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Kaffir (Thai/Asian/Wild/Makrut) Lime – Citrus Hystrix

Written by steve warrington on . Posted in plants. 10 Comments on Kaffir (Thai/Asian/Wild/Makrut) Lime – Citrus Hystrix

A word to the prospective Kaffir Lime shopper: don’t buy yours from Logee’s Tropical Greenhouses (my fault — I didn’t read that it came in a 4-inch pot, so ended up paying close to $20 for a 2-inch tall tree that won’t fruit before my children set me out on an ice floe) or from Growquest Growers (total scam and won’t send you your plant at all). I finally got a 5-gallon tree from a seller on ebay called socalnursery760, for $50 (+ $50 shipping), but after all that disappointment, I was happy to pay $100 just to get my fleaking tree. It’s a good looking tree, about eighteen inches tall, with several fruit already set.

I’ve been wanting one of these bad boys for a couple years. My Ma planted the seed when she bought one in aught-seven. At the time I wasn’t particularly impressed, but like all good seeds, it stuck and grew. Most of its appeal is in its weirdness: the fruit is knobby and brainlike, kind of like an ugli fruit, but green of course, and about an inch to an inch and half in diameter.

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citrus hystrix

So why eighty-three different names for one plant? Kaffir is a white Afrikaner pejorative for blacks meaning “infidel,” from the Arabic “kafir” that Portugese explorers brought over to describe the native Africans they encountered. Kafir was originally from the Semitic K-F-R (love that vowelessness) meaning “to cover.” It’s a derogatory term still and several alternate names like Thai, Makrut, Wild, or Asian lime are used to avoid causing offense. Malayan slaves brought to the Cape region influenced South African kitchens, and kaffir lime probably got its name from that association. As for Hystrix, it’s Latin for “porcupine,” owing to the thorniness of the tree, which it ain’t very, or not nearly as very as a Meyer lemon for example.

The other weird thing that I love about this plant is it leaves. They’re double on the stem, one on top of the other. Kinda crazy-like. Plus they’re sweet and smell great.

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kaffir lime leaf

The fruit doesn’t give much in the way of juice, but the leaves are all over the place in Thai and Indian food, and the rind of the fruit can be zested and used for flavoring as well. Good for cookin’, yep.

Twenty-Seven Degrees of Separation

Written by steve warrington on . Posted in money, navel gazing, not worth publishing, oh life, quotes. No Comments on Twenty-Seven Degrees of Separation

My mother and I ground a sober shuffle into the treatment center’s accountant’s office (she shuffled, I more limped) to pay another’s room and board. After some small talk and paper slinging, the bald fact of the sequestration made itself completely hairless: “This is where I ask for the money, she said. I pulled out my wallet, And that is what is called a pregnant silence I said, and handed her twenty-seven hundred dollar bills. I hope you’re okay with cash.

…….

We love cash, this tame little unweathered little mirror of my Mother was looking at me, but, she said half-joking, it still scares me. I had just had this conversation with the abovementioned mother in the lobby (cash, when it floats straight from the aether to someone else’s hand, is untaxed, so I had lubriciously withdrawn and subsequently handed over a wad of bills about half an inch thick). I had thought, walking into this office and somewhat anticipating this reaction, that I would say that I was a drug dealer, but given my surroundings had decided it might possibly be in poor taste.

I’m a big guy, I said instead, no one’s going to mug me. But still, My bank has a limit, she said, and I, to fill the next new pregnant silence said, It’s an online bank, they don’t care, thinking while I said it, albeit all true, that I still looked like a drug dealer, No, they echoed, comic relief smeared across the insides of their eyes, they don’t care do they?

I had said to the teller of my hometown bank, changing the ATM’s one hundred and thirty-five twenties into twenty-seven hundreds, that such a wad of small bills would make me look “too gangster”, and then, sensing that I had spoken too plainly about what exactly she was fearing in some small unspoken reptilian segment of her stem and cortex in that bored empty and remote far-west-side branch had said, Not that I’m not ‘Gangster.’ At which she laughed, and I, nuff said to semi-relax, finger-tapped and eye-shifted a half-polite deliberate space-out until she counted finally to one hundred and thirty-five for the policy-requisite third time.

