Going, Going, Gone.

With a painful irony, I realize that even memories are not forever.

But he had hardly felt the absurdity of those things, on the one hand, and the necessity of those others, on the other (for it is rare that the feeling of absurdity is not followed by the feeling of necessity), when he felt the absurdity of those things of which he had just felt the necessity (for it is rare that the feeling of necessity is not followed by the feeling of absurdity).
- Samuel Beckett, Watt (1943)

When friends part, the experience can be joyous, or sorrowful, or bittersweet. Fondness and sadness mix in measure proportional to the closeness of the bond, and to the time and the distance apart. When family departs, it’s mostly sadness that descends, at least on me. Being parted from a particular woman in my family has pushed me down the old familiar spiral water slide of self-pity, to splash feet first into the muddy pool of despair. Ok, you may ask, isn’t that metaphor a little over-the-top? Perhaps, I reply, but doesn’t the gardener languish in winter – separated from her garden? And plus, I’ve been here before, and know we all not only survive separation, we grow.

Separating from loved ones - even as the rich dark chocolate of love may smolder into the bitter ashes of extreme distaste - is more painful still. My fragile mental equilibrium teeters and I get indigestion and acid reflux. Yuck. I once went to a female holistic doctor and homeopath. She said that all physical symptoms have mental counterparts, if not direct causes. What more proof does one need to know that heartburn comes from a bruised heart? My heart feels hot and fussy, unsettled and anxious. It would not surprise me to learn that those I am separated from suffer a collectively similar fate. But that which doesn’t kill us just makes us madder, and also I’m told, wiser. I assume the ex-vegetarian now consuming MREish cooking has experienced some similar symptoms.

Growth happens while we’re apart, almost like the exuberant growth in my backyard drenched by recent rains. Although I never went to summer camp as a child, I am familiar with the miraculous growth a child can achieve in a few short weeks away from home. Not just in inches, but in the look in their eyes - those of a person whose heart has also grown stronger. We grow up, we grow apart, we grow old. Just like a garden. Or, as Mom used to say with more clarity, “It’s the frickin’ cycle of frickin’ life.”

And we continue to grow after being parted, even if we never reunite. There’s a song called “Someday I’ll be forgiven for this.” One of the lines is “Someday you’ll be forgiven for this.” A lifelong believer in the healing powers of forgiveness, that’s the only treatment I have for my burning heart now. Well, that and Tums.

The Circle

“Trust in the circle.
To end is to begin.”
- Charmaine Aserappa, In a Japanese Garden

Sitting here on this crisp, fresh day, I feel infected with Spring Fever. The old wheel of the seasons has ground creaking into Spring. This is the season that I most want to take up verdant residence inside my head. Spring opens wide the windows of the cramped sour winter cabin of my brain and lets the breeze blow out the cobwebs and dry autumn leaves from my mind.

Spring renews my trust in the circle. This is the form of immortal life that comforts me now, a thick mossy covering over my original conception of everlasting life - Our Return to the Garden that Christ promised – where our souls would go upon leaving our compostable bodies. Either way: reincarnation!

I read somewhere that in his Autobiography, W. B. Yates says he sought to express his poems in “metrical forms that seemed old enough to have been sung by men half-asleep or riding upon a journey.” I feel old like that in winter. I go into a kind of hibernation and dream like a man half-asleep on horseback on a sacred journey.

Spring wakes me up. Spring starts a new circle in motion.

Bao Yu, is the central character in A Dream of Red Mansions, his name means Precious Jade - reportedly for the piece of jade he held in his mouth at his birth. This 3” ceramic pot has been sitting on a eucalyptus tree trunk next to the driveway for years. I stuck a piece of jade in years ago and have completely neglected it since. No water sprinklers reach it, forcing it to be stunted but tought enough to survive. Here in the afternoon light, is my very own precious jade, glowing with vitality and smug self-importance.

Gardening for Mental Health

“I have tried to write Paradise.

“Do not move
Let the wind speak
That is paradise

“Let the Gods forgive what I
Have made
Let those I love try to forgive
What I have made."

- Canto CXX, The Cantos of Ezra Pound

Here is an almost empty shop, without a sign, but with a table that includes (pretty sure) the necessary equipment for me to rule the world. It looks like the left over detritus from a mad scientist's lab, old ham radio gear, including to the left of the tall piece of equipment, a hand keyer to send Morse code.

Now, I'm no expert, but after carefully studying the picture at great magnification, I postulate that the tall item in the center is a secret mind control device that would enable the skilled operator to dial in the brain frequency of any nearby brain, and then to gently adjust the brain waves in several different directions. I know it will require a bit of practice for me to master thought control, but I promise I will only use my powers for good. Or mostly for good. For me, that is.

Still, in case some combination of radioactive mutant villans, DHS, and those girls who were mean to me in high school conspire to foil my plan for world domination, I will still have the brain wave machines secreted in my underground hideout. There, I'll crouch at night, twiddling the dials, petting the kitty asleep on my lap, and laughing maniacally as I work. First I'll adjust my own brain waves to enable me to understand why some people find the taste of olives desirable, to sense danger before it strikes, and to remember to turn off the soaker hose before I go back inside at the end of the day.

Then again, perhaps not. Perhaps I'll go back outside while the white wisteria blooms are still so fragrant the scent might knock some sense into me. There's winter's mess to clean up, and that could take days.

So. It's either world domination or gardening…

Return of the Tourist

“Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good…
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.”
- Wallace Stevens, The final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

I’m back in So Cal after about a week on the east coast. I arrived in time to see the cherry blossoms in bloom in Washington DC. Déjà vu, Momma.

Although I’ve lived here for most of my life, I grew up in suburban Washington. We used to walk around the reflecting basin at this time of year. We’d pass people with cameras, framing a shot that took in cherry blossom boughs overhead with the Jefferson Memorial in the background. According to a statistic I made up for this post, 93.8% of tourists with cameras take the same picture. As we passed them, we would smugly mutter, “Been done.” So my cliché-compliant pictures serve to remind me that I was a smartass once. I’m a much better person these days – much wiser, much more modest, and barely any older.

I spent a few nights with family, then a long day walking around the Mall, stopping in museums like the Freer Gallery where one sister’s inner goddess was revealed. I’m sure that’s never been done, because nobody else ever goofs off in museums. According to the results in an exhaustive a Pew Research Study of museum visitors I made up for this post, nobody else in the history of the Freer Gallery has ever taken this shot.

I dumbly wore new shoes for the trek around the Mall, from the Capitol Botanic Gardens where there was an amazing orchid show, to the Smithsonian, riding Metro, and limping to the “historic” Williard Hotel for cocktails. I’d forgotten how everything that stands still for more than ten minutes in Washington DC ends up with a brass plaque memorializing famous historical events. One sign said “On this spot in 1766, British forces clashed with rebel militia, who, upon realizing they were outnumbered 7 to 1, heroically handled the battle the way a dog handles stress: since they couldn’t win, eat the British, or roll around on the ground and tickle then, they pissed on the brick below this plaque and walked safely away.” Ok, I made that up too. But I sure enjoyed the cocktail hour seated in a nook in the lobby, watching the beautiful people without blisters on their feet stroll importantly to and fro.

