy

venice, italy

mira, italy

venice, italy

trieste, italy

trieste, italy

mutant guide to travel tips

 

kathy & smith’s ever expanding rules of travel – we’ve been out of country 5.5 months now on the road through england, holland, poland, croatia, slovenia, italy with france and spain next.  these are some of the things we’ve learned the hard way.

0 – whatever you know, there’s a lot more you don’t.
1 – no sunday travel if possible … things are closed, schedules changed for the worse, folks elsewhere.
2 – check each country’s holiday schedule … for all the reasons listed in #1.
3 – take only what you can carry … you may have to walk miles, up down over obstacles, with it all on your back.
4 – wash clothes every chance you get … laundromats are frequently non-existent, as are washing machines – and clothes driers are a myth.
5 – do it now … never put anything off because this may be your only chance to see / buy / wash / eat.
6 – always have a backup plan … for travel, busses, sleep, escape, life.
7 – get a map of the area.
8 – look around for identifiable landmarks when you leave a subway, parking lot, or bus stop because you’ll be returning from a different direction, perhaps in the dark.
9 – learn the basic phrases of the language … folk treat you nicer when you try … please, thank you, where, how much, coffee, water.
10 – find out if the water is drinkable … use bottled water until you know.
11 – wear comfortable traveling clothes … forget about fashion, convenience is more important.
12 – carry backup clothes light enough to be washed in sink and dried quickly in room … like fisherman pants.
13 – carry umbrella, scarf, hat, gloves … weather changes rapidly in places like london, you must be ready for cold, warm, hot, wet, dry all on same day … it’s always colder or warmer than you think.
14 – drink a lot of water … you need 8-12 glasses of water daily … coffee and alcohol deplete body water … it’s easy to get dehydrated, dizzy.
15 – never count on internet access, even when advertised … free wireless is generally a myth.
16 – never count on anyone except yourself … even if someone is totally reliable, they may get hit by a bus or a republican.
17 – carry a pocket compass … especially in old cities like venice and amsterdam where inner alleys resemble stone mazes.
18 – walk everywhere … you see much more, and it’s good for your body and mind.
19 – be nice, polite … you’re your country’s ambassador, frequently the only proof your entire country isn’t the same asshole your government is.
20 – help others … you never know when you’ll need help yourself.
21 – go where others don’t … go off season, off route, off country … the well traveled path is less rewarding.
22 – if it were easy, everyone would be doing it … part of the prize is becoming more than you are, and that always involves discomfort and pain.
23 – be respectful, polite, and patient with cops, border guards, bureaucrats, and anybody with a gun.
24 – if possible, don’t fly … the airports are becoming the new concentration camps, and planes contribute to global warming.
25 – listen to what the country’s citizens say … you might learn something about yourself and your country, or theirs.
26 – tell friends and folk you meet where you’re going … they may know someone or some thing to help, but don’t take their word as gospel… everyone will try to tell you where to go, what to do, what is and isn’t … listen, but research and evaluate on your own.
27 – when taking trains and busses, try to find the number of stops, the names of places in between, and a trip time estimate … it’s hard to know where or when to disembark in a strange land and language.
28 – give yourself twice as much time as you think you’ll need.
29 – short hair is easier for travel than long … no hair easiest of all.
30 – use the internet to check the area’s history … makes the visit richer.
31 – go to the bathroom before you leave the house, train or restaurant and carry “piss pence” because public toilets are usually pay toilets, and they are frequently foul.
32 – a day or two is not enough to experience a place … quick visits are shallow trophies.
33 – carry a small sewing kit, a small flashlight, eating utensils, scissors, aspirin.
34 – it’s cheaper to buy food from grocery stores than eat in restaurants.
35 – dental and doctors are much cheaper behind the old iron curtain and in the far east.
36 – as much as i hate them, a cell phone is advisable for connections and emergencies.
37 – check schedules and info twice … it’s easy to transpose digits … write down times and addresses to take with you.
38 – keep a daily list of what you spend and what for … it’s easy to overspend.
39 – if you want something to happen, you are going to have to make it happen yourself.

i respected cnn back when i didn’t watch tv.  but now i’m watching cnn daily from 6 to 7 each morning here in croatia, i see it’s just another shallow spin jester working for the man.  kathy calls them the CORPORATE news network.  they push rolexes, designer luggage, pabulum.  their in-depth programs have as much substance as cotton candy.  cnn – less than meets the eye, all the news that fits pre-chewed.  thank goodness for http://www.commondreams.org/ and other independent internet news sources which contain actual content and speak to folk with working brains and open minds.  cnn: content net nothing.

