What the Hell, Brown Cow?

So it's like, Brown Cow plain yogurt already pretty much has the cream and the whey separated. The whey just kind of pools up at the top after you scoop away the cream. That diminishes last post's achievement (I used Straus European-style yogurt, which is mixed more uniformly), but only a bit...I guess.

Should I go on about how much I think about yogurt these days? How much I enjoy it and how I think those little single-serving Brown Cows with the fruit in the bottom are the ultimate snack? I tried the raspberry one yesterday...so fucking good. And the cherry vanilla one? Or was it French vanilla? I don't remember. Too amazing. Swallowed it in like two gulps.

Uh...what is this blog about again? I don't know.

Anyway a mosquito just bit my fucking face.

No, that's not what I was going to say. I was going to say something like:

Anyway, there's this greek-style yogurt that they sell at the natural foods store that is the most expensive of all, but I don't want to try it because it has an unattractive logo. And the color scheme on the packaging is really bad. It's like the color of nausea. Fuck that shit. I mean...I have standards. They may be shallow and aesthetic, but they are there.

Oh yeah, I guess this is a good thing to write about: I think I'm happier than I've ever been in my life. No, I don't have a girlfriend. I didn't just get a lot of money. I didn't score a killer job. I just really really like where I am.

And yogurt. I like yogurt.

Love,

Jason

Yes Whey

The title of this entry is a pretty dumb pun. Title puns are a magazine-article-writing tactic, aren't they? Now my post feels professional. The title is the necktie of my article and the dateline above it is a well-pressed collar. This is a white-collar article. Writing like the big boys now. But let's not dwell the dumbness of a dumb pun or on neckties.

I find myself drawn toward the refrigerator in the warehouse. I don't always open it up to get food out of it though. Sometimes, I just like looking at my shelf. Which--lucky me!--is the top, which is the roomiest. On my highly prized top shelf is a little jar partially filled with whey. It's this slightly sour, lemon-juice-looking liquid. I feel so proud of my whey. I wanna carry it around with me everywhere for all time.

I got the recipe out of a book called Nourishing Traditions. It's so easy to make. I used

1 big glop of organic plain whole milk yogurt
1 old dress shirt found in a box or something in the corner of the warehouse where the tools are kept
1 shiny chrome-colored bowl
some rubber bands
water

I needed a cheesecloth to strain the yogurt. John found a shirt in a box, and I used that. It was kind of a nice looking shirt before it was ripped up. It had these vertical magenta stripes and everything. The buttons were made of plastic, so I cut them off with a knife, because I didn't know if they were going to melt during sanitization. I boiled some water in a saucepan and put the shirt in. And then I boiled it again because I just think sometimes it's good to boil a shirt twice. I stretched the shirt over the top of the bowl (but left an adequate sag in it) to act as a net for the yogurt solids. The shirt was held in place with the rubber bands. Then I just glopped about 2/3 of a 2 pound container of yogurt on top and left it out on a table for a day. Oh, and I put a plate on top of it too keep out creatures. And you know what? It's a good thing I did, because when I woke up the next day there was a dead gecko on top of the plate. It was a really fucked up looking gecko, too. It was all pale and looked like it had been dehydrated. Ugh.

But no, guys, I thought about this yogurt all day. It was really at the front of my mind. I even had a dream about it. All I was really doing in the dream was sitting at the table and watching the yogurt sit in the cheesecloth. Very similar to what I did when I was awake. Anyhow, after a day, there was product. The stuff that dripped into the bowl was whey and the solid on top of the cheesecloth was yummy cream cheese. I don't know what I am going to do with either of those things. But the nice thing about whey is it is so much less gross than I thought it would be.

Oh, there is a second step to the recipie, but it is not that important and I am too sleepy to type it.

There is a little tickle in the back of my throat which I think is from shirt fibers.

Aloha, and I love you,

Jason

Whatever the Fuck You Want

So...the Captain Cook monument. People go there to snorkel. You've gotta hike down the side of a cliff and it takes about a half hour going down and forty or fifty minutes going back up. From the road it branches off of, it just looks like some kind of narrow walkway to someone's house. No signs to tell you what it is or anything. There is so much easter egged away here it's craaaazy.

