Here's a link to the online version of last month's Lonestar Music Magazine, to which I contributed an article.
I'm hoping I don't get disinvited as a contributor as a result.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Friday, November 12, 2010
Keep hacking
Sabbath eve, October 12, 2010
Another week has come and gone. Despite the implied unwritten rule that farmers must drop what they’re doing and work dawn to dusk during harvest season, I spent the last couple of days planting my winter garden while paying someone else to take my place in the pecan bottom. I know this is forbidden. But it’s not like I didn’t work dawn to dusk anyway. And I did look in on my hired hands a couple of times a day. It’s just that pursuit of the almighty dollar has to take a back seat to other endeavors once in a while or I find myself looking and acting just like all the rest of the industrial agriculturalists out there.
So I set out 2,000 onion plants, and planted 1,000 garlic cloves, made up rows with a garden hoe, planted seed and watered dry ground. I had to replant turnips and beets between tattered remains of plants that rose from seed planted a couple of weeks ago, now decimated by grasshoppers. Spinach and carrots are next on the replant list. Anyone got an organic solution to hoards of Texas grasshoppers? I didn’t think so.
I dug borders around cabbage and broccoli plants and watered them. They’re within a month of producing food. We also have green onions and shallots ready to eat.
The freeze I anticipated last week did not materialize and we still have lots of hot peppers to harvest. Some of the little bastards are so hot, one pepper transforms a dish into a near deadly concoction. (Does anyone actually eat habanero peppers?)
I pulled remaining sweet potato vines up and fed them to the goats. I shredded down a patch of black-eyed peas grown primarily to fertilize the ground. That plot of ground won’t get another crop until spring. I discovered that the sweet potato vines had rooted between rows and I found quite a few small potatoes in the middles that might suffice for a start next year when I ran the tiller through the ground.
A number of volunteer watermelons came up. I let some of them go for it when tilling the ground a couple of months ago, and for some reason they produced more and better melons than the initial crop. We eat all we can stand and give the rest away.
Eulit Miller caught about 20 catfish out of the Guadalupe River yesterday and traded me one good five pounder, already cleaned and gutted for a five gallon bucket of hot peppers. Good trade, considering he picked the peppers himself. Some say we shouldn’t eat fish from the river. You take your chances at the grocery store; I’ll take mine on the local fish and fauna.
Leah continues making some of the best fresh cheddar cheese can be had in these parts and we’re still working at perfecting aged varieties as well. I honestly don’t know what we’ll do with all of this considering our goddamned government likes to arrest folks for selling such dangerous stuff. Don’t want a swat team showing up at my door.
One good thing to report. Last week I loaned $300 to a man so he could keep his girlfriend out of jail. Today, he repaid $250 of the loan, a minor miracle in these times. The guy in question has a job drilling Eagle Ford shale wells, but also a family full of unemployed folks with serious needs. Now if I can get through this week without having to loan him back the money…
The good folks out in California decided not to legalize marijuana. So I guess we can continue to expect the war on drugs to keep people employed both sides of the fence. Henry David Thoreau once pointed out the ridiculous notion that the majority has to decide something’s right before it can be right. Wake the fuck up, people.
While it barely made a peep on the radar screen, last Friday there was one hell of a shoot out in Matamoros, just a half a mile or so from the bridge at Brownsville, Texas. At least 58 bodies lay in the street when it was over. A glance at the reports posted at this blog leaves no doubt that Mexico is coming apart at the seams.
I fear for the life of my friends in Mexico trying to make a go as legitimate farmers, even though they live in a remote part of the country long abandoned as a drug route. There seems no rhyme or reason to the violence down there. No one is immune.
Years ago, my friend Chuck Bowden wrote a book called, Juarez: the laboratory of our future.
I don’t think even Chuck Bowden understood how prophetic those words might turn out.
Keep hacking.
Shopping trip to Matamoros, anyone?
Another week has come and gone. Despite the implied unwritten rule that farmers must drop what they’re doing and work dawn to dusk during harvest season, I spent the last couple of days planting my winter garden while paying someone else to take my place in the pecan bottom. I know this is forbidden. But it’s not like I didn’t work dawn to dusk anyway. And I did look in on my hired hands a couple of times a day. It’s just that pursuit of the almighty dollar has to take a back seat to other endeavors once in a while or I find myself looking and acting just like all the rest of the industrial agriculturalists out there.
