Tree Fetish

Every fall and spring, for a period of just a few days, the light of late afternoon shines at just the right angle through a close-spaced line of eucalyptus trees along Western Drive. And the trunks turn red. Glorious, glowing, luminous red, like coals in a roaring fire, like the columns of some crazed temple to an unknown firegod. Earth as we know it is not supposed to look like this.

Of course, I am destined never, ever to get a picture of this. Even though I drive down Western several afternoons a week.

When the conditions are right, I never have the camera with me. And I forget to bring it the next day. Or I do remember, but the day turns cloudy and we get no sunset, or there's just enough cloud to weaken the light and dilute that wondrous red.

Or I get there at the right time with the right conditions -- but the magic few days have passed, the angle of the sun has changed, and all I get is pretty sunset light.

Here are my attempts for this year, taken last weekend. Just a couple of days too late. Dammit. Click on any to see a 1000-pixel-wide version.


The ragged, peeling bark of the eucalyptus has a wonderful texture in the high-relief light of dawn or dusk.





Western Drive is pretty much the western boundary of Santa Cruz. Beyond lies hill, fields, canyons, redwood forests, cougar and deer, hobbits and trolls. I like living in a town where the country begins at the city limits.


Give me a good sunset with good shadow, and the day is never a waste.


I like these shots, but once again I failed to capture the red-drenched images that I obsess over. By my calculations, the Season of Red will return to Western Drive sometime in late January. My camera will ride with me. Every day. This time for sure. I swear. I swear.

THE Word...

"...is worth a thousand pictures." The underground cartoonist Dan O'Neill said that back in the '60s.

Like many things O'Neill said, it can mean a lot of different things, or nothing at all. But it sounds cool. Sounding cool was big in the '60s. It didn't have to actually mean anything.

But I'm thinking of O'Neill today because, right now,THE word is "zeitgeist." We're about to enter very uncomfortable times, and our entire future hinges on the zeitgeist we end up with.

"Zeitgeist" is one of those multi-layered, hard-to-translate, extremely meaningful words that Germans are so good at coining. The kind that stuff two paragraphs of thought into two or three hard-bitten syllables.

Literally translated, "zeitgeist" means "time spirit." Figuratively, it means something more. It means, what is in the heart of the people at a particular point in history. It is the defining spirit or mood of the time.

This is no airy-fairy stuff. The zeitgeist of a time and place might suggest that it is a very good thing, for example, to invade Poland with armored columns, or torture and kill Jews to save their souls for Jesus, or massacre the aborigines next door and take their land.

In different times,the zeitgeist might tell you to spend serious money helping the less fortunate, or to spend time helping those around you instead of trying to make a million by flipping houses or speculating in petroleum futures.

Here's an example: back in the '70s and early '80s your average up-and-coming yuppies and professionals regularly got stoned at parties. But near the end of the Reagan years my Ivy League stoner girlfriend got hissed at for lighting a joint at a faculty/grad student party in Berkeley. In Berkeley! The zeitgeist is powerful -- and it can turn on a dime.

Right now nobody knows what the zeitgeist really is. We're leaving an era where the zeitgeist said that the individual is always right and government is always wrong. And that left entirely on their own, with no regulation or taxes, businessmen will naturally be honest and forthright and productive for the good of all.

Seen much of that around lately? Neither has anybody else. And they're looking for something else to believe in, another star to steer by. Either that, or they're in denial.

So what do you think the new zeitgeist will be? Will it be positive? Will we all give up something individually to gain something collectively? Or will we all just grab for what we can get and the devil take the hindmost?

Where will the mood of the people go? If anybody's listening, I'd be interested in your words. I am sure they will be worth... a thousand pictures.

Lasagna Dreams

The oven broke down eight or ten years ago, and we never got it fixed. It was a Magic Cook built-in that had come with the house. And it had decided that it was a fine thing, a very fine thing indeed, to go into self-cleaning mode and heat itself to 900 degrees -- oh, about every time we tried to turn it on.

The repairman offered no encouragement.

