Taomeow

I don't think it's an either-or approach. Depends on what you're working on. I prefer imagining nothing unless the instructions specifically ask me to, but it depends... I've been taught, generally, to "just do it," but there's techniques where you have to "just do it" in such a way that there's no way you can do it if you completely shut down your "stretching it" skills -- e.g. when the master asks you to pull your ears inward into your head, or to start with your room then your street then your city then your country, etc., and gradually paint the whole universe a particular color, then pull it (the freshly painted universe) into the crevice on the side of the fingernail of your little finger. Both are difficult to "just do," try it and see. My taiji teacher, who is very precise in his explanations and corrections where things external are concerned, usually switches to interjections and gestures when describing things internal -- these "can't be told," but he tries to give you an image -- of the pattern, the motion, direction, dynamics, tempo, the music of it...

Here's another "monster" COFFEE WITH THE MEAL by Ogden Nash . A gentlemanly gentleman, as mild as May, Entered a restaurant famed and gay. A waiter sat him in a droughty seat And laughingly inquired what he'd like to eat. "Oh I don't want venison, I don't want veal, But I do insist on coffee with the meal. Bring me clams in a chilly group, And a large tureen of vegetable soup, Steak as tender as a maiden's dream, With lots of potatoes hashed in cream, And a lettuce and tomato salad, please, And crackers and a bit of Roquefort cheese, But waiter, the gist of my appeal Is coffee with, coffee with, coffee with the meal." The waiter groaned and he wrung his hands; "Perhaps the headwaiter understands." Said the sleek headwaiter, like a snobbish seal, "What, monsieur? Coffee with the meal?" His lip drew up in scornful laughter; "Monsieur desires a demitasse after!" The gentleman's eyes grew hard as steel, He said, "I'm ordering coffee with the meal. Hot black coffee in a great big cup, Fuming, steaming, filled right up. I don't want coffee iced in a glass, And I don't want a miserable demitasse, But what I'll have, come woe, come weal, Is coffee with, coffee with, coffee with the meal." The headwaiter bowed like a poppy in the breeze; "Monsieur desires coffee with the salad or the cheese?" Monsieur said, "Now you're getting warmer; Coffee with the latter, coffee with the former; Coffee with the steak, coffee with the soup, Coffee with the clams in a chilly group; Yes, and with a cocktail I could do, So bring me coffee with the cocktail, too. I'll fight to the death for my bright ideal, Which is coffee with, coffee with, coffee with the meal." The headwaiter swiveled on a graceful heel; "Certainly, certainly, coffee with the meal!" Oh, what a glow did Monsieur feel At the warming vision of coffee with the meal, One hour later Monsieur, alas! Got his coffee in a demitasse.

I would think Voltaire, being French, used the standard French cup for coffee -- a demitasse, which translates "half a cup." It's actually smaller in many cases than half a tea cup -- more like a traditional Chinese tea cup, although the latter can be even smaller than a demitasse, as small as half a demitasse. Expensive or ceremonial tea is still served in these in China, and real good coffee (made in a cezveh and/or otherwise good and strong) is almost invariably served in a demitasse in many cultures. Of course it would make no sense to drink something Starbucks style out of a demitasse. So, my guess is, Voltaire would have no bladder room for the volume of liquid contained in 72 tea cups, but a demitasse, besides being small, is not necessarily filled to the brim -- it's coffee that counts, not the volume of the solvent. Whether his coffee was strong or weak, I don't know, but weak or bad coffee wouldn't have been tolerated in France in his time, in his circles, so my guess is, strong. As for "hearsay" with Tesla as its source -- well, I said "FWIW" which means "for what it's worth," not "ISOTB" (I swear on the bible). Tesla could have lied. As Dr. House put it, "Everybody lies."

