I wasn’t really enthralled by the Chinese showboating these last few weeks. It all seemed like a distraction from the world-as-know-it-is. All this talk about the games being “about the athletes” is bullshit too, because there is clearly a lot of national ego on the line in any of these games, else we could scrap the ridiculous opening and closing ceremonies and just show contests of physical ability.

So Phelps cleaned up. I don’t mean to rain on his parade—I certainly can’t do what he does. (Hell, I can’t even swim.) But think on this for a moment. You know he will be the darling of a lot of companies who want to put his name and image on their goods. And you can bet that some of that will be made in China at the sorts of factories and sweatshops that China would like you to not see in full disclosure. You know, the ones where people work 7 days a week and 12 or 14 hours a day, and where people live in factory dorms and are escorted to work each day by security goons, and back again to their cramped rooms where they are responsible for paying for their own utilities back to the factory.

How much of what we buy in our fervor for the games will only make the situation worse? Isn’t that the contradiction of our age? I can’t help but think of how China is getting rich off our inability to shut off the endless flow from our wallets. Well, someone is getting rich, while the workers who prop up that whole system are experiencing their version of what our nation experienced a century ago when we struggled to figure out how to industrialize, and the industrial world had to in fact figure out how to make citizens into consumers in order to actually consume and use the things which the industrial process was now capable of making. Our growing pains included fights for union representation and social justice concomitant with that. It included the fight for an 8 hour work day and weekends. Basically, it fought for human dignity in the face of the growing power of the Machine.

But China itself seems to be a machine. And the Olympic games were the user-friendly front end of it, but what lurks beneath?

The mournful elegy, molto adagio
Speaking out of the deepest grief and confusion
Too sad for words, the strings must weep in their stead
The bittersweet taste of Pyhrric victory
The heave and sigh of life itself
Deeper now, higher now, and back around
A slow marching band playing almost silently until the fortissimo-forte
Teetering at the crest of the ethereal arch
A pregnant, breathless pause—
Suspending our disbelief that we are still alive
The blood begins to flow once more; the spine tingles
A sigh and a glimmer of hope to keep going
We can begin our climb back down the mountain of our own devising
The tears seep from places within, hitherto unknown
Drawn out by vibrating strings of mysterious power and grace
Driven by horsehair and the enigma of life

I don’t know what it is, but in my little corner of the food industry, there are a great many southpaw lefties like myself. Cook and warehouser alike, there are a goodly number of us. I have never seen more lefties in my daily comings and goings. Maybe it is the creative aspect of food and cooking that attracts the right-brained among us. Dunno what it is, but it is all right with my soul.

So this week, I was dispatched to deliver a pound of thyme to Croce’s restaurant. It was delivered in a BOX of all things! Imagine that, a BOX! Lordy, what is the world coming to?

Yawn. I saw four Lamborghini cars today. Either that or I saw one black one and a yellow one on three occasions in different parts of town. In 1985, I would have shot a load at the sight of such a thing. Apparently, some people still have the same response, or the closest response allowable in public. It seems that 40-something guys can’t refrain from gawking and taking pictures. It’s just a friggin’ car, and one that can’t do much but look good and go just as slow as the rest of us in bad traffic! As for me, they are rather too prevalent and have lost their gimmicky charm. I’d rather have my old truck. At least it has space for a backpack.

