We´re  living about an hour outside of the old Inca capital of Cusco in the Sacred Valley in the village of Pisac. We live in an down a dirt road about one kilometer outside of town. My friend has style, that´s for sure - the house is shaped like a condor with outstretched wings. The living room has two disco balls that we refer to as the ¨eyes¨of the condor. We´ve been known to crank up the disco ball eyes and have post-dinner dance parties . . .

 The Urubamba River, which eventually connects to the Amazon, runs next to the dirt road. I can hear the roar of the river when I stand outside on the patio. Other than the river, the quiet is complete and divine. I´m surrounded on all sides by giant terraced mountains. The windows of my bedroom open up to the mountain with the Pisac ruins nestled on top. Walking to town is always an adventure – sometimes I see free-roaming sows nursing little piglets, sometimes I only smell the droppings they´ve left behind, always the river accompanies me.

The town itself is very small. We come almost every day to buy fresh vegetables and meat from tiny local retailers, flies buzzing all around and dogs roaming among the cobblestone streets. Life is simple, the people are kind and slowing down sure is nice . . .

I´m going to try, I swear,  to be more positive in 2009 on this blog, to show the lighter side of life, the fun side of life and  those little moments that make humanity amazing. I realize that my blog devolved a bit, especially at the end of last year,  into a diatribes against evil corporations and government entities.

And you know what? I´ve decided that that sort of talk is just BORING. It´s so easy to get sucked in to the machine of negativism that surrounds us and bombards us on every billboard, commericial and news story. I get sucked in sometimes and I don´t even own a television. I´ll admit that sometimes I get sucked in and then I get really, really angry and frustrated and feel like life is futile and that nothing I do matters. And I don´t want to live that way anymore, because it´s not true.

In fact, the opposite is true. Every little thing each of us does matters.

I want to be the good news sunshine break. I want to show a crack of sunlight through the clouds of despair. So, my promise to you, dear readers, is that I will try my damndest to be a beacon of hope and a deliverer of something that will attempt to make you smile in wonderment at how sublime life can be – if we choose to construct it in that way.

Remember that I´m no Pollyanna. I realize that our country is going through turbulent times, but I believe those incidents are manufactured, just like the hysteria that´s eeked out every night on the local news, like a steady stream of poison. And I´m tired and bored with it all. Good moments happen - all the time, all around us, every minute of the day.

So many things go right for all of us every single second. It can be easy to forget that and to lose hope. And I believe that all those corporations with all those billboards only feed on our fear and anger. So, I give it up. No more fear, no more anger. Time to try something new, ´cause the old way just ain´t working for me anymore.

Wow! If there´s one question I´ve heard over and over again lately, it´s been ¨Why Peru?¨ followed up immediately by ¨Whatever in the world are you going to be doing there for three months?¨

Well . . . I am in Peru because a dear friend asked me if I would house-sit for him. Also, I love this country . . . the mountains are amazing, the people are wonderful, the living is inexpensive and the food is fresh and local. Peru is also a great place for healing. There is something about the land that I connected with the last time I was here, so I figured why not come back?

Besides, I´m always happy to have an opportunity to brush up on my Spanish. I like to immerse myself in a place that´s completely foreign and different than what I´m accustomed to. Peru is a place where you get to live very close to the land, far away from the bagged, tagged and sanitized for your protection attitude of the US. Most of all, I´m here to live in a rural environment where I will be far, far away from the lure of finding parties and other social engagements. Because, I suppose I could say ´no´to going out all the time with the groups of friends I´ve made in every single city across the USA, but I never do.

So, I´m here to ostracize myself a bit and to write and to be far, far away from distractions.

Are all my ducks in a row?

No.

Is everything done?

Never.

I’m getting on a plane to Lima in a couple of hours – off to the amazing country of Peru.  I’ll be there for about four months, and will be writing often. Check in with me from time to time! There will be lots to read about. Hope you join me on my adventure!

