March 31, 2005

• I'm eating a chocolate bar. It tastes like dirt. Like a little kid eating soil from the yard. The deepest, most fertile earth ever to form a topsoil.

  It pulls warmth out of my gums. It melts into mud. My mouth is full of mud.

  Mud isn't the taste of chocolate, but chocolate is the taste of mud. It's primal. On the tongue, in the aroma, it communicates to my inner reptile and I feel content. Swallowed, it seeps into my blood and I feel intoxicated.

  Chocolate, dairy fat, sugar.

  I just watched 'The Motorcycle Diaries.' They kept mentioning maté, and now I want some. Maté is also primal. There's nothing refined about it. The social customs surrounding it are refined, but the material itself, the taste, the feel of the tea is basic and unsubtle.

  But the main thing 'The Motorcycle Diaries' made me think of is this guy I know named Alan. Some of my readers know Alan, too. Yes, that Alan. He looks like the young Che in 'Diaries.' Slender, reserved, profoundly intelligent, able to win you over by telling the truth without compromise. There are other similarities, too. Alan's not leading Cuban rebels to victory, but he's leading 'cultural creatives' to build consensus and act sustainably. A different kind of revolutionary.

  I've been thinking about this kind of revolutionary lately. When I first came here to the Pacific northwest, I wanted to be one of them. I wanted to learn all about sustainability and organic farming and alternative energy and participate with other folks who were doing the same stuff. Maybe work at a farm. Write about it. Typical romantic dreaming type stuff. I did a little networking, but only in a passive mode, because that's how you do things if you're me.

  But I still want to write that book. I've been thinking about it a lot of late. How it would work, what my focus would be, how best to address certain tricky issues.

  The voyage of a thousand pages begins with a single word.

  • 5:17 am
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