_/\_ A fine example of using half a brain -- the left hemisphere -- to prove that things this half does not understand are all in the imagination of the other half, the right one, about which the only thing this particular left one knows is that it's a waste of head space to have it there. Last week. Stepping out to go for an appointment, I pass the UPS lady who's talking on her cell phone, loudly, and repeats many times, "yes, I can drive there, but I need gas, will you give me gas, I'm out of gas, I can't go there unless you give me gas." So, OK, I'm thinking, why do some people always insist on yelling on their cell phone instead of just talking, why must I overhear snippets of conversations of no concern to me?.. I get in my car, start driving, make a turn and the gas pedal gets sticky and I see, to my shock, that I'm completely out of gas, normally it never happens to me, this time, it did. And my first thought -- I swear -- the first thought emanating from my right brain -- is, "she wasn't talking about things of no concern to me, she was channeling this from my car, it's my car that made her scream about gas to make me hear." Things of this nature happen to me often, but usually only when, coincident with the "coincidence," there's either a "special" feeling I'm experiencing or a particular question or problem I'm pondering at the moment, and a random snippet that comes into this receptive state is always meaningful. But this time I wasn't feeling anything -- well, maybe I didn't notice because I was rushed -- or questioning anything, I was just in a hurry, which is why I didn't recognize the message right away. Would have saved me a lot of trouble if I did -- the gas station was a minute's drive away, but the next one, nowhere, or I don't know where, hence the hassle and the stress of running late and all that jazz. And my car told me, "didn't I tell you?.."

People are not evil, but the overlords -- I'm not sure they're people, and I'm sure they're evil. Here's two random quotes I came across just the other day: "A man always has two reasons for the things he does -- a good one and the real one." -- J.P. Morgan "I don't care so much for a fortune... as I do for getting ahead of the other fellow." -- Thomas Edison Edison, incidentally, was the worst kind of evil. He set out to prove that the competition's AC was inferior to his DC by launching a vast smear campaign, in the course of which he had his agents hire kids to catch and bring to him cats and dogs from the neighborhoods around the competitor's (Westinghouse) facilities, and personally tortured and electrocuted them with AC to prove its dangers. Just imagine what you have to be to do something like that -- and, yes, not even for a fortune, just for "getting ahead of the other fellow..."

Yes!! And the relationship must be personal... like in the good old days. I had that in my life, in the good old days... A regular MD she was, a friend of my mom's. I knew her since I was a child, and later she was the one I turned to when my own kids were little. She worked at a hospital for rare and severe infectious disease (never got as much as a cold herself) where they would bring all the horror cases from the whole region. So, she wasn't a family practitioner or a pediatrician, but she was a healer -- and as Brian says, it was energetic. When I was little, she would come whenever I was sick and I would start feeling better the second she walked into the room. Same thing with my kids. Her every word and every touch would bring relief. Besides the physical side of it, she had an amazing effect on people's emotions -- calming and balancing, like an instant meditation. (It was actually very funny to observe the way she and my mom conversed. She would start saying something, my mom would interrupt and go on a tangent for fifteen minutes, her friend would sit quietly listening and then, once my mom was done talking, resume whatever she was saying when she got interrupted, as though the interruption never happened. My mom would later complain that her friend never listens! On the contrary -- she was listening... for what matters. Ignoring whatever she thought didn't matter was part of the skill of really hearing what matters, as I realized much later.) Also, she was a minimalist -- the typical situation went like this: my kids get the flu, the pediatrician prescribes medications, I call "auntie" (she was not an aunt, but "appointed" herself one), here's what the pediatrician says I should use, what do you think? She'd ask about the symptoms and then go, "don't use this, don't use this, don't use this... this one, yes, but only with fever higher than such and such numbers." She never once said that whatever was prescribed was not enough -- in her opinion, it was almost always too much. She worked till the age of 87. I don't think she ever lost a patient.

