Guests came in, this is what I served them

So, let's see: I had eight people come in last weekend for a weekend of medicine. All of them have been on trips to the Amazon with me. One came in Thurs., most came Friday, one or two showed up Sat. That's a lot of cooking. So I made couscous with lamb tajine on Thursday night, because I knew it would hold. On Friday, with the full crew, I had good hummus with white and blue corn chips, three or four cheeses, homemade guacamole, and then I made chicken parmesan with thin spaghetti. Fruit for dessert, though someone brought in ice cream, so that got eaten as well. My friends are slightly piggish, of course, so they ate copius amounts of magic shrooms that appeared out of who knows where, as well as a good spoonful of blue honey that materialized (honey infused with magic shrooms). Heck of a night.

On Sat, first Medicine day, I served sapo and nu-nu, then sent them out for breakfast, then had them clean the huge--26' by 38' garage--then served them lime tea, then aya. After medicine there was fresh, cold papaya and watermelon, apples, oranges, lime water and little else.

Sunday morning, I made scrambled eggs with garlic, onion, diced tomatoes and good cheese, and served that with bacon (a once a year experience around here) and cheese bread and fruit, if I remember rightly.

Sunday evening we did a bar-be-que: Marinated chicken thighs, shrimp on sticks, brats in beer, and marinated and barbequed broccoli, cauliflower, onions, and asparagus. With BBQ fresh corn, of course. The marinade is oil, teriyaki, white vinegar, lots of achote, garlic, onions, cracked black pepper, sea salt. Man that was good.

Monday, I think I made omelets but I forget.

Monday night was burritos: Fresh chicken thigh meat, good red beans, homemade pico de gallo, sour cream, a bit of garlic in olive oil, cheddar cheese.

Tuesday morning, one of the guests made really good oatmeal with honey, raspberries and blackberries, with a bit of organic milk.

Tuesday afternoon I made sliders: Tiny burgers topped with good cheddar, pickles, lettuce, sliced tomato, a bit of onion and mustard and ketchup. Three bites each, but worth it. Mouth watering.

Tuesday evening, with the crowd dwindling, it was lime chicken: One of my own dishes from years ago. Chicken breasts breaded in a mix of seasoned breadcrumbs and good quality parmesan cheese, sauted, then covered in fresh lime juice and baked. I think I served that with jasmine rice and spinach.

Wednesday I was down to two people. I made moussaka: I used very seasoned ground beef (with garlic, onions, parsley, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg in an organic tomato sauce) served between seasoned and browned eggplant, and thin-sliced new potatoes, covered in a good parmesan bechemel sauce. It's Greek to me, but still delish.

Thursday, I was down to one. I made seared/sliced chuck steak with onions and mushrooms and garlic, with a side of sauteed spinach in garlic and olive oil and Brussel sprouts with garlic and a little salt pork (boil first, cut in half, then saute in the olive oil, salt pork and garlic) with sea salt and cracked black pepper.

Friday, simple salmon, I think, with veggies, though I cannot for the life of me be sure.

Saturday, I made a roast chicken with hot sausages. Baked, perfect. I made rice and spinach and a really good pan gravy--no packets, just the real deal.

Tonight, I am here and my daughter and her boyfriend are coming over. Before I took the last sufferer to the airport he had watermelon, papaya, blackberries, chips, an avocado and leftover rice, chicken, gravy. In the oven now is a pork butt roast. It's been cooking for nearly 3 hours. It will be ready at nine. No sweat because Madeleina isn't here yet.

Two of those days I did not eat a single bite for 24 hours, preferring to cook and fast.

Oh, and somewhere in there, my friends were offered San Pedro, more shrooms, nice pot candies. Since I don't have any of that stuff, I just have to thank heaven it materialized.

I think it was a good weekend and a good week. At least for food and medicine.....and cleaning out that freaking garage!

If only Trump knew anything about anything!

If only Trump knew anything about anything. In the last couple of days, Trump has decided that we do not need to get out of or renegotiate NAFTA. I never liked NAFTA, because of the jobs it took from the US, but then I never ran for president with one of my key promises being to get out of or renegotiate NAFTA. Trump did. Then he spoke with Mexico and Canada and changed his mind.
Today, furious that he cannot get his way on defunding federal grants to what he calls sanctuary cities, he is calling for the breakup of the US Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit. Two problems there. The first is that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals did not hear the case on sanctuary cities. The second is that the president has no authority to break up--whatever the heck he means by that--and US Court of Appeals.
But wait! There is more! If you order now...Trump obviously has no idea what sanctuary cities actually are. They are cities in which the local police are told not to help federal authorities with catching and detaining illegal aliens. But local police have no legal authority to do that, anywhere. That is a federal responsibility, and laying it on localities to enforce those federal laws is not even legal. So there is that.
Trump went even further to expose his complete lack of knowledge of how things work when he declared that both his Muslim travel ban (which was heard by the 9th Circuit Court) and the Sanctuary Cities funding ruling (heard by a district court in San Francisco) were opposed by judges because lawyers suing to stop his executive orders "judge shopped" [actual phrase "judge shopping"] to find judges sympathetic to their cause. This did not happen. The lawsuit against sanctuary cities' defunding was filed in San Francisco, so it was heard by the district federal court there; the 9th Circuit heard the Muslim-travel-ban case because that was initially heard in Hawaii, and automatically went to the 9th Circuit on appeal by the US Government.
Trump went even one step further than that when he declared "...Ninth Circuit, which has a terrible record of being overturned (close to 80%..." SHEER LUNACY. According to the Washington Post, while it is true that 80 percent of the 9th Circuit cases taken up by the US Supreme Court in 2015-2016 were overturned, the Supreme Court only heard one-tenth of 1 percent of their cases for 2015-2016.
There is more, but if I keep thinking about Trump and his complete lack of understanding of any and everything in the world, my head will explode.

Trumpanini again

Keeping the Trump score. Man, I feel like I'm gonna be doing this daily till that boy is impeached. Why? Because every darned day something so stupid happens it makes my eyes roll. On Sunday, during the singing of the Anthem, his wife Melania had to nudge him visibly to put his hand over his heart. He probably thought he didn't need to do that because the song was being sung for him.
Then at the Easter Egg Roll, a kid asked him to sign his hat. President Trump obliged, then tossed the hat into the crowd, instead of giving it back to the kid.
This morning on Fox and Friends, (according to an article on Huffington Post) Trump said that both Clinton and Obama had been outplayed by "this gentleman," when referring to North Korea's dictatorial leader. "They've been talking with this gentleman for a long time. If you read Clinton's book, he said 'Oh, we made such a great peace deal,' and it was a joke.
"You look at different things over the years with President Obama. Everybody over the years has been outplayed, they've all been outplayed by this gentleman, and well see what happens."
Problem, of course, is that Kim Jong Un has been ruling North Korea (insanely) since the death of his father, Kim Jong II in 2011. Kim Jong II took over from his father in 1994. So Clinton dealt with the current NK dictator's grandfather and father, while Obama dealt with the both Kim Jong Un and his dad. All three of those men cannot be the same "this gentleman" that Trump referred to, leading to the suspicion that Trump, once again, has no clue as to what the heck he's talking about. I mean, given that he's threatening to start a nuclear war with NK--as is Kim Jong Un with us--you would think he at least knows the name of the person ruling the country you're threatening to bomb, wouldn't you? Tell you what: I'll bet Kim Jong Un at least knows that Donald Trump is the president of the US.
Dang, and you know there will be something else just as idiotic by noon.

Keeping up with Trump

Okay, so now not only did Trump step all over his feet not knowing what Easter represents yesterday, but the man just refused to release the visitor logs from the White House, claiming they were presidential papers, not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. Then he immediately began to issue ethics waivers to people he's putting in positions of power in his administration--and you know that if you have to issue an ethics waiver there is probably an ethics problem there.
Plus, he damned near started WW 3 over the weekend and has VP Pence telling N Korea to back the heck down because you don't want to upset Trump.
How, how, how is any of this a benefit to you, your family, my family or anyone? It does not, and that is not okay. The president works for us, supposedly on our behalf. Trump does not even recognize that there is an "us" here, and he certainly does not recognize that he works for that "us". This needs addressing.

