(and imbalance)

for the robot

so who are these people, and how are we different from each other?
'who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy

  Bronx on benzedrine'

can we agree on honest, kindly differentiating principles

(so that you don't get your thoughts stuck in mine) please?!

'can i get a drink started for you?'
'ye must be born again.'

order and disorder, balance and counterbalance,
'moderation in all things,' 
except (of course): moderation

in love and divorce

we make legal arrangements for a while
and make-believe that we're enraptured
my left ring finger says:
'you are the real me'

but you aren't
no one is

but the river (water woes)

well

i want to see the river like i'm meant to,
in reverence empassioning moonshine,
but
my arteries are rushing on without me
their winter woes are never on their minds

i was blind, but now i
blindly make conjecture
-through flood season
onto memory banks
and cameras can't ascertain at all
on the bridge, from the shore, what we see
the rushingrivers soundingsinto fall

how dark and deep and dangerous
my ideas about the water there
but the river just doesn't care

like it used to

squirrel's (corvallis, or)

squirrel's tavern on a monday night.

by joel. photos by amber (amber's blog).

if it's a week night and you didn't plan dinner, you may want to head on down to squirrel's tavern on 2nd street. their atmosphere is tasty, their decibel level is palatable and their burgers are deliciously spot-on. squirrel's does everything you wish those fast food blokes would do for just slightly more cost. here's a little taste of what that's like:

salad (surprising)
we got a $3 side salad, which we fully expected to consist of iceberg and tomato cubes. surprisingly, this little dish contained fresh dark green lettuce, sprouts, croutons, tomatoes and red onions - everything we would have asked for. dairy-free folks beware: the salad was also covered in multiple kinds of cheese.

burger
squirrel's served us a tasty, juicy and flavorful burger (medium rare) for $6. this is the sort of thing that you dream about when you see a burger king ad, only to be disappointed each time you visit a franchise location. squirrel's can deliver, ladies and gentlemen.

beers
we weren't in the drinking mood, but found that they had reasonable prices on pbr (a must for downtown) and no less than a dozen micros on tap. there's a draw-back here: there isn't a happy hour, which, at $4.25 a pint, makes this a one-drink location for beer snobs.

do you need a cheap, laid-back mcmenamins-style burger joint? are you interested in chatting while your drink your beer, instead of shouting over the music and the general roar? on any non-concert night, squirrel's is your joint. check it out soon.

bonus points:
+1 soy-free french fries.
+1 free wi-fi.

halfway

the half-life, much like half-caf "coffee," leaves me with a scorching caffeine headache and an insatiable lust for living large. ladies and gentlemen, i am a full-time food service worker.

it's one of those things that follows in a long line of other things: laziness, college, debt, no job skills, desperation, deep-frying chicken (always and forever in that order). i may have to remind you as i often remind myself that this is life, it's all we have, and it's brilliant if you want it to be.

the world (at last sighting).

p.s. if you'd like to read some of my recent work, you can find my food column here.

losing

in the beginning of this story i was jumping to my certain death off a moving train. i've been posting short segments that narrate the events of our time as novice freight-hoppers. use caution: they're out of order.

a train that you could hop but probably shouldn't. photo: freefoto.com

i would not advise dying without first consulting your doctor. it's silly and irresponsible. if you do, however, want to read about a couple of boys from the western suburbs doing bad, bad things that get them killed, you can follow along with this completely extraneous story. here's a bucket list of items you probably want to accomplish before you leap to your death off a moving train. (trust me, i'm an expert):

play hide and seek
we were discovered on the first afternoon by two railroad employees doing a routine check of the train. "do you have any animals with you?" was their initial question. the clipboard, on which they needed to initial the 'all-clear' for this unit, was mounted on the wall behind us.

the railroad employees seemed cautious and benign. i offered them a beer. in fact, even after the railroad folks discovered us, michael and i kept on riding that train. the fellows had switched on the air conditioning for us, a step we hadn't taken before because it periodically made the unit's diesel engine kick on.

the days were long and hot. we huddled down below the windows, mostly only emerging after dark. we weren't quite sure where we were. we did remember recently being in denver, colorado...

dine gourmet
 michael and i had the luxury, of spending some of our time leaping off a temporarily stalled freight train and searching for food nearby. i went to safeway. there i got peanut butter and cookies and sprinted back to the surprisingly-hesitant train.

after we ran out of money, our little grocery trips got a touch more interesting. innocent by-standers in the line for subway sandwich in a rural kansas town caught sight of a long-haired northerner in short shorts, running shoes and a pink bandana as he lept into the trash can and rummaged for exactly 15 seconds. back at the train, michael and i nibbled on scraps of sandwiches and a quarter bag of sun chips.
 
don't die in kansas
in hindsight, we really should have planned for this. we stashed our bags, complete with one guitar (r.i.p. blue) and two laptops, in the bathroom of the unit and went out searching for food-laden dumpsters across a thickly planted field in the rural kansas sun. turning to see our train was moving, michael and i sprinted after that sucker...

