it is election day. i took a break from watching the tv, because i was starting to feel anxious. i'm starting to worry that the country will end up electing trump as president again, even after his disastrous first term. more than anything, it will make me despair about the state of our democracy... how idiots and racists and rich people can game the system. anyway, as i said, i'm taking a break from all of that. i'm trying to focus on my routines. i just came back from watering the garden. it's doing alright. some plants are clearly dying, like some of the tomatoes. but my eggplants seem to be having a resurgence or rebirth after a long period of decline. there is a hyotan vine that is monstrous. it has snaked through a lot of my planter box, maybe choking off the light from a few things, and has wound its way down to the grass lawn. pretty soon, it may cross into the sidewalk, and i'll have to intervene. so far, it has given me one big hyotan (squash), but i'm confident it will give me more. that one hyotan that i harvested inspired my wife to make this dish with pork and squash, which was really good. so i'm hoping we can use more of them to eat. on the other side of the house, i have a bittermelon vine which is also doing well, and has also produced a couple of bumpy bittermelons. one is growing relatively large (for a bittermelon), while another is just starting. like the hyotan, the bittermelon vine has been pretty disrespectful of boundaries and borders, and has just crawled a distance both ways. i had a metal wire cone that i'd used for a zucchini plant. it was standing a ways from the bittermelon, empty. but now the bittermelon has taken it over, and climbed up it, producing a bunch of yellow flowers...
i keep wanting to harvest my worm castings, but i get lazy. it seems like such a messy, dirty job. my worm bin is filled with wet, slimy stuff that really stinks. i mean it smells like fresh shit, or something. i try to make it less awful by occasionally tearing up paper egg cartons into it. i'd heard that giving carbon stuff (like shredded paper) would reduce the smell... so far, no luck. i try to tip the bin daily to drain out the excess water, and give the worms a chance to "breathe." i mean, the bin has some air holes (probably a minimal amount), but i don't think it's enough to provide the thriving worm colony with enough air to breathe. they are red (red wigglers), and have a lot of hemoglobin in them, which means that they like air. so i try to give them that period of about 10 minutes to just breathe. i always have to watch out for them, though, because there are a couple of birds (songbirds, nightingales?) that come around hunting for worms... did i mention the smell? yes, it's awful. i even notice, after a few minutes, a few blue bottles coming around searching for a corpse...
my composting operation is doing well. i have 3 piles going. one is significantly reduced. i think it is almost ready to use. i'm not sure though. i think they say that compost is ready to use when the bits in it are unrecognizable. well, everything is pretty much brown, but i can still see small shreds of leaves and stuff... so maybe it isn't quite to the point where it should be. the other piles are processing. i keep adding stuff to the biggest of the piles, which is a monster held in by wire fencing. i even added fish bones and other food to it, which i try to cover up with a ton of dead leaves... i'm proud of all this stuff i'm able to keep from the waste stream, and recycle for my garden. i'm hoping that if i do a good enough job of taking care of the soil, then things will start to grow really well.
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i had a good time in my writing class last week. i'm not an actor at all, although the 3 other people, and the teacher, are clearly "in the business." i can't do a good reading for shit. i don't know why. i think it's related to how i can't talk pidgin. talking pidgin requires a sense of intimacy, of commonality, with your audience, which was frankly humiliated out of me by my older brother. or maybe i just never had it in me, and i'm just using my brother as a scapegoat... anyway, although most of my writing tends to be awkward and cerebral, i think at certain points i was able to write more or less from the heart (which means that i managed to bypass my stupid brain).
at one point, i wrote some dialogue using the seed word "cry", and with instructions not to use any caps or puncs. it seemed good enough to get somewhat of a reaction from the people who read it. i also wrote a little something about the moon. i talked about my grandmother, who i always associate with a sliver of a crescent moon...
i've tried to adopt some of the strategies and thinking of the class in my own routines. of course, i don't have other writers to play off of when i write alone. but i use a copy of the same worksheet. and i use this site that gives random words and random images... and i try to write little bits of dialogue based on these. i don't think it has the same bang as being in the class, but i'm trying...
i sometimes despair of completing something. because it seems that once you set out to complete something, the editor brain starts creeping in and ruining all the fun, the spontaneity, the creativity of the writing. i like the workshop because it encourages me to trust the side of my brain that doesn't exactly know what it's doing. to keep going with that...
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i am trying to do my routines faster, because as part of them, i'm incorporating what i'm learning from adam mizner, and i feel like i need to be more regular about all of that. right now, i'm really trying to target my right shoulder, which has a lot of stiffness, and which clicks and grinds a lot when i take it through a standard arm circle... as he says, taijiquan only works when you have a lot of song, or relax/release... and the shoulder is a typical place for most people to get locked up. if the shoulder is locked up, then it is impossible to truly fajin or emit energy/power. it's like you have a kinked hose or something... so i've been really working on that. also, in standing exercises, i've noticed how i don't sit in the position, and how i'm imbalanced between my left and right legs, and between the front and back of my feet. so i really try to focus on that stuff...
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well, not much else to say. let's hope that the country still survives today.
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