Madeleina's 20th

So my baby, Madeleina, turned 20 at about 3:09 AM on Sunday morning--yesterday. My it's been a long time, but only a second, really, since the doc had me help pull her out and she looked up at me with eyes wide open and made a sound that I swear I thought was "help, help", and all I could say was "It's too late to put you back inside, little one. You're going to have to finish coming out and live through it and we're going to do our best to make it a wonderful life."
   I don't think I actually said those words, but I know I thought them, so something like them. She was spirit who decided to try on a human body and was frightened at first feel of it. But there she was and once you make that decision and you come to term and come out into the world of physical beings, well, it's too late to change your mind.
   I have sometimes been a good dad, sometimes rotten. I've taught her some things and she's taught me a lot. When her mom and I broke up I screamed way too much; sometimes I still use the dad voice too quickly. There has always been enough money for good food on the table--even when we were flat the food was still good, if simple. But there has never been enough for some of the things she and her brothers would have liked. I've worked at home--whether in Peru where we had our bar/restaurant, or in New York when we came back from Peru, or here in Texas--for her whole life, and so I've been available more than most parents. But then I disappear down into Peru for three months or so annually, when I'm not available at all.
   I can say that I have loved her every second of her life, as has her mom, so that's a positive, if a given. But she has mostly been her own woman, even as a child. She is creative, fun, sometimes a fury, a hard worker, an independent spirit. I'd been my pleasure to know her all this time.
   Last night we had a small family party for her. I cooked sliders, a big roast pork, potato and egg salad, guacamole, regular salad--just good stuff. And when it was time for the cake, well, a nice evening turned real gorman, very fast. I was cleaning some dishes when I felt a chunk of cake hit me in the back of the neck. I turned: Chepa was arming herself with a second cake-bomb. The fight was on: Madeleina grabbed a piece and walloped Italo; Italo walloped his wife Sarah; Chepa got me again, then Madeleina got her. Sierra and Alexa were smearing cake on everyone's clothes. When we ran out of cake, the guacamole got into the mix. It was a beautiful mess of food and laughter, just the way we seem to like it around here.
   I'll clean up whatever didn't get cleaned last night later this morning.
   Happy Birthday, Madeleina! Have yourself a wonderful year!

Trump's Syrian Strike

Okay, just the way my mind works. I've spent a couple of hours reading dozens of reports of the US strike--read: Trump's strike--on a Syrian airfield last night in retaliation for Assad's using poison gas on his own people a couple of days ago. Now Russia, aligned with Assad and Syria, is supposedly upset with us, with Putin saying that the strike seriously affects US-Russian relations. Trump supporters have run out the line that this affront to Russia via Syria, proves that Trump and Putin are not aligned, in cahoots or otherwise on the same page. Some Trump haters have decided that this was a good move and makes him look presidential, finally.
    My take is a bit more skeptical. I think this was a very cynical move on Trump's part, done with the A-Okay of Putin. Here's the deal, from where I sit: Trump needs to do something presidential, and the US citizenry always finds war things presidential. Trump is forced, by public opinion, to respond to Assad's slaughtering of dissidents, including children, by gassing them, and then having his planes bomb the hospital that was treating the survivors. So Trump and his inner circle decide that an airstrike on the airbase allegedly used to deliver the poison gas will be an appropriate response.
    But then Trump contacts Putin, or someone in Trump's circle contacts someone in Putin's circle to announce the airstrike on the airbase, giving Putin fair warning to get any military or civilians and any Russian equipment out of there. Putin, in turn, relays the message of the upcoming airstrike to Assad's people, who move all aircraft and anything else of value, off the site and out of harm's way. Then the US fires off 59 Tomahawk missiles in the direction of the airbase. At the moment, the dead count is seven, and I have not yet read if those are civilians or military or both. But apparently no planes were hit, nothing of value destroyed, no message sent....
   Except the message to the American people that Trump is not Putin's patsy, which is a wonderful thing considering Trump and his people are being investigated right now for colluding with Putin and the Russians to fix the election that brought Trump to the presidency. After all, if Trump is willing to confront Putin and risk his wrath--which you would imagine would include releasing anything harmful he has on Trump--it almost proves that there could not have been any collusion in the election here in the US. Except for the fact that Putin was given a heads-up about the missile strike, which allowed him to warn Assad, which allowed him to get rid of anything of value.
   So Trump gets to look presidential, USA gets to bomb a vile Assad, Trump looks like he's standing up for dead children and standing up to Putin, and Trump, Putin and Assad all get to have a good laugh together at how well the publicity stunt went off. The seven dead? That's nothing for Assad to concern himself with: He killed many more than that just days earlier.

On the Ropes...

I will admit, I am having a hard time. I am an investigative journalist. I've got chops that go back 30 years, and while I/ve made an occasional small error, I have worked hard to be fair, decent, open-minded. Reagan blew my mind with Contragate; Nixon blew my mind with Watergate; Clinton blew my mind with his hard-right stance on the war on drugs; Bush blew my mind with putting little Dick Cheney in charge of the nation and outright lying us into the Iraq war. Obama blew my mind when it turned out he was a right-of-center president on half of the issues, and only a left-of-center president on social issues (including climate change, finally). But the current administration is blowing my mind daily. I have not heard a single true word spoken by anyone associated with President Trump, ever. Not a single word of honesty, decency, equality, fairness, truthfulness. That really has me reeling on the ropes. I got to get a breather, wait for the bell and get some ammonia salts into my nose to wake up so that I can fight this extreme evil with full force. I mean, these people are so bad, so very bad, that I feel I've taken a couple of body shots to my soul. We cannot allow this to continue. He's not just a reprobate, he's a man full of hate, so angry that the graceful President Obama shamed him at the correspondent's dinner several years ago that he will not rest until he has undone every single thing Obama accomplished. And in my local stores people praise him. What are they thinking? That Jesus rode with dinosaurs 2,000 years ago? That climate change is cool? That stripping away protections against polluting our air and waterways is a big advancement ? For whom? Asthma and neurological docs, who will see their business boom? Just today Trump stripped money away from the UN group that works to stop female genital mutilation and child marriages and promotes healthy birth practices. What the freak? Why? Why? Why? My head spins. I want to find a rationale, no matter how crazy, but there is none. There is none. And that is the real problem. We have a rabid hydra reaching out to bite and tear into everything good about us, and we are not stopping it. I need those ammonia salts, quick. It is going to take a lot of us coming up with smart ideas to stop this awful trajectory of our nation into worthlessness. I was raised to think that the USA was a great nation because we cared about people. We helped stop Hitler and Mussolini and Hirohito. We were righteous and strong and fought for the little guy who was not strong enough to fight for him/her self. Now we just fight each other while the billionaires pull our puppet strings with lies, disinformation, more lies, more disinformation. We need to stand up, stand up strong and say, that's enough. That's enough and no more. I am ready to enlist in this fight. Tell me where to sign up.

Why Not Just Give Peace a Chance?

I've done a post like this once or twice before, but I think it is worth revisiting now and then. I just checked my daily stats to see if anyone is reading my blog. I've got 238 hits today, on pace for about 300, normal range. But the audience is what attracts me. Not only because I am still waiting for my first hit ever from Togo--which my daughter Madeleina made clear some time ago, was the only important thing: "Dad, until someone from Togo is reading your blog, your blog is nothing. Nothing!--but because sometimes the makeup of the countries that have visited the blog in a 24-hour period are pretty fascinating. Today, I've had readers from the US, Canada, Chile, Argentina, Hungary, Ukraine, Russia, China, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
   Imagine the Ukraine, Russia, China, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the US having citizens who are all on the same page, so to speak, meaning my page. Now, if those people could arrive at the same place at the same time, why can't all of our countries come together the same way? I know I'm dreaming, but boy, I sure would like to see the world say, "Fuck it, this war thing ain't working, and it hasn't been working for the last several thousand years, so let's try getting along and see if that works any better." I'll bet it would work a lot better. We just need to be willing to share, give up out-sized egos, and turn the machines of war into ploughshares. Does not sound hard to me to give peace a chance. What have we got to lose, right?

For Those Keeping Score on Trump's Evil Deeds...