You're In the Army Now

"By its nature, strategy is more demanding of the intellect and imagination than most other military and policy competencies. Strategists must possess highly developed analytical and problem solving skills to rapidly conceptualize and develop creative feasible solutions to complex strategic challenges. Further, they must succinctly convey complicated conceptual or analytical material in a manner that is clearly understood by decision makers."
FA59 Education Opportunities (US Army)

Here is my final report from the front lines of the demonstration Vegetable Garden at the WCG. It’s not illustrated with photos because my stupid camera batteries on my stupid new camera were dead. Stupid camera.

Today, we harvested the last of the cabbage: both green and blue, as well as all the broccoli, red and green lettuce varieties, and the exhausted cauliflower that never got around to blooming. We spent the morning amending the planting beds with fragrant fresh warm compost, planting two squash and two cucumber starts, adding some worms, and covering the beds with a confetti of colorful ornamental kale and cabbage leaves to encourage the worms to make themselves at home.

Next week, we hope to add final compost and to begin covering the beds with mulch. We hope to have starts of warm season plants in the ground by the Spring Garden Festival next month.

Today was one of those days when I realize I live in paradise. Temperature in the mid-70F range, soft breeze with enough moisture to waken the rich warm compost, the living greenness of cabbage, the pungency of the thyme.

Bright and early tomorrow I leave for a few days in Baltimore, Washington DC, Greenbelt MD to visit with 4/5 of my sisters and miscellaneous other relatives. There’s nothing like being able to complain about your spouse to people who already know you love but also are being driven insane by your beloved spouse. Isn’t that what love matures into?

Someday My Prince Will Come

“Americans love junk. It’s not the junk that bothers me, it’s the love” - George Santayana

I love junk too much to let this go. It’s a spinning garden stake with a frog on either side. I especially love frog-themed junk.

Shut up. It’s better than garden fairies, imho. I say you can never have too many little garden embellishments, particularly in my climate where actual living plant material is so endangered. Besides, note that the frog is wearing a crown. He's not just your ordinary garden frog. Possibly he's a prince who will take me away from all this to a magic castle in a land where there is enough precipitation for me to grow stuff I like, and where I’d consequently not favor such cheesy garden ornamentation.

Which reminds me of the joke about Cinderella who took some garden photos in the days before we all had digital cameras. She took the film to her local photo developing store and returned a week later to pick up her pictures. They weren’t ready that week. Or the next. Or the next. After about 4 weeks, she was so discouraged she was overheard to say, "Someday my prints will come."

And thus was the legend born.

Seeing Everything as Brown or White

"Brown shoes don’t make it.
Quite school, why fake it?"
Frank Zappa

Unlike brown shoes, brown sage, in my always modest opinion, does make it in a garden. Here is the brown sage (salvia Africana-lutea, native to South Africa) now blooming at The Water Conservation Garden. Brown flowers belong in any garden that has no pretensions about being sophisticated, but is more comfortable with an amiable mix of the quirky and spontaneous. I have always been suspicious of the late Victorian conceit of “garden rooms” where different themes prevail in different places in one’s yard. I’m pretty sure I didn’t come to this conclusion only upon finally admitting my yard is a hodge-podge of design, but that I had this fixed in my mind all the time I was (apparently) haphazardly cultivating different corners with different impulse buys from the nursery. But even if I just use it as a retroactive justification for the goofy survivors who populate my yard these days, I stand by it, and I am not crazy. Then again, I may have Alzheimer’s, but at least I don’t have Alzheimer’s.

These lovely white jonquils are in the “white garden” at The Garden. I get the idea – that white flowers seem to hold on to the last light at twilight, making them almost glow. But white flowers have always struck me as about as silly as women who drop hankies in the hope that this clumsy gesture will prompt adjacent gentlemen to introduce themselves. Nature is brown, green and sometimes when the light is right, a sort of golden yellow that green becomes when backlit by slanting rays of early morning or late afternoon. The whole point of hankies are to dab coyly at the corners of your eyes to avoid smearing your mascara.

The whole point of flowers are to add other colors to your garden. My favorite kind of calla lily is the green goddess that always looks hand-painted. You can see one in the very left of banner picture at the top of my blog. Some might say my yard puts the “eck” in eclectic. I say if I wanted white in my garden, I’d paint a fence.

Ninja Rain

"Wherever I am,
Anyone in need has a friend.
Whenever I return home,
Everyone is happy I am there."
- Ninja Warrior Creed

Ninja Rain: (Attacking noisily outside the window) Hah! I scoff at your puny landscape, small and stunted, slowly being swallowed by the creeping Sonoran Desert. Drink this, puny carbon-based life forms!

Me: Hah! I care not toothless villain! I report to the courthouse these days; subjected to bad coffee, strange jur-fellows and metal detector lines almost daily. I have no fear of your pathetic attempts to overwhelm my back yard with fresh water.

Ninja Rain: Hah! BTW, You, what’s your case about?

Me: Hah! I engage daily with the forces of stupidity, vacuity and poor oral hygiene on slow and crowded elevators. I endure attempted conversation with “peers” who have attention spans as short as their opinions are shallow. While I dote on grand-child-aged relatives, oddly I’m not as captivated to hear about yours, dear. Besides: see this book I’m holding open on my lap? I was reading it. Where light conversation has proved difficult for four weeks, I now cower to think of attempting to collaborate and deliberate the final week with my fellow jurors. Ergo Ninja Rain, your noisome rain is like music to my ears.

Ninja Rain: Hah! I shall depress your spirits, Seasonally Affect your mood Disorder and enforce a chronic light shortage. Not to mention increasing your aging roof’s leak potential to Sesame Street Terrorist Threat Level Bert. (He’s the orange one, right?)

Me: Hah! Leaky roofs are the farthest thing from my mind!

Ninja Rain: BTW, You, what’s your case about again?

Me: Hah! I shall not capitulate to your assassination attempts on my confidence in our legal system. I have already had at least two nightmares about being tried by jury of my peers. In fact leaky roofs go to the heart of the matter of this case. So, shut up.

Ninja Rain: Ha ha! Hah! No seriously. Sorry. Hah!

Me: Very Master Ninja-y of you, NJ. But you gotta listen here. My case is about a homeowner who suffered winter rainstorm damage and fought the insurance company. Talk about Threat Level Bert. Here we sit, six years later. Listening to battling expert witnesses, silently witnessing revelations of shady conduct, trying to keep track of over 600 surprise exhibits, tortured by logic and the lack thereof, and by fornicating plaintiffs living an alternative lifestyle several pay grades above the jury members. Funny undisputed fact: The roof still leaks.

Ninja Rain: Hah! Sounds like a noble assignment: Everyman vs. The Man, and Hapless Small Business General Contractor. Meet the ungainly and unlikely heroic sole proprietor subcontractor trying to make an honest living practicing his craft and ending up as collateral damage. Pretty sure it's an undisputed that this guy doesn’t have health insurance.

Me: Yeah, huh? Greed, lies, revenge, innuendo, shady unasked questions, and disputed answers. Objection. No foundation. Sustained. Stricken, Question. Day after rainy day taking notes on technical details about insurance lingo, advice from architects and structural engineers about all the nasty things rain can do when roofs leak.

