I’ve been meaning to put up posts about our roadtrips of places east of the Mississippi. But all that went on the back burner once my back went sour. In hindsight, it’s probably good I never posted them. I love America, I love Americans, but we are such a beaten down culture these days. Sometimes I get watery eyed just seeing how mean spirited and bitter we’ve become. There are unchecked, unaccountable, and unelected factions driving our country in directions the consequences won’t be fully grasped for decades.

As I heal and recover I’ve come to see things differently, out of sheer survival, and my experiences in places like Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Portland, and Washington can be seen with more sensitivity. Once I can manage to sit in a chair for longer than thirty minutes I hope to write about them. I’ve always been at odds with the idea that America is exceptional, a shining city on a hill. Perhaps that is because I am from Passaic and there the hills are lined with lead pipes. Nonetheless, I’ve seen a decent amount of the world and there are many exceptional countries and others that just exist because some Europeans decided to draw lines and cause hell. America needs to be what our exceptional is, something I know deep in my brittle bones. There are many things in the way of this.

“You don’t understand, I ain’t scared of you motherfuckers.”

Dancing and laughing are the best medicines. Since I am currently unable to dance I try to drown myself in laughter. The quickest way for me to do this is with the help of a legend: Bernie Mac. The man always wore a prime suit.

I assume one of the reasons why he makes me laugh is that every reference he pulls out was part of that era of where my consciousness was most absorbent. He talks about sex, church, and family. Plus I’m watching a lot of his prime stuff and he was 43 which is what I’m about right now. He’s going on about parents trying to be friends with their kids and shit. He tells it like it is, calling little kids terrorists.

I used to be the collection guy at St Anthony of Padua church in Passaic, New Jersey. I was exactly the type of person to annoy the hell out of a somebody like Bernie Mac. Seeing him drop some dimes I gots to give the basket a good shake. Cheap ass, stank ass.

Now I tell it like it is. Some of Bernie Mac’s bits would be considered offensive today. I’ve seen probably 6 hours of his standup, and I always took his jokes to be impersonal and observational jokes. Not jokes like I’ve heard some other comedians who just seem angry, whether they are or not I’m not sure. I’m not talking George Carlin angry either, bless his rotting corpse. Like bitter angry, but that wasn’t Bernie Mac. I have yet to encounter a comedian that makes me laugh the way Mac does. If you watch Mac he can barely hold in the laughter himself. That one show he did with the lesbian up front heckling and getting in on the action, that was priceless. Then when he finds out his friend dropped dead. “I been having this pain in my back for a God damn while. Now I go to the hospital, fuck that. I was fucking last week, and I had sharp pain in my god damn left nut. Wipe your ass and come on take me to the hospital.”

Every year during my birthday I rewatch Friday. It’s one of my favorite movies because of all the iconic scenes, but man I just can’t wait until the Reverend pulls up. And the way Mac screams as he’s being chased down by a midget is priceless. Then you got Don’t Be a Menace and when he appears as the cop. Now Boyz in Da Hood is also one of my favs, but the spoof of the cop is just nuts. The first time I heard Mac say the back of Forest Whittakers neck I almost choked. There’s also him as the judge in Booty Call, but Booty Call is Booty Call.

He tells it like it is. You know, he’s been black a long time. Listening to Bernie is like hanging back on the block on a good day. He died too early. And let me tell you something, if there’s one man that can fix America it is Mitch Gilliam.

Favorite Bernie Mac bits:

- Take me to the hospital

- He was teasing me

- Suck a dick like a man

- You don’t understand, I ain’t scared of you motherfuckers

- Little kids screaming when hurt

By the way, I’ll be lying on the floor watching Mac and Jenny has no idea what he’s saying. I be having to translate. There was no real point to this blog post except to say you should go laugh about something because it’s good for you.

These are a collection of blog posts I drafted during my recent bout of back pain. Yes, I am rather depressed because at times I feel I can’t trust my own body, but whether through debilitation or medication I have come to be more sensitive to things within and without. All things come to pass, one way or another. Listening to Cecilia Bartoli, link below, also helps.

They overlap some, but whatever.

Bug out.

I used to plan to leave America. That’s not something I admit to many because I do love America. I’m romantic to a fault, unfortunately, and the promise of what we can be is like a wonderful whispering breeze at dusk. I love that we have those like Jefferson, Thoreau, and King Jr. who leave so much room for us to work with.