For those keeping score on President Trump's idiotic moves meant to hurt people, let's see:
In the last couple of weeks, he's proposed cutting administrative funds for Meals on Wheels, which would kill the program that brings hot meals to old and infirm people who would not otherwise have them;
He's proposed cutting back on public school funding;
An appointment of his has suggested cutting funding for school lunches, calling them unnecessary and saying there is no evidence that kids who eat well do better in school;
He's repealed legislation protecting federal workers from wage theft and dangerous working conditions;
He's in the process of rolling back the Climate Change-fighting regulations the Obama administration put into place;
He's calling for opening US protected lands for gas and oil drilling and coal mining;
He's given the green light to the Keystone Pipeline, which will bring Canadian tar sands through the US to the Texas tax free Port Arthur, where it will be shipped overseas (by existing contracts), meaning there will be no taxed paid on it, and about 1,000 temporary jobs--up to two months each, most shorter than that--with the 40 permanent jobs going to Canadians who work for the pipeline company-- a giveaway to the Koch brothers, who own much of the contested tar sands, to try to get them into his corner;
He's willing to go along with internet companies selling your private information and browsing history;
He's put into place the least competent people ever assembled for a cabinet;
He's reauthorized the use of private prisons for federal prisoners, which Obama had disallowed several months ago, leading to a huge increase in GEO Group's stock price, enough that they are about to do a stock split;
He's cost $16 million thus far for vacation travel and protection for his adult kids while they fly around the world on our dime doing his business, as well as protecting his wife and child in New York;
Oh, and he tried to take healthcare away, okayed a Navy Seal mission that cost the life of a Seal, a US plane and between 20-30 innocent women and children;
Then he's tried to stop the investigation into his team's possible collusion with Russia during and prior to the election that made him president;
For a cherry on top, he put his son-in-law in charge of revamping the United States federal operations.
Talk about a busy first 65 days or so! Wow! He's been at it, alright, if you want to see the country disappear.

Not the Best Mom in the World

Every now and then I am reminded by stark reality that I am not the best mom and dad in the world. Today is one of those reminder days. Chepa came over for coffee early, and noticed that my daughter and her boyfriend were in the same bedroom. They had come home from college last night about 2 AM to take care of their dog, Seven, who was neutered yesterday and was sort of freaking out. So I got a scolding for that, even though they are both second year college kids. Then Chepa announced that I would be taking care of Alexa, who is 8, who was staying home from school today. No problem.
   On her way out, I asked Chepa if she had been in touch with the lawyer about the money she owed for the next stage in a lawsuit she's unfortunately embroiled in. She hadn't, but suggested I get in touch so that the lawyer would know we remain a strong team.
   She dropped Alexa off a short while later, then called me from her job to say she desperately needed a locksmith as she'd locked her keys in her car. So I called six or seven and finally got one willing to drive over if Chepa would call. Chepa would not answer her phone.
   So I called the school about Alexa being sick, called the lawyer and made it clear I would be good for the money--hated doing that--if need be, then got ready to see Madeleina off to school. Unfortunately she had a flat tire. Worse, she had lockdown bolts that I could not get off. So I drove to the local tire place and they promised to come to the house to take off the tire but told me I would have to wait for an hour because it was lunchtime.
   I came home to a sobbing Madeleina, who, truth be told, has seen about 20 of these roadblocks pop up in front of her in the last week.
   It's a little later. The mechanic came, got the wheel off, took it to his place and he'll repair or replace it (I just bought it, used, last week). Then I will take Alexa to the store with me, she's sick so she is no mood so I know I am in for a fight, then we will pick up Sierra and Taylor Rain when they get off the school bus, and I'll come home to some other tiny, but real, emergency--like Madeleinia's dog pooping in the house.
   Gonna need some wine later. Today was supposed to be about other things but it got taken over by reality. My own mother and father always seemed better able to handle this stuff than me.

Drug War Follies

This is my 99th Drug War Follies column for Skunk Magazine. They have let me run with it for about 12 years now, and I hope they let me keep on running. In any event, this one is political so if you hate politics, or my position, just skip it. Or read it anyway and then write hate mail!!!!! 

DRUG WAR FOLLIES #99

We have met the enemy and we are fucked.

By Peter Gorman

As a rational, reasonably intelligent citizen of the USA, and one who has now been voting for 48 years, it bewilders me that Donald Trump, the thief of New York, the con man of carneys, the troll l’orange, has wound up as president. What did we do? How did it happen that we elected a guy with the intelligence of a can of Spam (sorry, Spam), the soul of Machiavelli, and the heart of a rattle snake to be the leader of the free world? What were his credentials going in? What did he promise—to the people, not the devil—to earn this position? And what is going to come of this errant experiment in populism?

   I’m not sure what you up in the Great White North think about this, but down here a lot of us are going crazy on a daily basis, and with good reason. This guy is killing us. His 3 AM Tweets knocking former President Obama, healthcare, Hillary Clinton, the connection between his closest associates and Russian intelligence in the lead up to the election are enough to make a sober man grab for a pint, or a doper to reach for a needle and spoon. His refusal to display his tax returns that might show where he could be compromised as president, his insistent chanting to have Hillary locked up, his choice of Cabinet heads, from a woman who hates public schools to head up the Department of Education, to a man who wants to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency to head the EPA, to Dr. Ben Carson, the man who says that slaves were immigrants who had to work really hard to head up the Department of Housing, and all the rest of them leave us baffled, bewildered, and yeah, reaching for a second, third and fourth pint.

   How did this happen?

   This is a man who was caught saying he liked to grab women by the pussies on video tape and yet 53 percent of white women voted for him. This is a man who said he would bring back coal mining jobs to forlorn towns which didn’t lose coal mining jobs to regulations, they lost them to animation and a disinterest in coal given the glut of natural gas the US has had for years. This is the man who promised a border wall after years of more Mexicans and other Central Americans leaving the US voluntarily than arrive annually. This is a man who claims the election was rigged and begged, on national television, Russian spies to hack Hillary’s emails, then won and called the election not rigged--though he did lie and say that the fact that he lost the popular vote my more than 3 million was due to illegals voting. This is a man who lies easier than he breathes. To help define his condition, the constant and abject lying, his marble-mouthed spokesperson, Kellyanne Conway explained that he simply has alternate facts—when there are no alternate facts. I have no idea what actual color you see when you look at a clear sky, but we all agree to call whatever we see “blue”. That is how society functions. There are no alternate facts unless we want chaos.

   But then it seems this President Trump actually does want chaos. He claimed, for years, that President Obama was not a US citizen, sent a posse to Hawaii where he said the truth had been uncovered and would blow Obama out of the White House, but never showed the proof. He swears he has proof that the election was rigged but has no proof to show. He swears, on Twitter, that he was bugged at the personal behest of President Obama, but has no proof, no incriminating evidence, nothing. He just recently sent high-level advisors to monitor the goings-on at each of his Cabinet departments and agencies to ascertain that people are loyal to him and not leaking anything to the press. This is not democracy, this is the extreme paranoia of a madman. He lied to his entire constituency before the election that his healthcare plan would include everyone and cover everyone better and for a lot less money than Obamacare, and now, in late March, admits that millions of people will not be covered, but will have access, if they have the funds, to medical insurance. The fact that tens of millions obviously do not have the funds was the precise reason Obamacare was crafted and drafted into law. The current president thinks it’s a great idea to go back to the old way, despite it meaning he lied through his teeth to his voters and that people will go back to being kicked off their insurance in the middle of treatments, even if they have insurance.

   This man bullshits every time he opens his mouth. He has never met the truth in his life. During his short time in office he’s pushed for mentally ill people to be allowed to buy guns, for everyone to be able to buy silencers for their guns, for rollbacks on guarding rivers and waterways from industrial waste, for pushing to rescind the Russian sanctions so that his friend Rex Tillerson, now Secretary of State, can have his former company, ExxonMobil, begin working on the billion dollar deal he crafted with Putin prior to Trump’s unexpected win at the polls. He has decried climate change science even while the sea rises around us; proposed to cut off meals for old and sick people who have no way to get out to get their own; he’s planning to defund Planned Parenthood, the primary source of medical attention for two million women and hundreds of thousands of men in the US because one branch of their operation—funded privately, not with a cent from the federal or any state or local governments—performs abortions. He has reinstituted the ban on any country that promotes birth control to stop receiving foreign aid. He has put forward a budget that will increase our military spending by $54 billion this year while phasing out money for school lunches for kids, afterschool programs, endowments for the arts, public radio and a host of programs that cost nearly nothing while educating millions annually.

