"The Placebo Effect."

"In most cases, the larger the pill, the stronger the placebo effect. Two pills are better than one, and the brand-name pills trump generics. Capsules are generally more effective than pills, and injections produce a more pronounced effect than either. There is even evidence to suggest that the color of medicine influences the way one responds to it: colored pills are more likely to relieve pain than white pills; blue pills help people sleep better than red pills; and green capsules are the best bet when it comes to anxiety medication."

Excerpt from The Power of Nothing by Michael Specter.

War is the most concrete thing there is.

Nowadays in Sarajevo death is all too easy to imagine and is itself continuously, intensely present, but back then the city was fully alive, both inside me and outside me. Its indelible sensory dimensions, its concreteness, seemed to defy the abstractions of war. I have learned since then that war is the most concrete thing there is, a reality that swallows all, easily overriding any other mode of existence and levelling both interiority and exteriority into the flatness of a crushed soul.

Excerpt from "Mapping Home" by Aleksandar Hemon.

Untitled: January Ninth, 2000.

Through the fog, driving

My hands smell of salt water

The grit between my fingers

As if I had swam today

But it is my own precipitate:

Sweat, old sweat.

The fog comes and goes

A wind tunnel

But there is no sound of wind

But rather music, faint, crackling

A bass tone, drowing out

And the fog comes again.

I pass through.

Walt Whitman visited me in a dream.

I told someone sitting beside me

That he had lived through the Civil War

Like I lived through the fog.

Walt Whitman looked at me

his outdoorsman yet feminine beard

was grey and he had a lisp.

He said: "I stop somewhere waiting for you"

But all I found was the fog.

The fog deep in the ins and outs of others

Those like myself who had

"Had the experience but missed the meaning."

Fog is in the inside of the telephone wires

A sigh on one end

The mumbling of words that cut on the other

Like a car passing through the fog

Or a boat like an arrow.

M.C-Journal entry, 1/9/00.

A tree: My old amigo.

Striding up to a cedar, he patted the rough trunk as if it were an old amigo. "This tree is a relative," he said. "It has feelings like we do, so it should be treated with respect. If you make tea from the bark of this tree, it has a lot of power. It's good for colds and respiratory problems. But if you don't ask permission before you cut the bark, it may not work. So I always say a little prayer so the tree knows I'm serious and I want to share its power. 'Give me your strength for healing,' That's what I ask."

Excerpt from "What became of the Taino" by Robert M. Poole

Was Qaddafi all that bad?

"The worst thing that Qaddafi did was that Abu Salim thing," he said, referring to the 1996 massacre. "I mean, killing a bunch of prisoners in the basement of a prison, that's not nice, but, you know, these things can happen. All it takes is for someone to misinterpret an order--you know what I mean? Yes, the students were hanged in the seventies, and there was Abu Salim, but there was not much else. The secret police was around, but it wasn't too obtrusive. If you got thrown in prison, they allowed your family to visit and bring you couscous."

Excerpt from John Lee Anderson's article King of Kings. Above, an interview with a friend of the Qaddafi's.

Five Pictures in Hope of Endless Travel: Part Two.

Tulsa, Oklahoma. July, 2011.

St. Pete Beach, Florida. July, 2011.

Lake Michigan. Milwaukee, Wisconsin. October, 2011.

Joplin, Missouri. May, 2011.

Providence, RI. August, 2011.

Photos by M.C and A.G.

You are what you eat.

Through processed food, factory farming, and the rush to get large amounts of food to the table as quick as possible, it's frightening what we have lost. On reading "True Grits" (based on chef Sean Brock's Southern food restaurant--Husk--in Charleston, SC.), Burkhard Bilger reminds us that the loss of extended crop rotations (some up to 17 years) and the substitution of more common, viable crops, has made thousands of foods disappear over the past century. Brock's intention: to go back in time (by diving into history books, diaries, etc...) and resurrect those heirloom vegetables that have been lost to convenience.

I pulled these two quotes: one poetic, one philosophical. Yet both inspiring.

"Southern food is more than a collection of recipes and seeds. It's a distillate of memory and hard-won experience, of ocean crossings and forest clearings, turnip winters and radish springs."

"It changed my life growing my own food," Brock said. "You start to see why farmers are so strange: they have a lot of time alone to ponder the questions of the universe."

-M.C.