Video Vault: All Turkeys Go to Heaven

I've been in Lao for about a week now, but rather than spend the time necessary to type out some of my adventures from this wonderful country (I'll have time soon enough), all I can give you for the moment is a video from Israel. This the turkey we pulled out of its pen and slaughtered so we could celebrate a proper Thanksgiving on the farm. I call the video

All Turkeys Go to Heaven

Video: Escorting a Goat to Get Milked

Slava escorts a goat through the pen to the milking station. This was my favorite thing to do on the goat farm in Israel. Catching goats is a blast.

What I've Been Doing for 42 Days

So, it's been a while since I posted here. To blame: having a really great time in places where internet access was a rare and fleeting treat. But now I'm in Bangkok, where they shower tourists in liquid cyberspace for pennies. So, let's catch up.
Went to Jordan! First stop, Wadi Ram, a valley that Jordan sees as it's answer to the Grand Canyon. Spectacular. No Grand Canyon, mind you, but spectacular. We made arrangements with a Bedouin who called himself Desert Wolf over the 'net to camp out in the middle of the desert. He drove us out and dropped us off...
The next day we went hiking. The whole place was sandstone, which was really grippy and made for some excellent bouldering/climbing. There were a few spots where I thought we'd gotten ourselves stuck, but we always found a way out. Expected to see Desert Wolf that night. We didn't have any kindling to start a fire so we looked around for paper...and I realized I had a copy of Fahrenheit 451 with me. Sweet sweet irony. Anyway, Desert Wolf never came. Not that night, and not the next morning when he knew we needed to leave.
So we started the long hike out. About an hour or so in, we flagged down a passing Jeep that gave us a ride to the nearby village.
Spent most of the day chilling at "Ali's Place." That's Ali there on the left. Lots of tea, some tasty food, hooka smoke. We had missed the morning bus to Petra, so we had some time to kill and expressed to Ali an interest in a Jeep tour, but the asking price of the official guides was too much. So he found some young relative to drive his truck for us at a reasonable price, and off we went.
The muffler fell off pretty early into the tour. Nice guy, though, that driver. About an hour into the trip we realized we had met the night before, when I had helped repair a Bedouin tent in the dark. (Maya actually suspected it was him immediately, but I resisted)
That night Ali saw us drawing and asked us to draw something in his guest book. We left a drawing I had done of Maya sitting at Ali's Place earlier in the day. In the morning we caught a bus to Petra.
Petra! You may recognize this particular structure from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Pssh. Back to Israel!
To a goat farm! With about 220 goats (we counted every day, but no one was actually sure what number we were aiming for), from which the farm produced...
Cheese!
It was a beautiful place, in the mountains of the Galilee, looking down at Nazareth through the valley.
It was run by Amnon (pictured here with live-in grandchildren Chumba and Ta'el)...
...and Dalia (pictured here with Maya).
I spent most of my time there making a stone pillar. I finished it once with a rounded top in an effort to be different from all the flat topped pillars around, but some people thought it looked too phallic (and maybe it did), so I had to circumcise it and refinish it. It's a sturdy pillar, with a hitching post for cows/horses.
There were a few Americans there, so we organized a Thanksgiving celebration and the locals indulged us, letting us butcher one of the turkeys they had on the farm. Cooked in sheep fat, it ended up tasting a lot like sheep. Green beans, mashed potaters, POMEGRANATE sauce, stuffing, pumpkin pie (not from a can, a first for me)... It was all there.

So I just arrived in Bangkok, and I'll be bumming around for a couple of days until the Kobayashi-Downs' get here and then it'll be a whirlwind of family fun. I'm looking forward to it, and I should be able to update this blog more regularly for a while. We'll see!

I leave you with... PUPPY CAGE MATCH!!!
As always, there are more adventures photographed at My Flickr Page.

Check Out This Saddam Hidey Hole I Made

Actually, it`s a septic tank. Corrugated concrete, rebar, and cement.

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."

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!

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.