   And he’s done this while spending more on weekend retreats—and maintaining a wife in New York who hates him—in two months, than former President Obama ever spent on vacations in a year.

   Then there are his businesses, all 500 or so of them. Rather than divest himself of them, he’s put his kids in charge of them and, what luck, they get secret service protection, and probably an armed jet escort, wherever they go to do business to make him money.

   Folks, we are in the Matrix and it is not pretty here. Things are out of whack.

   But it gets worse: His call to round up innocent illegal aliens who have been here 20-30 years, or were brought over before they could talk, has re-infused life into the dying private prison industry. Yes, the private prison giants have seen their stock prices soar wildly since his election. And then he has Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions in the Attorney General slot and he has promised to look hard at states where marijuana is legal. No, you did not think you were getting away from this red-haired octopus, did you? Yes, by the time you read this he will probably have started that war. Can you imagine him sending local police or national guard into Colorado, Oregon, Washington or elsewhere to shut down legal pot shops and grows?

   Somehow, this man, this man-child who pouts like a 3-year-old and acts like a terrible-two, this short fingered vulgarian—to copy someone smarter than me at perfect insults-—has managed to secure the Oval Office. And he has brought Steve Bannon, a scum sucking—in all ways—piece of flotsam who has never done a single thing worth noting in his entire life, into the Oval Office with him. Bannon, the white nationalist whose term as head of Breitbart News was marked by White Supremacist slogans, endorsements, paid advertisements.

   How did this happen? Were we all drugged? Were people just so angry at the idea of the beautiful nigger in the white house that they would have drunk the toilet water of anyone who shit into it just to get a white guy back into that place?

   As the head dies, so follows the body. We’re not doomed yet, but unless we change things quickly, we are definitely in deep shit and the stink is only going to get worse as people start dying from this freak’s programs.

   Give me a pint, bartender, and keep them coming till I puke, okay?

It would all be funny if people weren’t dying and the prisons weren’t full.

aa

Happy St. Pat's!

 Well, Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone! Raise a pint or two of Guinness but keep it safe out on the road. Dying is one heck of a lousy way to wind up a nice celebration.

Now this came out yesterday in The Guardian. For some reason it is not a live link, but if you cut and paste into a new window it will come up. It is a profile of me, including my belly, but the writer, Lance Richardson did a good job with it. I think it's worth a look if you've got 15 minutes on your hands.


https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/16/ayahuasca-peter-gorman-amazon-drugs

I'm Back and I'm Nuts

Well, I've been back from Peru for two weeks now. Sorry I have not written, but things have been very hectic and I got a nasty couple of bites on my right hand from a very angry anaconda--a juvenile at about 8 feet that was caught in a fishing net, and when I later tried to pick her up I missed by enough for her to nail me. She nailed me again as I tried to snap her off. The result was extreme numbness in my right thumb and right ring and pinkey fingers. Not from poison, as anacondas are not poisonous, but from just biting deeply enough to get some nerves or muscles out of whack. The feeling is coming back slowly and I can finally type again.
   Lots of other stuff going on as well.
   Some of it involves me getting way too angry on facebook at friends who copy and paste political lies. Twice now I have allowed myself to get trapped in stupid rants that make sense at the time but which I later wish I could eliminate from people's memories. The crux of the problem is not with people who disagree with my political position, it lies in people who simply repeat obvious lies. Why respond at all? It's just nonsense, right?
   Well, yes, except that it has real life consequences. If someone copies and pastes something from a source known to make up bs about, say, the new healthcare, well, people might believe that, and not bother to look into what is really going into the new healthcare bills being written. And if that happens, and those bills become law, people are going to die with no healthcare insurance. That is a real life consequence of a lie and I have a hard time ignoring those things.
   Now calling out the lie isn't the problem. The problem is that when people on the thread shout me down as not knowing the truth, I respond, and twice recently I've wound up calling people stupid or brain dead or idiots, that sort of thing. In other words, I have let myself get caught in traps--or maybe it would be more honest to say I ran into the traps full speed--that reduced me to a jerk and caused any validity of my initial reaction to the lies to lose all of its power.
  So I need to stop that. I have no excuse and am embarrassed by my behavior.
  So stop it, Gorman. Let's let those things stand and start over, beginning this morning.
  Hope you all made it through the winter okay.

Off Today

Well, I'm off today for several weeks in Peru. I've got two small groups to take out to the deep green. One of my guests is already in Iquitos though we don't start the trip till Saturday. It should be a good one. I can't make money on small groups, but I do generally like the overall intimacy of them. And people can learn so much when there are fewer distractions--other people--around.
   What this means is that I'm outta here and won't be writing on the blog for a while. I am not abandoning you, I'm just taking a respite and if I know myself, once I'm in Peru and with my team, that takes all of my focus. Heck, when I arrive tomorrow I'll have to jump right into the fray. First thing I'll do is have two of my guys go to the market and buy various types of tobacco--some smokes for me, some smokes to give away on the rive, and lots of local mapachos, black tobacco cigarettes, for ceremony; along with Halls/lollipops, and other hard candy the kids on the river expect me to bring; bottled water, soda and cups for my room. While they're out doing that, Sidaly will get the stuff I need to keep my room clean, from a broom to garbage bags.
   When she returns, the guys and I will go to where my equipment is kept in storage and they'll get all 18 boxes of stuff to my room where they'll sort out the hammocks, sheets, mosquito nets, blankets, towels and such that we need for the trip, and I'll go through the box of Jungle stuff to see what we need. Might be I need a few more flashlights, batteries, shotgun shells, fish hooks or line, that sort of stuff.
   Then we're off to the market to get that jungle stuff.
   Then we're free for the day.
   Tuesday we'll head to the market early to buy the dry goods for the trip, from coffee and tea to several kilos of a variety of beans, oil, salt, sugar, flour, spices, condiments, tinned butter and a host of other things. That trip usually involves two trips, with the second trip reserved for bar soap, bleach, kitchen dish/pot soap, clothes washing soap and so forth.
    Then we will recount all of the hammocks, sheets, towels, etc, and once that's done we'll seal up those boxes. We'll double check the dry goods and get them boxed as well.
    Then we're free for two days, during which time the guests will all arrive early and want to be entertained, so we'll show them a good time around town.
   So that's where my head will be, and it's hard to remember to write blog stuff when I'm in that space.
    So I'll see you when I get back. And thanks, as always, for reading.

So we're going with Chicken Parmesan...

So, we're going with Chicken Parmesan tonight. I was going to go with lime chicken, one of my inventions--chicken breaded with a mix of seasoned breadcrumbs and finely ground parmasan cheese, sauteed till golden brown, covered with the juice of one good lime per portion, then baked for about 7 minutes, add a touch of parmesan and more lime, and serve with rice and sauteed broccoli or mixed sauteed veggies or sauteed spinach. But the store didn't have finely ground parmesan. I already had good peccorino-reginato but not very finely done, and a good tomato sauce I made for the bracciole a few days ago, so I'm going with Chicken parmesan instead of Lime Chicken. About to bread the chicken breasts, then saute them, then cover with good tomato sauce, then with mozzarella cheese with a bit of parmesan sprinkled on top, then baked till the mozzarella is browning.
   With that I've got organic garlic, onions, zucchini, yellow squash, tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower that I'll saute after parboiling the veggies that need that, and then I'll make cappellini with tomato sauce for the little girls who can afford to eat that and not get fat, and saute spinach with garlic and a bit of balsamic vinager for me, who cannot afford to eat cappellini.
   So three days till I leave for Peru. I'm freaking panicked like you cannot believe. NightLine is coming to interview me tomorrow and I don't have a chance of losing 50 pounds and growing new hair by then. Hell, I'm having a hard time cleaning the house!!!! Shit!
 And when they leave I have to pack for the trip. I don't mind packing for me, but when I take people out to the jungle, I'm doing a lot of packing of medicines and such for my guests.
   Ah, I'll make it. I always do. But it's always barely. Darnit. Wish I knew how to take it in stride.