“Into the Interior: a vast subdivision, antennae of television to the meaningless sky…there is no drag like U.S. drag.” – naked lunch, 1959.

i re-read william burrough’s naked lunch.  read it 40 years ago before i did the drugs.  whole new book this time, more powerful.  over the edge, perverse, mostly unpleasant, but undeniable originality and genius.  for the mind, not the soul.  do know cronenberg’s 1991 movie of naked lunch has almost nothing of the book in it.  the movie’s not as depraved, much more enjoyable.  the novel has no plot line, story, consistency or continuity.

“Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for an answer.  Like one of those thinking machines, you feed in your question, sit back, and wait…” – naked lunch.

do the endless island hop

had a 130 minute boat ride on a 50 minute ticket…

bur first, a word from our sponsor… folks, do you need a bed & breafast 20 minutes outside venice italy? then try the faronhof b&b near the village of mira at www.faronhof.com. our 4 day trip will have been worth it just for our fotos yesterday and today and our b&b breakfast conversation this morning with our hostess and her 2 guests from taiwan and china. talked food, politics, history, global warming, rats – and the slowly sinking venice having no sewer system and being a 1,600 year old stone city built on top of wood and water where the giant rats ate all the venician cats and outnumber the citizens 4 to 1.

we bicycled a couple kilometers to the village of mira to bus into venice this morning little knowing it would be dark before we returned. i forgot the name of the village, forgot to check for identifiable landmarks or to time the journey so i’d know when we got back to where we started. it is amazing what the most brilliant of us can forget to do. fortunately we knew there was a river on the left and a well lit foodstore on the right – and it was just enough. learn and live. then we bicycled back in the dark – real serious no lights cloudy sky dark on narrow curving country lanes with a 6 foot drop into a small stream type of darkness… when oncoming cars passed, their lights blinded us so we road on faith, hope and charity through the cow manure fragrant night. kathy found it fun while i kept waiting to bicycle over her broken body.

venice is like an exponetially confusing amsterdam – the alleys are much more numerous and way more narrow, and the canals split forever into smaller and smaller fractals. you walk down narrowing edgar allen poe tunnels and over ever smaller escher foot bridges with frequent dead ends. delightful really. to top the day we thought we’d take a water taxi around the island of venice, maybe a 20 minute trip. our ticket was valid for 50 minutes. what i read as 9 stops oround venice were really 9 islands – took us over two hours to make the loop. for the last hour i was staring ahead hoping i’d recognize the backass view of where we’d left so we could leave.

tried to get tickets home to pula and were told you can’t get there from here even though we got here from there, so we’ll train back to trieste tomorrow and try again.

welcome to the rat maze… best bring your own cheese.

case of kitsch cake

it’s easy to tell you’re in italy – the buildings all look like over-iced box cakes with doo-dads on top of the doo-dads, flourishes on flourishes… a bad case of kitsch cake.

never knew venice was an island.

we discover we’re not the sort who can drop into a new town for a day or three and move on. in 5.5 months of travel we’ve seen enough new new to fill our eyes,.. to make the new new trick work anew, we’d have to go to the far east and fill our eyes with even stranger strangenesses. we find we need time to dip and savor a place… walk its beats, sip its streets. in burley on wharfdale in northern england, we took 7 days to savor the moors… in lewishham we had 3 weeks to learn london and the local poetry scene. in krakow there were 7 weeks to dip into the underground music scene with our 4 poetry readings. the 2.5 months in croatia so far have rewarded us richly in people, beauty, and 267 pages of our collaborative manuscript of smith non-fiction – plus kathy’s created a dozen new pieces of art, moved her act up another notch.

so we’ll walk venetian streets tomorrow and go home sunday with a surface taste of this ancient city – can say we’ve been here, but not that we’ve seen here.

i do have some dynamite fotos to blog next monday tho – some of pure beauty.

had to kill the statistics logging on www.agentofchaos.com – it was eating up my space. november and december 2006 saw 62,330 sessions viewing 213,817 pages. no more keeping score.

