Video: Coyote Hunting Practice

There's also something of an extended cut on YouTube. It's a bit more... abstract.

Come See a Sculpture I'm Making

Most of this week I've been helping Marc build a sculpture out of mud on the Western end of his property. Last week it was a base and a wooden frame. Now we've filled it with tires, rocks, and old construction waste and slapped many many pounds of mud on top (1 bucket dirt, 1 bucket sand, 1 bucket manure, some pinestraw, water, and a super secret ingredient) to make it the still-in-progress beauty it is today. It's tall--ten feet or more. The basic forms are done, Marc is going to spend some time on the faces and then that'll be that. I'll take some more pics when it's all done.

I also let slip that I was a filmmaker in a previous life, and I've been recruited to make a documentary of sorts for the place. I thought I didn't want to do this until the camera was in my hands and then I remembered what fun it is. Shooting a conversation happening in a language you don't understand is like deflecting a remote droid's lasers with your blast shield down.

Albo: "But in Hebrew, I can't even understand, how am I supposed to shoot?"
OWK: "Your ears can deceive you, don't trust them. Stretch out with your feelings."
[Albo calmly zooms and pans, capturing like three great decisive moments.]
Han: "I call it luck."

This is Your Brain On Shuffle, Pt. 2

The feature formally known as "Songs I've Found Myself Singing"

Without an iPod, the music is all in your head. Some songs, you bring to mind intentionally. But sometimes... Your subconcious takes control. These are songs that I have found myself singing aloud or in my head, without the faintest idea why.

Jens Lekman - Pocketful of Money (quickly amended to "Pocketful of Shekels")
Foo Fighters - Learn to Fly (I really don't like this song)
Soul Asylum - Runaway Train (Never comin' back...)
Francis Scott Key and John Stafford Smith - Star Spangled Banner
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five - The Message (Don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge...)
Spoon - Stay Don't Go
Lykke Li - Tonight
Blondie - One Way Or Another
Phish - The Wolfman's Brother (for some reason I was singing it as "Wolfman's Daughter")
Of Montreal - The Past is a Grotesque Animal
Bright Eyes - Everything Must Belong Somewhere
Wicked - Popular (quickly amended to "Secular"--worked out alright)

Where Do They Get These Wonderful Toys?

There is a playground in Tel Aviv full of cool stuff, and this structure is the highlight. After making this video I actually came up with a better way to do it, if height is your goal--standing in the middle and swinging from there can get you just about flush with the ropes.

What I Did Today

I rode a tortoise!

I willfully ignored signs I couldn't read! "Bor... Patu'akh... Sakhanah?" *SHRUG*

I thanked a shepherd for clearing the trail of his sheep!

I lounged happily underneath homemade arches!

I pretended I was Goliath on the very spot he once stood! "I do taunt the armies of Israel this day; give me a man, that we may fight together!"

I was like "Would you look at that view!"

More at my Flickr page.

Could I Kill a Coyote in (Relatively) Unarmed Combat?

Two nights in a row now I've encountered a coyote on my way from the main house to my little guest house. The first night I had my flashlight on me, walked outside, heard some rustling noises and flashed my light onto a coyote about 15ft away. He darted a few feet but then stopped and stared, his eyes bright in the light. He was afraid of me, but not as afraid as I would have liked. I made some menacing noises to no effect, then tossed a couple of stones in his direction which again made him retreat a little further but still he watched me as I connected the power to my cabin and went on my way. Last night, same thing happened, though I didn't have my flashlight with me so I was tossing the stones a little more aggressively. This got me to thinking--I feel like I'm a pretty accurate thrower (ahem), if a coyote decided to charge me and I beaned him right between the eyes (or on the temple or somesuch) with a decently sized stone do you think he would go down? I'm not a big fan of hunting, it seems like a very unbalanced fight what with modern human weaponry and all that. But me vs. a coyote in a field of stones seems pretty fair. As long as he doesn't call his buddies--if the nightly chorus is any indication, they are everywhere!

Maybe I'm just feeling inspired by the fact that I'm a short walk from where David took down Goliath...

Farming is Yard Work

I don't know why I didn't realize this before, it seems so obvious now. But it came to me as a was weeding a garden today. Farming is yard work. The same yard work I've avoided doing with my dad my entire life. And now I've dedicated the next almostyear of my life to it, because I feel like it has something to teach me. But it's something my dad's been trying to teach me my whole life! I wouldn't even be here if I had just done my goddamn chores.

Found a Place On a Farm, Probably

So I'm off tomorrow to a farm! Will I be out of touch? I don't know! I doubt it. I got in touch with them via email, so I would be surprised if there's no internet. Anyway, wish me luck!

Rabbi Crazy and the Prince Philosopher

So I had a good chat with my previously mentioned Tel Aviv hostel crazy, and it turns out he's ALSO from Florida, like the Granada hostel crazy. Is it something in the water? He calls himself Rabbi something, I can never catch exactly what he's saying. We'll just call him Rabbi Crazy. He usually goes out in an old Israeli army uniform and pink sunglasses. He told me he spends his days out on the beach, picking up trash and holding it up to God to show him how the people are misusing his Holy Land. This particular day he also decided to do a little ballet, and a passing man told his son "that right there's a freak." He told the man he shouldn't go around calling people freaks, because you never know what they're capable of. Our conversation:

Me: That sounds like a threat.
RC: It was. I could do terrible things to him with prayer.
Me: Is prayer the way you exact your vengeace? (this man inspires dramatic language)
RC: It's one of two.
Me: What's the other?
RC: I'll tell you tomorrow.
Me: What if I don't see you tomorrow?
RC: You won't, that's why I said that.

