Ride a Fucking Bike. It is totally worth the ride.

The other day I saw a bumper sticker on a bike that just read, “Ride a Fucking Bike”.  For some reason, it cracked me up.  If you ever see one for sale, I’d love it for my birthday.

Riding your bike will seem like a royal pain in the ass, especially when you haven’t done it recently.  Until you actually get your ass on it.  Then it will seem like the greatest idea you ever had.

There is something special about riding a bike, and that special something is that you are completely out in the elements.  It’s you and the ground, the air, the people, the buildings, the trees.  You are not being housed inside something else that is protecting you – there is no barrier between you and the outside.  Your senses are engaged, all of you is present.  It is a much more genuine experience than riding in a car.

Which brings me to the deeper meaning here – I find that in our culture we are constantly scuttled deeper and deeper into a false reality.  Think about it – how much waking time to do you spend looking at a screen of some kind versus a face?  How about versus something nature created, like a tree or a flower?  I get strange chills every time I see a fake animal on television, like the geico commercials.  I have a terrible fear that one day all humans will know about frogs, butterflies, snakes, bees and dragonflies will be fake cartoon versions of them on screens.  I got to catch real frogs – do children still get to do that?  Aren’t they nearly extinct?

It’s also why I love gardening, because it brings me that up-close reality of something nature made.

Ever notice how, if you drive a lot, you start to sort of feel like your car is your home?  It’s creepy, but it starts to have that calm, homey feel to it.  It’s yours, your car.  Ever notice too how being inside your car makes every other person inside their car seem like an enemy?  Ever notice how easy it is to seriously dislike other people when you are in your car?  Being in a car creates a passive-aggressive anger at the world.  It’s stressful, it’s weird, it’s out of touch with the real earth around you… it ain’t right.

That is why I like to find bicycle rental places whenever I travel.  Sightseeing on a bicycle is actually sightseeing.  It makes the sky your ceiling, as it should be.

So, about the pain in the ass part – here are some tips to make it less of a pain in the ass:

1.  Make sure your tires are pumped up.  It’s also pretty easy to get a little tire pump that attaches to your bike, as well as tire-changing stuff.  I actually don’t have this stuff, but my boyfriend does.  I take my chances I guess.

2.  In google maps there is a button with a bicycle up there somewhere – push it after you do a directions search for where you want to go and it will show the best route options for a bike and how long it will take you to get there.

3.  Don’t do any heavy grocery shopping on your bike unless you have a good basket.  If you do grocery shop, use the handheld basket so you know how much stuff you are getting and how heavy it is.

4.  Bring a backpack, just in case.  You never know when you might want to buy something along the way and need the carrying capacity.

5.  Be smart.  If you are on a busy downtown street like 17th and it’s freaking you out, just let all the cars pass you.  You can get pretty far before the next crowd catches up to you.  I like to let most of the cars pass me when the light turns green, too.  Then they aren’t scared to pass me, and I’m not annoyed they are being lame about it.

It’s really only a pain in the ass until you do it.  Then you feel awesome!  So just ride a fuckin’ bike!

 

Where the Grass is Greener

This world is a hard place for me to live in.  I am nothing like most of the people I am surrounded by, and everywhere I turn I am faced with the cruelty and harmfulness of a culture that values bliss over truth, convenience over caring, and materialistic self aggrandizement over genuineness.  I truly am tortured by my surroundings.

Yesterday it was a trip to Home Depot.  The line of traffic I had to sit through reminded me of the fact that I had to drive there, and that I am partially responsible for the death of the great coral reefs: http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2012/09/06/caribbean-coral-reefs-mostly-dead-iucn-says/

There are just too many humans here.  I had to fight my way through a moseying crowd of people who are completely, rudely unaware of anyone around them, only to run into a giant pile of Roundup for sale.