Good Food Stuff

I love a food challenge. I love it when someone asks: Can you make that tonight? or Can you make this? Well, this was a week for pretty good food. One night it was meatloaf with beef and pork and onion, celery, garlic, diced tomatoes. Another it was cous cous with Lamb Tajine. Since I have not made that ins about six months, it is still considered a challenge because cooking it only a couple of times a year I forget some things.
   Then it was Sopa de Mariscos, with shrimp, calamari, scungilli, mussels, and crayfish in a spicy tomato soup with cilantro and capellini to give it body.
   Then it was Duck breast with a nice savory sauce.
   Then it was, last night bracciole. I have not made that in 20 years, but my daughter Madeleina saw that my friend Al Giordano, from NarcoNews.com had made bracciole and asked me to make it. So I went and bought flank steak, butterflied it, cleaned it, laid it out, laid out fresh spinach along the entire 18 inches of meat, put a mix of very sharp provolone with tomatoes sauteed with onions and garlic in olive oil on that, then added fresh smoked mozzarella, sea salt and cracked black pepper. Then I rolled the two lengths of meat up and tied them with butcher cord and browned them on all sides. I put them aside, put garlic, diced red onion and later diced tomatoes into the pan, cleared it with half a bottle of red wine, then added a jar of organic Bertoli tomato sauce and a second jar full of organic vegetable broth. Little salt, little pepper, little oregano from Peru and once that had cooked about an hour and was looking fine, I put the two braccioles into the sauce, covered it with silver foil and cooked it for about 100 minutes, until that meat was falling apart good.
   That meat was so good it made good bracciole look not so good. Hey Al! Thanks for the idea!!!!
   Today, Sierra asked for homemade Ceasar salad dressing. I have no idea where she got it but I got out the organic eggs, cracked a couple and tossed the yolks only into a bowl and slowly added olive oil until it started to cream, or emulsify as we'd say in the kitchen. To that I added crushed garlic, salt, cracked black pepper, juice of a good lime, Worstershire sauce and finally some finely ground peccorino-romano cheese. I skipped the anchoves because the girls would find them too strong.
   So now we got it. And it's gonna be good going along with the chicken wings I just deep fried.
Bon Appetit!

One More on Politics, then I'll Shut the Heck Up

Someone wrote on Facebook that the Democrats and Republicans are equally bad, that both groups are two heads of the same snake. I'll say that when it comes to world power and such that may well be, but in everyday life, I think that's not accurate at all. This is what I wrote:


J: I respectfully disagree. I have no problem holding the Democrats' feet to the fire, and I've railed against some things Obama did and certainly railed a lot at Bill Clinton, particularly with his drug war "let's imprison everyone" shit and his insane General McCaffrey drug czar who thought kids could melt down hemp shirts in alcohol to make marijuana flowers. But I do not think the leaders of their respective parties are at all equally rotten. Take simple things like Social Security and Medicare. We all pay into them. We get our return. It works. So the Republicans want to privatize them. The Democrats say do not touch those programs. The Democrats are better on that one. The Republicans want to defund Planned Parenthood because they offer abortions. But 1) not a single penny of public money goes to those abortions, by law; and 2) the Republicans care about the fetus but not a human baby for one instant, and they prove that over and over by tearing at the safety nets a lot of those babies and their moms depend on. The Democrats are better on that. The Republicans were on record, over and over, that the Keystone pipeline would bring in 250,000 jobs when they knew that was a lie. There were 40 permanent jobs to be had, a couple of thousand jobs laying the Chinese pipe that TransCanada had ordered, jobs that would have lasted a few months. And the Tar Sands were previously sold to China and elsewhere and would pass through Port Arthur, a free port that would collect no taxes whatsoever. The Democrats stopped that. They were better. The Democrats want to cap payday loan interest that holds people down. The Republicans fight to keep those rates as high as people want. The Democrats are better. The Republicans fight against equal rights for women, LGBTQ people, and minorities. The Democrats fight for them. The Democrats are better. The Republicans fight to kill unions and refuse to raise minimum wages. They are wrong on both counts and the Democrats are better on those counts. These are just a few of the basic social issues which make peoples lives better or worse, and the Republican platform in recent decades has always been to make people suffer more. So yes, hold the Dem feet to the fire on their bullshit, but it's not an equal amount of bullshit at all.

Donald Fucking Trump

So I get baited once in a while. And I did today. My friend Tanya suggested we give Trump a chance. Knowing that Obama was labeled a "Nigger Muslim who Wasn't Born in the USA" for his entire time in office, I took the bait. Here was the exchange, and it's rude, and I was rude, but I have a hard time being nice to people who were not nice to President Obama and his beautiful family. My friend asked if us liberals were all about dividing and not coming together...LOL!!!

Peter Gorman I grew up near the guy. He paid other kids to fight his fights. He's a sissy, a bully, and completely full of nonsense. He's entertaining, but now he's dangerous. He didn't want to be president, he wanted a new tv network. Now he's stuck with it. It's not about divide. It's about stopping a kid with an IQ of 75 from starting wars. The last president was hated because he had the nerve to be black, well spoken, brilliant, and was working for all of us. This new president has lied 1000 times in the last year, does not remember what he tweets between snorts of cocaine, loves the killer Putin, kicks out reporters who don't report what he likes, denies intelligence from the freaking 17 intelligence agencies while refusing to go to daily intelligence meetings because, as he says, he's
"like smart". Like smart is not a description of anything. This guy can't read, can't write, doesn't pay taxes and went into a debate saying that made him smart; loved FBI Director Comey when Comey talked about Hillary's emails a week before the election, but hates Comey now that he says Putin ordered and oversaw the hacks of our political system and we all saw Trump encourage that. And even though there was nothing in any of the emails that was the least bit bad, idiots who didn't read them believed they had bad stuff. That cost the election. Trump encouraged that. He's a bad man. Wish all you want for snowflakes to come out of his ears, but you will not get that from this freaking horrible human that I grew up near. He's been rotten since he was born, discriminating against blacks, against women, against gays, everything he is: Gay, a sissy, a man who cannot get a real woman and would not know what to do if he had one. You asked for him, you got him. The rest of us who know him know how dangerously unhinged he is: He's a short bus guy not just for his mental capacity, but for his willful bullying and hurtful temperament. Good luck with prayer. That's not gonna help here.

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Peter Gorman And yes, liberals would--and I would, I promise--be all over Trump if things improved. But since he's inheriting a fantastic country with a great economy and promising to dismantle regulations, eliminate the EPA, kill the Ethics Commission, get more nukes, use the nukes, eliminate the safety net that I've paid into for 60 years since I was 6 years old, well, if he's successful, that's the end of the USA. If he fails, we survive. He's promised to screw us over. That is the part people miss: He wants to lower or eliminate minimum wage; he's against unions, which keep kids like me from working at age 6, though I did, and paid taxes, he does not pay his workers, he uses almost exclusively illegal aliens to do his work; he wants to build a wall when 1 million more Mexicans are leaving the US every year more than are coming in--We've dropped from 19 million to about 10 million during Obama's administration. And he just makes shit up. He kills me with his freaking stupid shit. And it's all stupid shit. He has never said anything, and I mean ever said anything, that was not completely idiotic. That's what you get when you have a person who cannot read. They think we're also making up shit. We're not. We know. He is. He does not know how much he doesn't know. He inherited $400 million and turned it into a billion dollar debt. C'omon, T, you're way smarter than this. This guy is 12 figs short of a fig freaking tree! He cheats contractors, hires illegals and doesn't pay them, boasts about "pussy grabbing", went bankrupt six times with investors money--and went bankrupt with casinos, the only person in the history of the world to lose money at casinos--cheats on his wives and what else do you want? You want me to give him the benefit of the doubt? There is no doubt here. He has told us who he is. He's been upfront, a characteristic I like in him. He says "I"m shit and I'll shit on you." And then people think that's cool. It's not. It's a wake up call to say "No. You do not get the right to shit on me, asshole." That' s what the response of normal people is. Not: Give him a chance. A chance for what? To show you he is exactly who he said he is? A freaking moron with no empathy? Why would you give a jerk like that the benefit? We've watched him for 50 years in the public eye. We know who he is. As they would say in parts of Brooklyn: He's a schmuck. That's the lowest of the low. And I'm giving him credit to go that far. But you will learn. I have confidence. So love him. But you will learn.

