The Saga of Juiceman Jr.

Recent speculation and rumor by the subversive mass media has propelled Juiceman Jr. into the realm of legend. Just what is he capable of? Pundits have proffered that Juiceman Jr. or J2 has not only revolutionized the way humans eat, but stands on the verge of a new society where one dare not eat solid fruit or vegetable. Mysteries emerge.

Where did he come from? Juicers were discovered by meta-physicists studying the alternate aether-verse. Little was ever known about the mysterious species, but new interest in J2 has shown scientists some of the gaps that need to be filled. J2 moniker 'Jr.' implies that not only are Juicers capable of sexual reproduction, but their culture has developed to a point where names and traditions are passed down along the family lineage. Also their song has become the 'haps' in the field of ethnomusicology. Its sound is a high pitched grinding whine, that when slowed down to 75 beats per minute resembles the avant-garde of the late 90's.

Of course, the epitome of the juicer's interest is it's digestive powers. Atheletes and health nuts alike have become interested in feeding juicers and consuming their excretus and sometimes ejectus. This article will focus on the fineries of this interaction for its duration.

J2 Trial-Run.

4 Organic Carrots (Lewis Creek, VT)

2 Medium-Large Gala Apples

1 Scoop (32g) ON vanilla protein powder

This concoction was pretty nice and simple. I tried the carrot/apple mix before adding protein powder, and found it a bit watery, but very flavorful. Adding the powder took the sweetness over the top, but the consistency had a great mouth-feel. Going to try rolled oats in the mix next time with and without protein.

Letter from a composting toilet

First post stateside, don't ask why. So far, I've just been at a loss. Brasil kicked my ass. I never really expected to want to be there. I never had that much interest for any place on our great Vespuccian landmass south of Mexico. I never expected to fall in love and want to meet it all on its own terms. But I did.

Venturing into the Amazon was supposed to be a vapid, masturbatory, I'm a world traveler kind of thing. I just wanted to get into the jungle, kill me some jungle critters, spend nights in hammocks. What happened instead was a complete about-face. My worldview got shot with an anabolic steroid grade screw. For those of you who know anything about the life of Ernesto Guevara, you may see a pattern emerging here. What caused an Argentine doctor (who very easily could have lived in the lap of luxury) to fall in with Castro and lead an armed coup d'etat? Learning about the economic and environmental rape of the landless South American peasant. Sound familiar?

Which reminds me, the biggest trick ever played on the modern education system, the biggest intentional bamboozling, sham-wowing, and skull-druggery, was making economics seem like a boring, dusty, sexless field of study. The only way to understand the drivers behind global history and human behavior is economics. That's why we as consumers are making all the wrong decisions, anyway. We believe that if the idea of economics enters our heads, we will be cursed to a barren, un-laid existence. In fact it took at least 20 minutes on google image search to find any image that even remotely combined economics and sexiness. And this is the internet.... jeezum crow.

Anyway.

My body having paled sadly, I'm back at Groovy UVM living in the same gross residence hall as last year. Amazing how one can travel thousands of miles, learn a new language, become a practically different person and then return to banality. I still notice the same New Guinea-shaped chip in the paint on my railing.

When seen through those eyes, this is completely depressing. My challenge, should I choose to accept it, is to re-frame this in a positive light, or for those who are pseudo-scientists, think about it differently. I recently finished Lawrence Gonzales' title Deep Survival. He made a point when describing the kind of rationale that keeps those stranded at sea alive. The thinking is this "I am but a minutae of the universe, it developed without me, and the world will be the same when I die. Everything will just keep on flowing." The paint chip will last, at least as long as no one cares enough to repaint the rail. My interpretation is that the important thing isn't our interactions with the world, but our sense of awe at the complexity and vastness that we temporarily inhabit.

Does this inspire or depress you? Guess it all comes down to our mood. Have you had your caffeine today? Are your neuro-transmitters running? You better go catch them.

Other realizations:

• I'm twenty. This means I'm no longer a teen. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Henry Ford, were all 20 when they sincerely entered the fields they would remain in for the rest of their lives. Guess I better act seriously.
• Walking somewhere you'd normally drive makes you think differently. It also makes you smell differently if you don't have deodorant.
• Thelonious Monk is not a monk. nor a truncated monkey. That's his real name, actually his middle name is 'Sphere'. Thelonious Sphere Monk. How cool.