So I set out 2,000 onion plants, and planted 1,000 garlic cloves, made up rows with a garden hoe, planted seed and watered dry ground. I had to replant turnips and beets between tattered remains of plants that rose from seed planted a couple of weeks ago, now decimated by grasshoppers. Spinach and carrots are next on the replant list. Anyone got an organic solution to hoards of Texas grasshoppers? I didn’t think so.
I dug borders around cabbage and broccoli plants and watered them. They’re within a month of producing food. We also have green onions and shallots ready to eat.
The freeze I anticipated last week did not materialize and we still have lots of hot peppers to harvest. Some of the little bastards are so hot, one pepper transforms a dish into a near deadly concoction. (Does anyone actually eat habanero peppers?)
I pulled remaining sweet potato vines up and fed them to the goats. I shredded down a patch of black-eyed peas grown primarily to fertilize the ground. That plot of ground won’t get another crop until spring. I discovered that the sweet potato vines had rooted between rows and I found quite a few small potatoes in the middles that might suffice for a start next year when I ran the tiller through the ground.
A number of volunteer watermelons came up. I let some of them go for it when tilling the ground a couple of months ago, and for some reason they produced more and better melons than the initial crop. We eat all we can stand and give the rest away.
Eulit Miller caught about 20 catfish out of the Guadalupe River yesterday and traded me one good five pounder, already cleaned and gutted for a five gallon bucket of hot peppers. Good trade, considering he picked the peppers himself. Some say we shouldn’t eat fish from the river. You take your chances at the grocery store; I’ll take mine on the local fish and fauna.
Leah continues making some of the best fresh cheddar cheese can be had in these parts and we’re still working at perfecting aged varieties as well. I honestly don’t know what we’ll do with all of this considering our goddamned government likes to arrest folks for selling such dangerous stuff. Don’t want a swat team showing up at my door.
One good thing to report. Last week I loaned $300 to a man so he could keep his girlfriend out of jail. Today, he repaid $250 of the loan, a minor miracle in these times. The guy in question has a job drilling Eagle Ford shale wells, but also a family full of unemployed folks with serious needs. Now if I can get through this week without having to loan him back the money…
The good folks out in California decided not to legalize marijuana. So I guess we can continue to expect the war on drugs to keep people employed both sides of the fence. Henry David Thoreau once pointed out the ridiculous notion that the majority has to decide something’s right before it can be right. Wake the fuck up, people.
While it barely made a peep on the radar screen, last Friday there was one hell of a shoot out in Matamoros, just a half a mile or so from the bridge at Brownsville, Texas. At least 58 bodies lay in the street when it was over. A glance at the reports posted at this blog leaves no doubt that Mexico is coming apart at the seams.
I fear for the life of my friends in Mexico trying to make a go as legitimate farmers, even though they live in a remote part of the country long abandoned as a drug route. There seems no rhyme or reason to the violence down there. No one is immune.
Years ago, my friend Chuck Bowden wrote a book called, Juarez: the laboratory of our future.
I don’t think even Chuck Bowden understood how prophetic those words might turn out.
Keep hacking.
Shopping trip to Matamoros, anyone?
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Where's my machete?
Friday, November 5, 2010
Steel yourselves
Sabbath eve, November 5, 2010
We got our first and second frost this week and anticipate another freeze tonight. That will probably put an end to what’s left of summer grass. It also will mean the end of any unprotected warm season crops such as tomatoes, peppers, squash, etc in local gardens.
I’d never before grown sweet potatoes, but after harvesting 100 pounds off of a 50 foot row, I hope to try again on a larger scale in the future. They seem well suited to our area, although I am told some sort of weevil can be problematic.
Pecan harvest continues, but with disappointing yields, somewhere on the order of 20% of maximum yields when compared to previous years. The price of pecans is historically high, but not enough to make up for the deficiency in yield.
It’s as though the law of diminishing returns exerts its power everywhere I look.
Central banks, on behalf of our government continue to create and throw new money at the economy, but regardless of the amount, no new real wealth results. While commodity prices rise, higher prices don’t translate into larger crops or profits to producers, nor do higher oil prices increase local or worldwide daily oil production numbers.
We hear of high corn prices, but much of the Texas crop was afflicted with aphlatoxin this year. Some of the crop had to be destroyed and much of the rest has or will be sold at discounts for feedlot cattle only. I continue to sit on my corn. Maybe the price goes up some more, or maybe it goes down, but I can virtually guarantee that in either case, the corn will be more expensive when compared to buying power of the average consumer.
I’ve spent horrible amounts of money, running, maintaining and fixing trucks and machinery on the farm this year. I know it’s the same in the oil patch. It’s as though we have a moving goal post; no matter what the price of a commodity, it always lags behind the cost of production.