Thank you, Brian -- after you, if there's a list. So, to continue on topic. Yes, you're right, specialists like to despise lay folks who "think they know something," and god forbid the latter DO know something -- in this case substitute "hate with a passion" for "despise." After the story I told above, about a "typical" doctor, fast forward three years. We meet an MD, accidentally (god sent him, everybody says whom I tell the circumstances). He is a big cheese at a large local hospital, also a researcher who pioneered some of the complex procedures that have been included into the "standard of care"since then, and he looks like Robert Redford in his prime to boot. And he is actually thrilled when I tell him, well, for such and such reasons we did this and that (completely unorthodox "alternative" stuff) and he goes, yeah, good choices, there's so much quackery in the alternative field, how did you manage to sort out through this convoluted picture to get to the few precious things that really work? I feel I'm in a dream. I explain to him that I've invested thousands of hours into research, orthodox, alternative, everything under the sun -- out of necessity, not for to prove anything to anybody. He goes, OK, have you come across this and that... and in no time we're talking shop like two professionals, which in fact we are, not in terms of experience and methods of learning -- I never had his, but then, he never had mine -- and he is really interested and I see he respects the work I've done, and I see he did his own homework, for the first tine I'm talking to an MD who never misses a beat when I mention an obscure study from his field -- whoa, he's read them all! And then we talk candidly, and he goes, about some parts of the standard of care, "yeah, that's a scam... and this, a band-aid to cover up the picture..." and so on. Despite the grim circumstances that brought me to that conversation, I'm in fucking Heaven! And the sick family member who's been avoiding doctors because he had zero trust and less respect for what he'd seen that far, goes, OK, now I think I can trust this guy. Praise the lord if he's the one responsible for this miracle.... or whatever powers. And of course the treatment worked close to the top of its capabilities. Placebo effect?...

Thank you for noticing, Liminal. I have always maintained that intellect is what you have to have if you're cornered, it's an evolutionary trick if you want to survive (and/or thrive) under adverse conditions. If nothing is going on that demands of you to get smart or bust, you just relax... My ideal is the taoist sage -- "has a strong mind but does not make it labor." I make mine labor when I have to... but not when I don't.

Yes, but they spend an average of 30 minutes a year familiarizing themselves with publications in those journals, at least that's the number I seem to recall, I've seen the article citing it a long time ago so I may be wrong by 15 minutes either way. I'm not saying people are born to become bad doctors. I'm saying the system is set up to produce doctors who have to stretch themselves very thin if they want to be good, and are really more comfortably embraced by the system if they're bad -- bad for the patients, bad for themselves, good for the system. Would you agree? I've several MD friends with experience of working in the old country (free medicine) and here. They turned into drastically different people over the years. Not that we had great medicine, it was a different kind of bad. But it didn't do to doctors what it does to many of them here, in my personal experience. And I do agree with your take on the value (or lack thereof) of "research," and then some. But, like I said, it's a separate story.

Six seconds per patient? That's luxury. That's when both patients and family members are docile and comfortably clueless. Try getting six seconds of the doctors attention to discuss something YOU want to discuss, rather than what the doctor wants to dispense. I was that family member who wanted to get 6 seconds of the doctor's attention when another family member was in the hospital with a surgery-or-not life-threatening emergency choice, and I spent the night reading research papers related to the problem in the doctor's specialty (something doctors are not given any time or incentives to do -- so they do not keep themselves current with professional publications, and use whatever is "standard of care" decades after the standard was, e.g., proven harmful or inefficient by researchers. Who are far from perfect in their own right, but that's a different story). By morning -- eureka! -- I knew what happened and why -- an obscure paper in a medical journal explained how a prior medical intervention caused the current emergency complication. There was a demonstrated irrefutable link between the two, which the doctor was not aware of. Accordingly the strategy was now much easier to choose, and it became clear that surgery won't be necessary. I managed to apprehend the specialist in the hall as he was doing rounds, and I had just enough time to say, "here's this German study, and it says... " I never finished. The doctor started screaming hysterically. "I haven't slept three nights in a row. I have twenty-six more patients to see. I have three kids of my own whom I never see. I have no time to discuss German bullshit or any other bullshit. If family members do not cooperate, we call security." And off he ran. The sick family member, who heard the exchange from his room, through the open door, refused to deal with any medical professionals for the next three years, despite a life-and-death illness.