 Matt is a southern boy and he loves his grits. He couldn’t bear to be without a steady supply of his favorite hometown staple, Adluh Grits, for the four or so months we would be in Latin America. When it came time to lighten the load in his backpack, he forsook extra underwear just so he would have enough room for his 5lb bag of stone-ground grits. That’s dedication.

We bought one-way tickets from Columbia, South Carolina to Lima, Peru and checked no baggage, so we knew we were going to get the thorough TSA security shakedown. Little did we realize just how closely our packs would be scrutinized. As Matt’s mom anxiously waited in the background to see us through the security checkpoint, we were suddenly stopped cold at the conveyor belt.

Matt’s bag went through the x-ray first and like I suspected, the attendant jerked the machine to a stop and squinted into the monitor for what seemed like an eternity.

“Ah, there’s a corkscrew in there,” she said. Matt fished out the offending wine key. So that it would not be confiscated, he marched it back to his mom, leaving the security area in clad in socked feet. The bag began to lurch through a second time and was again stopped. This time they weren’t sure about his tweezers. He pulled them out; they were regular old tweezers. He got to keep them. The bag went through a third time with the same TSA officer looking at it’s contents.

“Hand inspection!” she called out.

Matt looked at me dumb-founded and followed the officer toward the metal table. She proceeded to pull every single item out of his pack. When she got to the bottom of his bag, she pulled out the package of yellow grits and breathed a sigh of relief, “Ahh,” she said, “On the x-ray, these look just like liquid!”

I decided to consult a friend who is a chef regarding my trashing the tomatoes rant and his input not only surprised me, but in the end, he offered a brilliant and quite viable solution that would be easy to implement in every home and restaurant.

My friend the chef is passionate about the food he serves; it has to be perfect. He says that his number one concern is giving his customer a meal of gastronomic delight that doesn’t make them sick. In my tomato example he says that as a chef he would never want to spread any disease like Hepatitis, even though the chances of something like this happening in my example are near zero.

“I would eat the tomatoes myself,” he says, “but even if every single person in that hot dog line said, ‘Hey, it’s cool. Go ahead, serve those tomatoes,’ I would not do it. I’d throw them in my compost bin.”

“That’s great!” I roared. And it really is! “But . . . no restaurants have a compost bin.”

It would be the perfect solution. I thought about suggesting composting in that last rant, but really believed it was just wishful thinking. That is, until I spoke to my friend. That’s really the whole point - I don’t care if something gets ‘trashed’ in the compost bin; it’s the mindless waste and filling up our landfills that I have a problem with. Plus, nationwide composting in restaurants would create enough quality mulch to solve alot of our nation’s oil-based fertilizer problem that’s raping the planet of nitrogen reserves.

According to Lester Brown’s book, Plan B (which every single person absolutely should read in my opinion), US agriculture in 2004 produced 11.8 billion bushels of corn and used 10 billion tons of nitrogen-based fertilizer to do it. A bushel is not that big – 35.24 liters - compared to one ton of fertilizer. Incidentally that nitrogen-based fertilizer is made with – that’s right – petroluem products. This is an unsustainable model; composting on a massive scale is not only sustainable, it is viable.

This viability is key. The oil-government powers that be, who incidentally subsidized those same 2004 farmers to the tune of $4.5 billion in taxpayer dollars (to enrich their oil empire), would say that composting on a massive scale is not viable and too complicated and that restaurants would never be able to implement such a system.

My friend the chef says otherwise. He worked for two years at a four star restaurant in Yellowstone Park and they composted every single scrap available. What’s more is that the corporate restaurant he worked for actually made money in the composting business. Lots of money, according to my friend.

So, guess what corporate restaurant America?? Lots of money can be made on trash. And a four star, sustainable and massive composting model is already in operation.

Until our society comes to it’s senses, insanity will abound . . . all in an effort to side-step the possibility of financial fallout or social faux pas. While thankfully what I witnessed last week at Pink’s hot dog stand in Hollywood wasn’t life-threatening in nature, it was ridiculously wasteful – all because of society’s perception of litigation. Oh yeah, that and germs.