But a deep dwelling desire to just hop on a train to a new city with different tongues, smells, music, and versions of dumplings is within my soul. Where it’s not niche to understand a contrary idea above and beyond what a Bro can muster. A Roman back alley, Doric columns, tapa, loukum, the sounds of Havana, opera, and mahjong while simmering in a mineral pool, these are things worth a breath. Humans may be born to fight, but the distance between a simple argument and systematized punishment is far too close these days. They should be light years apart.

So I think that path is no longer viable for the foreseeable future, perhaps in lengths of years. Like my favorite poet, Robinson Jeffers, Jenny and I seemed to be locked in place as the world rolls the dice, once again as it will always do time to time. Therefore some American life must be cut through, a beautiful one I pray. For all the love of individualism in the West, we do very little to defend the millions of suffering individuals. Universality fades like a water balloon hitting a nerd’s face.

Oddity.

The oddest thing about this current bout of pinched nerve and back spasms is that for the first time my mood directly affects the severity. If I am negative or around negative things the more pain. And of course when things have calmed down for a considerable time my mind naturally feels at ease and then I turn on the news. An impulse I immediately regret.

I’ve taken to more consistent meditation but while I am seasoned in this practice I’ve had to develop a specific manner. Maybe a sort of compassionate whack a mole is the best description. As a result of this new terrible experience I’ve been forced to become a more compassionate person towards others and myself. Plenty still annoys me, but out of sheer survival I let them glide over me like rain off a leaf.

That is all I can write for now as it is difficult to sit. I pray that you can find softness in an opportune moment.

Be well.

Roid Rage

Despite fun pictures of food and some coastal scenes of Maine posted on our Instagram account my back has been at some of its worst. We were only able to do that trip with Jenny’s generous driving and perhaps too many martinis. Currently I’m at the steroids and PT phase and I hope to be more mobile within the next couple of weeks. I haven’t written a word for three weeks now, and spend most of my day horizontal. The only benefit is that I can refine my ideas for the book and think about scenes down the line. I’m still unsure as to what type of writer I am since I’ve always been more tactician than strategist. I relish the moments to live in each moment curious as to what a character within my mind will choose.

I’m not sure what causes my back to go bad because it just appeared to bubble to the surface randomly. Perhaps it was that week of extreme humidity that did me in or the constant barrage of misery on the news. And this misery didn’t really directly confront me until I got on these steroids to help stop the inflammation.

Boy do these roids make me have some fucked up dreams. I’ve had 3 nuclear bomb dreams and the latest was me being in New York City while one went off. Surviving the blast I had to flee the city and instead of boats getting everyone off the island they wanted to charge people. As if the original Vanderbilt reincarnated himself into my dream to screw others over once again. Another dream was trying to secure food for my family while a sniper picked people off for fun. I woke up when I got shot. Another was trying to save a faceless daughter from a group of female religious zealots who wanted to harvest her eggs. I was stabbed in the neck when they discovered she was fertile.

When I wake from these dreams it is obvious where these ideas are coming from and for my own personal sanity there is relief that they are actually just dreams. My back will heal, I hope and assume, but people I don’t know and have nothing to do with somehow haunt my dreams. When the roids are finished the dreams will stop, but there are countless who live my dream as reality.

Trial by pain

My back has gone out again. We booked a trip up to Maine and luckily the ride wasn’t so long that Jenny could drive. I could only be in the car if I was horizontal. At one restaurant it was easier for me to stand than sit. And the only thing that kept me standing were the martinis, quite delicious ones topped off with the precious juices from freshly shucked oysters. Half a dozen? Sure, afterwards I’ll browse the aisles of LL Bean.

We visited an oyster farm and it brought back memories of when we had our first business in West Marin/Sonoma County. That venture was a whole ordeal not just with the business but personally. The only apartment we could afford was way out on the coast 25 minutes from our dairy facility. And we didn’t know shit about living in a rural town of 200 near the Pacific Ocean. Our apartment was prone to black mold which both of us inhaled plenty of. I think my cough only subsided 6 months after we moved out. And I reminisced about the daily grind we lived. With the way my back is now I cannot imagine lifting 5 gallon buckets of prime organic Jersey cow milk into a pasteurizer. Every day ending with the scrubbing, spraying, and sanitizing of every inch.