Far out! Do you have Armenian ancestry? I've seen people drink coffee like that only in Armenia. Done it too while there, for a couple of weeks. Never, ever slept. Felt great. But I was 18 -- couldn't pull it off later in life, nor would want to, everybody has their own level of satiation, different for different people and even for the same person at different periods in life. I would never go higher than three cups now, but my three cups are more like 9 standard American dose-wise, and lately I'm cutting that down to 2 equivalent to 6, because later in the afternoon I'm experimenting with matcha, and being a matcha neophyte coached by a couple of devout aficionados, I'm fascinated with the novelty of it all, and for the moment, it competes successfully with my third cup of coffee of the day. Matcha may have more caffeine than any other green tea (I'm not sure, haven't looked at the statistics, but it feels this way), but the rest of the effects are different (obviously -- coffee is not just caffeine, anymore than tea is), and I'm exploring. I bought some tools and even made a special tray -- but wait, this is for the tea thread.

This, FWIW, comes from a very thoroughly researched biography book I'm reading -- "Tesla: Man Out of Time," by Margaret Cheney. The context -- Tesla's autobiographical notes, where he mentions that he had a compulsion to always finish what he'd started, whether he liked to or not, it was just part of how he functioned, and this compulsion nearly killed him when he began to read the works of Voltaire. "To his dismay he learned that there were close to one hundred volumes in small print 'which that monster had written while drinking seventy-two cups of black coffee per diem.' But there could be no peace for Tesla until he had read them all."

Here's a theory of mine: the word "sin" originally meant "wrongdoings against you," not "wrongdoings by you." It stood for "damage to your wholeness," not "damage you cause." "Sinful" meant "compromised, tampered with." If this hypothesis is correct, then the original sin is real. We are born victims of a crime against humanity perpetrated by demiurges who created or, more likely, refurbished us toward their own goals. From this point there's three paths we can take. The victim of a crime can proceed to identify with the perpetrator -- and that's where evil would come from. Or he or she can embrace the state of being a victim -- and that's where all the ideas of self-sacrifice, a self in need of being sacrificed to this or that cause, come from. In the first case it's evil we perpetuate against others, in the second, against ourselves. The third route is to acknowledge the damage and undertake to correct it -- in oneself, leaving others out of it. This would mean return to the original wholeness. Human wholeness, not otherworldly. The first two routes are popular and easy, all you have to do is replicate the program. The third is rare and difficult, because you have to use a program that is not imprinted into your make-up experientially, the program that has been deleted, overwritten by other programs. You have to find it and restore it without having been shown where to find it and how to implement it, unlike in the case of either doing damage to self (you know how, you've been done damage to) or others (you know how, others have done damage to you). This task of course cannot be accomplished in the head, because the program is not in the head, it's systemic. I think of the original taoism as either such program, or an attempt to find it.

This guy consumed 72 cups of coffee daily for most of his 84 years of life: Voltaire, a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state. Voltaire was a versatile writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets.