I somehow still, unshaven, semi-slept, illegitimate as I was born and limping even, managed to make them — the mother and the treatment center accountant both — happy enough with what I had produced out of my wallet that they still took him in (forgive me for thinking cold hard cashmoney to be more compelling than a I.O.U. from my bank). She gave my mother a receipt. We stood up to walk out, everyone in the building again looking up and mistaking me for mother’s young lover or my brother’s young father, (where is the father by the way?) this place reeking of everything diagnosable including Oedipus.

‘Gesk-air-ee’, is that how you pronounce it? my mother asked, reading the woman’s name from the card as we left. Yes, the accountant said, it’s Flemish. Oh, my mother said, naming the only other Flemish thing she knew of, have you read The Girl With the Pearl Earring? No, the accountant said, writing the name down on a pad, are you a big reader? Yes, my mother said with too much pride, while I began to cringe, this comfort with naming one’s qualities an embarrassment of riches borne of another generation, so is he, she said, pointing to me. And then the coup de grace, And he’s a writer too. Bye I groaned as I shrank away.

She took the Dale Carnegie course when I was a kid, and has worn a permanent smile ever since, but I don’t think that’s what makes the difference between her incredibly open and my pretty closed. Maybe bootstraps to my gen-x moping, maybe one blinding red society-gluing twentieth century atomic fear to my hundreddozen twenty-ought-plus socio-sexual-political anxieties, maybe just the desperate loneliness of thirty years of marriage to another one desperately sick with loneliness has turned her into a “sharer”, whatever it is, I shudder to hear that loud voice call me without a trace of irony, to a stranger no less, a “writer,” so much so that I am compelled to shout provocatively from halfway down the hallway I’m really just rich as shit!

Partly it is the rule of supply and demand applied to works: publish and call yourself a writer because as you have seen, anyone can do it; it is nothing. Write unpublished and despise the word. Likewise make money and see it’s magic fade in relation to its abundance. But struggle in poverty and think poison darts into the driver of every Mercedes you cannot afford.

But mostly it’s the romance of the artist: to make money just means you were clever. But to write stories that are admired is to be loved for your ability to speak to the hearts of others. There is something in that worth more than many millions, and I don’t dare presume to have that value. At least not until it is proved.

Map of St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands

Written by steve warrington on . Posted in travel. 2 Comments on Map of St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands

The St. Croix rental car didn’t come with a GPS — none of them did — and for a moment we sat there stunned, trying to remember how people navigated strange islands without directions beamed down from above. How do we find the hotel? I asked the rental counter attendant. Maps, she said, and handed us one. Everything suddenly seems so inscrutable.  They were speaking our language sure, but the third-world aspect of the airport (we hadn’t even gone inside, but were herded around the side and to the front where we found the Hertz counter near the parking area) and the cacophony of a steel drum welcome band plus ecstatic reunions or bon voyages or maybe a birthday party even (I couldn’t tell which, so complete with festive costumes and colorful flower bouquets were they) made the place seem suddenly very foreign, not familiar at all. The clerk pulled out a map and drew our route to the hotel. It seemed simple enough. Remember, the map said in bold at the top, to drive on the left side of the road. The driver’s shoulder should be near the shoulder of the road.

We got in the little Suzuki, rolled down the windows, and cranked the AC (best of both worlds: cool air plus the sounds and scents of the outside). I pulled out of the parking lot and absentmindedly pulled into the right lane. A woman at the gate leaned out the back of her booth and asked us where we were going. Carambola we said and she handed us a hand-drawn map with directions.  Thanks I said. Left side of the road she said.

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St. Croix may be a territory of the United States, but in many ways it is nothing like them.