Ninja Rain: Ok, but still, sounds pretty cool. Dark arts, deceptions, class warfare. Did the workers rebel against their overlords and save the day for Socialism? Viva Revolution, eh?

Me: NJ, I know more than I ever dreamed of about leaky roofs, covered damages, mold remediation, obscure construction attempts gone bad, code violations, lies, and damn lies. So technical at times I had to clench my fingernails in the palm of my hand to keep from nodding off. So gripping at other times that Juror #6 woke up.

Ninja Rain: Hah! Puny juror! Sounds to me like you’re really mad that you didn’t get to sleep in mornings, and fool around blogging. Just for that, I’m going to blow a branch into a bird feeder, knocking it on the patio where the birds too drenched to fly can waddle around the all you can eat buffet.

Me: Well, NJ, good for the birds, and for me. The trial is over. So I’m back home to my favorite job – playing around on the innernetz when I should be cleaning out the old e-mail in-box. So rain your little head off.

Ninja Rain: Wait, You. What was your verdict?

Me: We reached a verdict midday yesterday that will displease “The Man” and “the man” about equally, and will please only the innocent contractor. I’m completely satisfied that we did the right thing. My only regret is that we did so for reasons having more to do with the personalities of the characters that performed before us for 5 weeks than with the carefully outlined jury instructions on the law, or the objective and undisputed facts of the case, or even the basic principles of accounting.

Ninja Rain: You win some, you lose some. Others, you merely screw up.

Me: Thanks, Ninj. Your precipitous wind-whipped wetness, bringing the haunting residual smell of the prehistoric glacier melt is just what I need today to clean the salts out my flower pots and the cognitive dissonance of jury operation in my brain. Besides your winter El Nino rain is a far cry from a shower of silver shurikens whizzing toward my chest. By the way, if you ever wanna make an origami shuriken, check this out.

Expert Testimony

“I used to be offended, but now I'm just amused...”
Elvis Costello, (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes

I have spent several weeks listening to expert witnesses disagree under oath about technical details of building and construction codes so boring they would make my ears bleed if I had bothered to replace the batteries in my hearing aid. Kidding. Of course I listened, and took notes, and only doodled the barest minimum of time necessary to keep from smacking someone upside the head. Then, there are the liars. Well, some of them must be lying, because something can’t be metaphorically black and white at the same time unless it’s a zebra wearing an orange prison jumpsuit huddled beneath a blue tarp at midnight on the longest night of the year. In the rain. I should know, because an expert said so under oath.

Common sense and reason won’t save us here. As one expert witness said, reason is 6/7 of treason. Or maybe that was James Thurber. He also said nobody ever told him there’d be days like these. Strange days indeed. Most peculiar, Momma. Or was that a dead Beatle?

So, after going around in circles for the last several weeks, I’m thinking of going into the professional expert testimony business and wearing a business suit, and swearing to tell nothing but the truth for $500 per hour plus expenses. All that remains for me to put this brilliant plan into action is for me to settle on a specific field in which to purport to be an expert. My big brother recently mentioned that what happens in tautology club happens in tautology club. So I’ve decided that when I grow up, I want to be an expert in tautologies. Why, you (might) ask? Because that’s what I want to be when I grow up.

Jury Duty

"But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government."

- James Madison, Federalist No. 10

I’m on a jury in County Superior Court, on a civil case involving a dispute between a homeowner, an insurance company, and a construction company. It’s been going all month and yesterday we were told by the judge that the parties estimate they will be done presenting their various cases early in the second week of March. Then the judge has a day or two to give us instructions. Then we can begin deliberation. I am instructed not to discuss the case with anyone, but I don’t think I’m violating that admonition by confessing that I’m tired at the end of the day.

I live barely 2 miles from the courthouse, making it possible for me to go home for our 1.5 hour lunch break. We start at 9 and end at 4:30, so it’s not exactly a long day, and we go 4 days a week at the most. But for a retiree who has given up mental work for gardening, I’m finding the effort of focusing, paying attention, making notes on testimony I think is important, and sitting in a comfortable chair for up to 3 hours at a time is surprisingly hard work. I’m used to staying up late and sleeping til 9:00. This is cramping my lifestyle, giving me less time with my cat on my lap (which is as good as any blood pressure medication you’ve ever had). It’s making me miss important Olympic coverage like curling (kidding: has there ever been a more boring sport?) not to mention The Daily Show, and making me cranky in the mornings. Make that crankier.

It’s also preventing me from blogging, keeping up with e-mail, wasting time surfing the web in search of signs of intelligent life, going to the veggie garden weekly, and generally goofing off. The good news is that at $15 a day, I’ll soon be wealthy beyond my wildest dreams.

I suppose there is also an unintended benefit of “working” again in that it drains my energy to a sufficient degree that I’m too tired to yell back at the hypocritical politicians on the evening news. I don’t have the energy to tell members of Congress to stop acting like ten-year-old boys on an unsupervised school playground and do their damn jobs. (BTW, preventing the other boys from doing their jobs isn’t their job.) Which I suppose is just as well, since my rants never seem to change things anyway. You guys will just have to get health insurance legislation passed without me.

Baby It's Cold Outside

Per me si va ne la città dolente,
per me si va ne l'etterno dolore,
per me si va tra la perduta gente.

Through me the way into the suffering city,
Through me the way to the eternal pain,
Throuigh me the way that runs among the lost.

Dante, INFERNO CANTO 03 Mandelbaum Tr.

The poor east coast! Sorry about the snow. Brought back delightful memories of my childhood in Suburban Washington DC. Shared memories with grown and dispersed siblings. I’ve been in So. Cal too long. I’d love to be there now. Snowed in and walking down the middle of the divided highway to the neighborhood grocery store to buy canned food and stale bread.

I have to confess I’m feeling no pain here: sunny and in the mid seventies F. Afternoon breeze near the coast taking on the faint fog of a chilly night as the wet wind blows inland from the Pacific ocean.

Went out with J to get our faces threaded. We go to these Indian ladies in a half empty shopping mall, doing henna tattoos and using sewing thread to twist it around their fingers and snip off my ‘stache and shape my eyebrows. I paid $35 to get my whole face threaded. Along my hairline, I now have a tidy line of demarcation. The benefit is that a lot of what went was gray hair. I felt some especially long wild hairs yanked out of my chin. Gross.

The lady who did me, Saba, was extra patient because I couldn’t hear half of her instructions to me about where to pull my lips tight, my hairline straight etc. Not to worry, I’m an old white lady: I tip good. She did mention that I should consider coming more frequently…

While waiting for J to finish, we observed two independent groups of local high school girls – one set waiting to start, the other waiting for their friend to finish. As they sat in the waiting area, texting to friends naturally, they realized they have friends in common and knew who each other was. An interesting example of how the Internetz is keeping them all hooked up. Also an interesting example of the kind of small town community I grew up in but now exists mostly in first-generation immigrant communities. In this case, girls of obvious Mexican descent, speaking accent-less English. You wouldn’t find that in the days spas I’m more likely to frequent, baby.