Aah, the Pathetic Reality

Ah, the pathetic reality is that I would love to have another person or two on my January and February Extra-Extraordinary Jungle Jaunts to the Peruvian Amazon. I'm going with very small and intimate groups, the way I love it, but at the same time, since my team currently outnumbers my guests 3-1 on each trip, and my team members each gets paid $30 US per day, plus food, including several days before and after the trip, well, I'm just about gonna break even, if I don't eat till the end of February. So are there a couple of intrepid people out there who are dying to see some things they have never seen, experience the jungle the way it really is right now in 2017, deep jungle with all the bugs and trees with spines, and mud that sucks your boots off when you step wrongly, and the host of the most beautiful birds and fish you've ever seen? Are there some people who would like to try the jungle medicines ayahuasca, sapo, nu-nu in a traditional setting, each served by people who have a long tradition of using and serving these medicines Are there a few of you who would like to get an old-fashioned Amazon haircut with pirana teeth, or hunt for wild edibles with indigenous Matses women? If there are just a couple of people out there thinking, man, I wish some trip would come along that could change my life by introducing me to lots of new things, well, then send me a message. I'm your huckleberry. My team is my ace in the hole. The jungle, her rivers, people and medicines, are he tricks I've got up my sleeves. This is more than pretty cool. This is so cool it makes cool things look not so cool. Cost is high at $2200 for 10 days, acknowledged. But this is not your beautiful run of the mill retreat. This is real immersion into another world.

So this is about my truck

Well, I've got two old Ford Rangers with extended cabs and long flatbeds. One is a 1994 with 299,996 miles on it that runs but for some reason can't pass inspection--there is no engine light on and nothing shows up wrong with it, but it just won't pass inspection, inexplicably.
   The other is a 1998 with 252, 556 miles on it. Italo, my son, surprised me while I was in Peru in July and August and put a new engine he built from the block up into it. My cost was about $1000 for parts. While he was in it, he put a new timing belt on, put in new spark plugs and wiring, new fuel injectors. What a cool surprise.
   Since that was new, I decided to replace the cracked windshield--$200--and drop two new front tires--$200--on it. Mine were shot because my bushings were shot and so they were a little bow-legged, more or less.
   Naturally, a month after that work was all done, the clutch went, so I had to drop a new clutch into it for another $700.
   Two weeks later the engine light came on and it turned out that one of the new cylinders was misfiring. Guy said it was probably a loose wire or spark plug.
   It wasn't. Italo worked on it for a full day before coming to the conclusion that there were four old sensors that needed changing that were causing the misfiring. So he spent another $400 of my money and that was good.
   With all that, he decided he'd better change out the bushings, ball joints and sway bar. Another $300.
   But man, that thing rides like a brand new truck. I mean it's tight. It's so tight it makes tight things look not tight.
   Next thing up: Take it to one of those detailing places to have it scrubbed brand new inside and out for $150.
   So I've got an 18 year old truck with less than 1000 miles on most of its moving parts. Cool.
   Yeah, I'm $2800 in the hole and looking at more. And when I get some money I'm gonna have to give Italo a grand, but hell, I couldn't have bought a truck like this for $4 grand, so it's still a deal. Yea, truck! Yea, Italo!

Happy New Year, 2017

Madeleina and I just shot off a bunch of fireworks. Scared the life out of the dogs and cats, made us happy to set them off and run away. It's now 12:37 here in Joshua, Texas. Life could be better but it ain't bad so I'm not gonna complain.
For all of you who read this: I hope that 2017 brings you some wonderful surprises that fill you with joy. I hope that your wishes come closer to fruition than they've ever been. I hope that your loved ones recognize you for your full worth. I hope that you are loved dearly in a way you want to be loved. And I hope there are no nightmares, no scary things to make you shrink into a shell. I'd prefer you to stand tall, strong, brave and feel wonderful looking at the universe. Happy New Year, everybody!

Got through Christmas

I'm still pooped from it all but we made it through Christmas. The 'we' includes Madeleina, my glorious partner in slime and 19-year-old daughter who helped shop with me, did all the wrapping--except of her presents--and kept me sane. We were coming off that heavy load of guests, desperately needed to get shopping for nine people done in three days, had those same three days, plus the day after Christmas, to write a cover story for the Fort Worth Weekly, and we had to do it with no car, while we were taking care of Sierra, Alexa and Taylor during the day. We had them because everyone was working and we were the only place for them to hang out during Christmas/New Year's school closing. And I loved having them. As Madeleina says, "Dad, I think you still love being dad, I mean dad of everybody, a few hours now and then. You just seem to relish it." I assured her I do. It's one of the sadnedses in a dad's life when his kids grow up, move out, and you no longer are needed as "dad".
    So it was hectic, impossible, and yet we did it! Hooray, Madeleina!
   And now I've got a new client for my 10-day sapo (indigenous Matses frog sweat) course, have to find some fireworks for New Year's Eve, need to finish up a Drug War Follies column, then get ready for my January and February Amazon Jungle Jaunts. Boy, I could use a couple more people, but I'll let the universe sort that out. It's a great trip, someone will join at the last minute, I think.
   And even better, Italo brought my repaired truck back yesterday. He built a new engine a couple of months ago, from the block up; then I had a specialist put in a new clutch, then one of the new cylinders stopped firing--so he took a week and finally figured out what old parts needed to be upgraded to work with the new engine. And he did it. That man is a monster with a motor! Makes me very proud.
   So I'm gonna celebrate and take some of the garbage that's been accumulating here for two weeks out to the dump this morning. Why? Cause it's stinking up the place mainly, but also because I need to do a manly job today. Too much shopping and preparing food and other manly things like that, and not enough manly things like lawn mowing and garbage dumping lately.
   Y'all have a good one. And, of course, a very Happy New Year!

Whew! I'm gonna sleep good tonight!

Whew! I'm gonna sleep good tonight. I'm also going to miss several friends and a new friend. The last 15 days at the Gorman's have been hectic, to say the least. I had a fellow come in about 2 weeks ago who wanted to do a 3-day sapo--frog sweat--treatment. No problem. I applied the medicine daily, took care of him, and he'd disappear until the next day. He was strong, took a lot of medicine. The day after he left, another person came to start my 10-day Sapo Course. That is a brutal thing, with the student doing larger and larger amounts of the medicine and then doing it twice a day, then serving me, then serving others. She was great and got her diploma. But while she was here, Two friends came in, one from New York, one from England, to do ayahuasca. They were joined by two other friends and the person taking the course. That meant a lot of house cleaning, while simultaneously cooking for everyone, washing dishes, shopping for food, etc. During that time Madeleina came home from school and was able to help out. But we also had charge of Sierra and Alexa and my granddaughter Taylor Rain, which meant picking them up after school and making dinner for them as well as my guests.
   Somehow, Madeleina and I pulled it all off. The last person, the student of Sapo, left this afternoon. I'm about ready to collapase. Now it's just Madeleina, Sierra, Alexa and me for the next few hours, till Chepa picks up the girls.
   I loved having my friends in. I loved having the 3-day sapo guy and the 10-day sapo student. I loved shopping, cooking, cleaning, shopping for Christmas and trying to finish a cover story at the same time. But I am wiped out. I mean, genuinely wiped out. Gonna have a couple of glasses of wine, make dinner for the girls, eat a little something myself, then sleep good tonight. Whew!

Getting on Christmas Time

Well, it's December 20, so it's getting on Christmas time. Part of that is getting quiet, thinking over the last year and mulling what needs doing for the next. Part of that is taking a few extra minutes to think about family, friends, and for those of us who have been around a while, friends who left this plane this year. Part of that is wishing good things for everyone on the planet:
For those who are starving, a wish for good food daily;
For those who have no clean water, a wish for fresh rain daily;
For those who suffer physical ills, a wish that they get healed;
For those with broken hearts, a wish that a glimmer of new love reawakens their hearts;
For those who suffer from being alone, a wish that they might meet a new friend;
For those who are homeless and cold; a wish that they have a warm bed to stay in tonight;
For those suffering emotional problems; a wish for balance in their lives;
For those suffering from mental problems; a wish for a magic reboot to their brains;
For those suffering spiritually, a wish that they will take a moment to see the spirit in everything;
For those suffering the effects of war; a wish to end all wars today, this minute.
For those and the rest of us: A wish that we could recognize that we could do anything if we got together to do it, and it would only take a moment to make that decision.
    I just realized that I made the same wishes for you all on Thanksgiving. I apologize for repeating my prayers, but I stand by them, at least twice.
    But this is about Christmas and beyond friends, family, the whole world, is the job of being dad. And that means presents. That means foraging in store aisles I'd normally avoid trying to imagine one of my kids with this or that. It means spending $500 just on stocking stuffers that no one needs but everyone wants to open. It means going to hell daily for three or five days to get something that someone will cherish. In my family, that means Chepa, Italo, Sarah, Marco, Madeleina, Taylor Rain, Sierra and Alexa. But the nightmare of shopping is quickly forgotten when all arrive at the house and light up at the scene of all those presents. Most of them small: we were generally into one big thing--like a ping pong table, or a foosball table--for the family, then several small things each. It's dad's work, but it's really effortless because we love them all. Among the small things Italo and Marco always get are large bags of Twizzler red and black licorish. Both hate the stuff and won't bother to take it home. Fortunately, I love it, so willingly pick up their leavings.
   And now, out shopping again. Thank God I have Madeleina helping me. Have a good one everyone.