Roundup is one of the things responsible for killing off honey bees.  I cannot believe that it is even legal, and I really can’t believe people still purchase it!!!  It is also produced by a company that is one of the most evil companies in the world today.  Which is saying a lot, because there are a lot of evil companies out there.  Of course most of them are American companies. (<= Oh and by the way, scroll down to #1 – who do you think funded the c’oup d’etat?  That would be us, as the U.S. military is in place mostly to protect our corporate interests.  That’s why it is so important to the corporate leaders of our government)

Then I drive home and past my neighbor’s fluorescent colored, perfect lawn.  His lawn is disgusting.  I don’t understand the point of it either.  You wouldn’t be able to lay on it without inhaling carcinogenic fumes, which allows nothing to grow on it except grass.  Grass is the dumbest sort of stuff you can possibly grow here with higher water requirements than most ground covers and when doused in chemicals provides nothing for anyone – not bees, people or animals.

How are people this ridiculous???

Why must we constantly fight nature???

The reason a grassy lawn is such a pain in the ass is because all the earth is trying to become a forest.  There is a very specific pattern that life will go through (all life), starting with grassy low lying plants, moving through mid-sized bushes and finally on to big ol’ trees, to get to be a forest.  Basically, a forest is matured earth.  A lawn is infantile earth, that you have to continually fight to keep from growing up into adulthood.

The other thing that is so amazing about mature earth is that it reaches the balance of an ecosystem eventually – which is where all the life and water is in perfect balance.  In the earlier stages it goes through phases, sometimes where a certain species will infest and become over abundant.  But usually there is some kind of reason for the infestation – an imbalance, resulting in an overabundance of something else that was there.  Eventually the infestation is put into check once its food source runs out or its predator moves in.

Trying to keep a lawn in the wee stages of infancy all of the time created imbalance.  So of course we are bound to experience infestations of different pests or other problems too, trying to keep this lawn all picture perfect.  Which is why the only way to get a luscious looking lawn is through the use of horrible chemicals.  (Well, that’s not totally true).

The point is that the way in which we, as a westernized world of idiots, like to grow our plants, lawns and gardens, is completely out of sync with the way nature works.  First of all, you have to understand that our gardens are immature forests that want to be forests.  (For us here in Denver, because of a dryer climate we’re actually an immature prairie).  You are going to have to work hard to keep it from becoming what it wants to become.

I wish people would think about what they are doing and why – in all things they do actually.  But I wonder, does my neighbor think about the joy his lawn brings him?  Is that joy so enlightening that it is worth all the chemicals and horrible noisy shit he’s always doing out there?  And does it bring him more joy than it would if it were an organic garden of drought resistant cover crops and flowers?  Is it worth is to him, even if it is responsible for killing some of the earth’s last precious honeybees?

Would it even be that hard for him to convert to an organic way of doing it?

It would seem that all he cares about is how perfect it looks, without ever considering the impact all those chemicals have on the future generations of honeybees and people.  It is a concept I see as materialistic and vapid.  How can people continue their brutish existences like this without worrying about honeybees?

We tout around thinking we are so grand with our big brains.  But it seems to me that we can’t seem to process what the future is going to look like if we continue our actions today.  The world will have to be stripped of all of it’s almonds, apples, peaches, tomatoes, etc – people are going to have to starve – Oh wait, people are already starving – Americans are going to have to starve before anyone will even consider changing their lifestyles even just a tiny bit.  Most of us believe that we’d be missing something big and important to give up our lawns just because honeybees might be dropping dead everywhere.  How smart are we as a species really?

The same goes for cars, big fat houses in the suburbs, shopping on the weekends and purchasing all the stupid shit we all think we need to purchase.  Just please, please think about what you do and why you do it.  We don’t need SUVs, brand new TVs, Crap made in China, designer hand bags or perfect lawns.  Your life is more meaningful without them.

Want a good read about this kind of stuff?  I totally recommend this book: 

 

Why I Dislike Tower Gardens

I have a slew of friends and family members that are pretty into these things, so I apologize in advance that I am finally going to tell it as I really see it.  I truly hope I don’t hurt any feelings.

I understand that the Tower Garden is has a great many advantages, especially for people living in apartments or whatever where they don’t have a lot of access to space to grow their own food, but want to.  Okay so jolly joy!  But I still dislike them very much and I think they stink of civilization, excess, detachment, disconnection and excuses.

