9.25.2006

Quick Guacamole

My newest hobby has become random food projects, and my most recent discovery was guacamole. My buddy Andrew works in produce at the Wild Oats I work at, and this is his recipe:

Start with 3 avocados, 1 lime, 10 sprigs of cilantro, 1 tomato, 1 jalapeno, 1 red onion, salt, pepper, and cumin (optional).



Slice the cilantro to preferred size (I like big chunks of everything).



Squeeze the juice of one lime



Add avocados by cutting them in half, then into squares within the skin. This makes it much easier to scoop out the meat.




Cut the tomato in half, squeezing just the juice of one half, and then cut as many chunks from the other (or both) into the mixture as preferred.



This recipe calls for 1/2 of one red onion, diced. I used the whole onion (and left the chunks big).


Dice the jalapeno into the bowl, as much as you're willing to take. I recommend the whole thing.

Using a fork, begin to mash all the ingredients together. Add salt and pepper to taste. I think its best when there are still chunks of avocado left. If all goes well you should get something like this.



And the final product. Enjoy!

9.21.2006

The Monster

I’m sitting on the edge of a bank. A bank of knee-high, dry grass swaying in the twilight breeze. The moon is now the brightest object in the sky, an observation my eyes learned from photography. I stare at a sea of houses, all huge, walled-in conglomerates. Fear drives up fences and stone walls, street lights and motion sensors that give an alerting “beep” upon entry and exit. Fear drives the monster that is ‘comfortable’ living, or the misconception of it. Comfort is everywhere, in the woods, on an office chair, in a living room floor. It doesn’t discriminate, and doesn’t cost money. A feeling of equanimity, the passive ability to sit on the edge of a bank. More so the ability to feel the same on the edge of a bank as on the edge of a cliff. The edge of picnic table at a family reunion. The edge of sleep.

Comfort works like magnetism. My body seeks comfortable spots as my eyes seek bright spots. I occasionally find myself on a soft couch staring at a light bulb. The kind of couch that swallows you whole. Now that I have acquired this ability, the ability of comfort, the next step is to spread it. Like a wildfire on a bank of dry grass. Traveling down, stretching across the sea of houses, turning off televisions and turning on reading lights. Knocking over walls and planting flowers. Turning off street lights, and silencing beeps. The world sleeps better when it is dark and silent. When words are liberation, not a two-dimensional siege of sound and light. I sleep better when the world sleeps better.

Off in the distance the remains of an orchard can still be seen. Oranges, real fruit grown under watchful care, picked with delicious anticipation and eaten with a simple satisfaction. Fruitful trees are comfortable trees. No walls to stop the summer breeze, plenty of sun and just enough moon. The monster, fear-driven and misconceived, is hungry though. Orchards, large hills, dry grass. Nothing escapes it’s appetite. Even stars are a source of food for the monster; its eyes require space hitherto saved for the night sky. It devoured all the porches in front of houses. Porches inspire conversation, sharing, communion. A few rebels can be spotted sitting on the steps of their front door, but those few grow fewer fast.

Refrigerated cubicles of fear, far as the eye can see. I feel my brow wrinkle involuntarily at the sight, but I can’t look away. The monster has a disconcerting beauty at night. An accidental camouflage. During the day I feel better knowing its ugly head can’t hide under the cloak of darkness, and again my distaste has justification. I want to take all the monster’s victims camping. I want them to drink water from the ground, and sleep on a bed of pine needles. I want them to feel respect for the Earth they make their home on. I want this because it is what I have, and strive to improve upon. I search for a great respect for the bed I make at night, the stars that I muse upon, the mountains that frame the sky. Everyday the monster is stricken, a person sees something they haven’t seen before, a mountain top, a white cap on a lake, the look in a person’s eyes after you kiss them. As of late, the monster is winning and has won many battles, with a greater appetite after each victory. But I have faith in nature; in it’s inherent beauty and its passive triumph. The buildings of Japan’s islands claw at mountains, but the mountains laugh gleefully and without any effort trounce any insurrection. Maybe my born-in attraction to mountains is their invincibility. My comfort peaks at the top of a mountain, and my respect grows evermore when I can climb, be near, or take pictures of mountains. Of the monster’s enemy. Of life.

People who sleep with the lights on don’t want to remember their dreams.

9.16.2006

Looking Back

I ran into some of my old writing.. Here is one of the funnier examples.


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Having been a subscriber to “Car and Driver” for four years, I was not the least bit surprised to see Brock Yates botch another one of his columns, but this time he did it right out of the gate by producing one of the most atrocious run-on sentences ever to disgrace the otherwise unsoiled pages of “Car and Driver,” so you can understand my frustration with trying to read something so long and annoying, it just seems to keep going on forever getting bigger and bigger by the word. Like his ego. My problem is less Brock Yates’s views, and more the way he portrays them. Okay it is his views, too. I feel like every word on the page is being shouted at me, and I am not one to be shouted at. I tend to shout back.

In his article “Oh, how the mighty have fallen (and it ain’t over),” Brock Yates attempts to make a pity case for the three largest auto-manufacturers in the U.S. by slathering his filthy bias in every direction. To follow up his catastrophe of an opening paragraph, he insultingly compares the decline of the U.S. auto industry to the 9/11 disaster. But he can’t stop there, he goes on to label Hispanic and the youth buyers as people who prefer “rice-burners,” which I suppose means anything not made in the United States.

Yates’s whiny solution to this potential “doomsday” is so simplistic only he could have thought of it: “If any vestige of the American automobile industry is to survive, it must involve state-of-the-art vehicles that are not equal to but surpass the best imports…” I hope that three of the most successful companies in the history of the world have already thought of that. And finally he put the icing on the cake. He somehow weasels a plug for his wife’s book, a story about her son’s death, into the last paragraphs. It’s hard for me to have sympathy for Yates and his family after he insulted thousands of other American families within the first 100 words of his article.

Again, another column of “Car and Driver” has been wasted on the garbage typical of Brock Yates’s style. His pseudo-patriotism becomes a sham when contrasted with his ability to compare the worst attack in American history to Ford’s stock value. What do you expect from a person who has the ability to guiltlessly slander minorities and their buying habits? I took one good thing from this article, and that is the solace in knowing that if Brock Yates can spill his ink on the sacred pages of “Car and Driver” than I most definitely have a shot at doing the same.