Dumbing Down Things Even Further

If you're nervous that this might be the title of another of my screeds against the short-attention-span-theatre of Western civilisation, breath free my friends. It is not and I will tell you exactly why.

I was hiking down the hill this morning, past the great lines of 200 plus year-old grave markers, with a bit of a bee in my bonnet. I intended a screed of screeds against stupidity and thick headedness of all sorts. You see, I had just spent 36 hours in NYC for a bit of pre-birthday alone time and arrived back home with a bad taste in my mouth about the dangerous increase of spiritually dead materialism I saw at work there. By God I was going to set the world to right with the strokes of my digital pen! 

Then a strange thing happened: as the tombstones ticked by a question appeared in my head I had heard said by Ur-permaculturist Mark Shepard in a presentation about selecting food producing trees that thrive in local conditions: "Why would I spend my time helping out something that wants die or trying to kill something that wants to live?" The point is that trying to change anyone's mind with a screed seems, well, stupid and thickheaded at this point in time. THE wisdom of Permaculture is to work with nature, not against it.

Onward.

What this post is really about is how I have doubled down on the simplification of my cider making procedure.

Ever trying to cut down on things to buy, clean and sanitize I elected to simply allow my gallon jugs of cider to spontaneously ferment and then simply poking a small slit in the their tops with a sharp pocket knife to allow CO2 to exit but not allow the vinegar bugs to enter. Not that I am that worried about them at this point since sour beers and kombucha seem to all the rage these days thus contamination and laziness would be once again cloaked by the current mode.

And so it went for two weeks when I drilled the tops, slid the siphon tube in and filled 2 champagne bottles, 2 twenty-two ouncers, 1 Pellegrino litre and a bottle of Mexican Sprite. The results were just as good, if not better, than the previous batch. Different, lazier, method. Same great Pet Nat.

I was curious if I was perhaps high on my own supply. While I was a wine buyer for 3 1/2 years and have a decent pallet, I am also aware how one's mind can cloud things so I took a few bottles along on my trip and gave them to a few people who make their money with wine. Results have been more than favorable. Valhalla. Do try this at home.

This weekend I will be bottling up my first batch of Saké. It probably should have been filtered and put up last week but I ran short of bottles, so we'll see how that turns out. Ultimately there is $8.00 worth of rice at stake and, worst case scenario, I'll have $25 worth of rice wine to cook with for the next year or two. C'est la vie,' say the old folks, 'it goes to show you never can tell.'

What else?  

I dunno. I've been thinking about fasting. 

Let me explain. The spring of my Senior year of high school I got really sick. Fever. Hallucinations. Sweating. The whole nine yards. When I eventually got completely better several weeks later, my sense of smell had been completely altered. Most things had no smell at all while the few things I could smell were mostly things like the exhaust from old, pre-smog, automobiles. 

You can probably see how this condition might make food seem unappealing. It took almost a year for my sense of smell to grow back and during that time I ate much, much less that I had previously and, also, I experienced a lot of personal and spiritual growth. These two things, obviously, were not likely related. However I can't shake the feeling that they were. Pretty much all religions have periods of fasting to help attain spiritual growth in their orthodoxies AND science more and more says that there is a role of fasting in extending human lifespan. Hmmmm.

Anyway, I got a fucking TERRIBLE Flu in NYC. Yep. Chills, sweats, fever, hallucinations. My past 36 hours have been spent in a liminal state of shamanistic illness that I emerged from this just a few hours ago and it reminded me of all of this. I'll give it a try and see what happens.