Anyway. The point of creating this blog somewhat escaped me. I intend to have more writings floating for others to read, so I suppose in the meantime this is a place for that.

stay straight, walk true

-F

Drop in the bucket

Yes! My third foray into the blogosphere. The other two have been travel blogs, going to betray my beloved story format for something misguided and spineless. Why big hard sun? A lyric from the Eddie Vedder soundtrack of Into the Wild (a loathsome representation). ''Theres a big, big hard sun shining on the big people in the big hard world". This song always reminds me of the richness of our globe and the drop in a bucket that is human consciousness. Why a drop in the bucket? Dude, have you seen the internet lately?

My favorite new pasttime is combing the academic databases at University of Vermont's website. I figure this is one of the things that are available to me exclusively through my cock-and-ball tuition and constant accrual (sp?) of debt. Might as well take full advantage. I wonder how many GB all the PDF's are and if there is a way to download all of them? If the good reader knows, the good writer beseeches the good reader to divulge.

My favorite works currently are those about all things Maya, which include several about Maya concepts of Zero, and one treatise on Maya architecture (80 pages with 10 city layouts). Very interesting about how they feung shue'd their buildings around degrees of a sun calendar. Ecological architects take note. Also digging some academic works from folklore journals about riddles. A bunch of anthropological studies on Native American riddles, most of which are painfully plain, and some have been adopted from euro influence. My personal fave:

what goes in stiff and comes out soft and moist? A stick of gum! dumbass. Just love when the rug gets pulled out.

Really shouldn't be blogging right now, its my last day at IPA in Manaus, and I need to put the wraps on my research here and make sure everything is shored up. Just waiting until after lunch for all that. If your'e at all interested in permaculture, or deforestation, or agronomy, or sustainable development, you should check out my other blog, Force of Nature: Amazon. I'll probably have my research up on there sometime soon. Today includes determining average production and value of some crazy-ass Brazilian fruits.

Going to take a little time to be un-professional and talk about my research advisor, names excluded. She belongs to what is known in Brasil as the 'alternative' crowd. This is quite obvious from here appearance (on multiple occasions when meeting with her, nipples have found their way outside the garments), and her views. I would say we are generally not in concordance over issues academic, although from a humanitarian perspective, we agree mostly. At our second meeting, she passed me an invite to some kind of weird love in. The invite was generally ambiguous, but the inside held a story about the 'marginalization' of LSD being connected somehow to the Maya calendar. Indeed when I met with here at her pad, the digs were very viagem ('trippy' in portugês) indeed. Now a few days after this meeting, it seems something has forced them to leave their pad.

The empty professions of enlightenment due to hallucenogenic drugs by people crashing at her pad seemed an odd mix. She has a job as a professor, and seems wise, a quality I don't detect in her companheiros. It goes without saying, my experience watching Zeitgeist: Addendum there at her place was designed around the economic nature of my work here with permaculture. I think she views me as some kind of neo-capitalist, trying to exploit nature. Couldn't be further from the truth.

Her crowd made he delve into JSTOR and Academic Search Premier once again, this time for everything I could find about ayahuasca, or yagé. Having already read bunches about the origins of this psychoactive in tomes by Mark Plotkin and Wade Davis, I had familiarized myself with the basic lore about the jungle vine. It was used by traditional populations with varying consistency. When a young boy had his first haircut, he took ayahuasca, with or without admixtures containing dimethyltriptanine (DMT). More often it was a shamanistic thing for healing purposes. The study I read discussed its modern use, and its effects on spirituality. Seems like it greatly enhances one's personal recognition of god.

On other fronts, looking at a NOLS class for the summer. Wondering which course has the most bang for the buck, and its looking like the Wind River Mountaineering section (http://www.nols.edu/courses/locations/rockymtn/windrivermtneering.shtml). Obviously includes a lot of skill work. Now for the money... hmmmmmmmm.

listening to a lot of stuff off from Stones Throw, hip-hop, soul, jazz, breakbeat, etc. Check out Triorganico.
Also Os Mutantes, an awesome psychedelic Brazilian group from the 60s. Some of their early material rivals concurrent Beatles catalog!

also some cool reading: http://www.trailcast.org/skurka-interivew-transcript/
Andrew Skurka solo thru-hiked the new East-West continental trail from Quebec to Washington.

viva le blog

walk straight, stay true
-F