Don't. The German surgeon who suggested to his colleagues that they ought to wash their hands before doing surgery or aiding a woman in labor was placed in a lunatic asylum -- for the crazy unscientific mysticism of his assertion that dirty hands might be transmitting... well, he didn't know the word germs... they weren't discovered yet... transmitting energies that cause inflammations and untimely, unnecessary deaths as the result of medical interventions. He insisted on washing his hands before sticking them into an open wound, and was harassed, institutionalized, and died in a lunatic asylum as the outcome. Surgeons did start washing and then disinfecting their hands though -- over two hundred years later. Any system that has entrenched itself will give hell to anyone or anything who makes a peep against it, and all the "science" it holds sacred to support the status quo is ultimately equal -- it is put together just so as to support the status quo, anything that falls short is deemed "unscientific," end of story. The so-called skeptics are simply model conformists, they are not using their mind to investigate, they are using their indoctrination to stop such investigations dead in their tracks. And it is hard to argue with them precisely because the indoctrination is something countless trillions of dollars have been invested into over decades -- it's hard to take on a whole civilization, equipped with just your own mind, your own experience, and your own unprofessional "this is wrong" gut feeling. Prove a gut feeling?.. Prove that dirty hands infect open wounds, that light deprivation can cause depression, that eating nothing but white rice can cause beri-beri but failing to polish it prevents this, that scurvy does not kill sailors if they include a barrel of lemons with their food supplies on a long trip, that masturbation does not cause insanity, that opium is not the best remedy for colds in infants -- and on and on, the above took several hundred years to prove in every case, and I could give you a hundred more examples. So, don't feel bad. You're up against a mountain of shit -- no need to feel obligated to shovel it all away in any one conversation. Just back away slowly, and go smell some aromatic salts (yes, doctors used to prescribe them to help with troublesome feelings... They still work... )

Vaccination, one of the business staples of modern Western medicine, was invented by a taoist nun in the 13th century, against smallpox. The emperor, having seen its effectiveness, ordered mass vaccinations for the whole population of China. Here's where TCM and Western medicine could have taken the same route -- medicine by decree, decided on by non-medics. However, they did not. The nun passionately opposed mass vaccinations -- unlike our researchers who'd be only too happy if they managed to sell their invention to a big pharma company, and the latter, to the governments of the world. The route whereby you make megaprofits off medical interventions is just too irresistible to bypass. It was bypassed by TCM though, the nun managed to convince the emperor to cancel his edict. Epidemics of infectious disease follow cycles, she argued from the perspective of subtle physiology she understood so well, and this preventive measure is in the category of "strong poisons," a class of interventions in TCM resorted to only when there's real impending danger which outweighs the detrimental effects of applying health-undermining treatments, especially for prevention. If there isn't such danger because we're in the waning phase of an epidemic, this kind of drastic prevention will do more harm than good. (All our "conquests" over disease were accomplished in the waning phases of epidemics. Our medicine is one hundred years old. The cycle for smallpox is about three hundred years. It still remains to be seen if we've "conquered" anything at all with our methods of the past one hundred years.) And yet a newborn of today gets over 30 different vaccines by age 2 if I remember correctly, and it doesn't stop there. "What is the definition of good drugs? Anything that, when injected into a rat, results in a publication," according to the head of one of the largest medical research centers in the US.

Western medicine is a business. (Cancer alone is the second biggest money-maker in the US, after war.) It is a set of strategies for making megaprofits off illness. You are comparing apples and oranges. A better comparison could be drawn between Chinese medicine and biophysics. Biophysics is something that is not used in Western medicine (and not studied in med schools), but it is the closest Western science to TCM. What doesn't biophysics know about subtle energies that TCM does? Applications. The theory is there, but it's not being used to diagnose, treat, or cure any illness.

