~potherbs

Okay, so imagine a tree.  This tree is a giant, but he was a grandiose tree.  I mean, for love and life, right?  For love and life.  Anyway, this tree, he is old.  Have you ever walked with the redwoods? I mean, go to Muir Woods.  John Muir, like an idol, right? I mean, just go there.  You’ll see things, you’ll realize, you are a speck! A speck! These trees, they are big, massive, with this kind of fibrous bark that you can just pull right off. It’s resistant to fire, you know?  It’s beautiful.  Nature, man…nature! Anyway, so you have this tree, and its a husk.  Now what do you do with it? The wimps out there, those broken fucking suburbanites…those assholes will hire some workers, hire some kind of illegal immigrants or something that will chop down the tree for them, that will use chainsaws and ropes.  This husk man…only chop down a husk, don’t chop down anything living, I don’t roll with anything living…I mean, just look at the husk.  Stare at it.  This was a tree, man.  A tree of wisdom.  But we gotta survive, right?  Nature, man…nature! So we chop down the tree…ourselves. We take an axe, and we chop it down.  We break up the wood, make a fire for the night.  Post our tent.  And we spend days just chopping up that wood.  I’ve got a saw, an old school back-and-forth, not one of those bullshit internal combustion engine dingdongs, a real saw where you use your muscles.  We post our tent, maybe get ready to start chopping up that wood for fires, breaking up the logs, making a fire to last through the night.  Find a rabbit trail, use some string I found dumpster diving and place it on the rabbit run, hoping to trip one of those suckers up.  Say we start chopping that wood up to make a little cabin.  Michael Pollan’s A Place of My Own. Read it, cherish it, feel it.  It’s real! Anyway, we start putting this wood together.  We have some tools, gonna make some boards.  Lay down those boards.  Check the rabbit traps, nothing yet.  We’re hungry, it’s been about a week, but that’s okay, humans have always been hungry, I’m just being human now.  I wasn’t human before in the grungy apartment, drinking Nantucket Nectars (only 12% real fruit juice!), fixy biking to the white-collar job.  Linoleum! Ceiling lighting! My god! Where is the real world?  Where is the green?  Not that green, not money green, but LIFE green! The Life!  I mean, here I am, in a forest, chopped down a wisdom tree, hunting for rabbits and building a cabin! My god! It’s beautiful! The exultation, the wonder of it all, I feel connected to everything,  my muscles go weak and give away with the ecstasy and the forest seems to orbit around my mind. I want to hug every tree, tap every tree for sap and let it run through my veins! This is the dream! Let Mushroom Man and his bullshit see me now! I’m living the life! The Naturalist Life! The true life! I mean, I fucking chopped down a tree! And made logs! Hah! I made fucking logs!  Everything’s going black.

I woke up four weeks later in the hospital.  Apparently, I was dying from starvation and some couple hiking through the White Mountains found me passed out. Malnutrition led to some kind of coma? I’m not sure.  It was also extremely cold, so I think hypothermia was in the mix too. But when I woke up, with lighted machines beeping next to me, an IV pumping some strange chemical in my veins, my parents looking as if they were deciding between sobbing or hugging me or choking me to death, you know what I thought?

Nature, man…nature! My god (I don’t believe in God, but I say God sometimes, just putting it out there) that was real!  Tip your cap to the mother!  Mushroom man never chopped down a tree, and even if he did, he never almost starved out in the woods.  I nearly starved out there in the woods!  That’s way above organic, slow food, fixy bike, dumpster dive, any of that hipster shit, that’s the real ish, the numero uno, that was…that was Ginsberg.  Kerouac.  The Original! Man, love it. My beard is just curling up in pride right now.

Ole Westy is making me go through some introduction, but I think the above story should tell you all you need to know about me.  But, just to be careful, here it is: Hey, they call me potherbs.  I would say I think about the food I ate, eat and am going to eat for about seven to eight hours a day.  And that doesn’t include actual meal times.  I love to bike, urban explore, or just explore in general.  I used to have a chicken coop (they’re all dead now, but I tried to fletch some arrows), an SLR, and I eventually want to work in an organic farm.  That is, unless I move to Alaska, which is also in the works.  I love art, photography especially.  I’m an artist. Westchop’s Note: He is nothing of the sort. 

Things are moving fast, but just remember, nothing shines through the indelible love of my soul, or yours, and also remember to always think about what and how and when and where and why you eat.  All the questions.  Food! And Nature!