God and mushrooms

The god debate is never ending, everyone knows that. And it is easy to get real sick of it. This has come up for various people I've been talking with lately. Plus, for a few weeks I had the book "The God Delusion" by my bedside. My tactic of late for dealing/coping with the complex issue (I see the God issue as complex, even though atheists and believers seem to have no problem with it) is to have fun throwing the G word casually into conversations..."ahh, that's just God telling you to slow down", etc.

I've been finding some new mushrooms (to me) over the last couple of weeks. Wine caps were popping up all over the mulch at the arboretum, so I ate a lot of those. Then the other day I noticed, along the Charles, a patch Inky Caps. The books agree that this mushroom should not be eaten with alcohol since it has something in it that makes the liver temporarily unable to process booze. Well, it took me 4 days to finish the load that I found, so this was 4 days with not so much as a beer to end a long day. This was, of course, God telling me to chill on the consumption. Going to the chicken slacks last night sans miller high lifes just was not the same. I've made a vow, from now on when I find Inky Caps, they win over a beer, Oktoberfest or not.



The J.P. open studios was good the other day. Apparently i missed getting to see Eliza and her baby by about 10 minutes. My favorite artist that I found was a soft spoken woman who titles her paintings after lines she gets from poems and stuff, which I dig. Here is one of her paintings. I forget her name. Harvested heavily from the one autumn olive tree I know of in J.P. and made a puree with the fruits. It goes right in my oatmeal, along with the kousa dogwood berry puree I made the other day when I came across a loaded kousa tree with quality fruits. This is a good fruit for the foley mill, I didn't even need to cook it first since the inside is naturally soft.



Last night was a marathon battle with my car, which needed to be moved for street cleaning. I needed to jump it since the battery drained because I grabbed rope from it a few weeks ago, and left the interior lights on like an idiot. I've removed all the interior door lights so this wouldn't happen (the right rear door doesn't shut all the way so these lights would always be on). I should knock out the other lights too. Anyhow, I borrowed Sarah E's car to jump it, this was about 12:45 am. By 2:30 I was in bed. Where did those hours go, you wonder. Well, it took a while to get the thing started first of all. After 10 minutes of being connected to Sarah's battery, it sounded like a creaking rocking chair when I tried to turn it over. At this point I had basically decided that was it for the car, and sad that I'd have to pay for a ticket and towing, that would be a bad final date with the car. I gave it another 20 minutes or so, eating an entire bag of chips to pass the time, and it miraculously started after that. This puts us at around 1:45 or so. Next 30 minutes I spend looking for a spot. Then, finding one about a 10 minute walk from my house, I walk home.

Also, a new feature: my headlights only work when I put them on high beams - and then they are normal beams. That car needs to find a cliff.

The other day after work I made a quick trip to Brooks Estate in Medford with stef. Grabbed my first burdock root, but was really hunting for mushrooms. It had rained very hard a few nights before -- the night the Sox got rained out and we watched the rain come down from our sheltered grandstand seats. As the sun was disappearing, I was really getting edgy, and finally I saw an old tree with a bunch of mushrooms, but nothing I knew. I peaked around to the other side and bingo, chicken of the woods, young fresh and lots of it. That's me in the tree getting it. Later, picking up Stef's CSA, the farmer had a huge hen of the woods in his truck. After working hard on him, he parted with a piece of it. So I've been eating lots of hens and chickens these days. Also, in the Brooks Estate, found my first east coast thimble berries, which I'm happy about because Thoreau mentions them but I had begun to doubt they were still here.



I've started helping robert house .com with his new website, and art-based social networking site, kind of a monster. We'll see if I don't fry my computer brain with this project. Spend a week planning esophagus patients for a study I'm working on at MGH, then come to the gallery today and spend all day updating, webbing, working on a press release (for the coming show, mechanical migration, which I'm very excited about), and then, php for f-celebrities [rob's new site]. UGH! Need to go mushroom hunting ASAP. And visit NYC. And do more yoga. And record a new album. And shell those acorns in the bag in the back room.