We learned things through trail and error. And as we no longer work in the food industry and as I work on my culinary novel I appreciate hard work more. But perhaps in a different way than I expected. Rather than appreciating it I guess I should say I’m sympathetic to it. I think our lives are unnecessarily mean spirited to outright resentful, and we don’t take care of each other enough. Suffering on some level is a fact of life; but living everyday with our backs to the wall unknowing what we can trust isn’t a God given reality. Suffering should only exist to make you a better person, a good friend. Not a spectre of a man.

While I started my culinary novel over a year ago it was initially born out of my raw assumptions of what people wanted to read. And along the way I realized how unequipped I was to achieve this so I sought out various means of learning whether online classes, simply reading constantly, and trying different things out.

During the process my main goal was assumed to be that they are entertained while believing my sincerity. And I am at the point now where sincerity isn’t enough. That is because I am not a sincere person, not precisely. Rather I am an obsessive person at heart. I can’t help but want to drown myself in something. And while writing this culinary novel I rediscovered that I absolutely get off on cooking. And not just simply doing it myself, but the theoretical and cultural aspects.

But I am a terrible customer because at this point I don’t care if your roast whatever is cooked perfectly. And even worse I dare say that I don’t care if your braise has perfectly gelatinized. I need to know who you are, how to communicate ideas or culture, or how you exorcise something into life. Quite frankly there’s no clear reason to believe there’s anything to civilization beyond shitting, fucking, and eating. This is what I aim to write about, maybe minus the shitting. But hey it takes place in New York so…

I’ve been reading a lot lately. Some fiction like John Updike or random old Greek tragedies. But mostly philosophical shit concerning different concepts of freedom or the history of Liberalism (as opposed to Libtardism). It’s a weird thing to read and muddle over freedom since if one didn’t put any time into it then it could be easily assumed to be an easy thing. Yet it is not. It lacks the boundlessness many of us dream because it is fundamentally about relationships.

And in my various readings I’ve come across enough musing over nature and if exists at all. I understand their processes and thought, in theory, and maybe part of me agrees. But it’s also such a fucking waste of time, again maybe just for me. I go outside during these hot days and spend time amongst my perennials and walk amongst the “hazies”. Those are the tiny flies or whatever that always seem to hover where the air is most specific. I watch the goldfish peck at the algae and notice how my tomato plant seems to grow an inch a day. This stability I discover around me never sways me from the reality that everything hangs by a thread. Humans seem to be the only ones uniquely aware at this terrifying truth, yet we are the only ones uniquely pissing this beauty away. There are too many ideologies, too many disagreements, too many thoughts in general. I still believe in reason and rationality, but sometimes you are in an age where it is near impossible to have proper supplies of it.

As a true Taoist, my response is to calmly wait for the waves to smoothen even though there is boundless suffering today. A deeper reckoning filled with fresher agreements is needed for when the waves turn our way.

Note: This post should start off by mentioning that our trip was cut short because our little pug Clyde developed some freak melting eye ulcer. And from where we were it took us 2 hours by car, 2 hours by train and having to wait another day to get return flights back to New Jersey. The feeling of helplessness meant that Jenny and I didn’t really sleep for several days. The thought of him being in pain, surrounded by strangers, and with a catheter made me sick. When we got back to Paris with a night to wait the only thing that soothed the knots in my stomach was a bowl of pasta. I love French cuisine. It’s clever, introspective, and embraces seasonality more than other cuisines. But straight forward Italian food holds my hand when faced with precarious situations. We made it back to my little boy. We still haven’t really slept and as I write this, tomorrow he’s going in for surgery to get his eye removed. I expected that though we fought for a days to avoid it. Soon he will be a true Passaic dog: feral and filled with a deep smiling rage.

Dordogne

This trip was about settling in. No longer overcome with planning, rushing, and anxiety my mind didn’t know what to do with itself. Like Galactus, it consumed. I felt like a Porsche that went off a cliff and was still in midair. Where was I going?

My long gone friend Etienne used to say that I wasn't like the average American, that my soul was to the whole world. And regardless of where you stand it is evident that the American mind is quickly closing. I needed to go to a place where I could attempt to feel and see the things in my mind in particular freedom hence Dordogne.