1.  Tower Gardens perpetuate the disconnection from nature that is inherent in civilization, cities, and eating food from a grocery store. 

Today in my garden I watched the most adorable new wolf spider walk by with a giant fly.  He was definitely a smaller, teenager sized wolf spider.  I had seen him about an hour before, and we had stared at each other for a few minutes.  He looked up at me with his many eyes, which I checked out because it is always interesting to see an animal with that many eyes and imagine what you must look like.  I decided he was pretty adorable then.  But then later seeing that he had caught himself a giant fly, it was just too cute.

Birds are also a huge part of my yard.  I have a heated bird bath that turns on when the weather gets below freezing, and I have a couple of bird feeders.  They know I am their friend and have gotten to know me, so they aren’t afraid to hang out pretty close by me.  Today, they were making a nest.  I never figured out where, but two of them kept hopping by with sticks and straw hanging out of their beaks.

Then of course there are the squirrels.  I’m not so much a fan of them.  But they love to hang about my yard too.  And there’s my bees.  Bees are pretty cool.  You can hang out and watch them work very up close and they really don’t bother you.  Yesterday I saw a bee fight.  Two of them just went at it, wrestling around while buzzing in circles.  They both flew away at the end.  Which is nice because the last bee fight I saw left one bee struggling on the ground.

Then of course there are all sorts of creepy crawly things that are just amazing to see.  Some you can touch and check out, like worms, others you should probably leave alone.

They are all a part of this amazing network, the most amazing thing I have ever read about, witnessed, or been a part of.  They are all an integral part of an ecosystem.  They are all there for a reason.  They all have a job to do and a part to play.

But gardening, and nature, also has it’s down sides.  I have been stung by a bee before.  It hurt.  I’ve had an invasion of some kind of beetles on my tomatoes before, and it sucked.  I have had to figure out how to handle (organically of course) all sorts of bugs, powdery mildew, weeds, etc.  That is part of gardening.  It’s figuring out how to plant an ecosystem of plants that will have the healthiest relationships with each other and the bugs and animals in your yard.  Gardening should not be about trying to grow food for you and that’s it.  It’s about the kind of ecosystem you are creating.

When you are a part of something like that, it’s joyous.  You start to understand, in the tiniest way, how important ecosystems are, how beautiful it is to be a part of something bigger than yourself, and how beautiful it is to have relationships with nonhuman beings.  With things like spiders and worms and birds and bees.  Native children were known to play with baby wolves.  They had relationships with wild animals like that.

Tower gardens keep you from having a relationship to the land and the creatures that make your plants grow.  They are sterilized, having nothing to do with nature at all.  Why would I want that?

We, the civilized, on the other hand, are terrified of nature.  From wolves to worms to spiders are you kidding me?  Civilized white men would rather murder these creatures than have a relationship with them.  Some would do it out of fear, some would do it out of a hunger for power.  I don’t want to kill off the ecosystems that are a part of our life support, because I have a relationship with them.  I see these ecosystems as being a lot more important than tar sands, than even our stupid economy.  Because if the economy goes down, and we’re all poor as dirt, we’ll at least still have places where the water is clean and we are able to grow food if we do not destroy all of these important places.  But if we do destroy them for money, for the economy, well, here we’ll sit with a lot of money while we feed ourselves toxic food and poisoned water.  You should be terrified of the civilized.  Look what they did to the Native Americans.  Look at what Monsanto is doing to our own ability to grow food, to our own soil.  The civilized do not give a damn about your well being or your health.  Tower gardens represent this perfectly.  Now you can have food that grows without all of the pesky nature that normally goes with it!

2.  I hate plastic

Plastic is, like most man-made substances, toxic.  I’m not going to grow my food in a giant plastic container, are you kidding me?  I’m not worried about the toxic of the plastic seeping into my vegetables, I’m worried about the breakdown of that giant tube of plastic in thousands of years.  I can’t stand the idea of my trash existing past me.  How horrible.  When we die, our trash should die with us.  But instead, when we die we leave behind this giant, oozing toxic waste site.  I am not about to add something as giant as a tower garden to that!