Thankfully the crazy gleam in his eye wasn't particularly murderous, or I might have been up all night. Consequently, I did see him in the morning, but I didn't follow up.

Last night I ditched the hostel for a CouchSurfing.com host, a great guy named Ahava. The name means "love" in Hebrew, it's not his given name. He is something of an amateur philosopher. Over a drink he talked at length about the soul, the mind, the body, how the three interact and interact. In his view we're all splinters of God. God was a perfect being who wasn't actually perfect because he was all there was (alpha and omega and all that) and therefore there was nothing to compare him to to confirm he was perfect. As Ahava says "A race with only one car on the track has no winner." So he split himself up into all of our little souls, and we all live out a part of the complete picture, through many lifetimes and bodies and minds. One lifetime we may learn generosity, another we may learn what it is to be needy and depend on the generosity of others. Eventually our souls learn all of these earthly lessons and then transcend to something else.

When we got back to his apartment, he put on Purple Rain for me to watch and everything became clear.

Pictures Are Up and Organized at Flickr!

You can see pictures from Spain by clicking here.

And pictures from Israel here.

There are more Israel pictures taken with the nicer camera, but I forgot to pull them off before I sent the camera home with Ben. I'm trying to get him to upload them for me, BUT WE'LL SEE.

This Is the End

Finding placement on a kibbutz/moshav/farm/whateverwantsme is taking longer than I thought it would. I am waiting on many different people for many different things. I feel like Willard at the beginning of Apocalypse Now, watching the ceiling fan turn, smoking a cigarette shirtless in bed, sweating, waiting for an assignment. Literally, I have done this. It was certainly a forced situation to cement the parallel in my mind, but there I was.

Ben and I had a great time zipping around Israel at a rapid pace. Two nights in Tel Aviv seeing friends, one night in Jerusalem running between holy sights (Ben was getting a bit overwhelmed watching a Greek Orthodox monk chant evening prayers to a shrine built in the very spot Jesus was crucified... reportedly), zipped to the Dead Sea for some great hiking, swimming floating, back through Tel Aviv to get a car to drive up North to the Sea of Galilee (sitting deep in the water on plastic chairs sipping on beers and a bottle of vodka, a gift from Daniel, who owned the beach), hiking around the Banyas, Nimrod's Fortress, some beautiful things, then back to Tel Aviv to send Ben home.

My pace has downshifted significantly. Last night was my fourth night in Tel Aviv since Ben left. I spent the first couple staying with friends, then these last couple in a hostel. I have an insane man of about 45 in my room who sometimes wakes in the night to yell down at pedestrians from the balcony. He thinks it's hilarious to tell people they're going the wrong way, repeating himself like a psychotic broken record (or a Books song): "You're going the wrong way. You're going the wrong way. You're going the wrong way. You. You. That's not the right way. You. You're going the wrong way. That's not the right way." He'll keep this up for minutes and follow it up with some maniacal laughter. Last night he exclaimed to the world below "I don't give a shit about anything! I get that from my mother. She died. She's why I'm like this!" He'll then come back inside and have a quieter conversation with himself, during which I fall back asleep. This is the second insane older gentleman I've had the pleasure of sleeping next to since leaving the US. The first was of a calmer variety, but also an incessant talker. He lives in a van in Gainesville, FL and travels the world on a trust fund his mother left him that can't be spent on regular living expenses. These guys and their moms. He kept me up late one night while I wasn't feeling good (a reaction to my typhoid vaccine, I eventually decided), going on and on about his problems: "They tell me I have a personality disorder or schizophrenia or some shit. I just think I'm lazy." How laziness could be confused for schizophrenia I'm not sure, but he seemed pretty convinced the docs had it all wrong. That night I was up all night with horrible fever delusions, mainly about our rental car not being arranged properly (you know, one of these horrible dreams that has you going over and over through some nonsense bureaucracy and every time you close your eyes it's the same problem again, unsolvable...) but also about this rotund man from Gainseville deciding he's interested in what my insides look like.

I have a bunch of pics that I'm organizing, should be posting about them soon.

Songs I've Found Myself Singing, Part One

I'm traveling without an iPod, which is making me sing alot of songs to myself to get my music fix. Some I intentionally pull from the iTunes in my brain, others pop in quite mysteriously. This is a list of songs I have found myself singing without consciously pulling them forth. Most I think can be pretty obviously attributed to a particular mood or something I was thinking about. Except "All That She Wants."

Ace of Base - All That She Wants
The Zither theme from "The Third Man"
Devendra Banhart - Shabop Shalom Baby
Fiery Furnaces - Sing For Me
The Incredible Hulk TV Show Theme
Willie Nelson - On the Road Again
Queen - Don't Stop Me Now
Moulin Rouge Love Song Medley
The Flying Lizards - Money (That's What I Want)