The Scythiansby Aleksandr Blok (1918) You are but millions. Our unnumbered nations Are as the sands upon the sounding shore. We are the Scythians! We are the slit-eyed Asians! Try to wage war with us—you'll try no more! You've had whole centuries. We—a single hour. Like serfs obedient to their feudal lord, We've held the shield between two hostile powers— Old Europe and the barbarous Mongol horde. Your ancient forge has hammered down the ages, Drowning the distant avalanche's roar. Messina, Lisbon—these, you thought, were pages In some strange book of legendary lore. Full centuries long you've watched our Eastern lands, Fished for our pearls and bartered them for grain; Made mockery of us, while you laid your plans And oiled your cannon for the great campaign. The hour has come. Doom wheels on beating wing. Each day augments the old outrageous score. Soon not a trace of dead nor living thing Shall stand where once your Paestums flowered before. O Ancient World, before your culture dies, Whilst failing life within you breathes and sinks, Pause and be wise, as Oedipus was wise, And solve the age-old riddle of the Sphinx. That Sphinx is Russia. Grieving and exulting, And weeping black and bloody tears enough, She stares at you, adoring and insulting, With love that turns to hate, and hate—to love. Yes, love! For you of Western lands and birth No longer know the love our blood enjoys. You have forgotten there's a love on Earth That burns like fire and, like all fire, destroys. We love cold Science passionately pursued; The visionary fire of inspiration; The salt of Gallic wit, so subtly shrewd, And the grim genius of the German nation. We know the hell of a Parisian street, And Venice, cool in water and in stone; The scent of lemons in the southern heat; The fuming piles of soot-begrimed Cologne. We love raw flesh, its color and its stench. We love to taste it in our hungry maws. Are we to blame then, if your ribs should crunch, Fragile between our massive, gentle paws? We know just how to play the cruel game Of breaking in the most rebellious steeds; And stubborn captive maids we also tame And subjugate, to gratify our needs… Come join us, then! Leave war and war's alarms, And grasp the hand of peace and amity. While still there's time, Comrades, lay down your arms! Let us unite in true fraternity! But if you spurn us, then we shall not mourn. We too can reckon perfidy no crime, And countless generations yet unborn Shall curse your memory till the end of time. We shall abandon Europe and her charm. We shall resort to Scythian craft and guile. Swift to the woods and forests we shall swarm, And then look back, and smile our slit-eyed smile. Away to the Urals, all! Quick, leave the land, And clear the field for trial by blood and sword, Where steel machines that have no soul must stand And face the fury of the Mongol horde. But we ourselves, henceforth, we shall not serve As henchmen holding up the trusty shield. We'll keep our distance and, slit-eyed, observe The deadly conflict raging on the field. We shall not stir, even though the frenzied Huns Plunder the corpses of the slain in battle, drive Their cattle into shrines, burn cities down, And roast their white-skinned fellow men alive. O ancient World, arise! For the last time We call you to the ritual feast and fire Of peace and brotherhood! For the last time O hear the summons of the barbarian lyre!

Alive for a day, busting her prison, the clock, the cuckoo flies off.

My point exactly: success or failure are determined internally -- no exceptions. External circus performances, however impressive, don't count. A monkey riding a bicycle in circles, surrounded by the cheering crowd of spectators... Good monkey, here's your banana. It is unknown how Tesla's mother felt, but according to her son, she lived the same intense creative life as he did -- but because she did it without the need to struggle against "competition," unlike her son, she was spared his many phobias, obsessions, neurotic compulsions, meaningless rituals and the rest of those unhealthy manifestations of a never-ending internal conflict (between what you want to do for your muse and what you have to do for your ambitions, and/or against the ambitions of others) which external success provokes in an internally complex, smart, creative person almost by default. She was organic to her milieu, she used her stellar IQ to serve herself and her loved ones, so I doubt she felt like a failure. And that's the only thing that matters in determining success or failure -- the only judge of that who has a clue resides inside, he or she feels a certain way, and no amount of external measurements can impress this ultimate authority, of fool him or her for longer than the briefest moment. As my once-guru used to say, "fame is not a feeling."

I'm reading Nikola Tesla's biography. A very successful, popular, adored, admired, envied, famous man he was, and made money too. Einstein is quoted as answering the question, "How does it feel to be the smartest guy in the world?" with "I don't know, you have to ask Tesla." Tesla himself, however, thought that what he had was just the same talent and the same intellect and discipline that his mother had, plus the opportunities she didn't have. She was illiterate and too busy to prove anything to the world -- even though the house was full of her inventions, things she created and built just to make her own life, the life of a hard-working mother of seven, easier. (All of Tesla's great impact on modern technology may have come out of his admiring an electric egg beater his mother invented and built. She didn't show it to anyone outside the household.) So, was she less successful than her famous son? She proved nothing to the world -- created nothing anyone noticed -- does it mean she was an existential failure?.. What do you people think?