INDIEGOGO Call for Cash: Pass the Word, Please

So a client of mine who has become a great friend has been following me around with a camera for a year or so, both here in Texas and in Peru. Turns out he's making a film about me called "More Joy, Less Pain: The Life of Peter Gorman
   Mostly it will deal with the jungle medicines, but it will also deal with my family, friends, the river, the jungle. There is a two minute trailer that I think is worth watching. And if you watch and you see the potential for something interesting, well, by all means share it with friends and send Mike a couple of bucks. There's lots of good stuff he has me giving away to contributors so please take a minute and look at my friend Mike's work. Thanks very much.
Here is the link. I think you have to cut and paste, and if you forget it, I think you can just go to indiegogo.com and punch in More Joy, Less Pain to get to it.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/more-joy-less-pain-the-life-of-peter-gorman

Wow! I didn't expect that to hurt so much!

One of those days. They somehow sneak up on me when I least expect them. I've got a person coming to work with Sapo next week, and later in the week I've got a friend flying in from England, one from Chicago and one from New York coming to stay for a few days. Right now I'm in the midst of treating someone with three days of sapo--the Indigenous Peruvian Matses frog medicine--and he's having a blast. So I've got more company than I know what to do with. But then Madeleina called this morning to say she's going to be busy till at least Thursday, so won't be home from college till then. And man, that just about blew me out of the water. I just felt it like a knife. You know, I want her to be grown up and independent, just like I did with Marco and Italo, but now that Marco and Italo are grown up and independent, I don't get to see them enough. Don't get to toss a football, or clean out the garage with them. Or just watch a movie with them often enough. And Madeleina? Well, she's been my sidekick for 19 years and when she's not here, I'm freaking lost. Yes, I am thrilled she's growing up, but I guess the sap part of me still wants her around. How can I do proper medicine and keep the house clean, and get ready for a guest who will be here for a week and get the cats and dogs fed and get the garbage out and make great food if I'm not showing off to her? So yeah, it snuck up on me and I wasn't ready for it. I'm dealing with it, I'll be fine. But it still hit me like a Joe Frazier body shot. BANG! Ow. Okay, I'll be better in a minute. Just let me catch my breath here...
And that's my sob story for today. Hope all of you are doing fantastically and are surrounded by lots of love. And I mean that.

Calling All Intrepid Travelers

Ladies and Gentlemen! Adventurers of all Ages!

Announcing the 2017 Tour Dates for the Gorman Jungle Jaunts!

January 2017

Saturday, Jan 21, through the morning of Monday, Jan 30

February 2017

Saturday Feb, 4, through the morning of Monday, Feb 13

June 2017

Saturday, June 17, through the morning of Monday, June 26

July 2017

Saturday, July 1, through the morning of Monday, July 10

Looking for a dozen intrepid seekers for each of the Jaunts. Looking for people who want to see and be in deep Amazon jungle; people who want to experience ayahuasca and the Matses’ medicines Sapo and Nu-nu in their natural settings; people who don’t mind dirt under their fingernails if they get it because they were walking in high canopy jungle or in a primordial swamp or collecting wild foods or even making clay pots. I’m looking for people who want to collect the medicines they’ll use and watch their preparation, people who would rather participate than observe and be served. I want a small group of curious people, humans interested in their personal growth, in the spirit world, in the Northwest Amazon as it is today but may not be tomorrow. I want people who see bathing in the beautiful Aucayacu river as an opportunity, not as a poor substitute for a hot shower; people who view the chance to eat a few local magic mushrooms while traveling overnight on a flat-bottomed river boat on the Amazon as a once in a lifetime thrill, and see night canoeing in dugouts while searching for medicine frogs a rare and wonderful opportunity. In other words, I want anyone who sees living as a bit of a risk but one worth taking.

   And if you join, my team—which will outnumber the guests—and the medicines and the jungle and the rivers and I will all work our collective asses off to give you something you’ll hold onto for a very long time. The medicines will astound you, the people will thrill you, the jungle will amaze you. So what are you waiting for? Drop me a line at peterg9@yahoo.com or head over to the pgorman.com website for more info, photos, and an idea of the trip itinerary and costs.

A Tree Swing in the Yard

This is a story I wrote for a magazine about 12 years ago. I don't think I ever put it here, and I saw it for the first time in yeas and thought it worth sharing:

A Tree Swing in the Yard

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Sometimes the simplest changes in our lives make the most difference. I was reminded of that about a year ago, not long after I’d moved with my kids from Manhattan to Joshua, Texas.

         It was a difficult time for my family. My wife and I had separated, and she’d moved to the Fort Worth area to be near her sisters. She left with Madeleina, our 5-year old girl, and I stayed back in New York with our boys, Italo, 16, and Marco, 13.

We’d initially thought the separation would be short-term, but after some months my boys told me they thought otherwise, and that if I wanted the three kids back together we’d have to move to Texas. It would mean giving up the closeness of my family, my job as a magazine editor, my friends and the familiarity of my home.

            I decided that having the boys back with their sister and near their mom was the most important consideration, so after a three day trial trip to look for homes—my boys picked one just south of Ft. Worth—we set off in a rental truck with our world packed in boxes.

         We arrived and entered a period of adjustment: I was suddenly an out-of-work freelance writer at 50, the owner of a small house on an acre-and-a-half of yard dotted with lovely old sycamores, cedars, gnarly oaks and hackberrys, in a rural area where small ranches and farms dominated the landscape. It was bucolic but everything was new to us: I’d never even started an electric lawnmower, much less owned one, the neighbors didn’t know what to make of us Yankees, and we had to work on turning our new house into a home. We hung our pictures and unpacked our books, found out where the local supermarket was and got the boys enrolled in the local high school. It was all made easier by having Madeleina nearby and with us a few days a week, but none of it quite did the trick.

         And then one day, maybe two months after we moved in, Madeleina asked, “Dad, are we going to have any tree swings?”

         I’d never thought about it but after a moment said, “Sure, if you want one we’ll make one.”

         “Can we do it when I come back on Saturday?”

         “You got it, kiddo.”

         It seemed like a simple enough request, but never having made a tree-swing before, I wasn’t sure how to do it. I asked Italo and Marco what kind of swing we should make and they decided that a tire wouldn’t do, that we should have a board-seat swing.

         We’d been replacing rotting boards on a foot-bridge over a seasonal creek and that ran through our property, using water-resistant, heat treated 2” X 10” pine, so as we had that around we decided to go with that for a seat. For the length, we had Madeleina sit and open her arms as if she was holding on to the swing’s ropes: 30 inches was a generous fit.

         For stability we decided to go with a four-corner design: two ropes, each thrown over a tree branch, passed through holes we’d drill near the corners of the board and tied-off underneath. For rope, I though nylon would be the strongest and most weather resistant, but when we told the attendant at the local ranch store what we were going to do with it he said that the nylon would stretch and that our swing would be sitting on the ground in no time. Instead, he suggested a 3/4 inch rolled cotton rope. “That will last, won’t stretch, water won’t hurt it, the bugs won’t like it and it’ll be soft to hold onto,” he said. “Plus, it’ll hold about 600 pounds, so you won’t need to worry about it snapping any time soon.”

