Share Something with an American You Love

I've been thinking a lot about tea in America. I've been thinking a lot about how Americans drink and maybe just how Americans are.
Before beer and wine and spirits and tea and cola, there was water. Just like animals, the only thing we drank was water, and it was by far the most important thing humans did. The first non-water drinks people got hold of was considered magical or to at least possess supernatural powers and a connection to gods and the cosmos.
Ancient people drank from shared vessels with long straws, and rituals were built around drinks. The vessels were held aloft in a gesture of thanks or offering to the supernatural. Then people shared drinks.
Unlike food, drinks can actually be truly shared. When everything is coming out of the same pot, it's not like cutting up pieces of bread or pizza, where everything is unequal and maybe you got an extra mushroom on yours and I didn't get as much onion on mine. Everything in the pot is the same when it comes to liquid, and when we're drinking from straws, we are literally drinking the same thing.
Eventually ceramics and glass and silver became more readily accessible, and people were all able to afford to drink from their very own cups. When people drank, though, they did it together and when they had their own cups, they raised them up like they did shared vessels and then clinked them together as gesture representing that what they were drinking came from a single vessel.

Drinking is a magical necessity of life. And it's something that we build our cultures around. Everything else can be put on hold as long as you keep drinking. Without drinking, you're dead.

Tea, is still drunk today–for the most part–out of a shared vessel that is displayed on or around the table. If you drink alone, it's still great, but not the same. And this brings me to Americans...
Americans like things in their OWN cups that they pour THEMSELVES. Approximately 85% of tea drunk in America is iced. They drink it in bottles from 7-11and big cups from Hardy's. This separates them from an important part of their humanity because it turns them into islands separated by liquid rather than members of a community that's connected by drink. Drink brings us together, don't let big businesses and corporations and politicians and other interests keep us from that. Share a bottle of something today. Share a pot of tea. Share a carafe. Whatever it is, do it with someone else and have an experience.

Tips on Going Veg

Sometimes I get questions about going vegetarian. Many people have requested tips on going vegetarian, and I think it's finally time to create a list. I hate lists of things on the internet because it's usually just a play for hits, but I assure you this is not the impetus for this particular list. I have a friend who recently had a brush with death and has decided to take the pledge to go veg, and she asked me for tips. Here we go.

1. Rejoice in your decision to become a happier, healthier you. You are creating a better, healthier life for yourself.
   
2. Remember how many animals your decision is saving every year. Americans can eat up to and over 100 animals a year. Disgusting, right? Well, look at your dog or your cat or a fish or a bird or even a little bunny running in the park, and think about your decision not to destroy it every time you do.
   
3. Hang out with people who care about their health as well. People who care about their health are more active and don't criticize one another when it comes to their diets. I have never been around an active, health-conscious person who spoke negatively about my veganism. The only people who do are the fat, mean, lazy ones who laugh at "fags who do yoga" or people like me who "waste their time running around a park in the morning."
   
4. Educate yourself. There are tons of things to know about vegetarianism. There's a great Wikipedia page about its history, and there are tons of sites about its health benefits. People will ask you, and they will try to trick you into saying something wrong. Then they will use that to somehow prove that you are wrong about everything.
   
5. Admit that you don't know everything. When the haters come at you, they'll be throwing mud because that is the easiest thing for a hater to do. Facts and logic are not the tools of a hater, and hubris and arrogance should not be yours. It's easy to be high and mighty and self-righteous about begin vegan. Don't be so lazy. Be humble: say that you don't know all the answers, but you have simply made a decision to take a more active role in your own personal health and the mitigation of suffering on the planet.
   
6. Be vigilant resolute. When your unhealthy friends roll their eyes at you, ignore them. When your unhealthy friends want to go to McDonald's, abandon them. You cannot let others drag you down. If you were giving up heroin, you wouldn't let your junkie friends bring you down, so don't let the unhealthy friends you have do it either. Meat is as dangerous to your health as heroin. That's right. When you eat it, you will feel good in the short term, and then feel shitty all the time thereafter.
   
7. Find healthy friends at all cost. There are sites online. There are clubs in every town. There are vegetarian restaurants and hangouts. It's a community, and it's awesome.
   
8. Have fun with it. People who are vegetarian have better sex, they are more active, and they smell better. They have more fun and have more energy to do the things that make them happy.
   
9. Bring your own meals to holidays. This should be obvious.
   
10. Read labels. Gelatin, eggs, milk, and lard are in tons of things. But also, you'll realize that some awesome junk food is totally vegan. I personally love potato chips. I eat too many. Some people go Oreo crazy when they find out America's favorite cookie is also cruelty free.
    