To be deep in France in a part that is so ancient there is memory of a time before civilization is to be glorious. But we did have to make a pitstop in Paris, a place I wasn’t necessarily pining to be back in. I’m not in any way knocking it, in many ways it is better than New York, but I needed to be in more primal or bucolic surroundings. We zipped down to Bordeaux on a train (Why the fuck don’t we have good trains here? Punkass, bitchass, motherfucking government) and snagged a Peugeot.

Finally in Dordogne, if it wasn’t for all the boulangeries one would think it was the English countryside. The mornings were crisp and carried the sounds of babbling streams softly. With the hearty food and towns of stone it is a fine place to be provided there are less crowds. The wine is also quite good and deliciously cheap. Out of the many bottles of Bergerac was on average €15 with layers of flavor that would make me sound like a wine asshole.

What attracted me to Dordogne is the thing that never escapes my daily mind. The precariousness of existence. Do not take that to mean I’m some melancholic mope, though maybe I am. But what lingers over me is that when you strip away the civilization, the literature, ideologies, and religions all of life exist on a razors edge. Even worse, we have a nasty habit of taking ideas as real, the great barrier to actual progress. As I strolled through stone villages and observing ancient outcroppings I could see there were different times when we did less of this. When a destination was more than a dream. I wanted to go to a place that was at one point the limits of humanity. The ice age made it so that humans couldn’t push much further. And those who lived here semi settled down and created culture. They thrived on this razors edge. Somehow life became more than just struggling to find food and struggling to raise children. Life seems to have become special, something to be celebrated. That isn’t something to be taken for granted. And dotted all around the valleys are caves with art of various animals, some possibly sacred and others food.

Another thing that drew me was reading Henry Miller. He spent some time here, and spoke fondly of it. I only encountered his writing a few years ago, and at first was dismissive. And I know why: reading him is like listening to myself talk. He can be prickly, coarse, and dismissive while also being accommodating. We stayed at the same Inn he did, probably sipping wine along the same stream. His life, in his words, read like some alternative universe to my own with both of us naturally seeking out select places. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think back to the roaring waves of Big Sur.

That’s as much as I can say about Dordogne, or care to. But I expect you are here to read about food. So don’t let me disappoint you. Dordogne is also the land of foie gras, truffles, and walnuts amongst other things. Did I eat truffles everyday? In some form, yes. Did I eat foie gras everyday? No, I would have died. But I had it plenty. It’s not something I enjoy as much anymore. It’s just not as primal as I’d prefer. There are places to get a simple roasted piece of goose liver with some onion jam and a sweet sauce. That is more my thing.

The restaurants here are all great as far as I’ve experienced along with the people. Many speak directly with a touch of disdain at first then welcome you with a big genuine smile. Free time was spent enjoying a cigarette over a game of cards. One particular man seemed to despise me. I think he thought me a Patagonia vest wearing American to which I playfully displayed my own disdain for. He reminded me of a classmate from culinary school, a particular working class oaf with big dreams. After a few days our greetings were with a slyness as if we knew a secret joke.

There’s the wine. In Dordogne, the most attractive thing a person can do is tsk at you when asking about wines from around Bordeaux. The tsk seemed to best converted to American English as: bitch, please. The disregard for a neighboring region is one of the ways I judge if a place is truly a place. We lugged back a few bottles that I look forward to tearing open once life settles down.

I stopped writing to enjoy this trip and thought maybe I’d experience enough to propel my work further. And it has, though not in the way I expected. There have been doubts about my efforts due to my inexperience and paranoia that I’m never good enough. But I did realize one thing: that I’ve come to enjoy the characters in my book. They aren’t entirely my creation and no longer solely based on people I once knew. They are alive. The only problem now is that it makes my progress slower, because I spend a lot of time discovering them.

Did you have a great 2024? I hope so. And as for Jenny and me, I think we did on a personal level. It kind of just flew by. But on the macro there was a lot of shit going on around the world. I’d speak on those things, but perhaps not in this post aside from a few snarking comments.

First, there’s the book. Alex are you done???? Or maybe it’s, wait you’re working on a book? What the hell do you know about writing? It’s chugging along. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned the topic, but it is a first person fictionalized story of my time in culinary school back in 2006. Hipsters were only barely creeping into New York City, the iPhone didn’t exist, and DiCaprio and Gisele Bundchen were still together. Some themes are food vs cuisine, the transition of the food scene, the rise of the celebrity chef and chef millionaires, and other shit.

