Visiting Relatives
Drinking hallucinogenic tea, kneeling on peppercorns on the cellar floor, visiting in Beirut as shells shrieked around the city
January 2002
War: Such an easy word to utter. One syllable. It slices the air like a sword.
Sunbeams
I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly; feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.
What We’re Really Hungry For
An Interview With Geneen Roth On Mindful Eating
Many people, however, want to lose weight simply because they believe it will make them happy and stop their pain. So it’s not so much the weight they want to lose, but the pain. They are the main audience for my work.
how i failed at farming (again)
If you have a strong stomach and can listen long enough without fainting or retching, you’ll find that farm-injury stories have an important underlying message: pay attention. Furthermore, when you think things are going well, pay extra attention.
The Pleasures Of Eating
A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes. The pleasure of eating, then, may be the best available standard of our health. And this pleasure, I think, is pretty fully available to the urban consumer who will make the necessary effort.
Jean Jones
And Jean was off and rolling. It had taken less than fifty words, spoken with a modicum of interest, to snag her. Like some massive, ornamental carp, she nosed up out of the dark bottom, toward the light.
No Matter What We Eat
The sheet of instructions from the endoscopy center says to drink clear liquids only. They give grape juice as an example. I can’t quite understand how something purple could be clear, but it gives me hope. If grape juice is clear, can melted chocolate be bouillon?
Cómo Aguantamos
The thing Terry hates most about going back to England, even on vacations, is that it’s like coral: a living dead thing. There is sweet nothing to do. Football. Sky television. The cancer of the reminiscence.
The LaBrie Farm
I was working on a documentary project about a section of Route 11 that spans New York State when I stopped at Edward and Mary LaBrie’s dairy farm in Jefferson County, about twenty-five miles from the Canadian border. During that first visit, in 1985, I resolved to do a separate documentary project on this family. Procrastinator that I am, it wasn’t until the spring of 1998 that I finally set out to record their vanishing way of life.