I went with one of the other farm apprentices, and didn't snorkel because some other apprentices took the good community snorkel gear to a different beach before I woke up, so I was left with busted up gear. However, I did squat and wobble around in the water like the don't-know-how-to-swim non-swimmer I am. It's a really unfriendly sea-floor. Gnarly as shrapnel and blue and black spikey balls (Oh, that's what a sea urchin looks like!) are spread just...fucking...everywhere like little fishy mines. I stepped on one. But not that hard.

Look at it. It's super pretty. It looks very Pokemon.

So, um...I went off with the other apprentice to his secret hideaway across the vast black lava field that borders the water. He doesn't know why no one else goes out there. Yeah, it's kind of a walk, but it's a great place to get privacy and (I think) the best coconuts ever. He climbed a coconut tree that was 30 feet or so tall and sawed down some of the fruit. I don't even like coconut milk but this kind was amazing. It was "effervescent" (to use his word) as if it had been carbonated and tasted "like 7-up" (to use his simile). I mean, it really did. I couldn't believe this stuff came from the Earth.

I told him I was going to take a nap for a while and he said, "You can do whatever the fuck you want out here!" Yes, he really said it like that, and yes, you could, more or less, do whatever you wanted. There really wasn't a single person out there besides us. So, in the spirit of living it up, I ate some hot dog buns and drank a beer. Then I slept for about two hours and when I woke up, I wandered away from my travel partner, out over that triiiipy, cracked up lava. I pulled off my shorts and underwear and just walked around for a while naked. Just inland of the the lava field was a really thick forest with a) GOATS! and b) my favorite kind of climbing trees. They're those massive ones with these huge horizontal parts that you can just sit and relax in. So I climbed up fifteen or twenty feet to the bench of the tree and relaxed. I like being in trees without any clothes on. I think it's more fun than swimming. The bark is abrasive, but it feels better than stepping on sea urchins.

It's really late and I am almost always the last person on the farm to go to bed, and I don't like that. I gotta get some sleep. I want to write more tomorrow, but I don't know if I'll get around to it.

Tennessee and Sarah both sent me really interesting, but kind of spooky e-mails today. I will try to write you two some paper letters.

Oh, there's a Japanese girl on the farm now, so sometimes I get to say

Oyasumi,

Jason

Rat Wars

Evening. Sitting on a couch in the warehouse. Clunking sounds from the thin metal walls. Sounds like something softly banging on them from the outside. Light clicking and little knocks, resonating loudly, out of proportion to the size of the source.

"SQUEEEE!"

And a gray blob falls from a rafter to the toaster oven. Strange and slow and silly looking. It looks flat. A clumsy silhouette in freefall. The girls on the couch laugh. "Were those two rats fighting?" They were. The one that fell ran behind the sink and was lost behind dishes and cutting boards. "Rat wars!" one of them said.

The rafters are narrow. Assuming that rats can't go in reverse, if one comes to face another on a rafter, the only thing that could happen is one would walk over another (I mean, there could be particularly agile rats; why not?), or one would shove another off to get to wherever it was going.

As one of the sisters said, "At night this is really their warehouse. We're just intruding." I like the sisters. They're funny.

Love,

Jason

I Want to See Dan Deacon Live

and

1 typewriter
2 cassette recorders and a pack of cassettes
1 bottle of whisky
ice

That'd do, really. Various drums would be nice, too. And a well-balanced diet that supports my body type.

Here's a simple video cocktail:

1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzPN0bZfFo4&feature=related
2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubT6L7kollg

I let #1 play for two or three minutes and then started #2. There's a part where #2 goes silent and that's where the music from #1 started. Just by chance. Do you like a good mishmash? All this probably goes well with whisky on the rocks.

I don't much feel like talking about Hawaii today, but I'll say something about the bananas that takes some of the appeal away from them. Rats live in them. Rats. They live in the banana bunches before they're harvested. "It's the safest place for them," says Michael. They make nests that look like bird nests. And that explains the claw marks and the rat poo looking rat poos that are usually in the bunches that we-the-people-on-the-farm eat from.

What I really want to write about is human drama, but I'm not going to.

Japanese dog says "wan."

Jason

Do you wanna be on youtube?