You learn a lot about yourself writing fiction like your habits, neurosis, anxieties, etc… And since you are determined you must create new habits and routines to get things moving along. Another theme in the book is “time”. If you know me well you know that I have a special relationship with time. It is my torturer, and closest thing to a personal deity. That is why when we had our store my motto was “If you can do it now, do it now!” I put a lot of pressure on myself, but even if I get this book done and worked on the others I have outlined I’m not sure I’d consider myself a writer. I’m just someone who wants to express ideas and it can be in any form, as long as it hits a nerve. Plus none of that takes into account the maturity to be able to express things effectively let alone the skill.

Jenny and I did a fair bit of traveling this year if you go back into the previous blog posts. From the frozen forests of Washington State, tiled sidewalks of Barcelona, mascletas of Valencia, Thomas Jefferson’s pompous wine cellar, a remote island on the Adriatic, and to my family’s rice farm in the Philippines we experienced a decent amount. Such a world in flux. There’s good, bad, worse, and seedlings of things that hopefully flower into something beautiful. On the shores of a Croatian beach I listened as thousands of boulder sized rocks roared as the waves came crashing in. And there I realized that what was more important than thinking about the world was to listen. The world is full of information that it is almost a bottomless well. And that is the structure of our modern society. And if you listen most of that stuff is just noise, useless ass noise.

Now let me switch to something better to the eyes, nose, and tongue. We ate at some Michelin blah blah and Top 50 Restaurant yada yada, but also closet sized vermut bars and even a food truck on a Native American reservation. My conclusion? Do whatever makes you happy, like truly truly happy and not just checking off a box. I was disgusted to be in an alleged top restaurant and the table next to me recorded their entire meal, and possibly live streamed it. I also got rather depressed at another place because their music in the restrooms sounded straight from a looney bin. How did they expect me to enjoy the food when washing your hands feels like the moment leatherface drops the chainsaw on your neck? The best meals I had on our travels were at a small Vermut bar in Barcelona, a cevapi place in Split, and a seafood place on Vis. I base this on the quality of the food and the hospitality of the people working/owning them. The fancy places take too many risks to be consistent, at least they are daring and strike with creativity. It becomes performance art, and some days are better than others just like going to watch a Broadway show. And let’s be real, there’s a big market for this performance art food. Bigger than the talent pool. But I say, hey keep throwing things against the wall and give it a go. Eventually the next thing will come around and it will burn bright.

Did anything surprise you this year? Three things were fairly surprising for me, and they’re all related to the election. One was America’s willingness to cynically betray one of its primary myths: that we always do the right thing in the end. Two was watching the moment when the Democratic Party of my youth implode. I was in the Philippines during the election and I remember watching at my aunt’s house a specific moment that it all became so apparent. And three was watching the tech bros steal the Presidency from MAGA. Maybe the third one isn’t conclusive yet, and I know some will say the second isn’t the case. Sure, okay. I just want our society to be about us again, and not billionaires consolidating their fiefs. I was raised in the Classical Liberal shades of the Roosevelt clan; so whatever makes homes cheaper, health insurance cheaper, people happier, the general vibe of desperation wither, and the New York Jets not a shitty team I am down.

Oh my god, above I said I wasn’t going to speak on a few things but I did anyway. Oops.

2025 I’ll continue to work on this book and ideally by the end of it I can beg a few of you with help finding people to pitch for publishing. If not then maybe I’ll use ai to turn it into an anime. We have plans to go to France in the winter and specifically down to Dordogne. It is the land of Foie, but I am really there to attempt to see the painted caves. I’m obsessed with beauty and especially the primeval. What could be more captivating? There may be a trip to Chicagoland for a Cubs game, deep dish, hot dogs with lots of pickles and relish, and the Art Institute. But everything else is on a holding pattern until we see Donnie Boy in power. As the grand finance wizards of Wall Street like to say on Bloomberg: We don’t know what we don’t know.

My mother and I finally managed to take Jenny to the Philippines to see my family’s home island and farm. There’s finally a direct shot to Manila from the tristate area, unfortunately it’s at JFK. Many of things that can be said about JFK can also be said about herpes or a backed up sewer line. Sometimes things are best left in the past, so I’ll just NOT say more than that be prepared for Tita’s checking in 15 boxes each. I swear some boxes were legit washer and dryers. I won’t talk about the check-in staff, the security line, the TSA, or the terminal itself. It will trigger an anxiety attack.