//

We didn't have the IQ test in the old country. Instead, the language has a whole array of synonyms for "smart" that pinpoint different kinds of smart and different ways to be smart. E.g.: Умный -- smart, шибко умный -- trying to be smart at someone else's expense, толковый -- able to use one's smarts productively, сообразительный -- able to put two and two together, and do it fast, разумный -- smart in a prudent and balanced way, головастый -- good at solving arcane problems, хитрожопый -- smart in a cunning way detrimental to others, неглупый -- moderately smart, and so on, there's many more. I think English would do better hitting the "refresh" button on its linguistic capabilities to express finer distinctions of certain complex notions such as this one, instead of trying to relegate the task to numbers.

I love using incense, for all kinds of purposes -- ritual, clearing the space, instead of or in addition to dry cleaning clothes (see below), and just for fun. I don't overdo it though, a little goes a long way. Here's what I use fairly regularly: copal, myrrh, camphor -- in a burner that's exactly like the pic CT posted, with a fu dog on top -- unprocessed crystals on charcoal tablets; sage -- this I collect by a local lake where it grows in abundance, and make into smudge sticks; spray bottles with assorted combinations of essential oils added to water or rose water (from a local Middle Eastern store), these I hand pick wherever I can find the high quality stuff -- you add a few drops to water, and then just shake it well before spraying into the area; various incense sticks (I'm partial to frankincense); freshly ground coffee -- this I use for dry cleaning purposes when the jacket or coat isn't dirty but has been collecting the dust of time over the summer -- you put the coffee on the bottom of a plastic bag, insert the garment on a hanger, tie the bag closed over the hanger letting the hook stick out, and hang it to sit like that for a week, then extract, shake out, and air out in the open (or it will smell of coffee) -- works great. Clothes that did go through professional dry cleaning, I smudge afterwards with sage (no bag involved in this, and be careful not to set them on fire if you're going to use this method), then air out. I think this is a good place to mention that I hate, with a passion, all commercial "fragrances" -- which are invariably based on toxic petrochemicals -- perfumes (with very few exceptions used very sparingly), body lotions, deodorants, hair sprays, aftershaves -- it's endless. People stink up the air relentlessly with these, at a restaurant it can ruin my meal if the lady at the next table has bathed in her expensive petrochemicals before going out and her teenage daughter, in her cheap ones. Clean air act my ass. But I digress.

Yes, this is great stuff. I keep meaning to do it like that, but at least I always have a supply of bones in the freezer -- here I can only get one kind of organic bones, marrow (usually beef), and I avoid buying anything meat that's not organic. Luckily, these release their goodies faster than other kinds (though I'd love to have some knuckles and joints, they are a great yin tonic), so I just cook them for a couple of hours and use the broth the same day. Today, e.g., I made cream of asparagus soup. Invented it on the go (as I often do) instead of following a recipe (recipes usually have ingredients I don't want to use for various reasons, or else are too labor-intensive, or require special ingredients I don't have handy, or omit the ones I have handy and would like to use, etc.) Easy and delicious -- here's what I did: made stock with some marrow bones, a large onion, a large carrot, half a parsnip, half a bunch of parsley, a couple bay leaves, cracked peppercorns, and the tough fibrous lower parts of two bunches of asparagus; once this was done, I strained it, discarded all the stuff that's been cooking in it except for the bones, let them cool off a bit (important), then extracted the marrow into a separate bowl by blowing it out (fun); returned the stock to the stove, and threw in the tender parts of the asparagus, plus a zuccini that asked me to include it; in the meantime, combined the marrow with a can of coconut milk in a blender; once the asparagus and zuccini were done (15 minutes), I strained the soup again, added the asparagus and zuccini to the coconut-marrow mix in the blender, gave it a minute's run, then poured it all into the pot with the stock, returned to flame, added salt, cooked for a couple of minutes; and finally, smashed some garlic with my trusty Chinese cleaver, chopped it finely, added that to the soup and gave it another minute. Done. Yum.