So, two more apprentices have left since my last post and on Pat's last day all of us went into the city (Kailua) and drank kava. Kava is a regional treat that I thought I'd try to get a taste of Hawaii. Like bubble tea in Seattle, which was equally foreign to my sheltered North Carolinain self. You know, I think I should have tried chittlins at some point. But I haven't. And I don't think collard greens were ever served at my table back home. There's something kind of weird about that. Am I really even from North Carolina?

Anyway, kava tastes like mud. I think it is mud. Two of the other apprentices described the flavor as being like "paper" and "cardboard." I think it tastes a little like a dank basement, too. I call it frown water.

While we were drinking Kava, Apprentice John asked a local to take our picture. And then the guy asked us if we wanted to be on youtube and took a video of us. But we're just kind of sitting there. Being customers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XT6PRPkbQI

Look at his youtube profile. He likes pot.

Love,

Jason

Templeton

Oh no. There's a bag on the floor about eight feet from me and it's moving and I think it's moving because the warehouse rat is in it. When there are other people in the warehouse with me, the rat is not scary, but when I'm by myself, it's like some crazy baby monster. I don't like being scared at night!

I am really fickle when it comes to deciding if I am going to go out. Half of the apprentices went to a reggae concert tonight, and at first I said I was going to go, but when they were about to head out, I changed my mind, because I was writing a letter to Wilton and I was enjoying the vibe in the warehouse, and most of all, I HATE not being able to leave a place when I am ready to leave a place. I don't like having to wait for other people to get ready. And I wouldn't be able to wander off like I might in Seattle if I got bored, because it's dark and creepy and woodsy (not in the deciduous sense) out here. Oh, and it was raining really heavy and the concert was supposed to be outside. I don't believe in the "dry side" of Hawaii anymore. It's gotta be a myth. There's the wet side and the somewhat-less-wet side, where I live.

Oh, I have an interest in bilingual comics right now. The Kealakekua (kay-ala-kay-koo-uh) library had several Japanese/English bilingual childrens books. I got one about some whales who stole the heart of the world, a REALLY cute one that has lots of baby animals in it and a volume of classic Japanese newspaper comics called Sazae-san. I'm trying to find bilingual comics in French and Italian, too, because I want to go to Europe within a year or two.

Hey, the rat (Templeton) stopped making noises now. I don't think I'm supposed to sleep in the warehouse, but sometimes I do anyway. I have this fear that he's going to nibble on my feet in the night.

God, there are a bunch of wild chickens around here.

Oh! I made some pretty good french toast today. It had cinnamon, vanilla extract and a little bit of nutmeg in it. I don't really like nutmeg that much.

I am thinking about making my blog private soon, because I'd be more comfortable writing about some things if it were. I don't think of this blog as a blog, I think of it as a somewhat open letter to multiple friends.

I hope you are all doing well.

Love,

Jason

The Meat!

What the hell, I forgot the meat! There was meat on that sandwich! Turkey baloney. And It was between the avocado and the chard. Sigh.

Wait, no! This is good. Now it's not just a combination of two preexisting sandwiches. It is truly deluxe.

Truly,

Jason

It's a Cookbook

I made this sandwich just now that really moved me. I mean, it was fucking deluxe, so I decided to call it

The Fucking Deluxe

It goes

bread>mayo>avocado>chard>banana>peanut butter>bread

I think really it's just a combination of two preexisting sandwiches partitioned by some chard. But wow! I will have to lock it away in my internal cookbook.

A couple of days ago, I won my first game of Scrabble in...forever? I lost the scoresheet (I think I got 160-something), but I remember "oxide" and "quoth" being my highest scoring words. I always get stuck with Q. It's my spirit Scrabble letter.

And yesterday, large waves beat me up in Kailua. I feel like they (waves) were twice as tall as me. I can't swim, really, but I am very skilled at getting thrown against what few jagged rocks are on a beach. I got a gory heel, and while I was off in a bathroom or something a seal came on shore and I missed it. Damn. BUT...I did see a guy that looked like he got knocked out get hauled off by his friends. You should have seen his head bobble when they carried him. He looked like he had a black eye and everything. His eyes were open, but I mean, he was gone. I'll bet a Fucking Deluxe could have revived him.