Now, this wasn’t exactly Dante’s Inferno-painful. But the cocktail at BJ’s after went down particularly well: Jack Daniel’s and butterscotch liquor with smooshed sugar on the rocks. Think I’ll have another and toast family and friends suffering the eternal pain trapped in suffering snow-bound cities, without electricity. Thank goodness for iPhones.

Long Sonata of the Dead

“All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.”
- Samuel Beckett

Notwithstanding the foregoing however, I am trying. I’m not loling and whatnot all the livelong day. I have my dark nights of the soul, and even some dim winter afternoons when time seems to stand still and my heartbeat sounds like part of a scary movie soundtrack heartbeat. Frankly, when you live in a place where ten inches of rain in one year is becoming the norm, and you live there most of your life, you tend to go mildly insane when it rains nonstop for one whole week. Which, by the way, if you want to comment about how we don’t have friggin’ seasons here in So Cal, you’ll be dead to me.

Today was sunny and me and Tech Support Guy took our respective cats out into the backyard on their respective harness leashes. Once they’d rolled in the rain dust spots on the sunny concrete patio for a sufficiently long enough time to get thoroughly dirty, we went a’walkin in different directions.

My yard looks so neglected. Like the names of dead things: everywhere I look are signs of abandonment and dead things. Here’s the thing. When we go out, my cat walks me, and I let her. We took an unusual route for me, across a rather precarious dry waterfall. I saw a pretty pattern of shadow on the rocks facing east. Like the deeply toothed wing of a blackbird in flight. It was. A robin-sized bird of mostly gray feathers lay belly up against the rock, his left wing nestled next to the rock and slightly splayed like he was gliding on a warm current. Although I saw no evidence of cause of death, I admit I looked away fairly quickly. I prefer to believe he looked for a sheltered spot to die where he wouldn’t be desecrated by evil skunks or gophers.

There was the end of that life’s story, but it was a moment of beauty. Perhaps I heard the beginning of the long sonata of his death. Sometimes, I think I can hear snatches of the song while I sit with my back to the winter morning sun, smelling all the rain drenched new growth. I’m pretty sure this morning that I heard the beginning of the long sonata of this new year’s life. I was watching Lily roll around so gloriously in the warm dust, rolling onto her back, curving her spine up and sticking her chest out, spreading her arms and legs apart, rubbing her tiny backside in the dirt. She’s about the middle of her life (9 years this summer). She’s pretty limber for a middle aged female.

So there we all were: beginnings, middle and ends. The sum of the morning is more than a tidy sum of words. It’s part of the song we all sing together all our lives. This morning in my back yard, we got to a particularly nice part of the song.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (558 U. S. ____ (2010))

"And it is no less true, that personal security and private property rest entirely upon the wisdom, the stability, and the integrity of the courts of justice."
- Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833

The Case

The case challenged an federal law (2 U. S. C. §441b of Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002), prohibiting corporations and unions from speech that is an “electioneering communication” or for speech that expressly advocates the election or defeat of a candidate.

During the 2008 presidential campaign non-profit corporation Citizens United wanted to release a documentary critical of then-Senator Hillary Clinton. Concerned about possible civil and criminal penalties for violating §441b, it sought declaratory and injunctive relief, arguing that (1) §441b is unconstitutional. The District Court denied Citizens United a preliminary injunction and granted appellee Federal Election Commission(FEC) summary judgment.

In it’s January 21, 2010 ruling, the Supreme Court concluded that since it could not resolve this issue alone “without chilling political speech” it was also necessary to consider, and ultimately overrule, the precedent established in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (494 U. S. 652) that political speech may be banned based on the speaker’s corporate identity.

The Majority Decision

“Austin is overruled, so it provides no basis for allowing the Government to limit corporate independent expenditures. As the Government appears to concede, overruling Austin “effectively invalidate[s] not only BCRA Section203, but also 2 U. S. C. 441b’s prohibition on the use of corporate treasury funds for express advocacy.” (citation omitted). Section 441b’s restrictions on corporate independent expenditures are therefore invalid and cannot be applied to Hillary…”

Deciding that “Section 441b’s prohibition on corporate independent expenditures is thus a ban on speech” the decision concluded: “… The First Amendment underwrites the freedom to experiment and to create in the realm of thought and speech. Citizens must be free to use new forms, and new forums, for the expression of ideas. The civic discourse belongs to the people, and the Government may not prescribe the means used to conduct it.” (citation omitted)

So, disregarding partial concurrences and partial dissents, here’s how the 5 – 4 decision was made:
KENNEDY delivered the opinion, in which ROBERTS, SCALIA, ALITO and THOMAS concurred. STEVENS filed a dissenting (in part) opinion, in which GINSBURG, BREYER, and SOTOMAYOR joined.

Scalia’s Concurring Opinion

Scalia’s 8-page concurring opinion (page 79 - 87) is mostly a snarky exercise in rebutting Stevens’ dissent, saying that while the purports to show that “today’s decision is not supported by the original understanding of the First Amendment. The dissent attempts this demonstration, however, in splendid isolation from the text of the First Amendment.”

Further, “the dissent embarks on a detailed exploration of the Framers’ views about the 'role of corporations in society.' (citation ommitted). The Framers didn’t like corporations, the dissent concludes, and therefore it follows (as night the day) that corporations had no rights of free speech. Of course the Framers’ personal affection or disaffection for corporations is relevant only insofar as it can be thought to be reflected in the understood meaning of the text they enacted—not, as the dissent suggests, as a freestanding substitute for that text…. Despite the corporation-hating quotations the dissent has dredged up, it is far from clear that by the end of the 18th century corporations were despised. If so, how came there to be so many of them?” (page 79 - 80)

The Dissenting Opinion

The dissent seems pretty straightforward: “The real issue in this case concerns how, not if, the appellant may finance its electioneering. Citizens United is a wealthy nonprofit corporation that runs a political action committee (PAC) with millions of dollars in assets. Under the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA), it could have used those assets to televise and promote Hillary: The Movie wherever and whenever it wanted to. It also could have spent unrestricted sums to broadcast Hillary at any time other than the 30 days before the last primary election. Neither Citizens United’s nor any other corporation’s speech has been “banned,” ante, at 1. All that the parties dispute is whether Citizens United had a right to use the funds in its general treasury to pay for broadcasts during the 30-day period. The notion that the First Amendment dictates an affirmative answer to that question is, in my judgment, profoundly misguided. Even more misguided is the notion that the Court must rewrite the law relating to campaign expenditures by for profit corporations and unions to decide this case.
The basic premise underlying the Court’s ruling is its iteration, and constant reiteration, of the proposition that the First Amendment bars regulatory distinctions based on a speaker’s identity, including its “identity” as a corporation. While that glittering generality has rhetorical appeal, it is not a correct statement of the law. Nor does it tell us when a corporation may engage in electioneering that some of its shareholders oppose. It does not even resolve the specific question whether Citizens United maybe required to finance some of its messages with the money in its PAC. The conceit that corporations must be treated identically to natural persons in the political sphere is not only inaccurate but also inadequate to justify the Court’s disposition of this case.” (page 88 – 89).