Example two is those medium duty trucks you see that only exist to be roving billboards. I think it is ludicrous for those things to be clogging our roads while performing no actual useful work—i.e., not actually carrying anything or anyone. Yet I see more and more of them, and often at the most crowded spaces—Gaslamp, beaches, Coronado, etc.—where most drivers are already captive to begin with. Gas prices must not be high enough yet to eliminate this useless shit. Can you think of anything more useless on the roads, burning up gas that won’t ever come back? Or, even if those trucks were solar powered, their presence alone still clogs the road and causes more traffic to sit idle. More than a few times, these ad trucks have been distracting for me. They are big, after all. They are designed to draw your attention. The laws in this state can dictate you need a hands free cell phone to avoid distractions, but these trucks are free to roam and lure attention with not only their sheer size, but with their more and more elaborate presentations: the types with three images on rotating triangular columns; the diorama box type with stuff inside a clear box enclosure; or, another one based on that design, but with vinyl wrapped all around box with scrolling images in the windows. There are a few insurance companies that use these things. I wonder how many accidents result from the distractions these trucks create. Hmmm. And should one buy insurance from one of the companies that uses them? Isn’t that like the doctor poisoning the patient so he needs a doctor?

Here is how I got to and from church today. The church is about 15 miles away and I didn’t want to drive, since that is all I do all week anyway. I was trying to improve upon a similar trip back in January, but planned to use my bike and trolley. The universe had other plans for me.

1. At about 8:30 I went for my bike in the garage and pumped up the tires. One of the valve stems broke clean off, so that sort of put the kibbosh on the ridable portion of my journey to the trolley station and then from the station to the church.
2. Then I saw that I would have time to catch the bus that is about a block from my house, and recalled that on this same trip several months ago, the bus would leave about 8:40. I hustled on down the street but waited just a few minutes for a bus that seemed to have come and gone already.
3. The bus stop was at a gas station so I asked some middle aged fellow if he could give me a lift to the trolley station, and he did. That was his good deed for the day. I guess he saw no fault with helping a guy get to church, while I was carrying a well-thumbed 45 year old copy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics. (The thumbing was from the previous owner, Lee Van Ham.)
4. The trolley arrived shortly after this Steve fellow dropped me off. A few minutes more delay would have thrown this trip off, or pressed me to drive my truck. I was about to get on the trolley when I decided to get a bit resourceful at the end of the journey so I called Curtis, the pastor emeritus of the church and with whom I have played in a fellowship band. He agreed to pick me up at the station, though I wasn’t certain how to describe the best meeting place. I sort of regretted waiting and not calling him back, particularly since he is rather older (70 something) and I didn’t have a cell number of his and I didn’t even remember what he was driving anyway!
5. The ride was maybe a half hour or so, and I got a few pages of reading done.
6. I walked to the intersection where we talked about and waited. Finally I saw him and his wife but they turned and went to one end of the trolley complex and emerged a short while later after realizing that wasn’t going to help. Then they drove down right past me, even stopping at the light in front of me, but with a car blocking our line of sight, they went with the green light all the way to the other end of the trolley complex, and then I started wondering if maybe they’d give up and drive to church, up the hill, about 3/4 mile away. It was now about 9:45… Fortunately, I decided to huff it on down the road—a rather long block—and was almost in front of them before they saw me, but I guess they knew to wait there. I was out of breath when I got in but told them the story thus far… already I was joking that it “took a village” to pull this one off.
7. The service was great, and the theme was some of the best parables—the yeast, the pearl, the mustard seed. The people were great and even after several months of not attending that church, I was greeted as if it was only a week ago we had last seen each other. (My approach to churchgoing is quite in-the-moment now and the gas prices have influenced me of late, though really it depends more on how Sunday fits into my weekly work schedule and the energy left after all that effort.) Oftentimes, I do lunch with a group of folks who have been nice enough to include me in their crew, so today was no exception, and the ride to the restaurant and subsequently to the trolley station was forthcoming for the asking. They are a chatty bunch and know each other from a church they had to close up, and stuck together even as they migrated to this new church. There are many other friends they talk about—people whom I don’t know—but everyone has a good time trading notes on how life is, and it adds a nice community dimension to my experience at the church. But the lunches go a bit long, particularly on a couple occasions when I was beholden to them for a ride. After lunch, one of the folks pulled out a big tray of brownies and we munched on that in the parking lot.
8. I got to the trolley. It was not very far from the restaurant, but on a hot and humid day like today, it was far enough, and the ride was welcome. At about 2:40 I was on my way. I called Kelli and asked for a ride back home from the station, but by the end, decided I’d walk and maybe surprise Kelli.
9. So I walked, and without even thinking of the huge brownie I had already, I stopped in at the donut shop and got a couple fat and sugar pills and munched on the way back. Ultimately, all this took long enough that Kelli called and begged to know where I was, and I told her I was just a few blocks away. So much for the surprise. It was hot out and I sort of wish I had just taken the ride home but was pleased with my seat-of-the-pants trip to church today, and thought better of it, and kept walking.