First Example: Crucian Assumption

Crucians (the name given the 50,000 or so residents of St. Croix) give directions based on a different set of assumptions than we do in the States. For example, if I say take a left at the third light onto Main and then at the second light take a right, I mean that you ought to take the first left on the first road, and then at the second light on Main you would take a right. Rather than this first count, second count that we’re familiar with, Crucians have an ongoing count of lights.  So that when the directions read take a left at the third light onto Main and a right after the fifth light, they meant take that left and then, after two lights, take a right. That threw us. But we got to drive a bit further down Center Line Rd which bisects the island almost completely, giving us a better idea of the lay of the island.

Second example: The Reluctant Guide

The hotel literature suggested that a hike to the tide pools might be worthwhile. This was seconded by the St. Croix Weekly, a publication written for tourists that we found everywhere on the island including our room. We asked the front desk clerk how to get there. He pulled out another hand-drawn map. These are the tennis courts here he said pointing at the map, after those a bridge on the right, then follow the trail. He pushed the map toward us as if it were as simple as that. But… I insisted, where are the tennis courts? He pointed out the window. I didn’t see any tennis courts. Follow the road. He said. Which road? I said. This one, he said, pointing at the map. You mean the road the golf carts drive on? I said. Yes, he said, that one. That long drawn-out drawing of water from an ostensibly dry well could have been avoided had he just pointed out the window and said take that road there past the tennis courts to the bridge. Okay, I think I’ve got it, I said. Oh yeah, how long does the trip take? An hour and a half to get there, he said. Ohhhhh. I smiled. That seems like important information. Yes, said my straight man, depending on how fast you walk.

This was turning into quite the interrogation. He must have been afraid of somehow incriminate himself. So, how’s the terrain? I asked. This part is steep, he said, pointing to about 80% of the map. The rest is easy. Wise guy.

Ever been to Yosemite? They have god-knows-how-many trails, all marked, and all mapped with difficulty levels and time estimates.

The walk only took us an hour or so each way. We found the tennis courts, and the bridge actually had a sign that said Tide Pools, but the rest was unmarked (ok, not entirely true — one of two turns we took did have a white rag tied to a tree near it), treacherous, steep, and hot as hell. But the best part, the part they forgot to tell us about, was that the last ten minute leg of the trip required that you remove your shoes and, starting in knee-deep water, waves crashing into you all the while, climb over somewhat sheer rock surfaces to get to the pools tucked into the mountain edge. I’m not a huge sissy, but my wife is somewhat pregnant.  Plus the two cameras I brought? And the bag? And the snorkel and flippers? And my shoes around my neck? And we’re barefoot? Given all these factors I would put the difficulty level at a solid 8, which warrants, in my humble opinion, at least a mention from our guide.

tidepools2

We passed what must have been an expedition from a kids’ summer day camp on the way. Fifty-plus kids with three or four adults shepherding them along the trail. They were crazy to take those kids through there. Surely they lost at least one to the steep drop offs, or the places where the trail had collapsed down the hill. You miss one step and you won’t stop rolling for a good fifty feet at least, if you’re lucky enough to be able to grab one of the saplings or vines along the way. And here’s the saddest part of the story: after that hourlong walk, all those kids were allowed was to stand on the shore for half and hour. No swimming. No relief or reward after that life-threatening hike except for a view and the sound of the waves. They didn’t try to climb into the tide pools like we had (heaven-forbid they had), they just played there on the beach in the sun, in long pants and collar shirts, skipping stones into the surf.

Third example: unmarked and unmapped

Out for an exploratory drive, we decided to head toward the sole lighthouse on the island. Depending on which map you consulted, State Highway 63 would take you along the west coast of the island and get you there (other maps showed that the road ended before the lighthouse). State Highway 63 does not take you to the lighthouse. Rather, it ends abruptly at the gates of a cement plant.

