Palm Desert, Coachella Valley, December 23rd, 2011

It's COMMANDO FRIDAY!

That said, I am glad to have this blog to look back upon. I can tell my future self certain things that I may have forgotten; Everybody else can listen in. Here we go:

Hey Bashu. Things are raunchy. You're living in a van with six people.

six?

yes. Not the same six we started with at all. I can make an amusing map graphic later to show how everybody came together, but long story short, it's me, Bryce, Nate (from New York), Annabelle and Amelie (from Quebec), and Mason (from Oyama).

And I'm learning how to be poor. It's good. We're not really poor. But I am throwing off the vestiges of class. I take showers when I can. I unblock the toilet with a stick. I play accordion on the sidewalk, and if somebody should give me a dollar, I thank them kindly and with happiness in my heart.

we may be poor, but when the A-team are playing their ukeleles, and Mason and Bryce their guitars, and I'm stomping a foot shaker and squeezing the accordion, and we are all singing, we got something we don't need to pay for. It'd be the same if we were rich kids from LA, college students from Calgary. Your voice, your craft, they stand alone.

in Santa Barbara I came out of the library, blinking my screen-glared eyes, and a woman leaning in the door of a bookstore called out to me "Come, play, gypsy, play!". so I wandered over and played her One More Cup of Coffee, and she smiled and said, take any book you like. as long as it's not a new book, she said. This is what you earn. This is what I learn. I don't need a new book. I get what I need.

And if you try sometimes,

you might just find,

you get four boxes of dates as well.

Food stamps, putting a hat out, flying a sign that says "Tips not required to listen, but will help a young traveller", admitting to the world that you could use some help, saying "I'm poor", being happy, giving up the judgments you once had, the pride. I'm about ready to start playing blues, but I just play Fleet Foxes songs instead, cause I feel them, and people give us money and say "merry christmas".

When my friends travelled, I would be at home and think "you don't need to travel to learn lessons." Now I'm not so sure. Some big river of thought has hooked me by the waistband of my pants and drawn me up into its flow. Last night a jittery man called AJ was on Oxycontins and acid and showing me his burns and a previous Bashu might have been scared, or shunned AJ, but this Bashu just remembered that everyone's a person and kept a dialogue going with him.

I want to print out some more chords: Mother Nature's Son, Fleetwood Mac songs, etc. I need to go. I've said enough for now, or maybe not, but the Palm Desert library only gives you one hour of internet a day. good bye, dear friends.

busking and markets, Los Angeles, December 18, 2011

There have been a bewildering array of things happening for us in the last 8 days. among these:

I visited a date farm. I love dates. The harvest time was done but me and Bryce being perceptive hungry young men noted to the farmer that there were still dates on the palms. He said yep, they're no good, too low to the ground, or not quite ripe, or etc. Go ahead and pick em. Me and Bryce nodded knowingly and proceeded to glean like two small cyclones through the orchard, if that's the word for 10 acres of date palms. First we filled our stomachs to max capacity, brought ourselves to tears by the sheer variety and tastiness of fresh dates, and then filled four boxes. A major theme in the last 8 days has been "pass me another date.. no... three. Well, if the bag's open maybe I'll have another few."

But apparently the prophet Mohammed used to subsist on nothing but dates and sometimes milk, so we're fine. A diet of repute.

The desert is dry and a strange place for people to live. Of course many people do live in the desert, but they're strange people. So I'll rephrase: the desert is no place for normal people to live.

We have also been travelling with two extra folks: Amelie and Anabel, two lovely Quebecoise girls with ukeleles. They have brought joy to us and we have brought them to many various cities, and they have inspired me and Bryce to do a lot of busking.

For those of you who don't know, this is where you play music on the street, and usually goes along with putting out a hat for tips. You can make a lot of money from very drunk people, and indeed me and Bryce were walking down the pub-crawl street in Santa Barbara playing a Britney Spears song and a completely mashed young man stuffed a fifty dollar bill in a bowl I had just been eating salad out of. I told him "do you know this is a fifty dollar bill?" and he slurred "buy some good weed man" and wandered into a dubstep club.

Lucrative indeed, but I am finding I much prefer to play music for people who will fully listen to it. If I had to make a few hundred bucks fast, I would go down to the strip wherever I was and pump out the top 40s from my accordion - happily, even, because I really do enjoy entertaining people - but what's been super good is farmer's markets.

Farmer's markets to begin with are supreme. If you don't pay attention, you can end up eating a lot of anonymous food in this life. Yes, it's a chicken, but which chicken is it? The package says "ingredients: carrot", but where did it grow, and did anybody care? If you ask the grocery stocker, they'll be all "what?" But at a farmer's market, you can talk with the person who grew the food, and get excited about it. Being excited about the food you're eating is more important than I could have imagined.

Anyways, it's also a fantastic place to busk. Markets should be a bustling place, with good smells and sounds. It's nice to be the sounds. We have been visiting farmer's markets all over Southern California with great happiness in our hearts.

Here are some pictures of the original four of us.

Santa Barbara, December 10, 2011

Well,

first off, I wanna go home.