11. Don't worry about protein. Vegans don't need to worry about protein unless they're going for the gold medal in weight-lifting or are competing in a body-building competition. Even then, unless they're going for the Ah-nold look, they can ignore the hype. The beef industry started their protein ad campaign years ago, and it totally worked. Don't be fooled: most Americans have too much protein in their diets as is evidenced by the colon cancer, prostate cancer, and heart disease that kills more of us than terrorists every year.
    
12. Try not to eat too much processed meat substitutes. Tempeh and TVP are OK, but don't over-do the veggie hot dogs and Boca burgers. The truth about processed food is that you're not getting the nutrients you need in the ways you need them through processed food. But man, veggie burgers are pretty awesome, and you can also make them at home in a jiffy from scratch.
    
13. Online blogs and recipes. Read them. Love them. Comment on them and start conversations and ask questions. They are the best lifelines when you feel like you're alone in the world. And if you don't live in the San Francisco bay or in a big city filled with enlightened people, you will probably feel alone pretty often at first.
    
14. Know you are not alone. It's a movement. Really smart people are vegan. Really beautiful people are vegan. Titans of industry are vegans. Left-wing hippies are vegans. It's the kind of a movement that transcends social status.

I hope this list helps. Sorry it's so long.

Should I Open a Business in Staunton, VA?

Here's the question I am asked rather frequently by myself and others: Is Staunton, Virginia a good place to do/open a business?

The answer is a list of pros and cons, a list I will now endeavor to create here and now on my blog. I know this blog has a date stamp on it, but I want to repeat it: June 3, 2011.

Advantages:

• The Staunton Creative Community Fund is a very good organization lead by a person in whom I have some confidence (Meghan Williamson). If you're a little savvy and resilient, you can employ this wonderful agency to incur debt. Debt earns a bad name for a variety of reasons, but in business it's often your first step, and a difficult one. SCCF helps you out.
• The Tourism Office in Staunton is quite good. They are always attempting to bring people to Staunton and to keep businesses abreast of what's happening in tourism and to keep tourists informed about what's happening in Staunton. People like to visit Staunton, and that's a really fantastic thing.We have a Shakespeare Theatre, two movie houses that show mainstream and art-house fare, sweet architecture, and the Staunton Music Guild, who is attempting to turn Staunton into a music destination.
• The Staunton Downtown Development Association is pretty awesome. They sponsor and organize events downtown, help businesses communicate with one another and with the local government, and they serve as a shoulder to cry on. By "they" I mean Julie Markowitz and Karen Lawrence.
• The Staunton community, the people who live here, are the best thing about this place. We have a type of diversity that isn't immediately apparent and is unlike any I have experienced in the world.There is a portion of this population who are filled with a special type of fervor for this place. They will stand up to city hall for you, they will come in droves to your business to help you stay in business, and they will RSVP to your Facebook invites and do all sorts of things that really make you feel like you're part of something awesome and serving people who appreciate you.

Disadvantages:

• It's hard to get debt in a small city, and even though SCCF is a wonderful resource, many businesses find themselves out of the running. The board is filled with people who don't know much about doing/owning a business in a small city. We're in the "Enterprise Zone" too, and that's supposed to mean we can get cash from the feds and from the state to help us create jobs and improve our buildings, but almost no one is eligible because the rules are made for businesses in bigger places. It's a frustration that makes you want to give up.
• The events here that are ostensibly created to bring in outsiders to our area, often just end up bringing the locals out, or people from the county. The worst of these are our music events in the summer that don't seem to be a boon to any business at all. I wish the SDDA or the Tourism Office would just take them over. Also, the park is too far away from downtown, and there is little or no effort to connect it to the businesses in the city. When there are giant events in the park, churches and the like are invited to sell things and advertise there instead of real businesses. We do have one of the most beautiful parks in America that I've seen. Half of it is golf course, but it's enormous, and it's a cool place to hang out all year. It's not being put to use for businesses in any way that I can tell.
• Downtown has some empty buildings. The reasons for this are numerous, but some of them can be solved by an active government. Empty buildings are bad for business downtown. I wish real estate people would be more interested in pop-up retail and seasonal leases, too. But this brings us to the next problem.
• The building inspector situation here is a shambles. It's a disgrace. Getting something inspected is impossible, getting inspectors to tell you what they want you to do is impossible, getting inspectors on the phone is impossible. If you have to do ANYTHING that involves building inspectors, don't open a business here. They will bankrupt you by keeping you in a holding pattern like a 747 who can't land but is running out of gas. You can't land, you can't leave, and you can't get them on the radio.
• The Staunton community is dichotomous. For example, Obama won this town by 12 votes. So, if you can think of a business both sides of that kind of divide would love, good luck. If not, well, good luck. Most businesses try to cater to one side of that, like a "traditional rural/southern/country/old people" business that tourists will also like, or say a "cool/new/edgy/fun/pseudo-urban/hippie/young people" business that tourists will also like. The locals are great, but you can't depend on them to keep you alive, not because they don't want to but because there simply aren't enough of them.

