Big Hard Green Globes

With the Miami Herald on the shelf at the Dollar Store and the Sun-Sentinel limboing lower now, it is up to Gourmet magazine to do (excellent) investigative reporting on slavery in Florida's agricultural business. You might avoid certain strawberries as well; the people who pick them are prone to having children with tragic birth defects.

I don't buy out of season, and I try to stick to local. But there are folks, some related to me, who live not far from Immolakee who say that by doing so I am harming farmworkers more, that these people want these jobs, that they're grateful for them. (They say worse things, but I'm not quoting those.) I say, I don't want to enslave and poison people and I'm not grateful to be able to play a part in it, so what about MY needs?

Again the fallacy that the only solutions are those we've experienced, that we can't envision anything new.

It was about this time last year that I forced DH to leave the relations during our vacation and go with me to Lake Okeechobee, because I wanted to see where Zora Neale Hurston had written about and I wanted to hike part of the levee around the lake. Despite some health problems at the time, I found some beauty there: strange birds, long flat stretches of swamp, dragonflies mating in mid-air. But the lake bottom is riddled with arsenic; in drought, it catches on fire; in floods, it fills with farm runoff and massive fish kills follow.

ON ANOTHER topic...

This is in honor of Nathaniel Mayweather's impending nuptials. Yay, Fancy Lad! We like seeing you so happy. (You HAVE TO watch at least until the "grab the butt" part.)

I didn't write for a while because I was in a killer depression. Then I heard yesterday a "this day in rock history" item about Janis Joplin being fined for obscene language onstage in Tampa, and I thought, bitch, the least you can do in her honor is get out of bed and go use some obscene language. On whatever stage you can find.