         By Saturday, when Madeleina arrived, we were ready. We asked her which tree we ought to put it on. “The chain tree, of course,” she said without hesitation. The tree she’d picked was an old hackberry, maybe 40 feet tall. It had been hit by lightning at some point years earlier and the stout trunk had been split. The previous owner had double-wrapped a thick chain around the trunk about five feet above the split to keep it from falling, and the chain was now embedded deep with the trunk and the tree remained healthy and strong. It wasn’t far from the house and because of that chain, was our favorite tree. Best of all, it had a good thick branch growing horizontally out from the trunk about 15 feet from the ground, perfect for a tree swing.

         We drilled half-inch holes an inch inside each corner of the swing seat, then Italo scrambled up the tree and threw the ropes over the branch. Marco and Madeleina and I pulled as hard as we could to test the branch’s strength: the branch hardly moved.

         Confident it would hold him, Italo climbed out on the branch and notched the places where the rope would sit. He eliminated the bark without cutting into the wood, giving the ropes a good smooth surface to ride on, as well as a place to sit so that they wouldn’t slide sideways.

         While he did that, Marco and I taped the ends of the ropes tightly and forced them through the holes in the seat. We set the height so that a grownup could sit on the swing with their feet flat on the ground: for Madeleina it meant boosting herself up a bit, but she was growing fast.

         We leveled the seat and tied large triple knots just beneath it, then stepped back: The 13’ foot white cotton ropes almost glistened in the afternoon sun. The swing looked like it had been there forever.

         Italo and I got on the seat to test the rope: perfect.

         Then it was Madeleina’s turn. We put her on and she grabbed the two ropes on either side of the swing, her little hands clutching them tightly as we gave her her first push. The swing began to mark an arc that grew greater with each ensuing push. Madeleina began to laugh, her laughter trailing all the way from here to there and back again. “Higher! Higher!” she giggled, swinging back and forth, her long hair flying, until it seemed she might just take off. “That’s enough! That’s high enough!” she laughed, and we slowed her down.

         “Well,” I asked when she got off. “Does it work?”

         “That’s the greatest swing ever, dad!” she beamed. “Thanks for buying this house with that chain tree.”

         And that was it: our house was our home. And that swing has been used Madeleina and her friends, the boys and their friends, and even dad once in a while, ever since.

Immediate follow up to Sapo Collection Post

On that forum where I occasionally post, someone questioned whether it was right to collect the frog medicine (Sapo or Kambo, depending whether you're in Peru or Brazil), given that it caused fear in the frog. The question was really about whether we could justify using the frog medicine given that to get it we had to stress out the frog. I felt the need to respond. Here's what I wrote:

 I think you've got to imagine what the spirit of the frog is thinking, or sensing: I'll bet they don't like the 5 minutes of inconvenience/torture, but that they would prefer that to being boiled in soup. The indigenous who live in the Amazon, at least in the old days when there was not much agriculture, depended on harvesting wild foods, some tree barks for starch, fishing for those who knew how to do it, and hunting. There were not a lot of alternatives. Yes, they knew that if they ate a pineapple and tossed the top on the ground that when they returned there months later there would be a plant with harvestable pineapples, but those would be eaten by the first people who came on them.
To have a medicine that would steady their hand, stave off hunger/thirst/need for sleep, and eliminate the killing grippe had to have been a godsend. And the frogs are not dumb: They, like all of us, would choose inconvenience and some short-term fear over death.
In terms of us, now, yes, I think there is over-harvesting, bad harvesting, people who don't know what the heck they're doing and so shouldn't be doing it (you can buy egg yolk dried on sticks being sold as sapo or kambo in Iquitos; you can buy candle wax being sold as sapo or kambo in Iquitos; you can buy the medicine from frogs who are kept in a camp and harvested over and over--which will produce really lousy medicine; and a host of other icky or bad things). But harvested correctly, used as real medicine with good intention, I suspect the frogs go along with that. It's a very brief process of a couple of minutes from top to bottom, they are then released and put on their tree of preference, and if they have an obvious mate, they're put near that mate.
In terms of humans needing this, well, if you're 20-years old you might not. But if you're 50 or 60 or 70, the idea that you can eliminate the plaque from your arteries, trim the fur off you heart valves to eliminate an irregular heart beat, and cleanse your liver and kidneys in 15 minutes--or in 15 minutes a day for 5-10 days in a row--well that's pretty good and necessary medicine. If eliminating plaque from your arteries provides you with the space in those arteries to deliver just 3-4 percent more blood to your organs, that's 3-4 percent more oxygen getting to where it's supposed to go. That extra oxygen will improve your eyesight, your hearing, your balance, your heart rate, your pulse, your ability to assimilate and eliminate foods....that's pretty important. And if you maintain doing the medicine a time or two a month, well, you'll keep those arteries clear, you'll keep your heart beating regularly, you'll improve your kidney and liver functions. And most of us, at least us old timers, even if we eat organically and live in the country, are suffering from chemical waste inhalation (cars/coal/oil/shale drilling/cement factories) and so we really do need this boost. So yes, it is a very necessary medicine for a lot of people. And the frog is just doing its part--a bit cruel and insensitive, yes, but beats being soup meat.

Sapo/Kambo Frog Medicine Collecting

So on a forum to which I occasionally post, one thread has been discussing sapo/kambo, the medicine extracted from the Phylomedusa Bicolor tree frog that is such a great body cleanser. And one person wrote a long entry on the pain the frogs must suffer when they are tied up and stretched out between four little posts and sticks are rubbed along their bodies to collect the secretions which are the medicine. She wondered if the fear caused by the collecting process meant it was something we humans ought not to do--the fear creating an imbalance in the general universal harmony.
    Well, given that this is a topic I deal with a great deal, I weighed in with my two cents. Here's what I wrote:
Hello. In my experience, which is tons with this medicine, certainly the frogs are inconvenienced and probably scared to death for a few minutes while the medicine collecting is done. But then they are released. While they are tied up like green trampolines, the chambira fibers generally used to hold them leave marks around their wrists and ankles. The frogs are not collected again until there is no trace of those markings--which can be up to two weeks. In areas where there are large numbers of the P Bicolor frogs, some frogs are probably never caught.
   According to the Matses/Mayoruna who introduced me to the medicine in 1986, the story goes that they were going to eat the frogs but that the frogs suggested that their medicine would be better for the hunters than eating them would be. So they began to collect the medicine. And yes, it was much more valuable than the two ounces of meat (or so) they would have gotten in a soup would have been.
   In all likelihood, the Matses and other indigenous groups who utilize sapo or kambo collected the frog to eat when there was no bigger game around and the frightened frogs gave off their "venom" which went into cuts the hunters had on their hands and they quickly learned about the medicine that way. It's about 15 seconds from application (intentional or not) to effect, so the indigenous would have no trouble identifying what caused their initial sickness and subsequent strength and clarity. (As a result, all good collectors of the P Bicolor collect the frog by cutting off a section of the branch the frog is on and bringing that, with the frog, back to camp so that the frog is not disturbed and does not give off its initial, and most powerful medicine in the collection process.)
   While the medicine has a diminished value for indigenous groups that no longer depend on hunting, it remains valuable for breaking a fever, general well-being, and several other things. In my experience among people who depended heavily on the frog medicine for an extra edge while hunting daily, the frog was always held in high esteem. I never saw one injured, hurt, or abused beyond the abuse of the collecting of the secretions. I imagine that holds true among all groups that utilize the medicine.
   And I'll bet if the frogs could talk they would say that while they hate being caught and tied up, they much prefer it to being boiled in soup.

Suddenly lots of people reading this blog...

Suddenly, lots of people are reading this blog. Not lots of people like the big blogs get, but instead of 100 people a day, for the last couple of weeks it's been 300 a day. And they are coming from the USA, though I don't know where in the USA. I'm still getting 40 a day or 50 a day from countries all over the globe, but the majority of the additional 200 daily reads are coming from the USA.
     Now a few years ago, I had one day where I chanced to look at the numbers to see who was reading what, and it was a day when there were 6,000 views from Germany. That blew my mind. It was as if the students at a small university was given the assignment to read one of my blog pieces. This sort of feels like someone has given high school students the task of reading my blog daily for a couple of weeks. Why? To see the range of topics a writer might post on; to see the style of writing in my blog, who knows why?
    If these new numbers are from that sort of assignment, please let me know. I'm curious. On the other hand, if there is some wild and crazy speed freak out there reading and re-reading my posts all day long during a two-week binge, I'd like to know that too. Don't hesitate. Thanks.