I’ve been going to the Philippines since I was four years old so I’ve seen it change a lot. Manila Airport has gotten better in that when you exit the airport chaos doesn’t descend on you like a scene from a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. And there are express highways that zigzag the city for those who are willing to pay to dodge the insane traffic. We were in Makati for a day. It is probably the best place for a first time or frequent visitor to Manila. It’s where many of the hotels, shopping, and safe food are located. Hell there’s an Hermes store, Din Tai Fung, and a Raffles. Manila got a DTF before New York, and even has two. SHAME.

My family’s home island is Panay which is part of the central Philippines, but the province is Iloilo. And it has also grown quite a bit over the years. Back when I was a kid the airport was just a field with some goats, and now it’s concrete and glass. And they’ve developed some new areas of the city specifically around all the call centers. Remember all those times you’ve had to call customer service and “Andy” picked up the phone. Well his name ain’t Andy it’s really Ezekiel Jesus Santos de la Cruz. I guess when they were dropping the fiber someone had the right idea to pass it here. I get a kick out of all the change. Near our hotel was a Starbucks and McDonald’s but you walk a block away and it’s still people cooking skewers along the sidewalk. It reminds me of when I lived in China during the mid 2000s and witnessed their rapid transition. Jeepneys are one of the most iconic symbols of the Philippines, but now they have to compete against modernized buses with air conditioning. And talking to my family and meeting friends of friends I got to see how much of their mentality has changed with all this development and how much hasn’t changed. Though I must say that I didn’t hear anyone complaining, and how can you when a decade ago you may not have had electricity.

My family’s farm is forty or so minutes from Iloilo City. And on the way you pass many smaller cities like Janiuay and Lambunao. I have family in just about every town along the way, but if you come from an immigrant family like mine you know that sometimes you don’t want them to know you are around. Wanting to egg an aunt’s house is a rite of passage.

As for the farm, there’s not much to say except it’s got rice, bananas, coconuts, swine, chickens, and geese. Taro and Pandan grow on the side of the walking path and aside from a current drought it usually rains everyday here and there. All my mother’s immediate family have left the farm for America, but we still have family living and working there. I don’t know if you know anything about rice farming, but it’s like a sprint. When you gotta go you go, but sometimes you’re just chilling around waiting. Imagine the deepest July when it’s 98 degrees and the air thick as shit. Some of my family that has been in America too long like to complain they aren’t doing anything, but I’m like stfu it’s too damn hot.

There are only three things I really do when back on the island. One is eat, another is hang with family, and lastly is go to Guimaras which is just the next island over. What do I eat? Well, rice of course. There’s plain rice, fried rice, arroz caldo, congee, and my favorite: garlic rice. Now I don’t eat it like my family over there. Maybe I eat 2 cups at each meal, but they get down. I remember seeing Jenny’s face seeing how much rice my cousins eat. Oh you thought you’re Asian? I’m a show you something lol. There’s also all these desserts that are variations of rice flour and coconut milk you can’t get in America. Then there’s all the fruits from pineapples, mangoes (not in season at the time), lanzones, and the sacred kalamansi. I also make my rotation between grilled chicken at Mang Inasal, and seafood dishes like prawns and crab at various places. In all honesty, food in the Philippines is mostly simple and specific. Ornate dishes are reserved for the annual fiesta. Amazingly many of the iconic dishes are stews which just sounds crazy when you rarely see a low below 80 degrees.

Guimaras is famous for its mangoes. It should be more well known for the beaches, but I guess they aren’t developed enough. You definitely see Europeans and Australians around, but not many Americans yet. Perhaps that’s a good thing, though in my experience Americans have more manners than the type of European/Aussie that makes its way around that part of the world. I just go there to chill on the beach and eat prawns. North of the home island is Boracay which has amazing beaches, but it’s got a bit of that “Diddy” vibe.

I always come back from the Philippines feeling good. It’s nice to see the country chugging along, yet it’s the same old same old. There’s nothing better than walking out in the morning to the humidity carrying the fragrance of fresh rice. Well maybe some fresh Pan de Sal dunked into Nutella.