cement factory

So we stopped and stared at the gates of this plant. Maybe it’s a temporary part of road construction project, like you see sometimes erected alongside big projects in the States. So do we drive through to get to the road on the other side? No, they wouldn’t have gates if that were true. That’s the best part of traveling that moment there.  Trying to overlay the map of our experience and understanding onto an unfamiliar culture and terrain. Do they match up? Is this what I know from back home or something completely unfamiliar? To the left was a two-track, unmarked, that curved up and around into the forest. In the map above, you can see it clearly labeled State Highway 78. This has to be a joke. A highway is a main road. A connector. It is marked. This was an unmarked dirt path with two ruts for wheels to follow. We didn’t ever see the turn-off for the scenic route we had wanted to eventually attempt to take to get home (I say attempt because all the maps recommended four-wheel drive for these roads) so maybe this was that road.  On the other hand, maybe it was someone’s driveway. We took it to find out. After half an hour of extremely bumpy but not necessarily 4×4-only terrain we began to feel that it was safe to assume that it might be the scenic route we had originally wanted.

trails

How could we know?

Along this road we passed dozens of (unmarked of course) barely cleared turnoffs. In some of the better view photos we took later you can see some of these many trails that snake through the forest and connect to one another.

view

Who had made these roads and why? What purpose did it serve other than offering a  scenic view (somewhat scenic that is — the trees grew high on each side, obstructing all but the most famous views). Obviously some machine had to cut them out of the mountains and a good view didn’t seem to warrant so much expense and trouble. They clearly weren’t faster than taking a  longer main road.  Were they left over from the original cane farming and converted to recreational use? It’s a mystery.

toosteep

National and State parks in the U.S. clearly let you know what to expect. If they don’t fence you in (or out) and prohibit you from getting too close to perils they at least warn you clearly brightly and loudly of possible dangers and difficulties. Lots of fences. Lots of signs. St. Croix is short on signs and bereft of fences. Even if it had a fence that fence would have been toppled and the trail run through it. And it would sty that way — there wouldn’t be anyone around willing to fix it. I saw a cop drive by in the opposite direction once, but I didn’t ever see a law being enforced. Littering is punishable by a fine of up to $1000, but there was trash everywhere. Empty beer bottles dotted the roadsides plentiful as weeds. There is no open container law here, one tourist-targeted info/advert publication stated plainly, and drinking and driving in St. Croix is a way of life.

We are thoroughly policed in the U.S. We are highly directed and populated and protected and controlled. In contrast, this place truly felt like a frontier, an actual wilderness like we rarely see in the States (Highway 1 on the California coast with it’s sheer cliffs inches from the road shoulder and its cows in the road is one other place, Detroit is another — some of our old cores having become our new frontiers), especially on the scenic trails where we often encountered less than one other car an hour (a pedestrian once — miles from anywhere, a half-full 5-gallon bottle of water in his hand). Of course, anyone familiar with the area would probably feel pretty quickly like they knew the ins and outs and didn’t need the signs. After six days we felt that we had seen the grasslands and the arid region and the rain forest, driven down pretty near every main road, and been to every corner of the less-than eighty-four square miles. The map began to form and fill in in our minds.

It might begin to feel quite natural to follow common sense rather than roadside signs, a GPS, and an officer’s admonitions. Boot sense a friend calls it, common sense that comes from lived experience and a little bit of salty smarts. Boot sense comes with familiarity though, from experience, and it took six days for the place to begin to feel familiar. Prior to that, we floundered.

Example four: no script

We figured that Buck Island, a small island off the northeast cost near Christiansted would be the most tourist-infested spot and so decided to avoid it. But with all of the adventures checked off of our list and one full day remaining we asked the owner of Polly’s what we should do with our last day. Have you been to Buck Island? he asked. So we booked a tour with Big Beard’s, for the next day. The boat held over fifty but there weren’t more than twenty of us. The first segment of the tour took us to a beautiful beach where we had an hour to swim and sunbathe. The second segment was within the islands’ barrier reef. Lots of fish and coral to see, they told us.  Off by ourselves, Courtney and I saw the fish, we saw the coral, we saw a lobster and a squid and then we rounded a corner and a three foot long barracuda slid in front of us all mean-eyed and toothy. It just stared at us, and we backpedalled and swam away. Are barracudas dangerous? Obviously it was a predator. Did it attack humans? How could we know?