We were happily standing in the historically famous, possibly hours-long line for some of tinsel town’s most sought-after chili dogs. The hustling crew endlessly cranked out specialty dog after specialty dog, continuously dropped fries into grease vats  and restocked the dog toppings en masse. Not long after our arrival into the line, one of the harried workers tossed two gallon-sized containers of chopped tomatoes onto the side counter and turned her back for two seconds in an effort to multi-task.

A semi-scraggly guy came around the corner just at that moment with a plastic ounce sized container, dipped it into the tomatoes and walked away. I should mention this man appeared to be neither homeless nor dirty; he just wasn’t as . . . shall we say . . . upscale in appearance as the majority of people who frequent Melrose Avenue.

Someone called out, “Hey! That guy just dipped his hand in the tomatoes!” He did not, for the record, dip his actual hand into anything.

Ten seconds later, the same worker who’d put the containers on the counter dumped both of them into the trashcan with a loud thud. This kind of mindlessly wasteful behavior appals me. I said to Matt, “I can’t believe they just dumped that stuff out . . . ”

Opinions are like assholes; everyone has one. People on either side of us in line indeed had their own opinions and did not hesitate to share them with me. The guy in front of us said with a chuckle, “Well, you know they gotta throw that stuff out or else they could get sued for serving it after that guy messed with it.”

“But you and I both know that his actions didn’t contaminate two gallons of perfectly fine tomatoes,” I said. The man in front of us sort of guffawed and turned back to his newspaper. And of course, I understand that they had to actually toss the stuff in the can in front of the crowd just so all eyes could confirm that the offending tomatoes were properly disposed of.

The couple behind me (who I believe were the same ones who alerted the staff to the actions of the tomato-contaminator) began to chat. The man said, “You just never know what germs people carry.”

“On their . . . ahem . . .  mouth area. On their hands. Who knows where that cup has been . . . ” said his over-perfumed lady friend.

Seriously?! People . . . I hate to mention it, but c’mon,  we live in the richest, most wasteful country on the entire planet. And because an establishment has to factor in the possibility of lawsuits from germophobic patrons, we help create and contribute to a culture of waste. It saddens and sickens me to the core.

I was raised by elderly people who remember the Great Depression. The media today tells us that we are now facing a possible depression of even greater enormity. The increase in food prices is alarming. Throwing away two gallons of tomatoes may not sound like a big deal to a group of people who don’t know what it’s like to be hungry, but in my mind, it is a big deal and it’s indicative of a much bigger problem.

One of my best friends tells a story about his aunt who found half a donut in the street when she was a child during the Great Depression. She picked up the half donut out of the dirty cobblestone street, took it home and shared it with her six family members, who all remember that half-eaten donut as a very special treat.

I hope that spoiled rotten Americans don’t have to scrounge the streets for food necessities ever again. I’ve certainly never had to do it, even though my family did spend several winters with no heat and little more than government cheese and rice to eat. As this article explains, don’t believe for one minute that America is immune to food shortages, because just the opposite is true – if anything, we are susceptible to them. Certainly there can be a happy medium. That includes re-educating the masses about perceptions about germs, wastefulness and litigation, because I assure you the kind of seemingly innocent event I witnessed last week happens quite often all over the developed world.

I hate to cry out cliches about starving children, so I won’t, because we’ve all heard them ad nausem, but with the problems our world faces right now with food shortages and inflated prices (just ask any Zimbabwean how much a loaf of bread costs) and foodstuffs being used as agrofuels, we’d all better start realizing just how important every little bit of precious food is increasingly becoming. By the way, it costs a $10 billion Zimbabwe note (worth less than $20USD) for a loaf of bread.

The canary is singing in the coalmine of our backyard, but we’re too plugged into our I-pods to even notice. If our ancestors were here to witness commonplace acts of American wastefulness, the faux pas would be on our society. I hope we don’t have to worry about something as basic as where we’re going to get our next meal. And maybe, just maybe if we all have an about-face in our perceptions of what is acceptable, we won’t have to worry. But if we do, at least it will be a sobering lesson for all of us spoiled rotten Americans. I’m not so sure that those lessons would be a bad thing.

