It turns out it must have been a Bengal tiger, not a tepesquintle (“regarded by some authorities as the tastiest of all rodents”) I ate a few years ago. The restaurant where I et it descries any mention of the incident as foul slander (but I forgive them for their chicharron.) I remember the conversation perfectly. They used to be endangered but suddenly they (whomever they were) learned how to breed them in captivity and the country was frothing with indigent tespesquintle queuing up at soup kitchens to be eaten. I did my duty to rodentkind, ate and did not question the source of this revelation, an amiable bullshitter famous for believing his own yarns. Oops. In the future I will be more cautious of things magically delicious.

~

From The Princess and Curdie (I have been revisiting my childhood reading. Perfect for insomnia.)

…Curdie grew, he grew at this time faster in body than in mind—with the usual consequence, that he was getting rather stupid—one of the chief signs of which was that he believed less and less in things he had never seen. At the same time I do not think he was ever so stupid as to imagine that this was a sign of superior faculty and strength of mind. Still, he was becoming more and more a miner, and less and less a man of the upper world where the wind blew. On his way to and from the mine he took less and less notice of bees and butterflies, moths and dragonflies, the flowers and the brooks and the clouds. He was gradually changing into a commonplace man.

~

A note while reading In Defense of Food (very good, though no revelation for anyone who has been pondering food and nutrition science for a while): Maybe we don’t understand the sensual—the literal use of our senses, because we no longer have a food or physical culture much connected to the—empirical, to a tangible reality. (Is that the right way to put it?). This is why things like psychoanalysis, meditation, or fertility seem magical, mystical to us. They are so at odds with our rootless versions of sex and eating, which are decreasingly tethered to our own senses, which in turn are decreasingly tethered to the natural world. So many aspects of our culture encourage us to doubt our senses or outright deceive them with calculated fakes that satisfy enough to make us fat and sleepy as we float farther and farther from the earth; out of visual, auditory, or tactile range.

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Pink Tentacle highlights some monsters from Yōkai Jiten.

Fishing in the dead zone of the Gulf of Mexico.

Overcoming Creative Block (via SwissMiss). I’d add that in my experience, creative energy comes in waves and when it retreats the only thing to do is wait quietly. I find I have to switch back and forth between the stimulating and the soothing to not burn out.

Luke Jerram’s Acoustic Wind Pavilian.

5-d geometries. (See the video animations.)

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I am back in NYC now and besides feeling more energetic than I have in some time, everything that happened in the last month feels far away as I try to make notes on the farms and tangle of gardens we visited. I am still nibbling the last of the crumbly chocolate we bought in Puerto Viejo, where the best chocolate is cacao paste and grated tapa dulce and nothing else. It doesn’t stay fresh long so there’s no point in saving it for my hope chest or something. I have a bit of that astonishing honey left, a bag of nutmeg, lots of cacao beans, some banana vinegar, achiote paste, a tub of cacao butter, and a lot of different tropical fruit jams. We arrived home around 3am. All three of us were wide awake, enervated but alert. It was twenty degrees outside and the sky was brilliantly clear. New York looked cold and sharply beautiful from the window of the cab.