Stevens also takes issue with the majority opinion’s judicial activism in ignoring stare decisis (precedent) and overruling Austin when Citizens United didn’t even ask it to do so. “In fact, no one has argued to us that Austin’s rule has proved impracticable, and not a single for-profit corporation, union, or State has asked us to overrule it. Quite to the contrary, leading groups representing the businesscommunity, organized labor, and the nonprofit sector, together with more than half of the States, urge that we preserve Austin.” (citations omitted) (page 108 – 109).

My Opinion

My favorite part of the 57-page majority opinion were these gems:
“References to massive corporate treasuries should not mask the real operation of this law. Rhetoric ought not obscure reality.” (page 40); and
“That speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt. And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy.” (page 44).

So, not even addressing the threat that foreign corporations can now use their money to influence U.S. election outcomes, the decision seems to me to be not merely a stealthy extension of the rights of corporations but (as night follows day) a giant step towards fascism in America. Too bad.

Happy Anniversary

“Some time when the river is ice ask me mistakes I have made. Ask me whether what I have done is my life. Others have come in their slow way into my thought, and some have tried to help or to hurt: ask me what difference their strongest love or hate has made.”
- William Stafford

Talk about a glass half full. He asks the question, but does not answer it. Has the strongest love or hate has made a difference in his life? If so, was said difference positive or negative?

And what about us on the 23rd anniversary of my marriage to my one true love? We’ll have dinner at the same place we dinned after our courthouse marriage – a local restaurant within a mile of home. Just us, this week. That wedding dinner included your brand-new stepdaughter of thirteen going on 35, an adolescent with the new-found independence of a latch key child. Stepfather.

These days, we're sharing the frustrations of growing old together, watching our capabilities and cognizance dwindle with our bodily strength and beauty. It’s a bitch to get old, but we have the consolation of doing it together. Thanks for a ride twice as scary in the crazy clown car, stuffed with all the baggage of a quarter century. Thanks for the moral support, the mutual growth, the hard work we both put in

Thanks for all the parenting, the COPD, the depression, and the understanding. Thanks even for the MIL whose own decline has overshadowed our long marriage; and has sapped our strength and diminished the resources left for us to care for one another. Boy, do you guys get on my nerves sometimes.

Thanks for the joy, the accomplishment. We’re learning together how to make our lives progressive – building on the lengthening tail of all our life experiences and becoming better for it despite our mutual decline. Thanks for the kitties, the iPod, the neck surgery. Thanks for the sex, and the love, and the support, and the compassion.

We’ll go to dinner a night or 2 before our actual anniversary. Close enough and mildly more convenient. Here’s my toast:. Let’s keep this circus show of a marriage on the road another quarter century. At some point, I’ll get my own bedroom closet.

I love you. It’s the love that counts. Of all the mistakes you have made, and I have made, and we have made, what we have done is not our lives. What we have done together is the difference the strongest love can make: we’re still alive and we’re still in love. Thanks again.

Winter Harvest

"Once more I am the silent one who came out of the distance wrapped in cold rain and bells: I owe to earth's pure death the will to sprout."
- Pablo Neruda (1904 - 1973) Winter Garden

The week of recent rains have brought both good and bad news to the Veggie Garden. The white flies are gone from the cauliflower, although you can see the pathetic stunted purple cauliflower. The one to the left was planted at the same time, but for some reason, some pest attacked the one on the right, prompting it to desperately re-grow and sprout. Nothing like the fear of death to make plants come alive.

Hungry rabbits knocked over the wire screen enclosing some lovely purple kale. All that’s left are the skeletons. I’ve replaced the screen, and if the plants are brave enough and have the will to sprout, they might yet live. I'm not a big fan of kale anyway, but it was pretty to look at. I don't care for any leafy greens you have to cook first. Kale gives me flashbacks to the slimy canned spinach I was forced to eat when I was a kid.

But the good news is the broccoli. The enclosure it lives in, built with love and care by T, protects it from all predators larger than the diameter of the chicken wire. Between the insects and the squirrels and rabbits, it's been a struggle to grow veggies the past few years. Perhaps all the recent rain will revitalize the plants and strengthen them against attacks by predators who come silently, presumably at night, to munch.

Here is part of the harvest. I gave broccoli away to others as I strolled through the Garden after a meeting this morning. The taste of real broccoli, immediately after it’s picked, compares to store-bought broccoli about the way Aretha Franklin’s singing compares to mine.

Dinner tonight will include fresh broccoli slaw, and some yummy organic pork sauteed with roasted tomatoes and some of my canned caramelized onions and garlic. Eat your hearts out rabbits!

Rain

“That blessed mood
In which the burden of the mystery,
In which the heavy and weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened.”
- William Wordsworth

Rain.

I managed to cut some herbs before the rains came. Forecasters are saying that by the time the third storm moves through So Cal by the end of this wet week, we could get up to 20 inches of rain. So, you might be asking yourself, what’s a little winter rain? In a place where we’ve had so little rain for so long, we tend to over-react when it rains for more than a few hours at a time. Monday’s storm caused Disneyland to close early for goodness sake! Besides, generally speaking, Southern Californians collective skill level in driving in the rain is approximately that of a bus full of rodeo clowns trying to perform brain surgery while the bus tries to outrun the pursuing border patrol. Besides, I’m not even sure where the windshield wiper control is on my five-year old car.

I remember once when I worked in the Ivory Towers of Academia, the entire university closed early due to rain. I had to stay behind because I was in a car pool driven that day by a guy whose job became more critical in bad weather. I answered the phone and spoke to a contractor in Washington DC who thought I was kidding when I told him the entire university was closed due to rain.

Now, the real reason the university let us go home early was that storm drains – unused for years and clogged with debris – were overwhelmed and flooding was endemic; and that the university had thousands of workers who would only make the evening commute more hellacious if we waited until winter’s early darkness to hit the roads.

But I didn’t mention this to the caller. Instead, I explained that the only reason I picked up the phone was that I was still waiting for the cab I had called to pick me up at the door of my building and drive me to my car in the parking lot a block away. I said nobody here owned umbrellas because it never rained, and that we all wore clothing was “dry clean only”, and that I’d just had my hair done and didn’t want to get it wet.

This, of course, confirmed all his latent prejudices about us vain and shallow phonies living in the shadow of Hollywood. It also got me out of doing any serious business with the jerk, so it was a win-win.

Sneaky Weather

“I come from a land in the sun-bright deep,
Where golden gardens glow,
Where the winds of the north, becalmed in sleep,
Their conch-shells never blow.”
- Thomas Moore, Song of a Hyperborean

The weather has turned warm and sunny again. Perversely, it always does this to tempt me to prune too soon. In a logic almost illogical enough to be human, once pruned, branches want to start growing to replace what has been lost. Silly branches.

Once the tender new growth begins to flourish, Winter comes back to remind me who’s really in charge of the back yard. Tender young stems and tiny new leaves are killed by frost, their dead blackened tips waving reproachfully; mocking my clumsy gardening efforts. So, I’m not going to be a patsy to Winter this year. The other day, I pruned the white wisteria because it hardly matters to this rampant weed what weather challenges, or my pruning shears dish out. The wisteria seems to make even dumber decisions about growing than I do about pruning. For no reason apparent to my eye, some thick wisteria branches will die while other gangly strait shoots will grab all the energy and produce new growth in the wrong place.