learned this trip to italy that no matter what you learn, there’s always more to know. rather like life.

no brain to drain

“when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” – richard m. nixon,  may 1977,

plutarch – “an imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”

in america, “the top 1 percent of households now have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined.” – bill moyers, published 1.5.2007 in the nation 

george bush’s brain dome
can not be alone
it will never save the day
has no meat on bone
bio-scum from some clown clone
it is inside slave to pay

that’s my tanka toy – a tanka is a japanese poem of 5 lines featuring 5 – 7 – 5 – 7 – 7 syllables…essentially 2 haikus slapped together. i added a 5 syllable title, so offer my apologies to purists.  i take that back – academics and purists should apologize to me, to all of us, for boring the world to tears.

elvis presley was 72 years old the 8th… 42 years of that very much alive, 30 years lucratively dead… 24 years of performing.  he’s made more dead than he ever did alive.  can’t wait until i die and get a raise.  of course, i make zero now, so even 2 pennies on my eyes would be a raise…. raise the dead.

the croation couple who gave us homegrown pickles and eggs last week said we were the only americans they’ve ever met.  now they realize not all americans are assholes.

speaking of anal orifices, the u.s. attacked yet another country this morning – somalia.  way to go america.  since world war 2, not one year has gone by without the u.s.a. bombing some country – frequently multiple countries in a single year.  for defenders of the peace, we’re awfully violent. and for folk who hold our sovereignty so highly, we don’t have much respect for the borders of others.  since whirl war 2, we’ve invaded korea, grenada, haiti, cuba, iraq, somalia, viet nam, the dominican republic, afghanistan, and many others – some of them more than once.  we’ve kill and overthrow democratically elected leaders whenever we feel like it – especially those of our neighbors in latin america.  you know, america just isn’t a very nice nation.  we seem to fit all the symptoms of a rogue nation according to noam chomsky – we seem to be the united states of hypocrisy.

kathy&i are going to trieste italy for 1 day tomorrow, then 2 days in venice. come back sunday.  blog monday.  february 10th we’ll begin 2 months in the village of abeilhan in the south of france about 100 kilometers from spain.  after france, we’ll try to get to prague for a couple months.  then thailand for another 3 months.  following that, we might have to come home cuz we could be broke.  this has been far more expensive than we thot it would be.  there is no free lunch.  i guess in my heart i always knew that.  but even if we end up with nothing, this has been the bargain of our life.  more people should travel the off roads of the world – the experiences there are deeper, richer.

i’ve given up trying to find grass.  can’t afford it anyway.  reality wants me to get stoned, reality will bring me grass.  it don’t pay to fight the flow.

 at the post office, the clerk talking to kathy saw me by her and said in english, oh, here’s the father.  i should have leaned over and given her an unfatherly kiss.

 

Lady’s fotoblog

 

 

 

 

the itch or the scratch?

 

kathy’s question – “which came first, the itchin’, or the hatch?”  answer: the itch – if you didn’t itch, you wouldn’t scratch , and if you didn’t scratch, they wouldn’t hatch.

told my lady i wanted needed must have a cup of coffee this morning.  she said “but honey, didn’t your heart have a bad beat last night?“  told her no, not a bad beat really – more like a slow waltz.

the bells have disappeared from the church a 5 minute walk up the lane.  think they stopped january 1st. there were 120 bell rings rung at 6, noon, 4:30 and 8 every day… plus 120 rings rung 10:30 on saturday… and another 120 before 10 and after 11 on sunday with an extra 120 strings of bells at various times, moments and occasions… even the hourly bell chimes are gone.  perhaps bells only have a finite number of rings in them and these minimum 3,867 rings per week used up all the bell pings… so they’re still ringing them but no sounds propagate… or maybe someone finally snapped and kidnapped or killed the bell-ringer… or he’s on a drunk binge… or the rings finally drove him mad… or he’s on vacation… or there’s a mechanical bell-ringer and it’s on strike or drunk… or a victim of the bell rings threw a monkey wrench into the machine… or some other victim used his mind to put a powerful force field around the tower so the rings can’t escape and the tremendous force of the rings captured within the church have shattered the priest’s mind and eardrums… or they forgot to renew their 2006 bell ringer license and cannot legally ring in 2007…  or perhaps like everyone else around here, the bells went on vacation until the 8th.  i sort of miss them.  you hear 3,867 rings every week for two months and they become part of your life.  plus we were using the 120 at 6 a.m. as our get-up call.  i wonder where bells would go for vacation?  perhaps times square… or some sheep field to visit the bellwether… or maybe the library to read edgar allen poe’s poem ‘the bells’.  life is so mysterious.  i tell all this to kathy and she says “no bell peace prize… or maybe time’s stopped.”

