Saturday, August 26, 2006

It's late August in the Oberpfalz. Evenings are cool, it's 13 grad now and I'm wearing sweats indoors. Plums, apples and mushrooms are ripening. Climate-wise, I am so much healthier here. We're starting to think about staying here.
It's a little scary, to be honest. However, like so many misfits to their own culture who try a different one, it's almost a relief to be really foreign, instead of just rejected.
It's not that I don't belong in Texas. It's not that Texas doesn't belong to me.
It's just that I'm not in my best of health there. The heat in the summer, the cedar in the winter, and the terrible air with all the cars and heat and pollen.
There's no way to wander around in a hamster bubble, nor would I want to live that way. Meanwhile, the American health system is falling apart, afflicted with greed to its very roots.
Here, if you can pay a little extra for private health insurance, and be accepted, you can get all kinds of treatments and spa weeks paid for.
Try that with your American health insurance.
In the meantime, I think I have to really get my business off the ground, and work hard, so that I can be a success here, in a successful and stable economy where wholistic health is valued. I'll wait and watch to see where my own beloved country is going, but, at the moment, theocracy is not what our Founders had in mind.
Nor is Imperialism (which we fought to free our own selves of).
Nor did they have in mind such an economic oligarchy.

It's actually incredibly disgusting to an aware person, unless one takes into account that only %25 of America votes (and perhaps even then) that we are in such a state.

In any case, I'm aware, and I'm disgusted. Take Note.
|-P~~~

Thursday, August 17, 2006

It's the beginning of what I call "apple time" here in Bavaria. I learned about it first in Indiana. The apples on the trees begin to redden at the cheeks, the light turns more golden, and perhaps a little moody. Evenings cool, and the earth and its inhabitants seem focussed and gravid. Nuts on trees show promise, and mushrooms bloom.
Personally, I can weather any cold with a warm fire and a kitty in my lap. I'm wearing a deep pile jacket and have a down throw and an adoring kitty, with the back door open to let the katydid sounds and fresh air in.
It's amazingly beautiful to me, to look forward to apples and have cool nights. It was what I dreamed about back home. Now I bike past forests of ripe blackberries and cranberries, and check my favorite apple trees, and watch the wheat and barley dry down.
The vintners take the early fall grapes in and sugar them, starting the fermentation. Green wine and cider are available for those hard of head. I can't touch it, splits my noggin in two.
Fests are here and there and everywhere. Tents and toasted meat are everpresent.
Cars tuck into the entries of forest trails as the older folks go in to pick berries and mushrooms. It's quite the pastime here. No one is thought strange for it. Older folks interview me and even check my mushrooms for me, given a chance. It's hard to get their dialects, but even the best educated of folks will stop and chat, particularly in this area. America is deep in their cultural images, as the liberators, the givers of Coca-Cola and Hershey's Chocolate.

I can only accept the history and keep my eyes open to the future, as America deals with her own version of fascism.. how come every Communist nation, with a government Of and For the People, ends up with a dictator? is capitalist representative democracy headed the same way?


http://www.hightowerlowdown.org/node/835
http://civic.moveon.org/save_the_internet/
http://www.tfn.org/
http://www.brazosriver.com/index.html


I love apple time. I just hate the bad apples.
The fun part, I suppose, is throwing them at OTHER bad apples.

*evil grin*