Anyway, that's it for now. I hope this answers the question. . . it probably only broaches it. As you can see, it's a difficult one. Maybe this will help people who want to know.

Factory Farms and the Governments Who Love Them

You know, sometimes I see these videos, and I don't get angry at the people who are doing these horrible things but at the people who say things like "I don't care." I can't see how you don't care. This is some heinousness going down right under our noses. . . and into most people's stomachs. That's a big deal.

Now states like Florida want to make it so people know even less about what they're eating.

The Murder Bros. are Playing a Show this Saturday

The Murder Bros. are playing a show this Saturday, and you are welcome to come. It's a birthday party for a young lady who is turning 21. Her name is Lauren Young.

Here's a link to the Facebook Event Page »

Here are directions to the event, which starts at 6:30, but the bands will play at around 8:30:

975 Cottontail Trail- I81 exit 243. Left off ramp onto 11N. Right at next light Pleasant Valley road. Right at next light Early road. Follow back till you see Moose lodge on left. Take that left at Cottontail Trail. Last house on left. Big White scary looking farm house.

You can bring food and roast it in a fire pit, and there will be mud wrestling of some kind if you're into that sort of thing. I think Pablo will be mud wrestling. I hope you can make it.

National Poetry Month and How I Quit Writing Poetry and Killed Osama Bin Laden

I always write something in April about National Poetry Month. I feel very conflicted about NPH, but this month has been a sort of return to poetry for me.

Sure, I still read and write poetry. I even publish from time to time. But since I've been in a band, writing songs and playing music and doing all the things you have to do to keep a band going has been taking precedence over all other modes of artistic expression and ambition.

This April, we had two poetry readings at the Darjeeling Cafe. I read at one of them. I read a short cycle that has been accepted for publication, and I read another short portion of a poetry book I've been working on. I'm pleased to report that poetry readings, no matter where you go, are the same as they ever were.

People still clap when they're not supposed to. There are still members of the audience that will say "hmm" rather loudly in order to tell others audience members that, yes, they are listening to poems that are affecting them on a level that pushes them to audible response. There are still those well-meaning poetry reading goers who will laugh mercifully at little jokes in poems. Kids still make noises and distract everyone in a charming way that only kids can. I've always loved it when people make noise at poetry readings (except for the hmm's), but there is still the one lady who will "shh" her fellow inhabitants of the temporary holy ground of poetry. There's still the poet who demands people participate by raising their hands or saying something when prompted. There's still wine and wine and wine and wine and purple tongues to prove it. There are poets who read too long and ones who are too nervous. There are poets who don't know what a poem is but have enough money to publish through vanity presses. There are still stacks of books that go unread attractively arranged on a table near the bar where you can buy them for a handsome fee, knowing you'll never read them because there are just too many poems in them, and they aren't organized in a way that makes you want to finish. The pretty people and the ugly people and the over-educated and the wannabes are all still there and make a hodgepodge of who's who that makes you realize everybody's a nobody in the end because the art you're performing fell out of favor long ago and doesn't matter to anyone outside of that room, so you love them all anyway.

Poetry is still dead except during National Poetry Month for most people who have ever read a poem or pretend to care about things like that.
Poetry is still the greatest form of artwork the human race has ever known, forcing it to the privileged few and fringes.

++++++++++++==================+++++++++++++

Someone put together a poetry strike online. I thought it was funny, so I observed it. It happened on May 1. Poets were supposed to not do anything poetic except maybe look at flowers and faint. For the poet, this is very difficult.

One day of not writing poetry, and Osama Bin Laden dies. Coincidence?
Maybe poets should abstain from writing poetry more often.

Osama's death is a very strange thing. It caused many people to cry out in jubilation. I don't feel the way I am supposed to feel about it. I'm supposed to be happy, I guess. I'm supposed to be relieved. But I wonder how much information died with him, and I wonder if knowing more about him and how he became the way he was would be more valuable than his corpse. I've heard why he hates Americans, but I would like to know what made him hate Americans. I wish that that information were more public, and I wish more people would think about what makes a mass murderer. I learned almost nothing from his death, and that's why victory is often empty, and this one seems Pyrrhic if it is a victory at all.

Murder Bros. Perform Wingman

The Murder Bros. perform their song Wingman at the Blue Nile in Harrisonburg on April 17, 2011. I hope you like this song. Sound is always hard on  people's cameras at shows, but I think this came out all right. Thanks for watching.

Life in a Foxhole at Stratton

The Murder Bros. put these shows together for Stauntonians to experience bands from out of town. We think they're great shows. We have a ton of great bands around here that don't get the notice they deserve. We are going to change that with our efforts.

The Stratton Event Room before Murder Bros. Go on

The Laundry