couldn’t find a back brush for the shower, so bought a toilet brush.  all across europe, solid wastes do NOT flush down the toilet… you have to scrap it down with a toilet brush which they keep in a small plastic holder next to every toilet we’ve seen since we left america.  and the bristles are stiff – rather like washing your back with steel needles.  there are so many possible tasteless jokes i can conceive with me using a feces brush to clean my back that i’ll just let them pass, untouched.

kathy and i are gathering our collaborations of my life stories into a single manuscript – have 224 pages so far, and it is funny stuff.  i come across as an innocent and naive but really lucky half-wise half-wiseass cosmic clown court jester outlaw crashing reality’s party.  have so many stories i’m having trouble understanding how they all happened to me – yet every story is not only true, but understated as well.  it’s the honesty mixed with  self-deprecating humor and droll understatement which make them work, gives them power, makes them acceptable and funny to both the wild ones and the folks leading safer lives.  but seeing how there are so many, i have to start thinking maybe i had something to do with helping them happen in the first place.  i’ve had a lot of fun amidst the pain.  what a long strange trip it’s been, and it ain’t done yet.

reading “euclid creek” – an 128 page poem by michael ceraolo (kathy’s previous boyfriend… or rather one of 5 men in her life in her 2-3 months before me – i’m so good i replaced all 5 of them).  i was disinclined to like it, but i do.  good stuff.  worth reading.  it was just published by mark kuhar’s deep cleveland press.  mark’s also the proprietor of the d.a. levy/deep cleveland press site http://www.deepcleveland.com/. he has a lot of other books available as well.  he was going to bring out a book of 20 of my non-fiction autobiographical stories, but kathy and i’ve decided to include them in our own manuscript.

met ognjen’s parents yesterday.  they speak no english so natalija/ognjen served as language interface in the collaborative conversation.  his father does not think much of george bush junior or senior – nor ronald rayguns reagan.  since we’ve left america, we’ve not talked to one person from any country, any age, any sex, any political philosophy, any level of intelligence who doesn’t view george w bush as a war criminal.  america is held below low regard by the rest of the world.  fortunately, most folk are willing to give american citizens a chance.  they’ve been kind to us… tho many have pointed out that bush would not be murdering iraqi civilians right now if the american public lived up to their responsibilities – we are after all a democracy, and even tho bush’s league stole the election both times, the american public abrogated their responsibility to call them on it, failed in their responsibility to stop the war.  were i a senator right now, i’d cut every single penny from the iraq war budget.  no matter how you look at it, we’re killing folk, murdering them for oil.  and most americans are going right along with it.  every time i write something like this, i get a raft of complaints from americans saying there’s nothing they can do.  bullshit.  write your congressperson, write your newspaper, demand congressional investigations, demand impeachment, demand prison terms for these war profiteering war criminals, attend war protests, contribute to anti-war groups, teach your children and your students and your parents about the evil going on, talk to your friends and neighbors – let normal folk know.  and most of all, start putting corporate c.e.o.s in jail. murderers and thieves are murderers and thieves no matter whether you call them nazis or republicans or corporations.  there is a right and wrong, and we all know it.

i really enjoyed yesterday’s conversation… his father also keeps chickens, rabbits, and sports pigeons who twirl and tumble while flying – plus the inevitable garden.  we left with fresh eggs and jars of home pickled peppers/cucumbers/greentomatoes.  been a long time since i ate an egg i knew where it came from… last time was summer of 1960 just before we moved from our farm to the wicked city. we now also know where the rooster who keeps crowing resides as well.

just had our first bad croatian experience… took 1 hour and $88 to mail 2 sticks of wood and some chocolate back to the states.  the old iron curtain socialist slow bureaucracy lingers still.  but this is more than counterbalanced by the magic of the rest of our personal croatia.