Back on the boat we asked one of the crew. No, they leave us alone pretty much, he said. Pretty much? I asked. Well, last year a woman was sitting on the back of the boat throwing food in for the fish and kicking her feet in the water and a barracuda came up and sank its teeth into her foot and shook for a while.  That was a mess. We had to take her to get stitches. So don’t feed the fish and shake your appendages as a rule. They’re also attracted to jewelry, it looks like the silversides they like to eat, so we tell people to leave that in the boat.

Wait. Back up. He hadn’t told us that. I had a shiny ring on, the Missus had a ring and earrings. Another girl saw a shark just now, closer in to the island, he continued with his casually spun horror fantasy where there were no consequences and life held no value. Will they eat us? I asked. Pretty much only if you have fish parts in your pockets he said, so we usually advise people to leave those behind. It was all said so nonchalantly that despite being told that we could have been barracuda snacks, it never occurred to us to skin and filet him. Like the cliffs at the tide pools, we had made it out intact, so what was the concern? A tropical cocktail of nine parts luck and one part boot sense had kept us out of harm’s way once again.

Of course, tours must prepare for tourists, who are often floundering about in total or near-total ignorance. And didn’t this company have a liability if its passengers were injured? I didn’t sign any waivers.  Or wait.  Did I?

buckisland

I went home with more confidence in my inner GPS, and my sense of the world with some of its old-school unmediated integrity still intact, a sense of the world as an old playground with monkey bars that everyone breaks their legs on and concrete sculptures that everyone gets six stitches above their eyes from rather than a theme park with twohourlong ratmaze lines and wholly mediated fun and adventure. St. Croix, that is to say, is not at all child-proof.

We’d faced barracudas and stingrays and jungle paths and rocky cliffs and had found our own way there and back. More intrepid now in fact at four months pregnant than at any other time in our partnership, we came away feeling like we had made a new place our home, even if after six days of the humidity it will be years  before I ever feel like coming back.

there ought to be a an “Overheard in Las Vegas” site too

Written by steve warrington on . Posted in oh life. No Comments on there ought to be a an “Overheard in Las Vegas” site too

Overheard in Las Vegas:

1. man sitting at a slot machine at Caesar’s Palace: “I gotta get my lawn mower back out of hock”

2. man to friend passing by a ferrari and lamborghini outside the Venetian: “there’s valet, and then there’s valet”

3. poolside white man to his wife: “god made shadows for crackers like us”

ipod Shuffle Code Cracked (aka my iPod is Artificially Intelligent)

Written by steve warrington on . Posted in not worth publishing. No Comments on ipod Shuffle Code Cracked (aka my iPod is Artificially Intelligent)

While that title is relevant it is also a double entendre meant to bring the drooling apple fanatics by the thousands. Though they may be quickly disappointed, I still as ever ascribe to the philosophy that any attention good or bad is better than no attention at all.

So: I’ve been listening to my ipod “on the go” playlist on “shuffle” lately, which is as you’ve probably guessed if you’re not already familiar a random play of the 1400+ songs in my music library. What I noticed out of the corner of my ear yesterday and fully consciously today is that while, fer instance, Metallica may have found its way into my heart and therefore my library thanks to choice gems like “kill ’em all” and “whiplash” and “to live is to die” plus 28 other classics culled from the rest of the first four albums for maximum retro metal headbanging effect, and the band is proportionately underrepresented in relation to other bands (both the number of bands and the number of songs per band) in my library, I still managed in the space of an hour to hear three different songs by the band.

Three songs out of Fourteen hundred is point-two percent. So in an hour had my iPod been adhering to percentages I should have heard no more than approximately six seconds of Metallica. Yet I heard in that hour somewheres in the region of seven to ten relentlessly unrelenting hair-flinging headbanging minutes. Outrageous, I say!