"Magic Cook!" He said it with the disgust a different type of mechanic might bring to the word "Yugo" or "Fiat." He shook his head.

"What about them?"

"They're bad. We used to do their warranty service. There was maybe one guy left in their engineering department who knew what he was doing, and I heard he quit. Do you know your oven has three mother boards?"

"Ovens have mother boards?"

"Yes, but usually they have one. Magic Cooks have three. And yours are fried. Cost $400 to replace them. Don't know if it's worth it."

Rhumba turned to me. "When's the last time we baked anything?"

"You make Boston Cream Cake for my birthday."

"That's once a year. I'll buy you a Boston Cream Cake."

So we didn't fix the oven. It sat there for years, unused. Well, we still used the clock. And we had a separate cooktop that worked fine (and still does).

At the time, Rhumba and I were both making pretty good money. And we were commuters. We had little time to fix any but the simplest food, and we ate out a lot. Rhumba was right: we barely used the oven.

And true to her word, she bought me Boston Cream Cakes for my birthday. And they were good, but nowhere near as good as Rhumba's. When it comes to baking my woman has, as the teenies say, mad skilz.

As time went on we both lost our good jobs and found low-paying ones in Santa Cruz, close to home. So we cooked more. But we still didn't do anything about that oven.

By chance, I began collecting church and community cookbooks -- the spiral-bound, cheaply-printed recipe compilations published as fund-raisers by the Altar Guild of the Bleeding Wounds of Jesus Apostolic Church, or the Sump City Fire Department, or the Witches of Salem Heights Apartments, or Lurlene's House of Beauty, or the California Dry Bean Board.

At first I bought them for laughs, wondering at recipes for "Lime Jello Marshmallow Pineapple Salad" or "Impossible Custard Pie" or "Porcupine Meatballs" or "Mayonnaise Cake" Who ate this stuff? Moreover, who wanted to admit that they cooked it?

After a while, I had a couple of hundred community cookbooks. Why not, they were cheap? They go for a quarter at garage sales, a buck in most bookstores, ten bucks for a mixed lot of 20 on eBay.

Almost nobody wants them. But I'm a collector at heart; and happy is the collector who pursues something that few others care about. Because the world is his.

And besides, I got interested. Most of the recipes in these books are simple and down-home, which I like. And while a lot of them are mundane or, like I said, horrifying, some of them sound good, or unusual, or just mysterious. In the middle of any boring suburban PTA cookbook, you'll always find two or three recipes that landed from Mars.

Questions were raised that I couldn't answer. Why did one weird apple pastry show up only in cookbooks from one part of Iowa? Why did one Lutheran cookbook out of the northeast include ten pages of shepherd's pie recipes? And why did every third recipe in a church cookbook out of western Pennsylvania include -- bourbon?

And there were the endless variations. There are hundreds of different recipes for apple cake, zucchini bread, Swedish meatballs -- all just a little bit different, a few wildly different.

Especially with lasagna. It's the most popular recipe in church cookbookland, after maybe brownies and five-layer salad and banana bread. And the variations are endless and strange. Spinanch lasagna. Eggplant lasagna. White lasagna (white sauce instead of tomatoes). Chicken and ham lasagna. Mushroom lasagna. Olive lasagna. Tofu lasagna. Lasagna rolls. Meatball lasagna. Zucchini and sour cream lasagna. Apple lasagna. Tuna lasagna. Lasagna with pepperoni and salami. Lasagna with four pounds of cheese. Lasagna with four ounces of cheese.

Something about lasagna makes a cook want to leave her, or his, mark upon it. It's one of those protean dishes -- it can go in so many directions. And it's easy. No matter what you do, you can't go too far wrong starting with red sauce, cheese and noodles. What's not to like? I never saw one bit of lasagna go uneaten at a church potluck.

So gradually, in our ovenless years in the wildnerness, I began to dream of lasagne. Of taking a steaming pan out of the oven and digging in. Of making it just the way I wanted it, not the way some restaurant chef preferred to make it.