Do I blame the busy worker at Pinks? No. I blame our perception of what is acceptable. Did I continue to stand in the line that day? Certainly not. I wandered on in search of my next meal elsewhere on the streets of America.

Matt and I went to Applebee’s a few nights ago to say hello to an old friend of his who works there.

We waited at the bar until his friend got off work. The bar faucet was gushing out steaming hot water at full blast, draining out of a teeny, tiny little sink that never filled up. The water was on when we sat down, so who knows how long it had been on before our arrival? The entire time, the lone bartender ran around frantically texting, I-phone in hand, screaming every detail of the Ebay bid she was trying to win.

Finally, after about fifteen minutes, when I could stand it no more, I said gently, “You know, I come from a place where we have to conserve water. Can you turn the faucet off? Please?”

I should mention that this bartender seems to be a very nice lady. She’s a friend of the friend we were there to meet. She talked about how she had signed up for a bell-ringing shift for the Salvation Army. We even had a few beers together later in the night, where she apologized a second and third time about the faucet. I cannot help but wonder if she apologized because she realized the need for water conservation or if her reason revolved around the social pressure of my pointing it out.

Just one state over from South Carolina, where this runaway faucet event occurred sits Atlanta. Lake Lanier is it’s main water source. Just one year ago Lake Lanier was so low from drought, mis-management and overuse that Atlanta measured it’s quickly dwindling available water supply in terms of weeks and officials declared an emergency.

Only when the faucets run dry will people realize that there is no more water. We’ve got the technology at our fingertips, literally, so that we don’t have to lug water from wells anymore. But this technology has contributed to our mindlessness.

I’m not perfect; I’m here to educate and bring awareness. Guess what? Everyone is from a place that has to conserve water.

The FDA is for sale too. All the real scientists were fired years ago, obviously. Why else would a government agency originally designed to protect the health of the citizens of our country declare that mercury is safe for consumption by children, infants and pregnant women?

His name is Maleke and he drives a tiny little bus in the suburbs of Columbia, South Carolina.

I´d had a trying day. I was staying with Matt and his family in the suburbs of Columbia, South Carolina. I like to ride busses where I can, whenever possible, even when an alternative is available. Yes, there was an alternative available – Matt´s mom offered us the car. But I just wanted to ride the bus, mostly because I believe in public transportation. I´m along for the ride, for the characters, for the slower pace and for the peace of mind of not having to deal with a car. I also believe that as more people demand public transportation,  that it delivers a message to municipalities to extend services.

I walked out to the bus stop just in time to see the bus come zooming down the street about a block away. I stood at the stop, so happy that the timing was so good. And then . . . and then . . . the bus zoomed right on by, without even a pause. So, I ended up having a nice long two mile walk to the suburban Columbia mall. I needed the exercise anyway and I wasn´t in a hurry.

Finally, after traversing the mall, I found the bus I needed and I hopped on. I was the only white person on the bus, the other patrons were older black men, talking about beer and making jokes with one another and cute older little black women with shopping bags. The driver was nice enough and answered all my questions, including my query regarding the bus that zoomed past me earlier in the morning. ¨He shouldn´t a done that,¨said Maleke, the bus driver. ¨I bet he didn´t even see you. Call this number and tell ´em what happened, they´ll give you a free pass and maybe tell that driver to be more aware,¨ he said as he handed me a flier.

The information was nice of Maleke to give, but that´s not why he´s the best bus driver ever. At one of our stops a guy in a day-glo vest with dark sunglasses and cane got onto the bus. He said, ¨I´m trying to get to the mall.¨ Maleke told him that in order to get to the mall, he´d have to cross the street and get on the bus that was going the other way.

One of the bus patrons who´d been making jokes earlier grabbed the blind man´s hand and got off the bus with him and walked him gently across the street to the opposite stop. Maleke waited patiently for his rider to return, and only then did we all continue into town. That is why Maleke is the best bus driver ever.