Same with Unsane and Nick Cave yesterday. Not that I don’t love either enough to put them on my last gasp playlist, my death rattle shuffle, but when I say random I mean random and when I don’t get it I start to itch something fierce like fire ants in my socks or tomato juice in my paper cuts.

That’s not random I thought and therefore objected on a core level enough that the symptoms became more like fire ants in the pants or tomato juice in my eyes. But then it dawned on me, and all you mathematicians out there take heed, I’m here to set the record straight: avoiding a pattern is itself a pattern. Randomness must include seeming repetition.

In human terms, if you want to appear not to play favorites you have to play a little bit of favorites so as not to appear to be avoiding the favorite. I trust the iPod to do a little better than that. My meager little willful little mind may be able to muster, calculation- and desirelessness-wise, the semblance of random, but it will always fall shy one horse.

In the rarefied terms of High Art, i.e. the language of Hollywood Hitz, the objection made in “He’s Just Not That Into You,” that guys treating ladies like shit is not (surprise!) in fact a sign that they like you but is actually (reverse surprise!) true, the second-guess double-speak reverse-psychology that really really would in fact have a solid mathematical basis if only we could quiet ourselves like an iPod and not-at-all-randomly randomly play Metallica three times in an hour actually bears some scrutiny: the subtleties required to outhink Deep Blue are probably as subtle as the B in subtle.

Self-Soothing

Written by steve warrington on . Posted in navel gazing, not worth publishing, oh life. No Comments on Self-Soothing

In Sam Sheridan’s A Fighter’s Heart he talks about dogs that will fight for forty-five minutes without letting up versus the dogs that quit earlier.  He quotes a trainer: “All this care, you must love the animal, and if the animal loves you back, you will get a dog that fights past forty-five minutes, an animal with gameness. If there is love, the dog will fight to the death…without it, the dog will not show heart.”

A dog whose trainer beats it to make it mean will rage and tear but run out of steam early. It’s the loved (love here not taking an easy definition) dog, the dog that not only trains with but connects to its trainer, the dog with heart, that will die before it quits.

In eighth grade, we had to wrestle in gym class.  I wrestled Mike Haft, the bully. He was big and solid and he got me on my back and I let him take me without a fight. I’ve relived that moment differently in my mind at least a thousand times. I didn’t prove myself then and I’ve proven myself many times since but still that moment haunts me.

My friend has a two year old, and she and her husband are slowly going mad trying to get him to sleep through the night. They’ve tried letting him cry it out, and they’ve tried letting him sleep in the bed with them.  They’ve tried detachment and they’ve tried attachment, and are confounded by the hard fact that no matter how many childrearing philosophies there are out there telling you the right way to raise your kid, each is his own special little (hard) case. Some will be easy and some will be hard.  Some will sleep and some will slowly drive you insane.

Fourteen years ago I was a hardcore attachment parent.  I knew (knew!) that if I gave my baby everything she wanted she would not know need, and would know the world was a good safe place, and would be contented.  But my cute little Hobbesian bundle of complicatedness flew in the face of everything I thought I knew.  I gave her all I could and she only wanted more. Now, at fourteen, she wants me to tell her how to make jell-o.  Where’s the ice? she asks.

I don’t know how to self-soothe and so am consequently constantly flirting with compulsion (long ago cigarettes, now alcohol, now sex) — never quite permitting it to do harm but never quite able to get enough either.

It occurred to me last night, restless and agitated next to sleeping Courtney, unable to deep-breathe myself down into unconsciousness, thinking only of the one thing that would soothe me but unwilling to wake her (even if I had…), that I have heard of few if any successful rescue stories. You can love it and you can give it some peace, but can you ever get its tail out from between its legs? I am trying to learn that in our cores we are all good, and satisfied, and safe, but I see so much hurt and hardness and danger. If I were more religious it might feel easier to have this sin washed out of me suddenly in a moment but I just keep getting hung up on how many thousands of neural paths have to be rerouted. Old dogs, new tricks… Or, once a cur always a cur, isn’t that how it goes?