and lying in the gravel below the tracks, i found myself struggling to come to terms with my injuries. skinned knees and shredded jeans for sure; but there was also some bruising around my legs and one hip felt displaced.

next came the memories: i had run after the train, trying to grab on an external ladder. i had succeeded in gripping it, but  had let go to avoid being swung beneath the wheels by the forward energy of the moving train. i looked back to see michael was having similar problems. my second jump had been a rush, and i actually felt grateful that my momentum had sent me head-first into the gravel below.

while watching the next train pass, i turned around to see that michael was gone. he had lept aboard on a wild guitar and backpack chase.

and i found myself alone, standing in the dust, bleeding in the sun in a rural kansas field.

the trouble with gmo's

gmo corn being harvested. photo by scott olson/getty images.

gmo's (genetically modified organisms) and gmo foods have made quite a stir lately. in the news, california's proposition 37, if passed next week, will require all vendors of food made with gmo ingredients to label them. even though almost every other first-world country requires labeling of gmo foods of gmo foods, it is not currently required in any state in the united states.

genetically modified foods are edible organisms that have had their dna spliced with the genetic code from another organism. they arrived on the scene in the us around 1996, and they really took off. after fifteen years with no gmo labels on our foods, though, many grass-roots groups are advocating for all that to change. so why the big fuss now?

 

the fuss

gmo foods in the us are limited to a list of just a few species, but pervasive ones. according to the institute for responsible technology, "currently commercialized gm crops in the u.s. include soy (94%), cotton (90%), canola (90%), sugar beets (95%), corn (88%), hawaiian papaya (more than 50%), zucchini and yellow squash (over 24,000 acres)."

in the united states, corn, soybeans and canola are some of the major building blocks from which food scientists construct many processed foods. in fact, the center for food safety says gmo's make up about 70% of processed foods sold in the us (source). it's sometimes hard to document exactly which ones they are, though, because they're not labeled.

the current legal gmo's haven't been genetically modified to produce higher yields, better nutrition or even drought resistance. according to the non-gmo project, "virtually all commercial gmo's are engineered to withstand direct application of herbicide and/or to produce an insecticide."

the existence of herbicide-resistant crops means that farmers can spray weed killer directly on the food and still have a harvest to yield; and that's exactly what our friends at the monsanto corporation have been doing for over a decade (see monsanto's description of round up-ready crops).

rats

ingesting round up on a regular basis sounds to the untrained ear like a recipe for disaster; and there's some evidence that it is. thirty peer-reviewed animal studies found that gmo foods caused problems in the liver, kidneys and blood, along with  the development of abnormal immune responses and reproductive abnormalities in the animals that ate them.

more importantly, a lifetime study on rats released last month in the peer-reviewed journal food and toxicology suggested a new side effect of gmo foods - cancer. the rats that consumed gmo foods from the monsanto corporation along with the herbicide normally sprayed on them (round up) developed large tumors in various places in their bodies.

gmo studies like the ones mentioned above are very controversial. the usda considers a lengthening list of genetically modified foods to be safe for consumption. the companies that develop the crops consider them great for profit margins. more than that, there aren't any long-term studies that specifically focus on the physiological reaction or human beings to gmo's. could 70% of our processed food really be cancer-causing without us knowing about it?

guinea pigs

rats develop must faster than humans, and gmo's have not been around long enough for us to see the lifetime effects on human beings... yet. true, as many scientists and chemical company representatives have pointed out, much of the most conclusive evidence linking gmo's to cancer comes from just one study. and yet, this one study is the only peer-reviewed study that has run long enough to test if gmo's and their complimentary herbicides (like round up) cause cancer when ingested. time, and many, many more studies will have to tell if the results have will be duplicated.

for the moment, however, we are right in the middle of a lab experiment of our own. the american food system is so inundated with genetically modified foods that it has become taboo to label them. we, the uninformed consumers, are the test group; the control will be certain western european countries that won't touch the stuff. and in fifty years...

more conclusive studies need to be done before we can say whether gmo foods are safe for human consumption. in the meantime, however, you may be interested in escaping the grand-scale experimentation at play, there are ways to diminish the genetically modified foods in your diet.

 

here's what you can do

want to avoid getting cancer from the food you eat? though gmo foods are un-labeled in the store, you can get get a pretty good idea of what is and isn't gmo if you follow the following guidelines:

• go to the farmers' market!
  here's a great chance to talk with the farmer who grew your food. ask him or her how they feel about gmo's, and find out if they use gmo seed or animal feed. there's an online list of 120 oregon farmers markets here.

• buy organic at the supermarket.
  if the food you're buying has a usda organic label, it is legally required to have 95% organic ingredients. you can find more info on the national organic program website. while gmo's officially cannot be marketed as usda organic, there is no system in place to test for gmo contamination in already certified foods.

• do a little readingmany companies in need of a little marketing boost have voluntarily paid for a certification process to ensure their foods are gmo-free. the non-gmo project has a list of gmo-free products here. you can also check out the center for food safety's non-gmo shopper's guide.