But apart from the wisteria, everybody else can just look like crap until March. No more pruning. I doubt if the flowering quince branches now showing off in January will make it without some frost damage. But I dare not cut back the growth to make it a bit more compact. Tried that with the hydrangea (may it rest in peace) one year about this time, and then one rare killing frost took the entire plant out overnight. It seemed mean of nature to punish the hydrangea for my sins, but at least I learned from its untimely death the dangers of premature pruning.

Perhaps my potted plants are like rock stars. They can’t manage to just live a glamorous life. They have to try to go out in some grand gesture that befits their splendor. They could get old like a regular person, eating prunes in a bowl, and wrapping themselves up in a metaphorical old plaid flannel bathrobe, and sitting by the fire, and dying in their sleep. But if you’re a rock star, you’re probably going to die in a fiery crash of your Lamborghini - missing a curve and diving off a cliff in Monte Carlo. Or, maybe you’ll die huddled in a tent on an icy mountain in Antarctica with your faithful Sherpa guide, or whoever it is that acts as a local guide in Antarctica, victims of some unlikely and unseasonable weather.

Or, like my potted basil, burned black by frost and looking for all the world like you died of an overdose of prescription medication while sitting on the toilet. Not that my basil took drugs, you understand, but that it died before its time, and a way somewhat more notable than tripping on a roller skate and falling down the basement stairs, and being found a week later by the underpaid cleaning crew.

Hello 2010 and Lotus

“When the lotus flowers bloom in summer, they close at night and open in the morning. Yun used to put some tea leaves in a little silk bag and place it in the centre of the flower at night. We would take it out the next morning, and make tea with spring water, which would then have a very delicate flavour.”
Shen Fu, Six Chapters of a Floating Life

The Lotus is usually considered the flower of summer, a blossom of Nelumbonaceae is usually the first thing you picture when you think of a lotus: Nelumbo lutea or Wild American lotus. The Native American Lotus is also known as the Yellow Lotus or Water-chinquapin. I’m one of the places in California where a lotus should survive, though I confess, despite several tries, all I can grow is water lilies, Nymphaea.

But I wish to distinguish these from the lotus of Chinese myth and legends which is probably the Asiatic Lotus, Nelumbo nucifera. The Asiatic Lotus is also identified as the blue lotus, Indian Lotus or Sacred Lotus. The Chinese recognize lotus as the flower of July.

The lotus is more than a flower. It is seed and root. Many cultures associate the 3-stage transformation as an emblem of past, present and future. Lotus can represent change, and can be the emblem of purity: it resurrects from the muddy black root to produce a flower so pure and lovely that it represents truth.

But pictured here are the frost killed lotus blossoms of last summer flowers, with their heads hanging down like so many bells to reflect their seeds in the water. This picture taken on New Year’s Eve, 2009 at Huntington Gardens’ Chinese Garden of Flowering Fragrence in Pasadena, California.

Shen Fu illustrates how practical Chinese peasants appreciated the lotus to be one of the most useful of all ornamental plants. Some contemporary herbals insist the lotus root is poison ( (Jeanne Rose’s Herbal, Herbs & Things (1972). However, Chinese people know the lotus root is sweet and can be eaten as fruit, salad, or as base for soup. Nutritional contributions of the lotus root include iron, vitamins B & C and efficacy as a febrifuge.

Shen Fu’s floating world referred to special places for geisha to idealize woman and remain somehow pure. Yet he includes his recipe for growing lotus flowers that “will be only the size of a wine cup, while the leaves will be about the size of a bowl, very cute and beautiful to look at.” Presumably, such flowers would adorn suitably-sized bonsai gardens or miniature landscapes with mountain-shaped stone.

To my north, I happen upon these bowing lotus seeds, nodding above the surface of the pond, preparing to keep their promise, to begin their dignified, almost smug, subterranean journey that will bring Spring’s blossoms. The picture was taken in Pasadena California on the eve of the New Year's Day Rose Parade. Sidewalks blossomed with people staking out either side of Colorado Avenue, snug in their lawn chairs and quilted coats. For one night a year, this street's sidewalks are inhabited - from one year into the next. This night, the population is not exactly the street people one typically finds in urban winter landscapes.

A few days later I traveled in the other direction. To my south, I see poverty and blight in my usually invisible neighbors. The border crossing is about 20 miles from my house. The streets are alive with life, color, smells of chorizo, taco stands, hot peppers and steaming corn tortillas. We went to buy prescription heart medication for an uninsured person at a cost less than the $10 co-pay I pay for mine.

This is the Mexican side's view at the border crossing between Tecate, Mexico, and Tecate, California. If not precisely impregnable, it clearly conveys that poor people are no longer welcome to California. They once were. The colors of the dry winter landscape are parched like the stalks of the lotus, if somewhat lacking in somber grace, these two pictures mark the stark border between the rich and the poor.

Here in rural San Diego, I stand at the threshold separating Winter from Spring. I stand at the beginning of the last year of the first decade of the new millennium. Here I pause. Whether I use lotus as a myth, a food or medicine, or as an inspiration, I want to find in the lotus an appreciation of all the stages of life, not merely youth. I want to find for rich and for poor, that we pay attention this year to the public mood and continue to hope for tolerance and compassion instead of hate and fear. My hope for 2010 is that I wait a bit longer before starting on about how this year has been a rough one for me. The year feels new, pure and ready to promise renewal.

Goodbye 2009

“With immediacy and intensity, smell activates memory, allowing our minds to travel freely in time.”
- Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

Went outside yesterday to say goodbye to the garden in winter. It’s so messy that at least it reminds me how industriously I once spent afternoons, and how swiftly nature moves to erase traces of the gardener. I pruned the wisteria alba on the leaning arbor. I managed to clean up the poorly swept patio area of an entire trash-can of pine needles, fallen leaves and other deadfall. The guys who come by every other Friday to blow away such detritus manage to simply blow it into corners where it accumulates – the closest I get to snow drifts in So Cal. (The picture is at the Chinese Garden in Huntington Gardens, Pasadena, CA. Taken on 12/31/09)

So, raking, then light watering in the last of the veggie garden and awoke the smells of the last survivors as well as those of the slow decay and return to dust that this season bring. There are no ants working industriously, no grasshoppers fiddling indolently, no bees survive to sip water from the shallow basins. Just me and the smells of a slumbering garden. Me and the pink flamingo, in its vanity managing to color-coordinate with the final mums.

Winter Solstice Letter

I really create everything I do from the heart.
Kenny G

Well, it’s that time of year again, when we send our family update to all our friends (except the illiterate, i.e. most of them).

It’s been a good year in our household, and nobody I’m related to slept with Tiger Woods (that I know of). We even re-decorated the living room this year. Billy Bob found some perfectly good freeway furniture that's pretty-much level and we tried to fix the smell of the couch by dousing it with a bottle of fabric deodorant. When that didn’t work, Ma poured some Wal*Mart brand Pine-sol on the cushions and hung them on the clothes line strung between the old refrigerator and Grandpa’s rusty old Ford in the backyard for a couple of weeks. Once dry, the cushions worked fine, and once we all got used to it, we don’t mind the crunchy sound the cushions make when you sit on them. It smells like a forest. As an extra bonus, we found that even Grandma smells better after spending a day sitting on the couch. The Pine-sol seems to overcome Grandma’s natural smell better than putting slices of Spam in the pockets of her apron did when we tried that last summer during the heat wave.