Finally I got home, took a shower and with the sugar crash on its way, I took a nice 3 hour nap on my newer couch, with the fan blowing across me. It was good. Then I was able to reflect on my meandering course to church and back. Sure, I could have driven, but today I got some exercise, met a stranger, used public transportation, carpooled with some friends, had some lunch, and got more exercise (while sabotaging it with donuts, d’oh!) and all in all had a good day. All this adventure was had for $5 in transportation which is slightly less than what it would take to drive my truck, and also for the cost of lunch and poison pills.

When we got to our house, the yard was dingy and mostly grown over with grass and weeds. Most of it still is like that, except for our precious little garden which is now in its second season. Last year we were a bit more careful about what was planted. We picked a range of things to try out but it was all picked out to the last plant or seedling. As we went, we fed the compost bin and kept a pretty good balance and got some nice black loam from the city-supplied black igloo. Only a bit of it went back to the garden. It took a good long time to actually fill it up so I was hesitant to dig any of the decayed material out. It would cook better if it was left to fill and decay, and the summer heat would accelerate that process.

Then I got the gig as veggie monger, and have brought home a lot of veggies not only to eat but I’ve captured some waste product and fed it to the bin. All in all, there are a great many types of veggies and fruits which have joined the delightful decaying heap.

Usually, the idea is to keep the mix in balance between carbon and nitrogen sources, or the balance between the living and the dead, the newly picked stuff and the dried out stuff like sawdust, cardboard, and so forth. I think Kelli jumped the gun and spread some of it before it was hot enough for long enough to cook out the seeds. The stuff was certainly black, but I guess it would need to have been left to cook for a few months in order to cook the seeds. Anyhow, some of this stuff got turned into the garden soil in a few places—not uniformly because of the existing plants and their roots—and within a few days, we began seeing the um, fruits of our mistake.

That is, if you can call free plants “mistakes.” What we got was a whole bunch of tomato plants that started cropping up just where the compost was prematurely mixed into the land. How many varieties of tomatoes have I brought home either to eat or to feed the bin? I have no idea, but there were some hardy seeds in there that took advantage of the extra rich soil! Now our garden has a number of tomato plants scattered about and though we’ve dug out many that would be far too densely clustered, there are way more tomato plants than the two we ever planted this year! We don’t know which of the new ones will turn up what sort of fruit, though one is looking like it is turning up some green heirloom type. Our intended plants are Romas, and little tiny things at that. But I guess we need not worry about our tomato supply this summer. We may need to make new friends in order to give them away!

In a slightly more restrained way, there are some eager volunteer pepper plants which are cropping up in just as random a fashion. A short couple steps away there turned up a whole bunch of corn plants that had to be thinned. The earlier, intended corn was not any good so we composted that and apparently some of that wasn’t cooked well either so it was more than happy to take root. Kelli has dubbed the region “chaos corner” as the new volunteers blur the lines of the old rank-and-file layout of the original planting. Tomatoes and peppers are now mingling among rosemary, basil, chard, jalapenos, green onions, strawberries, and the amazing bean plants that have scaled their poles up to the height of the crest in the roof, about 12 feet in the sky! (It takes a ladder to harvest that one.) Also volunteering is a big plant—a vine of some sort—that looks like it either has a round green squash or a watermelon on it. We don’t even know what awaits us.