We just had the kitchen remodeled; and I won't say we did it just so I could cook lasagna. It had more to do with extra storage space and counter space, and adding a door to keep out the cats. But we did buy an oven, a Fragidor. I think it has only one mother board, and I could find no horror stories about it in the Internet forums. Cross your fingers.

And the first thing I baked in it? You know. And I made it my way. I've read so many lasagna recipes and made so much pasta that I just free-styled it out of my head.

So welcome to Healthy but Not Fanatical Vegetarian Lasagna. Rhumba wants another pan of it this weekend. Yesmam. But when's that Boston Cream Cake coming?

1 pack of no-boil lasagna noodles
1 28-ounce can of crushed tomatoes
1 12-16 ounce can of tomato sauce
5 cups or more of small-chopped veggies ( any combo of summer squash, brocoli, cauliflower, peppers, green beans)
I box frozen spinach
1 pound riccotta cheese
4 ounces mozzarella cheese
1 4-ounce can chopped black olives
olive oil
dried basil dried marjoram (or Italian seasoning)
Salt, pepper
two cloves garlic, chopped (or a teaspoon of bottled chopped/minced garlic).

Throw the chopped veggies in a skillet with any oil (I used light olive oil) and saute until tender-crisp. Mix in salt and garlic for the last couple of minutes.

Add the crushed tomatoes and tomato sauce to the skillet. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Add basil, marjoram, a dollop of olive oil, salt and pepper as needed. Simmer for 30-45 minutes.

Thaw the frozen spinach in the microwave until it's hot, around 3 minutes. Mix together in a bowl with ricotta cheese and chopped olives.

Oil a 9x13 baking pan (or equivalent) and put down a layer of the sauce on the bottom.

Now add a layer of noodles (according to instructions on box), one quarter of the sauce, and a third of the cheese mixture. Make three layers in this way.

Put the final layer of noodles on top and top with the remaining sauce and sliced or grated mozzarella. Optionally, also sprinkle sliced olives on top.

Cook at 350 for 45-50 minutes. Let stand for 15. Eat!


Shortcuts:

Use premixed Italian seasoning instead of basil/marjoram.
Use sauce/crushed tomatoes with basil/italian seasoning already in, or use a couple of jars of a pre-made marinara sauce you like.
Use the pre-minced garlic from a bottle.

Longcuts:

Nothing to stop you from using regular lasagne noodles and boiling them. But the no-bake noodles turn lasagna prep from a three-ring circus into a two-ring one. Much more serene.

A Healthy Suspicion

"There's no such thing as a fruit juice fast," the Emperor of the West Side told me. He waggled his finger. "If you drink anything but water, it's not a fast. You don't get the benefit."

The Emperor of the West Side is a bright-eyed, bristle-bearded geezer who favors double-knits and loafers. Anywhere you go on the West Side where it's possible to hang out, he's there: Beckman's Bakery, Kelly's, that forgettable coffee house next to the Safeway. It's all his turf.

I had made the mistake of asking, "What's new?" And before I knew it, I was hip deep in a world of circulatory system flexibility, ketosis, drying fresh apples at home, and the evils of hot peppers. The Emperor is into Health in a big, weird way. "I've done five one-month fasts myself," he told me proudly. "It does great things for you."

The Emperor comes off as something of a kook. He's most definitely a promoter, a lifelong salesman who, long into his old age, is still looking for the next big multi-level-marketing opportunity. Right now he's messing around with home cardiac scans.

That said, the Emperor is eighty years old and looks and acts a good 20 years younger. He has a much younger wife and a daughter in college. Whether it's just his optimistic disposition or 50 years of fasting and eating vegetables and minding his pH levels, some of the many alternative health regimes he follows seem to be working. So I give him a big hello whenever we meet, even though most of our conversations end up somewhere down the Yellow Brick Road.

Santa Cruz has a lot of citizens like the Emperor: alternative health is big here. If you knew what conventional medicine's like around here, you'd know a good part of the reason why.