You all may have caught the episode of Worlds Best Car Chases that featured brother Lou Bob. You can see how much weight he lost the last time he was in jail, because it only took two cops to bring him down and his arms even stretched over his belly far enough for two sets of handcuffs to secure him. And once he stops being on the crack, he’s pretty nice most of the time, not like in the TV show where he’s cussing and whatnot.

Mabel Bob has finally finished beauty school after six grueling years, but is having a bit of trouble getting a job. She told Ma she thinks it because her front tooth is a bit loose and she’d probably get a job if only she had dentures. So I loaned her my upper plate for an interview last week, but then she blamed the yellow tobacco stains for their decision not to hire her. Sometimes, it seems like you can never please Mabel Bob. Let’s hope she gets a job soon, because we can’t collect on her as a dependent child much longer since she’s almost 40, and the profits from Pa’s still aren’t as high as they used to be, probably because the rotten potatoes he’s using don’t impart the velvet palate or crisp finish of hooch made with good potatoes.

That dog with three legs what used to live with us has finally moved on. We told Grandma the dog crossed the rainbow bridge, but there’s a good chance she saw when the tractor hit it one day because we park her powered scooter on the front porch most days so when she spits tobacco juice, it don’t stain the living room carpet. Next time we redecorate, we’ll find a brown rug at the dump instead of a pastel-colored one like we got now that’s kinda brown shag flattened into a lovely paisley pattern made by all them tobacco stains. We think it was once a pale ivory, but Mabel Bob insists she remembers it was pink because she lost her bus pass once and remembers it was the same pink color as the shag rug used to be because she spent a whole afternoon combing the rug with a fork looking for the lost bus pass. In vain as it turns out, but Grandma says what don’t kill you makes you madder, so that might explain why Mabel Bob is mad so much. That, or she’s going through the change, you know.

You might remember how tough that was when Ma went through the change in 2004. That was the year she killed a hobo with a shovel, but we luckily won that case on self defense because Cousin Willie Bob convinced the jury Ma’s cuts and bruises were signs of self defense rather than a result of her run-in with that rabid badger who cornered her in the outhouse the day before the hobo passed. And good news, Ma still has the asthma but the scabies have almost cleared up now that
she don’t volunteer down at the saloon no more.

Merry Xmas from our house to yours, and may your hooch be made with good potatoes, your dreams not be filled with raging zombies, and your freeway furniture not smell too much like something died on it and got left there for a good long spell.

Garden of Dreams

"We live in the city of dreams
We drive on the highway of fire
If we awake and it gone
Remember this my favorite son."
- Talking Heads, City of Dreams

My back yard is totally like an abandoned city, slowly decaying back in to desert. We’ve had two good rain storms over the past week or so. Heavy rain, accompanied by strong gusts of wind from the south, have cleaned up years of dried shedding bark from the eucalyptus trees, dead branches, pine needles and small boughs, and other fallen clutter. All of that is now on the ground, covering great swaths of driveway and making it difficult to drag the trash cans out to the street.

The shade cloth over the patio immediately outside my window has been hanging like a shower curtain blocking the door, one side having been blown down to the ground while the other side is still connected to the overhead guy wire.

I may no longer be able to swing a shovel hard enough to kill a hobo, but I’m still in whatever category it is that can take down the already-half-removed shade cover. That's my job today, while the sun is shining. My weeping cherry will probably be cooked next summer without the meager shade cover overhead, but it’s probably time for me to accept the reality that I live in a desert. I did manage to get some lovely red basil, mostly gone to seed. I clipped some of the seeds to save, but couldn’t resist putting them in a stark arrangement to dry.

The silver lining is that the view and the mess encourages me to stay inside. Our Xmas wrapping theme this year is very green. I do all my shopping using the internets. Everything is wrapped in the mailing box or envelop it arrived in, or in brown packing paper from another box. Once corner of the living room looks like a scene from my new favorite reality show “Hoarders” which features pathologically disturbed people who live amid the junk they slowly bury themselves in. Watching this show gives me that horrible sense people get from looking at the devastation caused by a train wreck: what sickos these hoarders are, and how positively normal my own domestic mess is.

Besides, while I’m inside, I can look at pictures of the yard in better seasons past, remember it like a garden of dreams.

Roasted Pepper Saffron Pasta Sauce

I made some roasted peppers and saffron pasta sauce. Sweet yellow bells and a few bright sweet red bells. I amped up the garlic and added a large shallot. I can show you the golden roasted peppers before blending, and the glittering golden sauce they made, but I can only describe the smell. There’s something about roasting vegetable in the oven on a dingy chilly day. As the fragrance builds, I acquire this sort of olfactory superpower and feel the spicy sweet fragrances through my skin. Well, maybe not quite so ethereal, but certainly mouth-watering.

The basic recipe is by Andrea Chesman, from “The Roasted Vegetable.” (My modifications are in parentheses.) I would call it Saffron Roasted Pepper Pasta Sauce, but she calls it:

Saffron Pasta with Roasted Peppers
(serves 4 – 6)

4 yellow bell peppers
2 red bell peppers
(2 stunted but lovely sweet purple peppers from the Veggie Garden)
2 garlic cloves, peeled but left whole (WTF? Clearly more garlic is required) (6 fat cloves, sliced into chips)
(1 large shallot, sliced and separated into rings)
(1 T olive oil, in which to soak the shallot and garlic and add to the red pepper roasting pan for the final 10 minutes of red pepper roasting.)
1 cup high-quality neutral-tasting chicken or vegetable broth (I used organic chicken)
Generous pinch of saffron threads, crumbled (I used more than J would have)
1 cup half-and-half
1 pound linguine or rotini (I used egg noodles)
¼ cup chopped fresh basil leaves (I cut red basil and Thai basil in chiffonade)
salt and freshly ground black pepper
A few springs fresh basil, for garnish (All I had was lovely purple Thai basil which added to the bright color of this amazing sauce)

1. Preheat the broiler. Lightly oil a rimmed baking sheet (I had only a 4-pepper sized ceramic dish that would fit, so I did the yellows first, then the red together with the garlic and onion)
2. Place the bell peppers on the baking sheet and space between them. Broil 4 inches from the heat for 15 to 20 minutes, until charred all over, turning several times. (I did 5 minutes on each of 4 sides, turning in between. This is where the smell first gets you.)

3. Place the (broiled) peppers in a covered bowl, plastic bag (yuck), or paper bag. Seal and let steam for about 10 minutes to loosen the skins.
4. Cut slits in the peppers and drain briefly into a small bowl to catch any juices. Scrape or peel the skins and discard. Scrape and discard the seeds and membranes.
5. Chop the yellow peppers. Combine them in a food processor or blender with the garlic and pepper juices. Process until finely chopped. Add the broth and wine and process to make a smooth puree. Transfer to a saucepan and add the saffron and the half-and-half. Heat gently over medium heat, stirring occasionally.
6. Cut the red peppers into thin, 1 ½-inch-long strips.
7. Cook the pasta in plenty of boiling salted water until al dente. Drain well.