But secondly, that's mostly brought about by three sicknesses at once:

1 is a sore throat and stuffed nose that everybody's been suffering, perhaps on account of the awfully chilly California Coast nights. Snork. Hargle. Gurk. Phlegmblob! Snork! I take this moment to educate you about the magic of rosehip tea: It's free and abundant vitamin C.

2 is a really dreadful stomach mangle brought about by eating bolting brassicas, AKA wild mustard greens in a field in Big Sur. They looked great. They tasted... bitter. and tough. We cooked them with some salt. They immediately softened to the texture of cotton fabric and tripled in bitterness. i regret to say that i, never one to waste food, chomped down 10 or 20 leaves before giving the whole pot up as a lost cause and dumping it. 2 hours later I was in the throes of a full on lurching nausea. I thank my strong dumpster-diver stomach for keeping it down. The moral is, wild food is great. But make sure it's food.

3 is plain homesickness caused by therapeutic staring out the window and almost recognising a black outline. Let me explain.

you can look out almost anywhere on the coast of Vancouver Island where I grew up and see the outlines of mountainous islands, with beautiful names, Texada, Lasqueti, Saltspring, Galiano. It's normal. I don't even know what island I'm looking at half the time but they never move. It's part of my favourite sunsets.



driving along the California coast south of Big Sur, when I looked out the window of Leslie in an effort to not spew, I saw this:


So, yeah.

Eventually we pulled over at Hearst Castle. The van's battery died and I spent a while phoning home and observing a pack of zebras move about Hearst Ranch.

as a last, I will leave you with the observation that the practice of resisting buying persimmons, dates or oranges in BC is very grounding, and the practice of buying them locally grown in California is also very grounding.

Thanks for reading.

Fairview Gardens, Santa Barbara, December 4th

Hi! So much has happened in the past few weeks. I've had almost as little access to internet than I have had access to hot water to clean my body. It's been exciting! Here's a lightning telling of the tale, including our heroes, their urine, 4 thanksgiving dinners, Rivendell and Rafiki and his dog's saddlepacks.

Me and Bryce set out to meet fantastic natural builders. We did not set out to empty their urine from 5-gallon jugs into 45-gallon barrels but that is indeed one thing that Ianto Evans, the originator (with his wife Linda) of the North American cob revival, asked us to do while we were staying on his company's land. It stank in a more bothersome way than I thought it would. That ammonia really goes to your brain.

He also had us do fantastic things with a tool called a "froe", with which we can split wood into shakes that can cover a roof. Fantastic! Me and Bryce were well chuffed about this. Look that term up.

Anyways, his place was called The Cob Cottage Company, in Coquille, Oregon. It was essentially Rivendell, if you would compare our journey to that of the Fellowship's, which me and Bryce regularly do. My goodness. The most beautiful houses. The deliciousest potlucks. The wisest and most effective people. It was all I could do to not cower and throw myself at everybody's feet.

And of course eventually we left.

You may very easily expect to see a post later on in this very blog about us coming back to that place like pilgrims to a holy stone.

First, though, we have to drop a ring into a volcano. More on that later. Anyhow, the rest of Oregon was a chilly and wonderful time. Me and Bryce got a speeding ticket! We went to see the Accordion Babes. They were fantastic, and we bought their sexy accordion babe calendar, which can be viewed at my family's house cause I sent it home to them, starting in January 2012. Me and Bryce and Daveed and Kathryn met back up again in Klamath Falls, headed to Ashland, where we ate American Thanksgiving in a church. This was me and Bryce's 4th thanksgiving feast of the year, and we count ourselves as amateurs, but you can email us for tips (hint, cross the border.)

We became richer by a huge bushel of apples in Klamath Falls, upon finding an apple tree. We do not let these things pass us by. The impressions will come quickly now. Stream of consciousness begins now. Ashland is a lot like Nelson, BC. We met a traveller named Rafiki with a dog named Juju who carried saddlebags. We picked chestnuts in Ashland. We became warmer and warmer as we crossed over a river into California. We found a chocolaterie next to a creamery and bought much fine blue cheese and spicy chocolate. Commando Fridays have been a success, and if I forget I always change by noon. Me and Bryce have played music for everybody we've met. Arcata is one swinging town, I tell you what. I earned a glug of whisky for playing accordion which served to blur an already blurry night of busking, and I remember at one point teaching myself "Down by the bay, where the watermelons grow, back to my home, I dare not go".


But then eventually we got to San Francisco, which is an excellent place to sum up-



our travels are a success so far. Me and Bryce left with the aim of learning how to be better peasants and people. We keep meeting people who are making this work and who are willing to show us. So we keep asking. Travelling for travelling's sake could be a full happy adventure, and we do it then and now.

But I'm feeling like this is the travel of a tetherball, which spins wide and wildly but is always pulling itself back to center. Except we won't bounce when we come back to center. We'll stick there. So maybe a tetherball with spikes. We are a morningstar, ladies and gentlemen.

Right now we're in Fairview Gardens, Santa Barbara, a farm, a place that grows good food, in the middle of suburbia. It's heartening to say the least.