But also, this is Santa Cruz, this is California, and people are wide open to any unusual form of therapy that drifts in from Asia or was mined from the Secret Knowledge of the Egyptians or whipped up in the lab by a rogue biochemist/nutritionist or herbalist. Reiki, acupuncture, rolfing, sensory deprivation tanks, shiatsu, veganism, aromatherapy, homeopathy, nudism for weight loss, a dozen different kinds of chiropractic and massage, naturopathy, osteopathy, raw foods -- the list goes on and on.

Of course, a lot of it is crap. It doesn't really work, or the practitioner took a three-week course in Las Vegas and is passing himself off as an expert who studied with the yogis. Where minds are wide open and credulous, rogues and fools can rush in.

And a lot of it isn't crap. At least, people feel helped by it. I know too many people who've been helped by acupuncture or herbalists or supplements or changes in diet to write off alternative health. The best doctor I ever had was a traditional M.D. who was also a homeopath; Dr. Dubya mixed and matched the two approaches with intelligence and wisdom. And it worked. This was in another city, many years ago; but I've heard of a few M.D./homeopaths in Santa Cruz, and if they're half as good as Dr. Dubya, they're okay by me.

And there was my old chiropractor, Dr. Neanderthal --hairy, low of brow, and prone to talking in grunts. He was a a broad-shouldered back-cracker of the old school. He could make my aching back straighten up and pay attention when it laughed at kinder, gentler approaches.

And he worked cheap and took on anyone who walked into his tiny office. He didn't try to keep patients coming back forever, either. Dr. Neanderthal was good people.

But Doc Neanderthal had dreams. He was always showing off some odd machine or instrument or supplement or orthotic from a trade show that he just knew would revolutionize his practice -- and maybe make him a few bucks. None of Doc's gimmicks ever amounted to much. I learned to ignore the sales pitches and just have him twist my back into a pretzel.

And yet -- one day in his office, one of those gimmicks really worked. Doc Neanderthal brought out a hand-held gadget that unkinked my back without him tying me into knots, and left me flying on endorphins besides. It really did revolutionize his practice. Happy patients, no more back-cracking -- well, not much.

But he had to go through a lot of crap to get there, and somebody who bought everything that Doc Neanderthal tried to sell along the way would have walked down a lot of blind alleys with him -- at the very least. Alternative medicine is like that -- it's alternative. Unregulated. Not tested in the lab. With best practices subject to the preferences of each practitioner.

The Emperor of the West Side told me that a blood panel was an absolute must before a long fast, to make sure that your body was healthy enough for it. But is there some healer out there recommending fasts without blood panels first? You can almost bet on it. And who's right? Who knows? Is the herb that did wonders for your friend going to affect you differently, or clash with your heart medication? Nobody's paid to do the studies, because you can't patent an herb and there's no money in it. What studies there are, often disagree.

And here's the biggie: when you swallow an herbal cure, or rub it on your skin, do you really know everything important about the herb, its preparation, its quality? And the answer is, you don't. And if you did know, you might think twice about putting that stuff in your mouth. I found that out, the hard way.

A few weeks ago, I started taking the supplement glucosamine to fight the arthritis that's taking hold in one of my knees. I did research online, and found out that pills combining the supplements glucosamine and chronditrin were a good bet and not known to be harmful in any way. I bought a bottle of house-brand glucosamine/chonditrin pills from the local New Leaf natural food store and started taking them. And after a few days, my knee began to feel better.

One day, I found myself looking at the bottle. It told me that the glucosamine was extracted from seashells, and the chronditrin derived from cartilage. What cartilage, I wondered? From what animal? Carefully harvested from an animal, or swept up off a slaughterhouse floor? And from what country? The bottle showed no country of origin. I had heard a lot lately about contaminated food ingredients from China going into food products produced elsewhere, and I was worried.

So I emailed New Leaf and asked what they could tell me about the origin of their house-brand glucosamine. And to their credit, someone answered me promptly. But I was not reassured by what she had to say:

"Hello! Here is what the company that produces the vitamins for us has to say:

“The official answer is China. There is some positive news about raw material from China though. The NPA (Natural Products Association) has a new office in Beijing that is teaching and reviewing companies for GMPs. It has been very successful according to David Seckman NPA’s CEO, in fact so successful that the drug companies have come to the Natural Product Association and requested help with their program.”