3.  Why not join a community garden?

You know what I did when I lived in the city and couldn’t garden in my house?  I got a plot at a community garden.  It was great fun.  We got together to weed as a group once a month, everyone brought something fun to eat, and I met some really cool people.  Community – yet another giant thing that our culture is completely lacking that Tower Gardens are also completely lacking.

4.  They say that Tower Gardens use ‘less than 10% of the water and land needed for conventional farming’.  Sounds like a giant marketing excuse to me.  First off, I am not gardening as a conventional farmer.  That isn’t what we’re doing here, when we go to purchase a Tower Garden.  Secondly, I understand that the use of the tower garden might use less water and land, but how about when you figure in the industrialized manufacture of both the tower itself and the fertilizers they are selling you to put in it?  How much water, energy and land went into that?  I want to see the figures for that.

And besides that, it has to depend upon how you use it right?  I know people who have these things hooked up to tons of grow lights.  So how much more energy is it taking for them to grow their lettuce than it does for me to grow mine?  And as far as water goes, how much water was used in the creation of that energy you are using?  We all talk about solar power this or that, but honestly the best way to harness solar power is through growing your own plants!  why warp that into needing more energy?

5.  Tower Gardens do not protect the earth or make it more sustainable, but gardens do.

I like the feel of the earth and I like supporting it.  I want to help the worms and the spiders survive and enjoy their lives, and I avoid consumerism and industrialism as much as I can.  Because Tower Gardens are a product of industry, because someone makes money off of them, and because they need a convenient-to-their-producers constant supply of fertilizer that itself is probably helping to kill the environment, I just don’t buy this argument.  The only thing they do is eliminate some of the carbon dioxide emissions of food transportation.  But I still wonder how much emissions are created in the making of that damn fertilizer?

Tower gardens do nothing to promote the health of our soil, our oceans and rivers, nor do they protect endangered species, endangered ecosystems, or endangered land from the capitalists that are destroying them for profit.  It looks to me like instead these things are promoted and sold by capitalists who wan the same thing – profit.

6.  I have an idea!  Get rid of your grass!

If you have a yard at all you have no reason to purchase one of these things at all.  Why not spend all the time and energy that goes into maintaining and watering your lawn into a garden instead?  That, in my opinion, would be the best way to save money on vegetables (and carbon emissions on transporting them).  Plus you’d actually get to be outside, you might actually get to have a real relationship with your yard, some birds and some worms.

BTW – a note to anyone who really does want to garden to make a difference: don’t give up.  Nature is very very slow.  And we, by nature, are also slow.  You have to give yourself time.  Don’t expect your first year to be amazing.  Expect some bugs, some weeds, some failing plants, and don’t worry about it.  Be happy with what you do get.  Look into companion planting, permacultuer, and a great book called Gaia’s Garden!

7.  Tower Gardens don’t give back.  To me, nature is a give and take, cyclical sort of wonder.  At the end of a season many plants give back to earth in their death.  Trees add an amazing layer of mulch to my garden in the fall, and all the excess I produce goes into compost.  You take, but you are meant to give back.  Civilization, by its very nature, takes without ever giving back.  Because of this unnatural way of being it cannot persist forever, it simply can’t.

I understand that for some, a Tower Garden is gratifying.  I just could never feel that way myself.  I try to avoid plastic as much as possible, I love the earth with all of its creatures, and I avoid being the dollar signs in someone else’s eyes whenever I can.  Tower Gardens embody all of these things I do not aspire to.

I see gardening as more than just a narcissistic way to feed myself.  If you like to live in skyscrapers, drive everywhere, eat tomatoes in winter, walk on cement every day, and are afraid of bees or spiders… if you believe that all of nature should only serve you, the human being, then the tower garden is for you.  In my book it is simply another function of the industrialized, consumerist, human-narcissistic system.

Get a real garden, and get your hands dirty.