I went and got a truckload of the more usable topsoil compost from the landfill. Apparently that stuff is cooked for at least two months in massive heaps, and is let to break down. This is my third such truckload of black earth; the first was for the initial planting, the second one excited the garden some months later. For only $5 for a full Toyota load full (dumped in with a giant skiploader), you can’t go wrong. This time we just spread the stuff out instead of trying to mix it in. The first couple applications of that much compost and other amendments was not easy using only manual labor and hand tools. This time I was hoping to apply it in a blanket fashion so that it might retain water during these hot months, and to also remain a looser soil. The existing soil, despite some amendments, had the tendency to get packed more.

I find gardening enhances my spiritual perspective both as spectator and participant. There is life and death; intention and chance; chaos and order, and other life lessons that reveal themselves to the attentive soul. I don’t even do as much of this as I would like; work is quite a task that fills my days. I do fancy it an art. It is a joy to come home and see my little plot (about the size of a nicely sized bedroom–about 200 sq ft) defy logic on a daily basis. The bean pole itself was something to watch as it rocketed up the wire grid then the short bamboo then the long bamboo. While I don’t end up harvesting or tending the plants as much as Kelli does, I do end up working the compost, and there is a lesson in there too. Even the compost retrains a mind to see that there is less waste out there that can’t be put to good use. So it fosters an alertness and a resourcefulness that maybe can’t be learned the same way in daily life around computers, plastic, and other stuff that defines our daily environment. The compost is full of worms and bugs of all sorts delighting in my detritus, and who, when spread around the garden, work more diligently than I to make it a great place that will hopefully provide quality nourishment, and the means to share and meet people, or deepen other relationships. Like I found last summer after I was fired from a job that did not appreciate me, the tomatoes spoke in opposition to that. The tomatoes from two plants were there to greet me the next day, full of life and color, and really, full of grace. Grace, I say, because there was only so much I did for them, the rest was mostly miraculous outworkings of the universe at large, all things beyond my control. The tomatoes didn’t grow like they did because I earned it in any way. They just…are. Tomatoes are only tomatoes. They lead lives with no complications and pretensions such as we know. And on that day a year ago, they instructed me that is was okay to just be. It is rather like what Jesus said about the birds of the sky having no worries… God will take care of things for us just like for the birds. If we let it be so.

But back in “reality” there are perfectly good economic and social reasons to hone one’s green thumb. I think though that while people will understand that most readily, given the prices for the food that is provided commercially, the intangible quality of gardening will also infect people’s souls too. I think it is a good thing as we realize that a lot of technological promises have been made that can’t be kept. Gardening instructs us to live by our sensibilities, in consideration of nature and her rhythms and laws, in community, and with the satisfaction of knowing that even beyond the satisfaction of our own work, there is a dose of grace that touches the whole thing. If it were Forrest Gump speaking, he’d say, “you never know what you’re gonna get.” And contrary to the materialist view of the world with its various methods for analyzing and measuring trade-offs, that isn’t all bad. (I don’t know if I have technically broken even on my total investment, nor do I really care. The reward is substantial in ways that can’t be measured.) The human drive to conquer nature is what is killing us, both as creatures and as human beings. The whole project of civilization involves being at war with nature, but maybe we should reflect on the ways in which we can be “civilized” and kill ourselves, or be civilized and still enjoy a world worth living in, where life can be witnessed and cherished, even in the null points of death. It might take restraint. Or maybe it will take the breakdown of The Machine. Gardening isn’t anti-science or anti-technology. Rather it depends on observation and the use of various means to work toward a positive end—hopefully one that allows people dignity beyond basic survival. But what we have now is an over-reach of science-backed technology, and it is one that is killing us in so many ways we don’t even realize it.

For now, I await the randomness of whatever the universe sees fit to provide in my little patch of dirt in the back yard. And, I consider myself lucky to have the dirt at all.