Glucosamine and Chondroitin are usually derived from either shellfish, or bovine sources, but vegetarian versions are also available. I think you’ll find that most “value” lines source from China to keep costs down."

"Value lines:" the cheap stuff. The house brand. Nearly everybody I know buys the house brand vitamins and supplements from places like New Leaf. Why not, we ask? It's all good, isn't it? A natural food store wouldn't sell stuff that was suspect -- would it?

But China isn't a trustworthy source. You've read the news. You know why. If you would think twice about buying food imported from China -- wouldn't you feel the same about vitamins, supplements? And yet, you'll find no sign on the bottle that tells you who made the raw material.

I went to another natural foods store, Staff of Life, and attempted to find a glucosamine product that would tell me on the bottle that that its ingredients came from the U.S.
I couldn't. A few bottles said that the supplements were formulated in the U.S., but didn't say where the ingredients came from.

Eventually, a Staff of Life employee thought it odd that I dithered so long in front of the same shelf, and came to offer assistance. I explained what I was looking for.

"Most of the raw material used for supplements comes from China or elsewhere in Asia., " she told me. She shook her head. "Even if you find a supplement that was formulated in the U.S., the material itself probably came from Asia."

She didn't understand at first why I was upset about this. But when I made the connection between Chinese-produced food products and Chinese produced herbs, it finally sank in. She promised to research the glucosamine products and try to find something that was purely first-world created.

And then she upped the ante. "Most raw materials for vitamins now come from Asia, too. It's not just the herbal supplements."

Wonderful. The active ingredient in that cap of Vitamin E you pop without a thought may well have come from a country with no enforced standards for food or herb processing -- at all.
I'm still looking for a glucosamine product that I can trust. I've stopped taking the cheap pills. I've laid off the vitamins, too. Again: if you wouldn't eat processed Chinese food, why would you swallow their mass-produced vitamins and herbs?

Am I putting down supplements and alternative medicine? No. But if western medicine is General Motors, bureaucratic and barely competent, alternative medicine is like a flea market. It's full of unfamiliar goods from south of the border, bargain hand tools made of mystery metal, and eight-packs of white tube socks that might or might not last a few months.

You have to be careful, no matter how many diplomas the kindly practioner has on the wall, or no matter what good things you've heard about this supplement or that one.

Because you're on your own. And there are important things that you don't know and that no one has an obligation to tell you.

Oh, Happy Day

This morning, Rhumba and I stopped off for coffee before work at our usual joint. Since we're regulars, the owner came to our table and asked us how we were.

"Fine," Rhumba answered. "Yourself?"

"Better. Much better this morning. I feel... relieved."

We didn't ask why. We knew.

At work an hour later, the data entry clerks were giggling in the kitchen as I walked by to the men's room. Five minutes later, on the way back by, they were still giggling.

The data entry supervisor stuck her head in. "You all sure are happy this morning!"

They just giggled at her. She looked at me. We both knew why.

Not everyone in America is giggling, or relieved, or feeling better this morning. But, here in Santa Cruz, most of us are.

Hard times are ahead. Our new leadership may or may not succeed in holding the nation together. But we do feel as if the next few years will be about pulling together as a nation, rather than pulling apart into angry factions.

And if we can do that, all things are possible. Oh, happy day.

Voting Day: Good Luck to Us All

The lines were out the door of the clubhouse at Harvey West Park, our polling place. That's never happened before, not at 7:30 in the morning. People want to make sure that their voices are heard today. Nevertheless, the line moved fast, and we were in and out in 15 minutes.

We're lucky here in California. Our state government actually wants to make sure that everybody votes. Our state law guarantees the right to up to two hours off work to vote, and that everybody still in line when the polls close will have the right to vote. Some other states -- none of these things.

Today of all days, when the course of the nation will be decided I hope by the many and not by the political machinations of a few: good luck to you. Good luck to us all.

And most of all, good luck to democracy. We, all of us, need all the help we can get.