It's shaping up nicely for me over on the Lesbian isle. I would say that my domestic transquillity is now an accomplished fact. We cook or bake every day, be it pies, stews, roasts, pizzas, elaborate salads, and so on, asymptotically to the limits of culinary experience. And, as my scribbles have indicated, I have also reinvented myself as a brewer. My first batch was not so hot (too watery), but the second batch, a dark, hoppy ale, is on its way to solid drinkability. I hope one day to become one of these hyphenated brewers you hear so much about. Like Sam Adams, the man they call the Brewer-Patriot. Or John McCain's wife, who has profited so handsomely off the Budweiser distribution concession that she has earned the title, at least in my book, of Brewess-Parasite. But I, who cannot aspire to anything so lofty as patriotism or parasitism--abstracting for a moment from the fact that in our corroded national reality, these two noble conditions are nearly one and the same--would settle for a more junior hyphenated title. Something like Brewer-Translator, Brewer-Scribbler, or Brewer-Mensch. Suggestions are welcome, so long as they originate not in the fingertips of patriots or parasites.
Also doing a fair bit of running along the high cliffside road overlooking the sea to the west of town (Plomari, in case you're interested in Google-Earthing it, or in stopping by: Just ask for the American living with the teacher). There's a lot of relief on the run, a lot of horsepower required. Some days are hell, others a triumph.
So far I've only made it into the sea once, but the beauty of the swim merits canonization in the hallowed annals of this url. On Sunday we had the idea to sleep on a beach under the stars. Acting on the idea, we drove to a little spit of land in the SW corner of our section of the island that we had zeroed in on almost at random. We parked our car about 1 km away from the path down to the beach in order to mislead putative miscreants, then strapped on our boots and went for it. First down a pebbly trail, then over surf boulders and briny pools until we came within view of what looked like an idyllic little postage-stamp sized beach not more than 150 yards away. Those 150 yards, of course, were made up of impassable boulders and open water. To get there we were forced to retrace steps, scramble up a decaying cliffside, and then squirm along the interstice between an apparantly abandoned naval radar station and the lip of the crumbling scree slope overlooking the boulders that had blocked our way. The radar station may have been abandoned by the technicians and cadets who once managed it, but the barbed wire was still faithfully performing its repellant service. Our steps quite literally were a dance through its tangled skein. After braving this and some thick, thorny thickets for a few hundreds of yards, there was a little gully leading down to the beach. I cut some gnarled sprigs of wild thyme as we clambered down. The beach was lovely, lovely, full of round stones and driftwood and little shell fragments. The only human befoulment there was sea wrack, some of it of the Egyptian variety, floated up on currents for many hundreds of miles. And ah! the swim: As soon as we'd set our things down, we swam, floating on the bracing current as the setting sun gilded the little reefs of water marching all the way to the horizon. We managed about 15 minutes in the water, which is not quite comfortable so early in the season.
Back on the beach, I used my sandal to level a patch of ground hard by a boulder for our sleeping site, then scrambled back up the hill to look for firewood beyond what the tides had brought. I was duly rewarded by an olive tree, long dead and uprooted, which I hauled on for dear life to negotiate over the hump, down the slope, across the stones. We had a fire, a meal, ad hoc sangria, gazed up at the stars, and slept deeply.
Today in Athens we took care of an item that has been fouling my to do list with its incompletion for far too long: We headed to a neighborhood of Pakistani immigrants and purchased spices in bulk. Now we will be able to provide the coriander and garam masala and whatever else the recipes I want to cook call for.
Penultimately: I continue or at least have resumed writing at a rate that I fancy satisfies the temporal minimum if one is to refer to oneself as a writer. It is going swimmingly, all things considered, and I should soon have an update on the Justice story. It is a story with a point, obviously, and I hope that at least some of my few readers will have the patience and the Quixoticness of spirit to consider the point, if not to translate it into our corroded reality--that pesky son of a bitch is always rearing his behorned head--for that would be to sacrifice the limited parcel of freedom granted you by the masters and minions of the state.
Finally: Many of you will have wondered if it is the case that my politics have taken a definitive turn toward radicalism over the past year. Let me assure you that it is so. I consider it shameful to shirk the truth, of which there is only one, and am facing it full-on and full-up, like a man. The truth, of course, is a metastasizing landscape of bleakest horrors. Capitalist and military elites are experiencing what can only be described as an orgiastic consolidation of their power over the rest of us. The Pentagon and its legions of citizen accomplices (does that include you? i know it includes me, inasmuch as I pay taxes to the militarist state, and oh how I am paying) are carrying off acts of unfathomable evil in broad daylight without so much as a whiff of protest from the groveling media or our idiot citizenry. Truth is avoided like the plague. "Progress" and "hope" have been bled of all meaning by the master class of parasites, and stand there as withered husks for the untutored masses to worship as evil proceeds unabated. The theoretical foundations for martial law--yes, my friends, for dictatorship--are all right there, written into the law. And who will fight for their rights? War in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, war in Pakistan: Who will stand up and fight for what is right? War on the laboring class at home, war on the unwashed masses with the grave misfortune of requiring medical care in America while not being a part of the ruling class, and, portentiously, complete and utter war on consciousness and on the human soul itself by the gibbering legions of intellectual and media mercenaries. Who will stand up for what is right? Who?
No comments:
Post a Comment