8. Transfer the pasta to a large serving bowl. Add the saffron sauce, red pepper strips, and chopped basil. Toss to combine. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve at once, garnished with the basil sprigs.

Next time, I plan to try to can the sauce (excluding the half-and-half) but including the chopped red peppers and garlic/shallot mix. That way, when I open the canned sauce later, all I will have to do is heat and add the half-and-half and some fresh basil, and make my own egg noodles.

Rain, dammit!

“And now, hark at the rain,
Windless and light,
Half a kiss, half a tear,
Saying good-night.”

- Edward Thomas, Sowing

The rain is coming. Not yet, but soon. The bird feeders are dry and filled to their brims yesterday, already half full. Before the rain, I have to give everybody a drink of water (there’s no such thing as a gentle “soak”) so the ground softens enough to open and drink when the rains finally arrive. If I don’t gently hand-water a bit first, the first rain just makes the surface of the dry dust damp. The first water to fall from the sky rolls off my dry yard like a duck’s back, right down the storm drains.

So I go outside to water before it rains. The birds resentfully quit the bird feeders at my approach. Some of them are too fat to stand on the dainty feeders and, like the plump morning doves (aka, hobo chicken) who are content to forage on the ground below the feeders. The wren pictured here is actually too obese to feed from the hanging feeders . The morning doves also waddle around, sorting through the sunflower hulls for any dropped seeds.

In early spring rains, the seeds who have escaped the birds begin to sprout. I’ve sometimes managed to transplant the fragile sprouts into a sunnier spots where they survive and prosper. I’ve never had much luck buying sunflower seeds and attempting to cultivate real live sunflowers. Which is a shame, because I love sunflowers. Big, gaudy, and vulgar like their humble beginnings as subsistence food for poor farmers. Now the darlings of the Farmers’ Markets, the icon of the Art Nouveau which was beginning to fade and be eclipsed by Art Deco about 100 years ago. I insist that I liked sunflowers when I was poor, before they became trendy and sustainable and green and junk.

Some day, I will stumble my way into the perfect combination of sun, soil and rare rain to cultivate wildly successful sunflowers. My timing is also probably off, a sad metaphor for my gardening skills in general. I am the Almost Gardener, who may insist on not remembering all the right botanical names, but I garden for love and for physical and mental therapy, and probably enjoy it all the more because it relives me of my obsessive need to name what I see.

But someday, I will grow sunflowers deliberately. Meanwhile, my yard is overrun and run amok with mint: the perfect barometer of my measure of care in the yard. I practice gardening like a clinical drug trial doing the LD50 phase. This means the dose at which 50% of the patients die. I probably am doing better than 50-50 these days, but it was not always so.

One day, I will all arrive at the exact right time and deliver the exact right dose of all the ingredients needed to grow monster sunflowers. But first, let’s have some rain, dammit!

Xmas Shopping

“He realized now that to be afraid of this death he was staring at with animal terror meant to be afraid of life. Fear of dying justified a limitless attachment to what is alive in man. And all those who had not made the gestures necessary to live their lives, all those who feared and exalted impotence – they were afraid of death because of the sanction it gave to a life in which they had not been involved. They had not lived enough, never having lived at all. And death was a kind of gesture, forever withholding water from the traveler vainly seeking to slake his thirst. But for others, it was the fatal and tender gesture that erases and denies, smiling at gratitude as at rebellion.”
- Albert Camus. A Happy Death

Did some xmas cybershopping till I didn’t exactly drop, since I shop sitting down. Boy my butt is tired. And I’m a super cypershopper. I like, made a macro of my Visa card number. I use a Visa because when you select the type of credit card to use, Visa is usually listed at the top of the drop-down list. I’m listening to Hey Sinner Man, by the Long Beach Children’s Choir. Pretty xmasy, eh?

I did go outside briefly to loosen up my wrists and avoid fatigue. I was confronted by the glittering eyes of the tiny stone frog at the right of the mushroom. The yard is in it’s neglected minimalist pallet that would be conjured by Basho – stark monochrome of bright light against dark shadow.

There is nothing more likely to cause cognitive dissonance than my afternoon shopping on line, followed by than a walk in the dry warm air as it moseys around and then settles silently on the yard like a cat who circles around in your lap before finding the perfect configuration for sleeping.

Ahhhh, another day in the life of a non-working retiree with good health insurance.

All it would take to make my life perfect would be a snow-ball martini with some actual coconut on the rim. Godiva white chocolate liquor? Check. Coconut vodka? Check? Kalua? Check. In lieu of caramel sauce, I used a splash of butterscotch liquor the other night and it worked.

Like I see in the mirror on the mornings I’ve slept in my cat t-shirt: efil si doog.

Where Credit is Due

"If your grad school gives you a full ride you can easily afford to go. Or if you can afford to pay for your schooling yourself with money left over. Or if you don't want children and are completely indifferent to material considerations. A rule of thumb is that you can afford to go to grad school if you can afford to spend an equivalent amount of time lying on the beach."
Can I afford a PhD?

Recently, there have been a number of student and labor actions, aka “strikes”, at the University where I have a young relative now in law school. He has posted here and here some perceptive and insightful reflections on these strikes, and on some of the actions taken by “The Regents of the University of California” and the administration at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), Law Schook, aka “Boalt”. The irony that UCB is the founding member of the Free Speech Movement from way back in my own college days.

His undergraduate professors and his graduate professors were able to attend the University of California in the 60’s and graduate without any debt, and get a good job in the academy or the still shiny new corporate world. In contrast, Laz graduated with a PhD in 2009 and a debt of >$30k, as did his spouse with her own $30k school loans. Through hard word during and between academic responsibilities, they managed to buy a house when the market was at the top of its game, back before the Bush Crash of 2008. Having graduated without job prospects last May, they moved to Berkeley. Being prudent, they put their house on the sale and rental market more than a year before their anticipated move. It has not sold or rented to date, partly due to professional incompetence of real estate and property experts and partly to the global financial meltdown. They are flat broke.

Half the student loans come due next month. Some people look at their scholarly pursuits as if they are selfish in not procreating and consuming. What if these people admitted how easy they had it compared to this generation? What if we gave them affordable, good healthcare now, while they are in the prime of their lives and working harder than we did with less to show for it?

In their exceptional dedication and determination, my relatives in the same cohort as Laz have sacrificed material wealth in favor of what they consider a more worthwhile goal: to make the world a better place. Some have decided to forgoe adding to the weight of the world by making little copies of themselves to overdress and spoil. Others - in their wisdom and compassion drawn from a life experience in much harder times than we boomers ever had - have insisting on taking a course that meaningful to them: fostering a sound and compassionate community. I think that’s a better choice than my generation’s own self-absorbed insistence on our inalienable right to our own individual happiness.

They may fail. Just like the Hippies failed to change the world when we were young. They may also succeed. You’d think we’d all be looking for a better world, no matter who got the credit.