Wages of those lucky enough to still have a job always seem a bit less than necessary to keep the vultures away; poorer citizens face a gauntlet of bill collectors and predatory entities from traffic cops to utility companies, to hospitals and banks with their myriad service fees and penalties, all delivered with a friendly smile that feels a whole lot more like fuck you than howdy do.
I’ve watched many an animal spiral toward death and the signs our empire exhibits are similar. Ailments arise, treatments bring temporary relief, but wave after wave of further complications reassert themselves and eventually have their way. Death brings relief, but oftentimes the journey between life and death can be ugly and painful.
I wish I could offer a better prognosis, but to do so would be to lie.
Steel yourselves. Rough times are here and it ain’t gonna get any easier.
We got our first and second frost this week and anticipate another freeze tonight. That will probably put an end to what’s left of summer grass. It also will mean the end of any unprotected warm season crops such as tomatoes, peppers, squash, etc in local gardens.
I’d never before grown sweet potatoes, but after harvesting 100 pounds off of a 50 foot row, I hope to try again on a larger scale in the future. They seem well suited to our area, although I am told some sort of weevil can be problematic.
Pecan harvest continues, but with disappointing yields, somewhere on the order of 20% of maximum yields when compared to previous years. The price of pecans is historically high, but not enough to make up for the deficiency in yield.
It’s as though the law of diminishing returns exerts its power everywhere I look.
Central banks, on behalf of our government continue to create and throw new money at the economy, but regardless of the amount, no new real wealth results. While commodity prices rise, higher prices don’t translate into larger crops or profits to producers, nor do higher oil prices increase local or worldwide daily oil production numbers.
We hear of high corn prices, but much of the Texas crop was afflicted with aphlatoxin this year. Some of the crop had to be destroyed and much of the rest has or will be sold at discounts for feedlot cattle only. I continue to sit on my corn. Maybe the price goes up some more, or maybe it goes down, but I can virtually guarantee that in either case, the corn will be more expensive when compared to buying power of the average consumer.
I’ve spent horrible amounts of money, running, maintaining and fixing trucks and machinery on the farm this year. I know it’s the same in the oil patch. It’s as though we have a moving goal post; no matter what the price of a commodity, it always lags behind the cost of production.
Wages of those lucky enough to still have a job always seem a bit less than necessary to keep the vultures away; poorer citizens face a gauntlet of bill collectors and predatory entities from traffic cops to utility companies, to hospitals and banks with their myriad service fees and penalties, all delivered with a friendly smile that feels a whole lot more like fuck you than howdy do.
I’ve watched many an animal spiral toward death and the signs our empire exhibits are similar. Ailments arise, treatments bring temporary relief, but wave after wave of further complications reassert themselves and eventually have their way. Death brings relief, but oftentimes the journey between life and death can be ugly and painful.
I wish I could offer a better prognosis, but to do so would be to lie.
Steel yourselves. Rough times are here and it ain’t gonna get any easier.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Hacked
About a month or so ago, a companion forum to Matt Savinar's life after the oil crash site began to falter.
I am under the opinion that the forum became the target of malicious hackers. The hackers won.
Originally, users would get cut off while trying to post entries or would receive denial of service messages when they tried to acces the site. Matt called in friends to help; apparentely they couldn't fix the problem. Then he hired professionals; they too failed to fix his forum woes. Then he tried a different host with a lower quality setup.
Forum users began complaining. (We want it easy and we want it now. We're goddamned Internet junkies and we demand to be fed.) Eventually the strain got to Matt. As a result, he closed the forum. Archives of the original forum can be read here.
I think the way Matt was treated is shameful. Both by the sons-of-bitches that targeted his site and by those that were so quick to lay blame on the young man for circumstances beyond his control.
Sometimes the bad guys win. Sometimes we're the bad guys.
I am under the opinion that the forum became the target of malicious hackers. The hackers won.
Originally, users would get cut off while trying to post entries or would receive denial of service messages when they tried to acces the site. Matt called in friends to help; apparentely they couldn't fix the problem. Then he hired professionals; they too failed to fix his forum woes. Then he tried a different host with a lower quality setup.
Forum users began complaining. (We want it easy and we want it now. We're goddamned Internet junkies and we demand to be fed.) Eventually the strain got to Matt. As a result, he closed the forum. Archives of the original forum can be read here.
I think the way Matt was treated is shameful. Both by the sons-of-bitches that targeted his site and by those that were so quick to lay blame on the young man for circumstances beyond his control.
Sometimes the bad guys win. Sometimes we're the bad guys.
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